Chronophilia: Nabokov and the Time of Desire

A metaphysical conception of desire dominates Nabokov scholarship. Historically, metaphysics has understood desire as the desire for the absolute fullness of timelessness. In contrast, I argue that temporal finitude is not a lack of being that testifies to an absent fullness. Rather, temporal finitude is the condition for both the desirable and the undesirable. I conceptualize this double bind in terms of the constitutive entanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time (chronophobia) does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend time. On the contrary, I argue that chronophobia and chronophilia are two aspects of the same condition. It is because one desires temporal phenomena (chronophilia) that one fears losing them (chronophobia). Accordingly, there is an incurable chronophobia at the heart of chronophilia, since whatever one wants to hold on to is constituted by the fact that it will be lost. There is no way out of this double bind because the threat of loss is not extrinsic to what is desired, but intrinsic to its being as such. The essay explores this double bind in a number of Nabokov's texts, mainly focusing on Ada. The logic of "chronophilia" that is developed opens a new perspective on the writing of time and the finitude of desire, which draws on the work of Derrida.