Martin Hägglund

Reviews

Of This Life   

"An important new book... Always lucid... Beautifully liberating... And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge... I finished This Life in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose—I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value... Hägglund’s book ends, stirringly, with a grounded account of a man who died trying to use his precious time to change the precious time of oppressed people, aware that the full realization of his vision would likely involve a revaluation of value that could not yet be spoken in America. We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one."

                              James Wood, The New Yorker

"A new philosophy for our time... I burned through this book so fast I forgot it was 400 pages. I even reread passages I enjoyed, because it was so engaging and thought provoking... My new favorite philosophy book."

                                         Alex Bell, The Boston Globe

"Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question: What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have?... This Life presents a vital alternative."

                             Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The New Republic

"Brilliant...Exciting... One of Hägglund's most impressive achievements is to bring to a new public agitating for freedom in our lives a bold project of exhuming from the grave an identifiably Marxist intellectual enterprise. At stake are the beliefs we all must share that humanity is one, the social life it has created for itself an affront to its destiny, and—theoretically as well as practically—it has a world to win."

                                         Samuel Moyn, Jacobin

"Deep, critical, and lively... Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so... Hägglund wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives... The book's central contention is powerful." 

                             Mark O'Connell, New Statesman

"Earnest and precise... huge intellectual range... beautifully clear. This Life requires no philosophical training, only an interest in the meaning of this life... I found Hägglund's cherishing of mortal existence a cheering corrective to the sometimes joyless scientificity of the new atheism... Hägglund is surely right that it is our mortality, our miraculous existence as carbon-based matter turned all too briefly into conscious beings who can love and be loved, that makes us priceless to ourselves and to each other." 

                                        Joe Moran, Times Higher Education

"This Life is to be applauded. Its iconoclasm and sweep provide an example of what intellectual activity can and should look like in an era of emergency... The great virtue of the book: it provides a regulative ideal, and a reminder of what kind of world we are actually fighting for... We need a vision of justice that is plausible and compelling enough to organize our efforts. Hägglund’s book provides one. After a half century of anti-utopian suspicion, This Life calls us back to a nearly forgotten style of thinking and imagining... Hägglund is right that time is our most precious resource."

                              James Chappel, Boston Review

"By far the most profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful book I have ever read on the topic of immortality, and the problematic implications of the religious fixation on eternal life. For a secular person–or anyone who wants to understand the secular worldview–this book is essential reading... Hägglund plumbs its depths like no one has ever before. He does so artfully, theoretically, and with tremendous wisdom. This Life is a truly welcome addition to the secularist humanist canon." 

                              Phil Zuckerman, Psychology Today  

"Electrifying...Hägglund's work stands as one of the most morally and politically compelling intellectual projects of our time."

                                           Conall Cash, boundary 2

"Hägglund's rich understanding of democratic socialism... opens fascinating questions for a left that has been, in recent decades, too narrowly focused on the share of the pie rather than on how we can lead meaningful lives. Hägglund reminds us to not only think about beating the 1 percent, but also about the kind of world we want to build, the kind of existence we want to have on this earth. For that, we need to not only envision a world with less inequality, but also one with new institutions that sustain our lives... This Life calls us to think deeply about a political project that gives us all the time and space to decide what matters."

                         Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Daniel Zamora, Dissent

"A momnumental achievement... Hägglund is exactly right to focus our long-term vision on a fundamental transformation of society... Hägglund's revaluation of value is itself a powerful Polaris to help navigate the political projects that we set ourselves to embracing."

                              Michael McCarthy, Jacobin

"A book filled with insight... Hägglund has written an important work that pushes forward a secular, rational, and fulfilling view of humankind's place in the world. If the reader is up to the challenge of engaging deeply and historically about their life philosophy, this is a book that rewards that effort."

                                           David Chivers, The Humanist 

"Hägglund hopes to help people seize this moment of discontent with capitalism and ask some fundamental questions: How should we live and work together? What are the optimal ways we can organize society to enhance freedom and well-being — and avoid scorching the planet? That’s a good conversation to have."

