1869, Ep. 159 with Nitzan Lebovic, author of Homo Temporalis

9:43PM Mar 4, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Nitzan Lebovic

Keywords:

Homo Temporalis

German Jewish thinkers

time concepts

Anthropocene age

Martin Buber

Walter Benjamin

Hannah Arendt

Paul Celan

philosophy of life

Zionism

melancholy

temporal egalitarianism

life forms

modern humanities

critical thinking.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Nitzan Lebovic, author of Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time. Nitzan Lebovic is professor of History and Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. He is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death and Zionism and Melancholy, and the coeditor of two volumes, including The Politics of Nihilism.

We spoke to Nitzan about four German Jewish thinkers who shaped much of what we know today as the modern humanities, the different concepts of time that these thinkers developed, and how our understanding of time has changed with the introduction of the modern idea of the Anthropocene age, the time period when human activities began to significantly impact the Earth. Hello, Nitzan, welcome to the podcast.

Hi Jonathan. It's an honor, and I'm very happy and grateful to be here. I've been a listener of 1869 for a while before becoming an author, so I'm very happy to be here.

Oh, that's great. That's great. Happy to be talking to a fan,and we're a fan of you because you have published a book with us that we're really proud of, Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time, which sounds like a fascinating topic. Tell us the back story to this book. How did it come to be?

Thanks, Jonathan, so that took a long time. I've been thinking, contemplating about that topic for about 20 years while writing my first other two sole author books, my monographs. It started, in fact, with the first book Thinking about the concept of life, or historicizing the philosophy of life in German culture, which listeners may not know that history, particular history, for reason I'll indicate in a second. But that was the language that was taken by the Nazis during the mid 1920s and then identified with the Nazi language of the 1930s and 1940s

but in fact, the origins of that philosophy of life was with a post Nietzsche, Nietzschean line of thinking, which became identified with groups of bohemians, aestheticians, artists, thinkers, poets In the late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, among the many Jewish figures, German Jewish philosophers and thinkers and poets. And what I was interested in is the history of that discourse, that vocabulary, and how it served to enlighten certain problems of liberalism, idealism, nationalism, the liberal nation state of the 19th century, and how it helped those esthetics, those interested in different forms of esthetics, to radicalize vis a vis that language which they perceive to be one of compromise of the decline of a certain radical way of thinking, as they identified that and that book, and I'll say something about the following book now, but that book ended with the dismantling of different forms of radicalism Within the Nazi language during since the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s and it completely disappeared after 1945 because with Democratic the Democratic allies occupying Germany, the immediate understanding was that one should not really speak the language of the previous regime, of the Nazi regime, which really caused the disappearance of that vocabulary until it was taken by and this is why the first book, including and this book, really reached the end of the 20th century in the rise of bio political critique. So philosophy of life was then readapted by bio political critique as a radical strand that was used to criticize, again, 19th century forms of progress, growth, the rise of the liberal, liberal state, etc. The second book, The following book after that dealt moved from the rise of German life philosophy to Zionism, the history of Zionism, and I maybe I'll tell you a short anecdote which really connects it to one of the things that happened to me when I researched the first book, was I interviewed families of Nazi ideologues and philosophers and trying to look in archives, family archives, but also state archives for the documents. And I had to meet those families. And one of the things that really surprised me, greatly surprised me during those interviews, was that the members of those families, in some cases people who stayed loyal to the Nazi perpetrators in their families were grateful and very happy to meet an Israeli who was back then, who was interested in that particular history. And I couldn't figure out what was going on until someone expressed that. Said it explicitly, and she said she was the widow of one of the Nazi key ideologues. And she said, I'm very happy to meet an Israeli being interested in this history, because you Israelis do now the job that we fail to do, which means, for her, getting rid or creating or excluding Muslims now from culture, which for her was just a transformation of anti semitism against Jews now into anti semitism against Muslims. So for her, I came to replace that old logic with a new logic that belonged to the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century now, replacing her thoughts.

Yeah, that really shocked me. And I'll just say one last thing, which is the next project dealt with the incorporation of melancholy, building really on Walter Benjamin's critique of left wing melancholy, so attacking again, the way liberalism adapted melancholy for its own sake in order to serve institutions. And I, yeah, and that led, one can say, into this project, which is really trying to think about temporality, first of life, then of different political institutions and political concepts, and how that reorganizes our perception of again, 19th, 20th Century modernism, and then moving into the present with a very different form of thinking about that particular history.

Excellent, excellent. Thanks for bringing it all together. And speaking of bringing it all together, you've brought together four thinkers that you focus on in this particular book, the philosopher religion, Martin Buber, the cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, the political scientist, Hannah Arendt and the poet Paul Celan. Each of these individuals shaped much of what we know today as the modern humanities tell us more about each of them and particularly what their philosophies on time were.

