The Chronolibidinal World of Dying for Time

Desire, as Martin Hägglund claims in Dying For Time, has been erringly conceived in philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic traditions as testifying to a fundamental lack of being. In response, Hägglund develops the notion of chronolibido, a theory that posits the constitutive difference of desire as testifying to temporal finitude and mortality as the object of desire. In the rubric of chronolibido, the desire for immortality dissimulates a preceding desire for survival. This review takes up Hägglund’s theory of desire and examines the implications of chronolibido for reading modernist literature.