Det sovende subjekt

Abstract

In this article, I consider how questions of subjectivity and self pose problems for the conception of sleep as a field of scientific study. During the twentieth century, the study of human sleep underwent significant changes and is now considered a fully fledged scientific object available for scrutiny outside of purely subjective criteria. It is nevertheless relevant to question how the expropriation of subjective sleep experiences to a medical and technological domain affects the conception of human sleep. The interplay between subjective sleep experiences and objective as well as medical depictions of sleep is inherent in the narrative framework of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), most prominently expressed in the narrator’s sustained effort to articulate his experience as a subject in sleep. By applying Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the expropriation of subjective experience as a pre-condition for a biopolitical critique of modern sleep science, I argue that Proust’s narrative articulates the crucial connection between language and subjectivity in the experience of sleep. I conclude by suggesting that a linguistic and literary analysis of subjective experience is a necessary pre-condition for any serious effort to grasp subjective sleep in medical and scientific terms.