Okay, thanks a lot. That brings my interest in different disciplines in the humanities and a critical understanding of those disciplines with the question of time. And the book really starts where I left off with the first book, which is really the history of life after Nietzsche and how German Jewish thinkers such as the book starts with Martin Buber in 1900 really take over that. And Martin Buber and his close friend Gustav Landauer, an anarchist communist who was killed in 1919 by the right wing, were really obsessed with Zarathustra, the figure of Zarathustra. Nietzsche is Zarathustra and trying to create kind of a Jewish parallel vocabulary of that, connecting, tying back the German interest, fascination with post Nietzschean notion of life so Nietzsche's stress on life with Jewish understanding of life in the early 20th century, after again, the failure of assimilation, emancipation and integration of Jews into German society. So in 1901 for example, Buber is Writing, Publishing a break, a watershed kind of article, a very clear article called The Jewish Renaissance, or renaissance in Judaism. And he's talking about the fact that one needs to understand now Jewish identity in a different light, which, for he means a new notion of life. And the concept he chooses for that is linking life. It's a Nietzschean concept. Nietzsche'sconcept called in in German. It's called Leibniz. So living experience, you can hear the life in the living experience, right? And the stress there is on the moment of the present, because you can only experience something fully if you are invested in the present, right? And that's, that's the stress he gives that, and then he builds on top of that, a philosophy, a theology and a philosophy and a politics of dialog, of dialog, ism, right? That's his system. And he, um, talks about that up until the really, until his death, he continues to develop that. So that's kind of the framework of the first chapter. Then I moved to the second chapter with the stress on Walter Benjamin, and the way Benjamin comes after on the footsteps of Martin Buber and together with his own friend, Gershom Scholem. So two of the most interesting figures in Jewish critical understanding of the 1920s 1930s and on and 1940s really follow up on that notion of Eleni so the living experience, and how one should really use that in order to understand time, the time of modernity in a non linear way. So here, the investment in the present becomes a critical investment in understanding modernity. And you right, and that means for them, also understanding history on you. So not just how we invest ourselves in a present moment and create a religious or theological form of experience, but also how we rethink the history within that now for them, the two of them, Martin Buber, idea about investment in the present is kind of ecstatic. They dislike that because it's not analytical. It's not critical enough. They, in fact, and I quote here, criticize Martin Buber as a man who lived in a permanent trance, yeah, because he wanted always to invest in that, you know, ongoing ecstasy of of the present. And Walter Benjamin develops out of that, the key concept of his philosophy, which is now time in one word. So here you see an alternative to the living experience in the present, but now time, which is a critical concept that tackles and criticizes what Benjamin is, is arguing, is identifying, is recognizing, in idealism in the 19th century as an empty, homogeneous time. He thinks that the way liberalism and and the liberal state build towards an end goal, which is always economic, one creates and here you can hear the overtone of a Marxist education. Here

is, is indeed built on the fact that the temporality of that is completely empty of values, of meaning, of any signification, form of signification. So it's a critical tone. It's a critical concept. And that leads to Benjamin's critique of progress. That leads then to Hannah Arendt, the fourth chapter, who's a close friend of Walter Benjamin, one of his closest friends. Indeed, he gave her he entrusted her with his last work, his last book, which he worked for a long time about over the arcades and the part, the version we have, is mostly based on that manuscript that he shared with her, that he gave her before she escaped to the United States. As we know, he tried to escape, he failed and committed suicide in the Pyrenees. And she's also someone who's married to Gunther Anders Walter, Benjamin's cousin. So you can see how, you know, good intellectuals, really brilliant, exceptional intellectuals come together in in the private but also in intellectual spheres. And yeah, they build, you know, each of them is building their own kind of group of thinkers. And you can see how those ideas about temporality, in her case, the idea is the key idea is one of natality, right, the ongoing creation or recreation of a present moment.

which is built again on Walter Benjamin's notion of now time as well. Now she's talking about the generation of German Jewish thinkers that came before her as expressing two parallel ways of thinking, of critical thinking, one, and she talks about Benjamin explicitly. There's an essay in 1968 that is dedicated to Walter Benjamin's work. She's also one of the editors of Benjamin's translations to English, together with with theodo Adorno, another close friend of Benjamin. And she talks about that generation is is trying to gather distance, get distance from the generation of their fathers. So there's a critique of patriarchy, Bucha, patriarchy, taken by Walter Benjamin. And she talks about Franz Kafka the author together with father Benjamin as the two key representatives of that generation. And on the other hand, she says this is a generation, the generation that through critic critique, be it critical philosophy, as in Walter Benjamin's case, or critical form of literary expression as in Kafka's case.

