Sleeping soldiers: On sleep and war

Abstract

In this article, I explore sleep specifically as a weapon of war, as a logistic of war, and as a metaphor for conscience in war. In proposing the capacity to sleep as a measure of the effects of strategies of war, and to recalibrate understandings of intimacy and vulnerability in war, I highlight the distinct effects of war on all its denizens. I make no claim for sameness among their experiences – far from it. And yet, at the same time, I wish to draw attention to what this exploratory essay also conveys, namely, the possibility for a sort of what Judith Butler terms ‘sensate democracy’ in the experience of sleeplessness, exposing a counterintuitive commonality among those deemed friends and enemies. Such a focus brings to the fore that which Simone Weil so powerfully articulated – that violence and force destroy those who wield them and those who are subject to them, potentially reducing each to something less than human, rendering them ‘brothers in the same misery’. Far from facilitating or structuring a relativistic moral equivalence, this potential solidarity provides a form and a measure that, in turn, make way for an analysis of distinct relations of power.

Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism

“…Military weaponry and equipment are no less important in soliciting, orienting and steering the human agent, their design guided by principles of ‘human systems integration’ into the war machine (Pew and Mavor, 2007). The methods employed for the purpose of mobilization vary, but their core objective remains constant: to augment the individual’s contribution to assembled combat power and ward off the thresholds beyond which the compound effects of stress, pain and fatigue induce its degradation and eventual collapse (Kinsella, 2020). Indeed, among all the spheres of human activity, it is plausibly within that of armed conflict that the previously established limits of the body are most persistently and spectacularly breached.…”

“…Cardinal as it may be, the encounter with war does not reduce to the conflagration of battle but encompasses a multiplicity of locales, durations and affects. War is diversely experienced by its participants as a cacophony of fear, anxiety, love, grief, rage, boredom, reminiscence, longing and elation, to which sleep offers merely a temporary respite (Kinsella, 2020). Many soldiers describe missing war and its unparalleled heightening of human existence, but all wrestle with its fundamental unintelligibility and foreignness, one way or another.…”

“…Attending to the sensory and affective dimensions of war requires inspecting both the battlescapes in which combat occurs and all the other spaces in which bodies are primed and conditioned for fighting in the first place. Kinsella’s contribution (2020) on the regulation of sleep in war and the successes and failures of military interventions in the governance of slumber is exemplary. To consider sleep or its privation as part of the formative milieu of war draws us to the rhythms and processes of the body that both set the stage for martial experience and themselves constitute sites of power and contestation.…”

The body weaponized: War, sexual violence and the uncanny

“…It is a commonplace of phenomenological inquiry that the body cannot be apprehended directly, only askew, in the discourses, codes and fantasies that help grant it coherence. An act of sensory translation is therefore required (Baker, 2016; see also Kinsella, 2020, for a different domain of war experience). Feminist and martial theorists draw on, even as they also rearticulate, the interpretations of combatants and others who experience war with greater immediacy.…”