Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov

by Martin Hägglund

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time--whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hagglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hagglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust's "Recherche," Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," and Nabokov's "Ada."

Through his readings of literary works, Hagglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. "Dying for Time" opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory, Criticism

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2012

About the author

Martin Hägglund is a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, which was published in Swedish in 2002. In Spring 2009, CR: The New Centennial Review published a special issue devoted to his work.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the name 'Jacques Derrida' and the phrase 'sparklingly clear prose' are usually treated as oxymoronic when paired together, Martin Hägglund -an exquisite writer and spiritual student of Derrida - has, by now, a habit of shaking things up. Dying for Time, Hägglund's marvelous follow up to his brilliant 2008 study of Derrida, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, does nothing less. Some changes abound though: whereas Radical Atheism found Hägglund writing as a knight of the Derridian faith, Dying for Time finds Hägglund free of his exegetical chains, writing in a name that's wholly his own. So instead of philosophy, it's to literature that Hägglund turns his critical eye, examining the ways in which Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov narrate the experience of time, so central to each author's works.

The basic idea that governs Hägglund's readings is that instead of striving to secure a timeless state of eternity, each author shows - in some cases in spite of themselves - how desire is instead driven by the need to endure in time; to survive, and to 'go on in time', instead of reaching a state of durationless repose. To that end, Hägglund reads and rereads crucial moments in Proust's Recherche, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov’s Ada in order to show how time ('the negativity of time'), conditions any and all moments of being. Although Dying for Time is a fairly quick read - running at just under 200 pages of sharp prose and meticulous arguments - it's one which is propelled by the relentlessness with which Hägglund hunts down any traces of the eternal; a relentlessness that's only too easy to get caught up in.

Although Derrida's name is hardly mentioned until the fourth chapter - which breaks with the analysis of literature in order to pitch Derrida against the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan - Hägglund's readings are throughly 'deconstructive' to the extent that he continually pitches the explicit claims of each author against their own, implicit descriptions of time (to those unfamiliar, 'deconstructive reading' is all about undoing texts 'from the inside', as it were...). And when Derrida's name does get mentioned, Hägglund grasps the nettle and tackles some of the most notoriously difficult works in the French philosopher's oeuvre. I'm thinking here of The Post Card, which contains a collection of bewildering post cards written by Derrida to an unnamed lover, which Hägglund elucidates with unnerving ease.

Perhaps the coolest thing about reading Hägglund is that all of it feels incredibly fresh. It's old literature read anew, and the philosophy at work feels like it's right on the cutting edge. Hägglund has no qualms about jumping right into contemporary debates on either, and the confident, fighting spirit of the book is, as I said, infectious. One could hardly be immune to it... (cf. Hägglund to get this rather lame, academic joke...).

[Pippa LaMacchia · Rating 4 out of 5]

gorgeous, groundbreaking, etc., etc. i wish to the gods i could write like this (clear, precise, moving).

[David Selsby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I liked this book. I don’t know if I’d recommend it. I read Hagglund’s “This Life” and I really enjoyed it, especially the last third of the book where he does a thorough and compelling reading on Marx. It’s spectacular. If I read the book again, I’ll probably only read that part. I enjoyed the rest of the book, it was fine, but that last part about Marx was fantastic. So I immediately checked out what else he had written and ordered this book.

I can’t . . . yes, Nabokov, Woolf and no, I can’t remember the last author. Proust! Yes, that’s it. I don’t know how Hagglund can do it (write this book; focus on something to such a degree that is seemingly dry and abstract). It’s like nuclear physics. Or putting together underwater cameras that capture time-lapse footage of coral bleaching. That last tidbit is from a documentary I just watched (well, part of it). There was an underwater photographer interviewed and he worked on the technical and electrical problems and components of this pod he was putting together for the documentarian. The director wanted the photographer to station three different camera pods in three different locations around the world to capture how over time our oceans’ coral is dying. It just so happened this photographer was a huge fan of coral; in like, he loved it. I don’t know if they were back at his house or an annex to his photography studio, but they filmed this photographer gently attending to his tanks full of coral. He seemed so happy; so self-contained and content. And earlier watching him with his colleagues discuss the wiring situation in the camera pod--again, content, self-contained, focused, happy--I thought, damn, these guys have found what they love; they’re fulfilled; no sturm und drang or existential angst or overt political commitments; no striving; no drama.

