Hartmut Böhme, “Schlaf der Vernunft: Zur politischen Deutung von Müdigkeit, Schlaf, Schlafwandeln, Traum und Erwachen” / “Sleep of Reason: On the Political Interpretation of Fatigue, Sleep, Sleepwalking, Dreams, and Awakening”
Thursday, 11 January 2024, 19:15 CET
Auditorium of the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 1-3
10117 Berlin
GERMANY
With Ulrike Vedder
Sponsored by:
The Mosse Foundation
Institut für deutsche Literatur
Humboldt University
Mosse Lectures
Starting from Francisco Goya’s Capriccios on the “Sleep of Reason,” the lecture will examine essential states as well as border phenomena of sleep. After an overview of the essential phenomena of sleep, the semantic fields are sketched that have led to the metaphorical interpretation of the manifestations and practices of sleep. Thus, for example, fatigue, sleep, sleepwalking, dreaming, and awakening, which are actually bodily and phantasmatic states or processes, became ‘source fields’ of metaphors: these added cultural ‘meaning’ to political states or actions. In this manner, levels of meaning were implanted in the political system that challenged or even abolished the limitation of the political to the conscious and discursive as defining markers of politics. Hallucinatory or somnambulistic collective states thus belong to the political just as much as dream-like illusions or an exhausting fatigue of individual subjects. But also political awakening movements can be interpreted as ‘awakenings’ from a general state of twilight and unconsciousness. In the twentieth century, pharmaceutical and toxic agents became crucial, transforming all levels and borderline states of sleep into a ›regime‹. Has this ‘artificialization’ of sleep and wakefulness also developed a regulative, possibly anesthetizing and manipulative force in the political? Natural scientific perspectives on sleep do not become the subject here. Rather, traces of language and cultural imagology are pursued, which can broaden our view of politics.
Hartmut Böhme: Literary and cultural scholar, until his retirement professor of cultural theory and history of mentality at the Humboldt University Berlin; Böhme was head of various research projects – including the collaborative research center Transformations of Antiquity, the research training group Codings of Violence in Medial Change; visiting professor at various universities in the U.S. and Japan, as well as fellow at the international College for Cultural Technology Research and Media Philosophy in Weimar and at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen; his research and work focuses on cultural theory and literary history from the 18th to the 20th century, cultural history since antiquity, the theory and history of fetishism, the history of science and images, and historical anthropology and psychohistory.
Photo credit: Niels Leiser for the Mosse Lectures