Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov by Martin Hägglund (review)

Abstract

HAGGLUND, MARTIN. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 197 pp. $49.95. To begin, Dying For Time; Proust, Woolf, Nabokov is a crucial follow up to Martin Hagglund's first book published in English, Radical Atheism: Derrida and Time of Life (2008). In Radical Atheism, Hagglund masterfully rethinks philosophy of Jacques Derrida in order to posit his theory of radical atheism, which disavows traditional atheism by refuting very desire for immortality, existence of divine, and so forth that traditional atheism aims to reject in first place. As Adrian Johnston and others like Michael Naas make clear in their trenchant responses to Radical Atheism, theory of radical atheism hinges upon a theory of desire that is not yet fully developed in early text. In part then, Dying for Time consolidates Hagglund's response to his critics who have challenged theory of radical atheism on question of desire. But as Hagglund takes on a more sustained engagement with psychoanalysis--in addition to his philosophical and literary investments--in order to develop his theory of chronolibido (the central theory of desire that drives text) it quickly becomes clear that Dying for Time is a tremendous philosophical achievement that will make it hard to understand desire without turning to arguments Hagglund makes in his book. Hagglund introduces notion of chronolibido through a scene in Plato's Republic in which Socrates proclaims his frustration with tendency of Homer's writings to make even most keen of philosophical minds fall prey to dramatic pathos of Iliad and become victim to grip of desire for mortal (1). The problem for Socrates, in Hagglund's reading, is that philosopher is precisely figure who should otherwise remain immune to the loss of mortal beings; he should rather turn his desire toward immutable presence of eternal (2). Socrates, in other words, discovers himself at a remarkable impasse in which task of philosopher--understood as converting the desire for mortal into a desire for immortal that can never be lost (2)--is challenged by fact that poetry both conjures and inspires a desire for a mortal life that is threatened by possibility of its own loss. Hagglund sets up scene of Socrates's discontent in order to elucidate how desire, in tradition of western philosophy, is predicated on a constitutive difference between what one is and what one is not, and who one really wants to be and who one actually is. Hagglund also deftly deploys scene of Socrates's polemical response to Homer's writings as an allegorical frame for establishing that desire has heretofore been erringly conceived--in psychoanalytic theory, contemporary literary studies, and in tradition of western philosophy--as always therefore testifying to an ontological lack. Although Hagglund is careful to point out that pervasive tendency to read difference in desire as affirming a fundamental lack of being does not indicate an inherent failure in logic, he does insist that this line of thinking fails to account for very structural logic of difference in first place. In Dying For Time, Hagglund thus pursues a new account of constitutive difference of desire that is not read as an ontological lack. To do so, Hagglund begins by tracing the constitutive difference of desire to condition of (3). Without spending too much time recapitulating main tenets of Derridean-inspired, Hagglundian logic of time that governs chronolibidinal argument, it will suffice to say that Hagglund posits that present is constituted by simultaneous passing away of past and anticipation of a future that is yet to come. The present (and thus everything thought on basis of presence), in other words, is not intrinsic itself; it is instead characterized by an infinite splitting between past and future. …