                                           Tom Krattenmaker, USA Today

"A highly readable, accessible--yet profound--examination of what kind of society might enable life at its most fulfilling... The discussions and analyses, however complex, are written with a light touch and beguiling clarity which is both wholly absorbing and deeply relevant. The reader is complicit, a partner. It is a book to read slowly, and this reviewer is about to start reading it all over again." 

                              Marina Vaizey, The Arts Desk

"Both draws on and critiques such major thinkers as Aristotle, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Keynes, Hayek, Adorno, and Martin Luther King—without ever bogging down in philosophical jargon. As timely as a work of philosophy could be these days."

                              Ray Olson, Booklist, starred review 

"Hägglund's intellect is clearly impressive, but equally so is his grasp of what makes human life, from the private to the political, meaningful... His book presents a vision, in a liberating and robust way. Secular faith is to know this life will end, and not to see that as unbearable, but rather as a catalyst to creating a life that is worth living."

                                           Kathryn Drury Wagner, Spirituality & Health

"The beauty of Hägglund's book is that he does not stop where Spinoza does: freedom here leads to socialism, for freedom means collective freedom... Brilliant, inspirational, and should be read."

                              Adolph Alzuphar, Counterpunch         

"A splendid primer on the importance of authentic freedom."

                              Yanis Varoufakis, author of Adults in the Room

"Arriving at a moment of widespread intellectual and political disorientation, This Life is a timely, profoundly ambitious attempt to fashion a new foundation for personal and collective existence. Hägglund argues that a return to Marx’s radical materialism does not have to signal a loss of spirituality or contempt for democracy, but something like the opposite: a truly secular faith in a redemptive realm of freedom."

                             Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve

"Hägglund shows with real originality why the moral concern that underlies religious faith has always been a hope for the perpetuation of life on earth. Stringent, lucid, and urgent in its appeal for a politics equal to the prospect of climate disaster, This Life is both an argument and a summons."

                             David Bromwich, author of Moral Imagination

"Martin Hägglund is the most important young philosopher in America, whose work on time has already made an immense impression in academic circles. Now he has chosen to address a broad audience, in a work of immaculate clarity. When this powerful and moving book reaches a wide readership, it will, I think, have profound practical as well as theoretical consequences for the discussions that are raging on every side around questions of religious belief and the future of democracy."

                             Richard Klein, Professor Emeritus at Cornell

"This is a rare piece of work, the product of great intellectual strength and moral fortitude. The writing shows extraordinary range and possesses an honesty and fervor which is entirely without cynicism. Beneath Hägglund’s affirmation of secular faith and a life-defining commitment is a compelling reworking of the early Heidegger’s existential analytic, especially his understanding of finitude and ecstatic temporality. With the great difference that this is a distinctly leftist project, where secular faith leads to spiritual freedom which is understood as a Hegelian-Marxist affirmation of democratic socialism. Hägglund is a genuine moralist for our times, possessed of an undaunted resoluteness and a fierce commitment to intellectual probity. Maybe he’s the philosophical analogue to Karl Ove Knausgaard."

                             Simon Critchley, author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

Of Dying for time

"The Swedish philosopher and literary scholar Martin Hägglund has swiftly established himself at the center of some of today’s most lively intellectual debates… Dying for Time delivers a revolutionary reading of the ways in which modernist writers express elemental aspects of human existence. In the process, it disproves the idea that deconstruction—or, indeed, literary theory per se—is always off-puttingly arid and abstract. Hägglund’s approach is absolutely the opposite… This is a book that brings literature and theory into forceful collision with life’s underlying realities. The resulting insight is resolutely atheistic: neither art nor thought allows access to another world of timeless perfection. Instead, each is irreducibly interwoven with the world in which we live. Some say that literary theory is dead, out of fashion, a thing of the past. But Hägglund shows how it can and should go on living: in unflinching fidelity to how it feels to be human."

                              David Winters, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Martin Hägglund has changed forever how we see the modern novel’s relation to time. Richly argued and lyrical in its celebration of narrative experience, his book shows that what animates the pages of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov is not the longing for immortality but the keen wish to continue in time."

