To coincide with the Ancient Greece Episode at Tate Liverpool, this panel explores sleep as an important, but often overlooked part of culture, and the subject of numerous artworks.
The panel presents the work of two writers who each propose theories and philosophies of sleep. Join them to explore sleep as both a space in which stories are told and times are travelled; an act full of delight and materiality, offering an escape from the pace of everyday life.
“Sleeping Beauties and Vigilant Monsters, on the Politics and Aesthetics of Sleep”.
Dr. Alexei Penzin will discuss Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale, linking its interpretation to the problem of vigilance and sleep in the ancient Greek philosophy, as well as to medieval and early modern political theology of sovereignty and to early capitalist modernity and elaborate an aesthetics of sleep in the contemporary context.
“The Elements of Sleep”
Prof. Matthew Fuller will draw on his book ‘How to Sleep, in art, biology and culture’, in order to discuss the relations between sleep science and an aesthetics without a subject. In most accounts and representations of sleep, the sleeper becomes a null field, a placeholder for a thinking being, something that will come back to its senses in due course. Drawing on the pre-socratic philosopher Empedocles, an aesthetics of sleep as a bodily, mediatic and ecological admixture of forces is counterposed to this imagined emptiness of sleep.