During the past years, online services like LivesOn, Eterni.me and DeadSocial received some media coverage. They seem to establish ways to suspend death by digital means as they perpetuate some communicative aspects of the deceased individual. This article shows how a new logic of negotiation between life and death is not restricted to such specialized services like LivesOn, Eterni.me and DeadSocial. On the contrary, the computational processes that are embedded in massively used communication platforms enforce a phenomenon that I suggest to coin with the term algorithmic undeath: Web algorithms for recommendation and personalization in general establish a post mortem prolongation of individual communication. The article unfolds this argument, suggests a categorization of dimensions of death and closes with some remarks about the cultural and social significance of algorithmic undeath. The algorithmic perpetuation of some aspects of individual communications poses serious questions in relation to our concept of death, work, expropriation and value creation, personal identity, authorship and continuity, but also in relation to the question of creativity and the social value of oblivion.

Much has been written about dreaming, but deep, dreamless sleep still seems to receive little attention within cultural studies and social science. This article analyses Georges Perec's A Man Who Sleeps and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation in terms of the phantasm of metamorphosis enabled by sleep. These two novels show that the polarity of waking and dreaming can be relativized and shifted to the polarity between waking-dreaming/sleeping: This shift becomes particularly productive when it comes to the question of losing and finding ones identity, but also when we try to shed light on the relationship between (ideological or biographical) subjectification and self-overcoming. At the centre of this article is the notion of the sovereignty of sleep, which could allow both day life and dream life to be lifted out of joint.

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