The reasons I bring this up is because there is something about Hagglund’s project in “Dying for Time” that reminds me of what I thought when I watched that cameraman and the way he conducted himself with his coral and his colleagues. Hagglund clearly knows his Derrida very well. Looking at his CV on the Yale website one can see he has written some heavy-duty papers on Derrida. I’m not looking at it right now, but I remember thinking that his writing and scholarship focused on a who’s who of the most difficult if not inscrutable philosophers of continental philosophy and post-structural theory. I studied some of these philosophers in college and grad school, and I did enjoy some of the books, specifically those written by Foucault, and I had a favorite teacher as an undergrad who’s had an influence on my thinking. That being said, once I left grad school I left most of those philosophers behind (reading them, that is; again, besides Foucault). I also left behind or never really discovered a way to make the ideas of those thinkers pertinent to my life, or the lives of those around me, or life for an American living in this country. Perhaps I’m over stating the degree to which these philosophers didn’t stay with me. This is a roundabout and not very clever way of saying it’s pretty darn impressive Hagglund has made these sometimes inscrutable and intractable thinkers his life’s work.

In this book he takes three writers, one of whom I’ve never read (Nabakov) and he presents detailed, close, philosophical readings of their work. That’s what reminded me of the coral guy. Just, I don’t want to say a focus on minutiae because that connotes an unimportance of what he’s studying, but just, I don’t know, it’s a terrain of exploration and appreciation for a small group of people. And I don’t think I’m one of them. Maybe it’s not that small; maybe there are thousands if not tens of thousands of scholars, teachers of, and readers of Woolf, Nabakov, and Proust who will appreciate and delight in Hagglund’s scholarship. I think I’m finally getting to my critique of this book: if you’re not a devotee of these three authors; if you’re not enamored with their work and really moved by it, you might not get a lot out of this book. And by get a lot out of I mean feeling invigorated and enlightened. I wouldn’t say I’m a bad candidate to appreciate this book. I’ve read “A Room of One’s Own.” I’ve read parts of “Swann’s Way.” I think I’ve actually read Lolita now that I think about it more. The point is I’m interested in the modernists. I wanted to learn more about Woolf and Proust, especially. I wanted to read Hagglund’s book and expand my appreciation of and sharpen my thinking about Proust and Woolf, especially, but Nabakov, too. I wanted to learn more about the milieu in which they wrote and learn about their critical and artistic and maybe even political commitments too.

I didn’t get that. I can’t imagine ever picking up “In Search of Lost Time” (again) or “Mrs Dalloway” or “To the Lighthouse.” Not because Hagglund soured me on them. Just that I’m no more likely to read them having read Hagglund’s book than I was before having read it. And that’s fine. Perhaps that was not the project Hagglund set out to accomplish when he wrote this book: to make these writers and their works come alive to the uninitiated or even someone like myself who had more than a passing understanding and appreciation of what they did and why it was important but wanted a guide to really walk me through the structures of their work, pointing here and there, telling me what to look for and why there’s such a hubbub around these authors. That’s not what happened. I think “Dying for Time” is ultimately for other scholars of English and French literature. I think it’s ultimately for scholars who have dedicated much of their professional training to the study of these authors and their work. Like a lot of Derrida and other post-structural work, “theory” in general, the scholarship (the books, articles, interviews) consists of discrete interventions and response to and expansions of particular theoretical and philosophical concerns that are only comprehensible to a small group of people. These discrete discursive interventions are built around close, technical readings of the work under consideration. As such, they are written for people who probably already have an intimate understanding, appreciation, and knowledge of the work in question.

That’s why I brought up the coral enthusiast. I don’t care about coral. I don’t wish anything bad for coral. I’m indifferent. I have neither good nor bad feelings about it. I hope it lives and thrives, but I’d be lying if I said I cared. I don’t care about electrical engineering either. These two subjects tell me nothing about my life, nothing about the lives of the people around me, and nothing about the experiences we have of being human. When I read a book about artists I want their work to be explored, interpreted, and dissected in a way that tells me something about the human condition and my and other people’s lives as we pass them on Earth. That did not happen for me from this book. There something of a hermetically-sealed nature of the type of explanatory rhetoric Hagglund uses. The aperture of his interpretive project is small, resulting in a technical and molecular analysis of the texts.

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very penetrating studying of desire and its double bind to the finitude of being. His deconstruction of the Lacanian notion of desire as driven by the desire for the Thing is on point, and his readings of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov are diligent and perceptive. The arguments do get repetitive sometimes, and there does seem to be a certain atheistic idealism that confuses ontology and epistemology. His notion of time, borrowed from Heidegger's, can be sometimes not clear enough (or taken to be too self-evident), and his treatment of suicide in the last essay is one of the most awkward paragraphs I've read in a while. Nevertheless, this is a monumental philosophical work bringing together the major threads of 20th century continental philosophy and definitely worth reading. This work has been very helpful in my thinking about psychoanalytic notions of desire and the time of trauma, and how time configures into the desire for an object.

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should’ve just focused on Proust

Am reminded of 6.4311 from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

“Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.”

[Nihar Mukund · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

It is really well-written, and explains and moves through ideas (somewhat repetitively) in a very clear manner. The core principle of this book itself, too, is really brilliant. But, let's be honest. It could have been a slightly long essay rather than a full book.

[Lamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

补

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just amazing.