Tag Archives: Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund’s This Life

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“The brevity of my life is made salient by the forms of time to which I am recalled.”

“What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal.”

“The sense of finitude—the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about—is at heart of what I call secular faith.”

“I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time.”

“I seek to show that any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith.”

The “idea of secular life as empty or meaningless is itself a religious notion.”

The central thesis of Martin Hägglund’s This Life is summarised in his introduction. His book then labours to go beyond critical philosophy, developing his arguments through readings of the Bible, Buddhist philosophy, Greek and Roman Stoics, and writers like Augustine, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Augustine, C. S. Lewis and Charles Taylor. In the most rewarding chapter, he reads a secular confession in Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Finally, he turns to Marx’s argument that renders spiritual freedom the essential attribute of human labour.

The book seems unnecessarily verbose, not to disguise weak reasoning, but an excessive use of circumlocution. I was also surprised that Feuerbach is missing from Hägglund’s pantheon of writers, as from what little I understand of this undervalued thinker, his is a highly elegant argument that dissolves religious essence into human existence, without finding, it necessary (a strength of Hägglund’s) for an aggressive tearing-down.

That said, Hägglund’s thesis is substantive and thought provoking. It succeeds in moving Knausgaard forward in my reading plans, and reminds me to reread Feuerbach, a thinker I read with great enjoyment in my twenties.

Here is a proper review of Hägglund’s book.

Idées Fixes of the Week

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Rineke Dijkstra: Matadors

Rineke Dijkstra, arguably the most essential contemporary portrait photographer.

A photograph works best when the formal aspects such as light, colour and composition, as well as the informal aspects like someone’s gaze or gesture come together. In my pictures I also look for a sense of stillness and serenity. I like it when everything is reduced to its essence. You try to get things to reach a climax. A moment of truth.

*****

Martin Hägglund

While Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov all sought to transform the art of the novel to convey the condition of time, their works have persistently been read in terms of a desire to transcend temporal finitude. In contrast, I pursue a notion of “chronolibido” that challenges this notion of desire. The fear of time (chronophobia) does not stem from a desire to transcend time, but rather from the investment in a life that will be lost. It is because one desires a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia). The implications of chronolibido that I pursue in the major works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov are not simply an extrinsic theory that I apply to the novels in question, but rather a set of insights that I derive from close readings of the texts themselves. Finally, I systematize the logic of chronolibido through an in depth engagement with psychoanalysis. Contesting Freud and Lacan’s notion of the death drive, I seek to demonstrate how the chronolibidinal notion of binding provides a better model for thinking the constitution of the libidinal economy and why the logic of survival is more expressive of the problems of attachment, trauma, and mourning that are at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry.

*****

Mary Ruefle
I Remember, I Remember

I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes, and I felt I was looking at a map and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and went inside and wrote it down: the cracked earth is a map. Although it only takes a little time to tell it, and it is hardly interesting, it filled a big moment at the time, it was an enormous ever-expanding room of a moment, a chunk of time that has expanded ever since and that my whole life keeps fitting into.

*****

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. Even he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language, just as a Czech Jew writes in German, or an Ouzbekian writes in Russian. Writing like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its burrow.

*****

Jon Rafman

9 Eyes of Google Street View (2009)