Is Time Running Out? Buber, Benjamin, Arendt, and Celan on Temporality.

This is an in person event at UCL and  hybrid on zoom. Refreshments will be served from 6.00 pm and the lecture starts at 6.30pm.

Modern scholarship identifies a series of “temporal turns” in Jewish studies stemming from the early 1900s, 1945, and the present notion that “time is running out.” Homo Temporalis: German-Jewish Thinkers on Time follows thinkers who watched catastrophes unfold but imagined a new world rising from their ashes. Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan shaped our understanding of the Humanities, by dedicating their thought to temporal concepts such as Living-presence (Erlebnis), Now-time, Natality, and Breath-turn. Their message was a necessary one for those interested in the modern study of religion, critical thinking, political thought, and post-1945 literature. They all shared a deep understanding of time as the most important component of modern life, and social egalitarianism.

Nitzan Lebovic is a professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. Nitzan is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics(2013), Zionism and Melancholy: The short Life of Israel Zarchi (2019), and Homo Temporalis: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan about Time (2025). Nitzan is the co-editor of Catastrophes: The History and Theory of an Operative Concept (2014) and Nihilism and the State of Israel: New Critical Perspectives (2014), and edited special issues about political theology, nihilism, and biopolitics. His new project is titled “The history of complicity, 1945- Present.”