She says, portrayed that the linguistic impossibility of the German Jewish letters culture. So the linguistic impossibility that means that their investment, their investment, is really in critique for her, and in shedding light on the inability of that generation to continue the tradition linguistically write vocabulary of their fathers. And that brings me to the last chapter, which is really dealing with the poet Paul Celan. Paul Celan was maybe the most famous, acclaimed poet of the post 1945 era. Again, someone who was a close friend with or correspondent with Theodor Adorno, but someone who read was an avid reader of all the figures were discussing, except Allen, who's this contemporaneous thinker, and I don't think they knew each other. There's no trace really of each other relating to any of the work of the other. But He's an avid reader of Walter Benjamin, of Martin Buber, of gelsham scholem, indeed, in one of the poems I analyze in that chapter, this is a poem I found that the root of which I found inscribed on the margins of a page inside Gershom scholems book in Paul Celan library. So the very you know, beginning origins of that poem started by reading through reading Gershom scholem and Paul Celan is doing a the work of a historian, as if he dates every single section, sometimes, but definitely the book he's reading. So there's we have really a chronology of his reading as he's writing the poet, the poems which he also dates. We know what poem was written when and while he was reading what which is really fascinating. And I'll just conclude by saying Paul Celan, in that case, is building atop the hermeneutics of time the interest of that of these generations with temporal concepts. His two key concepts are that cesul That says the break the rupture within the poetic language which he invests or re examines as the notion of a breath turn. That's his neologism, breath turn in one word. This is also the title of one of these collections of collection of poems, and he uses that to talk about different levels layers of Poetry and Literature Through general history, the history of what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, of course, but also the history of literature, the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of painting, of social terms, etc, etc. So there are these really. There's an archeology of different layers of poetic and historical layers that he keepusing in order to build those cathedrals, those structures that allude to the past that was forgotten or that he thinks may be forgotten because of the Holocaust, and it's always all these allusions always refer to thinkers, artists, poets, who dealt with the centrality of life on the one hand, how important life is for all human beings on the one hand, and on The other end, to the creation of a new language, poetic language,

That's beautiful. I love, I love these concepts, living experience now, time, totality, breath, turn. So these German, Jewish thinkers came up with these new ways of thinking about time, and they also were the first to identify a collapse of time at the heart of politics, modern philosophy and the environment they covered three temporal turns, one in the early 1900s one in between 1933 and 1945 and then, most recently, in the early 2000sand that's the Temporal Turn I'd Like us to focus on in this particular question, how these concepts are the human experience in many ways, even though they're timeless of themselves. But regarding this most recent turn, how has our understanding of time changed with the introduction of the modern concept of the Anthropocene age and.That's the moment when human effects on the planet come to rival the scale of change through geological deep time. Tell us more.

Yeah. Great question again. So one of the key questions that someone for any historian interested in political concepts and in really opening, opening up these, you know, those vaults of the past and how languages is used in them is really to try and understand, on the one hand, how language is working within the confinement, within the context of the time, vis a vis the present, right moment. The motivation is very often ours, retroactive one. But the ethical responsibility, if you like, is really tracing the the these terminologies, much like the figures, the characters who who give them a voice in their own context. The way I brought all that together. I tried to synthesize all that together in the last chapter, is by talking about another concept that really continues between the different my different books, or the different histories I was engaging with, and that is life forms. In German, this is known as a Lebens form, life form, and in German, it's a pretty unique one, because the interesting aspect of it, because it's linked back, it's going back to the romantic tradition, and again, to Nietzsche and post Nietzschean vocabulary, is that, to begin with, the notion of life form is a plural one.

The reason is because it's, it goes one step beyond the human and it really equalizes. It creates a language that I call in my book, the language of temporal egalitarianism between all forms of life. Yeah, and that means that it changes. It forces us to really change, move beyond the the limitations, one may say, of the humanist, liberal and even democratic traditions that usually focus on the human, even more specifically, on the individual, right, the individual human. Think about, you know, walter critics, again, critique of growth, which is always talking about the individual as a consumer, the tradition of the Levin's form of life forms completely tackles that completely takes a completely different line of thinking about that. Now that goes back, and I'll just refer to a few key moments here that goes back to the 19th century, and the critique in the end of the 19th century, again, that that really interests me as the president of what we see nowadays. So one of the most famous German Jewish thinkers, Georg Simmel, the father, one who's considered to be the father or the key founder, one of the key founders of modern sociology, is talking about life form and life in general as the secret. That's what he says. I'm quoting the secret king of our intellectual epoch. So life, the vocabulary, or the notion of life and life form, is at the core of how one thinks about living entities, already then and already then, in relation, in a critical relation to the rise of the liberal state,

