The Chronolibidinal World of <em>Dying for Time</em>

Abstract

Desire, as Martin Hagglund claims in Dying For Time , has been erringly conceived in philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic traditions as testifying to a fundamental lack of being. In response, Hagglund develops the notion of chronolibido, a theory that posits the constitutive difference of desire as testifying to temporal finitude and mortality as the object of desire. In the rubric of chronolibido, the desire for immortality dissimulates a preceding desire for survival. This review takes up Hagglund’s theory of desire and examines the implications of chronolibido for reading modernist literature.