                              Elaine Scarry, Harvard University

"Dying for Time is brilliant and innovative. From this point forward, one would be hard pressed to think through questions of desire without turning to Hägglund's study. But much of what makes Dying for Time so remarkable is its attention to modernist masterpieces that continue to demand our critical attention and our emotional investment as readers. Whereas in Radical Atheism Hägglund emerges as an influential philosopher of deconstructionist thought, in Dying for Time he asserts himself as a formidable literary critic."

                             Jennifer Yusin, Journal of Modern Literature

"Eminently readable and engrossingly polemical... Rather than an ontological lack, Hägglund argues, it is the condition of time that is constitutive of desire."

                             Marc Farrant, Times Literary Supplement

"Brilliant...Beginning with his influential writings on deconstruction and atheism, Hägglund's work can be read as an attempt to recover concepts that have traditionally been associated with divinity for a secular mode of enquiry: what metaphysics is for Heidegger, theology is for Hägglund...As an alternative to arguments that rely on transcendence, whether as inescapable fantasy or as religious doctrine, Hägglund develops an authentically secular analysis of love...A major accomplishment."

                            Emily Vasiliauskas, Cambridge Quarterly Review     

"What distinguishes this important book is that it allows us to understand these canonical modernist concerns [temporality, mourning, and desire] in a wholly new way... It is the true nature of temporal experience that we are returned to by Hägglund's profound and brilliant book, a work of literary criticism as timely as it is untimely."

                            Adam Kelly, Modernism/Modernity

"Revolutionary... Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov ultimately convinces one of the validity of its author’s Derrida-influenced challenge, as Martin Hägglund carefully refutes prominent critics, as well as Freud and Lacan, and consistently proves the validity of his chronolibidinal reading of these texts. Not only do we see how deconstruction is put to a new advantage via Hägglund’s approach, but one is also moved by the elemental struggle to survive depicted in each of these three modernist writers."

                           Helane Levine-Keating, Woolf Studies Annual

"This is an excellent rereading of these canonical works, which deal with the subject's preoccupation with time and loss and explore universal themes of mourning, memory, and subjectivity. Summing up: Highly recommended."

                            D.L. Spanfelner, Choice

"Dying for Time has much higher goals than simply challenging the established, traditional reading of Proust, Woolf and Nabokov with respect to questions such as time, mortality, memory or trauma and achieves more than it promises at its inception… Apart from opening an innovative hermeneutical perspective on the works of Proust, Woolf and Nabokov—which could prove itself very fruitful for further and more in depth literary and philosophical analysis of the texts—Hägglund’s book successfully challenges the traditional understanding of time, finitude and temporal being and offers a sound solution to the paradoxical logic of desire. Although Hägglund’s work is to some extent indebted to Derrida’s thinking, the concept of chronolibido can nevertheless be seen as one of the book’s original contributions to the revisal of the traditional understanding of time and our relation to it and to our temporal finitude."

                            Paul-Gabriel Sandu, Metapsychology

"A major intervention into psychoanalytic theory... Hägglund offers a model of trauma that neither prescribes nor restricts the possibilities for ethical remembrance, replacing a static binary of 'working through' vs. 'acting out' with a provisional reckoning, invested not in trauma's endless repetition but its surviving, shifting legacy."

                             Sarah Senk, MLN: Modern Language Notes     

"This book takes a shot across the bow of literature, reexamining the great works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov. Martin Hägglund takes on other professors in how they interpreted these great authors. He leaves no stone unturned and no major work untouched... Hägglund makes a convincing argument."

                             Kevin Winters, San Francisco Book Review 

"This book develops a significant and original theory of desire, disputing traditional philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts, and it reads novels by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov in light of this theory, challenging the critical consensus that attends them... Hägglund convincingly draws out assumptions that otherwise divergent readers hold in common. Still more convincing is the way he draws out evidence from the literary texts in support of his arguments, even if this means challenging those texts' self-understanding."

