Martin Hägglund


Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher, literary theorist, and scholar of modernist literature. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of , Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet.

Works

''This Life''

In , Hägglund pursues a critique of the religious ideal of eternity and reconceives faith in secular terms as the fundamental form of practical commitment. Through new interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Martin Luther King Jr., Hägglund develops the social and political stakes of his critique of religion, arguing that labor under capitalism alienates us from our finite lifetime. Calling for a revaluation of our values, Hägglund presents a vision of democratic socialism as a post-capitalist form of life in which we could truly own our time and recognize our shared freedom.

''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, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss.

''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. As Hägglund argues, 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 for religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the condition of temporal finitude.