other German Jewish thinkers coming after Georg and Valter Benjamin, you know, Martin Buber is is studying and collaborating with Simmel Benjamin reads him and comments about him, etc, etc. So they're really referring to each other. And that is something else I was trying to talk about in the book, the fact that these people relate and build the top of each other, and there's an ongoing dialog between them, intellectual one, but also ethical one and political one and other thinkers. And I'll give just two examples for figures who, who, who move around these circles, around these thinkers that I'm talking about, but, but I don't have the span of you know, the space there to really explore them in depth. One is Gunther andos, who I mentioned, who's Hannah Arendt's ex husband and Walter Benjamin's cousin, and someone who, after 1945 is very involved with the anti atom, anti atomic movement, the vagu in Germany and in the United States, while writing, interestingly enough, about Franz Kafka, a book about Franz Kafka and someone who reads the great philosophers, specifically from a German, Jewish perspective with a critical eye. In the book, I talk about Martin Heidegger is one of these key figures. Carl Schmitt is another one who every single character in my book refers to and talks to, sometimes in a coded manner and very often explicitly. But they're always on the horizon of their thinking about modern politics and and life, and the notion of life, the concept of life so Anders is talking about

the atom period as what he calls the end time, or the time of the end. And his notion is that humanity in the 20th century brought itself to the cusp of annihilation in different ways. Right? He's good friends also with Han C on us. Han C on us, Hannah aren't best friend all their life. They share manuscripts, and they, they talk about Heidegger together in a critical manner, and they, they meet and drink, and Hans C on us in his memoirs even admitted to have been in love with Hannah Arendt in their youth. You know, they took the same seminars with Heidegger together and with another theologian called Bultmann. But Hans is the one who goes back to what he calls the phenomenology of life in the 1960sand tries to again, revive the concept of life now with the notion of life form in mind, meaning that he sees humanity, up to that point, making the mistake of giving preference and really allowing humanity to think it's the center of the universe, Much, much as humanity did until the early modern period, thinking about the about Planet Earth at the center of the universe, right? Says, No, that's a mistake. We need to think about all forms of life in an equal way.

So that brings me to the notion of the Anthropocene, and the understanding that nowadayswe need to realize, we need to understand, that the very understanding of life we had until pretty recently was a mistaken one, and that forces us notonly to rethink politically and phenomenologically, but also historically, the notion of life, the concept of life, and how mistaken we we were in giving preference to the to the Anthropos, to the human element within that right and one of the key historians, I'll give just one example for where that comes to The fore, deepest Chakrabarti, maybe the historian, best known historian that is dealing with climate change and Anthropocene is indeed in interviews mentioning specifically Benjamin and Arendt and Celan and other German Jewish thinkers as allowing him to think what he calls rethink or reshape his thinking alongside what he calls planetary thinking, planetary terms. And one of the interesting aspects of that critique, points of that critique is he says the mistake we're making now in the beginning of the 20th century is continuing fighting the wars of the 19th and early 20th century, at a time where humanity needs to understand that it needs to deal as one form of life among others, with a planetary challenge, right? And we're speaking today. This is the morning of a massive, massive apocalyptic fire in Los Angeles, where we see, I think, in front of us that way and that need actually really, really urgent. Need to change the way we deal with those challenges and really reshape our thinking in order to be able to respond to them properly.

My gosh, that is so true, so true. I mean the headlines over the past few years. It does feel we're on the precipice of humanity. Humanity writ large, can go in two directions, and one direction does not look good. And so I'm so grateful that you have written this book, bringing in these four incredibly influential German Jewish thinkers to show us how we need to rethink our concepts of time. And then, as you said, what we need to do is see our time as a species among many species, and having this planetary point of view, that's the only way forward. But, but to understand that, we also do need to understand these, these super important concepts of time that you cover in your book, Homo Temporalis, German Jewish Thinkers on Time. I encourage anyone that's listening to this grab Nitzan's book and dive into it. There's some great mind-bending information in here that we need to know. So I want to thank you for writing Homo Temporalis as a Homo Sapiens, we also need to embrace our Homo Temporalis nature as well. So thank you,

Woot. Woot, thank you so much, Jonathan. I am grateful for the kind questions and generous hospitality. Thank you very much.

Our pleasure. Our pleasure. Thank you. That was Nitzan Lebovic, author of Homo Temporalis, German Jewish Thinkers on Time. If you want to buy Nitzan's new book, you can use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off at our website, at Cornellpress.cornell.edu if you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you For listening to 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. You