                              Audrey Wasser, Modern Philology

"Dying for Time provides important readings of the works of Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov, all three envisaged from the point of view of temporality. Here again, Hägglund operates with the concept of 'survival,' a vantage point that allows him to tackle difficult and central issues in the corpus of these authors. He has original and compelling analyses."

                              Jean-Michel Rabaté, Derrida Today 

"A compelling rethinking of the link between time and desire coupled with singularly insightful readings of novels by Marcel Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse), and Vladimir Nabokov (Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle). Both as theory (of desire) and as practice (of literary analysis), Dying for Time is an unqualified success." 

                              Robert S. Lehman, Theory and Event

"Few academic careers have proceeded quite so meteorically as Martin Hägglund's... Dying for Time is an important book by an important thinker, one that ought to serve as a filip to modernists and theorists alike."

                              Keith Leslie Johnson, Symploke

"Tremendously fruitful... To the extent that literary criticism exists to return the reader to the text, to reveal how much richer and more complex it is than one's memory of it or thesis about it, Hägglund succeeds admirably."

                              Tim Langen, Russian Review 

"Dying for Time is a clarion call for the relevance of philosophy, and reading, to life, and to how we live it." 

                              William Egginton, Open Humanities Press

"Dying for Time has the chance to become a minor classic… beyond the crises of the humanities it leads the desire of the writer and the reader back to its origin in a care for something whose value is only underlined by the withering of time."

                              Klas Molde, Dagens Nyheter

"A riveting sequel to Hägglund’s brilliant Radical Atheism, Dying for Time offers a telling critique of traditional approaches to time in modernist fiction and explores a different scheme of values: neither aiming at transcendence nor regretting the impossibility of transcendence, but inextricably linked to our mortality. A critical tour de force."

                              Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

Of Radical Athetism

"Martin Hägglund has produced an exceptional work. It is peerless and groundbreaking in its originality and contributes the most consistent, compelling and complete articulation of Derrida’s work…. In summation Radical Atheism is daring and persuasive in opening up materialist and atheistic vistas for future deconstructive analysis. Derrida is portrayed as a philosopher concerned with the thick of life in its vicissitudes. It offers a forceful account of how Derrida meditates on questions of life and death, good and evil, politics and the meaning of mortality. It will prove attractive to all readers of Derrida, professional and student alike and undoubtedly will become a definitive starting point for understanding deconstruction."

                               Patrick O'Connor, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

"In the very insightful and intelligent book by Martin Hägglund….his analysis reaches what we could call the zero degree of deconstruction, the point at which deconstructive logics show their internal potential and cannot be assimilated to any of the various discourses—ethicist, religious, and so forth—which have tried to hegemonize it."

                               Ernesto Laclau, Diacritics

"In his important and hard-hitting new book, Martin Hägglund lucidly delineates the argument by means of which Derrida problematises the desire for plenitude in its various guises, and on the strength of this clarity of insight offers trenchant critiques of a number of interpretations of Derridean thought that simplify or distort it…Hägglund goes on to show in a sharper light even than Derrida elected to do how [time] provides the basis for the latter’s treatment of the most far-reaching topics, starting with life itself…Hägglund has shown superbly how Derrida’s account of time underlies his explorations of these ethical topics, and how unlike traditional ethical postures the results are." 

                               Derek Attridge, Derrida Today

"Hägglund writes so well, argues so persuasively, and clears the interpretative field in such a confident and strident manner that if one is willing to engage this work it is hard not to be swept up by it and won over to its side. Indeed it is difficult not to think that Hägglund has figured out Derrida’s logic like no one else really has, that he has not so much put Derrida’s thought in a nutshell as completely cracked the nut, and that no one will be able to understand Derrida’s work adequately without coming to terms with the arguments Hägglund makes in this work…. Arguing by means of both a judicious use of Derrida’s own works and a relentless critique of many well-known commentators on Derrida, Hägglund shows the deficiencies of all other interpretations of Derrida that fail to take into account the full implications of the trace and radical finitude."

