I’m falling asleep.¹ I’m falling into sleep and I’m falling there by the power of sleep. Just as I fall asleep from exhaustion. Just as I drop from boredom.² As I fall on hard times. As I fall, in general. Sleep sums up all these falls, it gathers them together. Sleep is proclaimed and symbolized by the sign of the fall, the more or less swift descent or sagging, faintness.

To these we can add: how I’m fainting from pleasure, or from pain. This fall, in its turn, in one or another of its versions, mingles with the others. When...

By falling asleep, I fall inside myself: from my exhaustion, from my boredom, from my exhausted pleasure or from my exhausting pain. I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward. I fall to where I am no longer separated from the world by a demarcation that still belongs to me all through my waking state and that I myself am, just as I am my skin and all my sense organs. I pass that...

What a self it is that allows itself to be discovered! Fallen from the supposed heights of vigilant consciousness, from surveillance and control, from projection and differentiation, here is a self given over to its most intimate motion: that of the return into self. What, in fact, is “self” if not “to oneself,” “for oneself”? Self relates to self and returns to itself to be what it is: “self.” “I” do not make a self, for “I” do not return:I, on the contrary, escape, either by addressing the world or by withdrawing from it, but only in order to...

Everything is equal to itself and to the rest of the world. Everything reverts to the general equivalence in which one sleeper is worth as much as any other sleeper and every sleep is worth all the others, however it may appear. For sleeping “well” or “badly” comes down merely to sleeping more or less, in a more or less continuous, or more or less perturbed fashion. Interruptions and perturbations, including those that arise sometimes from within sleep itself, like those nightmares that wake us up in anxiety and sweat—these accidents of sleep do not belong to it.

Sleep...

The sleeping person closes his eyes so he can open them to night. Inside himself, beneath the eyelids that sink with sleep and that were already there, throughout the whole day, solely that there might be evoked, lowering their awnings at times, the always possible imminence of a night in broad daylight, the possibility, if not the necessity, of escaping the solicitations of wakefulness, what he sees is nothing other than night itself. For night—through a major difference from day—is no more external than it is internal. Day is wholly outside; day is before our eyes, at the...

Still, we have to put ourselves to sleep [s’être endormi]. But this reflexive verb leads to an illusion. No one puts himself to sleep: sleep comes from elsewhere. It falls onto us, it makes us fall into it. So we have to have been put to sleep. We have to have been put to sleep by sleep itself—by the sleep of exhaustion or the sleep of pleasure, by the sleep of boredom—or else by some access road to its realm.

What leads to sleep has the shape of rhythm, of regularity and repetition. It is a matter of...

Never, however, never does the soul sleep. That absenting of self in self is unknown to it. Absence belongs to the body and to the mind; it is foreign to the soul. In sleep, the mind abandons itself to the body and disperses its location through it, dissolves its concentration into that soft, almost disjointed expanse. The body, for its part, abandons itself paradoxically to the very location of the mind: it is no longer actually exposed in space but implicitly or virtually withdrawn into a nonplace where it anaesthetizes itself and separates itself from the world. The person who...

Like death, sleep, and like sleep, death—but without awakening. Without a rhythm of return, without repetition, without a new day, without tomorrow.

Like death, sleep, for the body stretches out alone there, is alone there outstretched. Outstretched alone there,there, a here like nowhere. Nowhere else but a weighty body cast down, laid out, left on the ground. Like sleep, death: body deposed.

A sleep, though, that would be its own waking: an immortality raised in death through this waking, stuck at right angles like the uprising of that which will never rise again. A sleep sleeping elsewhere than...

Whoever does not know how not to wake up, whoever remains on the lookout in the hollow of sleep, he, she, is stuck with his or her fear. He is afraid of letting go even of his troubles and cares. He wears out his night in stirring them, in ruminating over them like thoughts bogged down in tautology, becoming viscous, creeping, insidious, and venomous. But what he fears above all else is not that the difficulties or dangers that these thoughts display threaten to arise as so many failures and defeats on the following day, what he really fears more...