Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund (born November 23, 1976) is a Swedish philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University.^[1] He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows,^[2] serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, 2002).

Literature

Radical Atheism

Radical Atheism is a major intervention in deconstruction, offering a novel account of Jacques Derrida's thinking of time and space, life and death, good and evil, self and other. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs his work from beginning to end. Atheism has traditionally limited itself to denying the existence of God and immortality, without questioning the desire for God and immortality. In contrast, radical atheism seeks to demonstrate that the desire for a timeless eternity (immortality) dissimulates a desire to live on in time (survival). Rather than being dependent on a transcendent ideal, all our commitments presuppose an investment in and care for finite life. Developing a deconstructive account of time, Hägglund shows how Derrida rethinks the constitution of identity, the violence of ethics, the desire of religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the condition of temporal finitude.

Dying for Time

Dying for Time offers new readings of the problem of temporality in the writings of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Through an engagement with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Hägglund also develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire ("chronolibido"), addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss.

Bibliography

• Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 2008.
• Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet (Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude), Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposion, 2002.

References

External links

• Review of Dying for Time in Los Angeles Review of Books
• Review of Radical Atheism and its reception in International Journal of Philosophical Studies
• Video recording of Hägglund and Derek Attridge on Radical Atheism at Oxford University
• Martin Hägglund’s website