Martin Hägglund, Dying For Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, Harvard University Press, 2012, 198pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674066328.

Reviewed by Humberto Brito - (excerpts) “Martin Hägglund develops a sustained attack on what he considers to be immortality fantasies. We might equally describe it as an attack on the belief in redemption, as it reviles the intelligibility of any "state of eternity", as well as all descriptions of an individual human life as "a path to the salvation of eternity" (88). This attack is based on the author's prefatory distinction between immortality and survival [  ]  Hägglund argues… that wanting to be immortal is nothing but wanting to live on as a mortal. It is an expression of a desire for survival, which originates in our attachment to our temporal lives[  ]. In addition, since "immortality would not allow anything to live on in time", the "desire to perpetuate a temporal being is incompatible with a desire to be immortal." [  ]The key argument here concerns the co-implication of chronophonia and chronophilia. The fear of time and death does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend temporal life [  ] It is because one is attached to a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia)” [  ] “It is telling that Hägglund's guiding intuition is that we can elucidate chronolibido in reference to how our human experience of time was depicted, or rather magnified, by three modernist writers (Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov). Strikingly, he takes their pictures of temporal self-awareness as final word on the topic. Hägglund offers a forceful, lucid, and rigorous account of how their work epitomizes a "chronolibidinal aesthetics"[]  In brief, Hägglund is interested in: how Proust saw our sense of the past, how Woolf saw our sense of the present, and how Nabokov's idea of writing is the quintessential figure of the notion of chronolibidinal investment in survival. More specifically, Hägglund focuses on Proust's treatment of involuntary memory, Woolf's treatment of epiphanic "moments of being", and Nabokov's depiction of the activity of writing.[  ]. In chapter 3, he offers an interpretation of Nabokov's dramatization of the act of writing in Ada or Ardor in reference to what he takes to be the negativity of time, in which writing is understood as a tool to cope with the texture of time and the destructibility of memory. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/37962-dying-for-time-proust-woolf-nabokov/