Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Nitzan Lebovic. Homo Temporalis: German Jewish Thinkers on Time. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2024. 348 pp.

Review by Tsiona Lida

19 March 2026

In Homo Temporalis, Nitzan Lebovic demonstrates the centrality of temporal concepts in the philosophy, politics, and poetics of four twentieth-century German Jewish intellectuals: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. Lebovic argues that they advanced a shared project of critique grounded in an “ontology of time” that understands life as structured primarily by a temporal framework: “All forms of life are born . . . into the world, live in it, and die in it” (p. 39). He characterizes this as “‘temporal egalitarianism’”—the notion that “living time” is the “fundamental equalizer among all forms of life because of the biological and existential condition of being subject to time” (p. 4).

Lebovic’s third book begins where his first monograph, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013), ends—but it focuses instead on how German Jews transformed the concepts of post-Nietzschean life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), Christian historicity, and Heideggerian phenomenology. Homo Temporalis reconsiders how German Jewish “in-betweenness”—in national struggles, languages, and Christian eschatology—generated a sense of entrapment and possibility between the “no longer” and the “not-yet” (p. 40). An acute awareness of the now animated political commitment to equality beyond territorial borders—a commitment forged amidst existential crises spanning the early 1900s to the Holocaust. From this, Lebovic discerns temporality as the condition that can provide a view of humankind as, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, a “minority form of life” in relation to other species.[1] By engaging environmental theorists, Lebovic brings German Jewish thought to bear on contemporary planetary catastrophe.

Lebovic’s narrative is chronologically structured by three “temporal turns” of the twentieth century that mutated concepts of time: the early 1900s acceleration of industrial modernity and failure of assimilation, the annihilation of European Jews, and recent appraisal of “the age of the Anthropocene” (p. 16). Chapter 1 lays out the political-theological terrain that German Jews thought within and against, arguing that in-betweenness constituted a temporal dynamic out of step with the exclusivist and territorial interests of both German and Zionist teleology. Chapter 2 depicts Buber’s meditations on lived experience (Erlebnis), Judaism’s renewal, and dialogical philosophy as animated by a temporal gap that opened onto a prophetic form of present-mindedness in which “the power of creation” might be internalized (p. 100). Lebovic interprets this temporal consciousness as Buber’s portal between theology and politics that might empower humans to recognize, rather than differentiate, one another. Chapter 3 presents Benjamin’s antilinear philosophy of history, analyzing his likening of time to a womb, a whirlpool, and a swamp. Lebovic affirms the centrality of “rhythm” and its disruption to Benjamin’s influential conception of “now-time” (Jetztzeit) as a flash of recognition that reconfigures one’s awareness of the relation between past and present (p. 150).

Chapter 4 explores Arendt’s concept of natality—the revolutionary capacity to begin anew—as a counterpoint to Heidegger’s stress on human finality. Lebovic posits an ontology of time at the center of her politics wherein living affirms the political and creative agency, as opposed to impotency, in being “subject to time” (p. 181). Chapter 5 argues that Celan sought to reconstruct in-betweenness as a “language of living absence” in poetic syntax that addressed and reintegrated the ontological separation of life and death in the post-1945 literary imagination (p. 287). The final chapter traces the reception of German Jewish thought on time in post-1945 theory on deconstruction, biopolitics, and environmental studies. This brings us to the contemporary stage of what Lebovic presents as an evolving fascination with German Jewish in-betweenness since 1900—both in the Jew as a figure of alterity and in German Jews’ writing on liminality. He clarifies the stakes of the work by invoking German Jewish temporal hermeneutics as informed by exclusion and destruction to nurture the “multiplicity of life-forms” and grapple with our “‘not yet being non-existing’” reality on a planetary scale (pp. 278, 282).

Lebovic offers a compelling account of temporality as the shared substrate of living existence from which we might assemble alternative grounds for politics. He is galvanized by the minoritarian vision of the human as a life-form among many—equally subject to temporal order—that emerges in German Jewish thought. The account carries a universal register that is founded on yet sits in tension with “lived time,” the insight that, as the catastrophes German Jews lived and died through attest, living beings do not experience being “subject to time” in a uniform way (p. 277). Social theorists—including labor historians such as E. P. Thompson, theoreticians of biopolitical critique, and Black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Denise Ferreira da Silva—have underscored that the experience of time is figured and disfigured according to the social forces and labor conditions to which one is subjected, including colonial, racial, and sexual violence. Likewise, as Jason W. Moore argues, the Anthropocene concept’s focus on “Humanity” as the collective agent responsible for planetary catastrophe elides the outsized culpability of imperial and capitalist elites.[2] The emphasis on “temporal egalitarianism,” then, names an ethical and political aspiration but risks occluding a full grappling with the impossibility of equality in a world whose resources are so disproportionately distributed and whose habitability is eroding unevenly. Nevertheless, we should read Homo Temporalis as an invitation to consider radical modes of attention to time that emerged precisely in the context of abysmal inequality. As such, Lebovic prepares the ground or, rather, the temporal horizon, for confronting the disparity and destruction that characterize the conditions of our own time.

[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Waltham, Mass., 2023), p. 38.

[2] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York, 2015), pp. 169–70.