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Praise for Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Karin Lavér31 July 2013

"Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day." Friedrich Nietzsche

Jonathan Crary's recently published 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep has awakened a number of journalists, rendering them to give the books some excellent remarks.

According to New Statesman's Steven Poole, Crary's explorations "result in some splendid formulations".

In an engaging review in Popmatters, Vince Carducci compares Crary with the late great Michel Foucault "but without the gnarly, headache-inducing sentence structure." Carducci writes that 24/7 is
marked by a moral passion that fuels Crary's polemic and underscores what's at stake, specifically the future of the human being in both the physical and emotional sense." Steven Poole for New Statesman writes: "Crary's book is, on the whole, a humane and bracingly splenetic counterblast, with a lot of interesting micro-theses along the way.
Meanwhile, Ron Jacobs of CounterPunch describes 24/7 as "a masterful exploration of the place of the human individual, their dreams and the future of the species in today's age of nonstop neoliberal capitalism and its multitude of manifestations."

He continues:
The text provides a historical survey of capitalism's growing encroachment on individual human life and the reasons this occurs, yet emphasizes the current scenario where that encroachment has increased in a manner previously impossible, but now matter of course thanks to today's technological advances. Although this book is a philosophical treatise, it rarely wanders into a verbal density that would render it unreadable. In other words, it definitely will not put the reader to sleep.

An in-depth review has also been written by Matthew Fuller for Mute.

Visit New StatesmanPopMatters, CounterPunch and Mute to read the reviews in full.

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