Waking the Living Dead-Man: The Biopolitics of Early Modern Sleep

This essay argues that the early modern fascination with the sleeping body—a fascination attested to in the many accounts of extraordinary sleeping in the period—is tied to anxieties about social and political transformation, namely, the transformation of sovereign rule to secular liberalism. Sleeper narratives share formal similarities with visionary literature and medical case histories, but they cannot be reduced to either: the uncanny presence of the sleeping body at the center of these strange texts engages key biopolitical discourses by challenging the philosophical hegemony of consciousness and the political imbrication of identity, labor, and property. After linking the extraordinary sleeper genre to the problem of "soul sleep" in both theological and epistemological contexts, this essay works through the specifically biopolitical dimension of these texts by examining the changing conceptions of life and subjectivity at this crucial juncture. Finally, this essay shows how the unsettling attempt to employ torture in order to awaken the comatose sleeper, represented frequently in the archive, is an explicit form of biopolitical violence that bespeaks a particular concept of liberal agency. The essay concludes by comparing the way pain empathy works in sleeper narratives to the deployment of sentimental affect in the eighteenth-century novel.