                               Michael Naas, The New Centennial Review

"Radical Atheism is the most accurate, insightful, and complete account anyone has produced so far of Derrida’s thought. Hägglund refutes a whole panoply of influential misreadings of Derrida, and he does so with a flair and clarity rarely attained by writers on deconstruction."

                              Henry Staten, The New Centennial Review

"Like the best of philosophers measured by Nietzschean standards, Hägglund could be characterized as marvelously ‘untimely’…. [a] superlative conceptual-theoretical analysis."

                              Adrian Johnston, The New Centennial Review

 "As a reading of Derrida's position on theism and atheism, I venture, the book is exhaustive and unimpeachable. I also find it deeply satisfying as an ethical (if you will) treatise on the desirability of immortality....We need such a book, just as we need Martin Hägglund, because the illusions of metaphysics are powerful and hard to dispel."

                             William Egginton, The New Centennial Review

"Radical Atheism is a brilliant book, brilliant in pursuing a logic through to its end... Hägglund has proposed a comprehensive interpretation of Derrida which requires not a few good one-liners squeezed into a standard book review but a re-narration of deconstruction as a whole... His book has reinvented Derrida for the younger generation."

                             John D. Caputo, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 

"Radical Atheism has already received a degree of critical attention that marks out its claim to be the major event in Derrida scholarship since the death of Jacques Derrida himself in 2004...Martin Hägglund’s revisionary thesis has been the subject not only of copious journal reviews, but of a number of lengthy essays by important Derrida scholars. These high-profile responses have been demanded both by the impressive extent to which Hägglund fulfils his stated aims, ‘to always strive for clarity and to philosophize with the hammer,’ and by his methods of argumentation… Radical Atheism brilliantly overturns some of the very premises of logical and philosophical thought, but does so in a discourse that is exemplary precisely for its logical rigour and philosophical seriousness."

                            Adam Kelly, International Journal of Philosophical Studies

"Through his argumentation...Hägglund has at once placed himself at the center of the international academic battle over the legacy of deconstruction...Radical Atheism is a book that truly deserves respect as well as praise. It is philosophically both advanced and multifaceted in its endeavor, and through its clarity it forces to reader to take a clear stance."

                            Hans Ruin, OEI

"A commanding and refreshing interpretation of Derrida which promises to be a crucial intervention in critical disagreements over Derrida's legacy...Radical Atheism is an important and prescient volume...It re-assesses Derrida's work and its philosophical futures with care, vision, and scholarly rigour, serving to regenerate interest in Derrida for a generation of philosophers for whom his name has fallen out of fashion."

                             Danielle Sands, Parrhesia

"In this explosive little book on Derrida….Hägglund extracts and explicates what he claims is the core idea of Derrida’s work, writing without the piousness, esoterism, or obliqueness that has critically imprisoned his subject…. Hägglund’s refutation of the idea of an ethical turn in deconstruction is definitive and his association of Derrida’s thought with radical atheism is compelling."

                             Brian Rajski, The Voice Imitator

"The tremendous clarity, depth, and insight of Hägglund's analysis and development of Derrida's notion of 'spacing,' and its implications for those who would seek to derive ethical or political prescriptions from deconstruction...[provides] an incisive reading of Derrida's deconstructions of time and presence and their relevance from his earliest to his latest works."

                             Joshua Andresen, Philosophy Today

"Especially admirable….Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life is a decisive rejoinder to those seeking to capture deconstruction for religion."

                             Jonathan Culler, preface to the 25th anniversary edition of On Deconstruction

"Impeccably argued, Radical Atheism is bound to have a significant impact on Derrida scholarship. By developing the logic of survival, Hägglund convincingly demonstrates that Derrida is essentially a philosopher of life, but of the only life there is – the life of finite beings – and hence a radical thinker of temporality. It is a very courageous book as well that critically takes issue with the negative theologians’ appropriation of Derrida and makes the unprecedented argument that Derrida’s reflections on the temporal conditions of life in general imply that God, if there is any, necessarily is mortal."

                             Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY Buffalo