Since its inception, capitalist modernity has driven us toward incessant productive activity and the continuous extraction of value.

It has become increasingly intertwined with what Arendt called the restless “life of the mind”, a convergence that has reached its apogee in our own time. AI and cognitive automation embody the ideal of operational continuity at its purest, while deskilling, exhausting, and damaging human intelligence.

Through a heterodox reading of the European philosophical canon, When Thinking Stops develops a genealogy of this predicament, focusing on the dominant paradigm of continuous activity. The book untangles this genealogy by tracing a seemingly marginal motif: the strange fear of sleep that brutally interrupts what philosophers treat as the precious activity of thinking. From Plato and Aristotle to modern philosophers including Descartes, Locke, Spinoza and Leibniz, up to Hegel, one finds the repeated claim that thinking is the most valuable activity and that its seamless continuity must be ensured by all means.

This philosophical fear of sleep, or hypnophobia, aligns with capital's “vampire's thirst” (Marx) for an uninterrupted consumption of living labour. On a more speculative level, and drawing critically on Emmanuel Levinas's early thought, When Thinking Stops invokes the figure of “ontological insomnia” and posits that the modern drive for continuous activity reveals a dispositif of violent and incessant compulsion “to be.” The book concludes by evoking speculative and utopian visions of non-continual and non-compulsive existence.