Is There a Right to Sleep?

This chapter probes what lies beyond the enduring rational, conscious, Lockean legal subject by speculatively returning to the disregarded body in sleep. The answer is formulated through studies of the phenomenology of sleep and the political theology of the sleeping king, which converge on a concept of legal vigilance. These inquiries are used to demonstrate the inherently collective and political nature of sleep, a kind of “flesh” to which, individually, we have little conscious access but which has the potential to reorient legal rights and political values. This chapter mobilizes this concept of vigilance to analyze two recent cases, one from the European Union, the other from India, that have grappled with a right to sleep, finding in one the kernel of a nascent right worth development.