Lionel Ruffel Knihy

Within the hypermediated age where knowledge production is decentered and horizontal, the experience of lived time has become a concordance of temporalities. The literary imagination, which was emblematic of modernity and thoroughly connected to the book as a support structure, has now become integrated within a much vaster regime of publication. Thought concerning the world is from now on a thought concerning a plurality of worlds. By way of six guiding threads (exposition, media, controversy, publication, institutionalization, archaeology), this essay describes the transformation of cultural forms and visions of history.

An attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, with references to Jonathan Crary, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin. “This book could have been called The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams, but frankly, I Can’t Sleep sounds better, plus it’s true.”—Lionel Ruffel The diaristic form of I Can't Sleep is an attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, making reference to Jonathan Crary, Bernard Stiegler, Yves Citton, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and above all Walter Benjamin. Written in a style that borrows not from classical forms of theory or prose, but operates in between fiction and nonfiction to investigate the very concept of the contemporary, I Can't Sleep uses a quite old but often renewed method—in this sense a very contemporary one—consisting of starting from one’s own personal situation.