Workshop: “Time Revolution: Contemporary Thought and the Struggle Against Scientific Necessity”

July 17––18, 2025

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW)

Organized by Amir Engel (HUJI/HU-Berlin)

SPEAKERS | PROGRAM

The scientific notion of time, which developed gradually since Newton’s discoveries, construes time as uniform, constant, and unidirectional and has proven remarkably successful. It is the key to ocean navigation, rail transportation, and electronic technologies. Furthermore, it seems to have solved a fundamental human problem. It is possible to set appointments months even years in advance. And yet, at same time, this conception poses a monumental threat human consciousness for it clashes with the most basic tenet of human self-perception, namely its assumption of freedom.

The workshop explores the ongoing struggle between the modern-scientific notion of time and other competing ideas on time rooted in religious, artistic, scientific, and social constructs. The scientific notion of time developed gradually since Newton’s discoveries and construes time as uniform, constant, and unidirectional. This notion has proven remarkably successful. Synchronizing time and space opened the path to ocean navigation, rail transportation, and electronic technologies. And yet, this mechanized and unidirectional synchronized conception contradicts basic tenets of human self-perception, including its assumption of freedom.

To explore this struggle, we intend to look at the debates about synchronized time from a historical and conceptual perspective. How did modern philosophy, literature and art, and the natural and social sciences react to the synchronized concept of time? How did religious ideologies and texts contribute to the modern debate about time? What part did this debate play in modern and postmodern discussions about, for example, colonialism and gender? Simultaneously, the workshop offers a platform for debating time in the present. What, for example, is the time of postwar democracies, and what are its alternatives? And, what is the time of contemporary media?

SPEAKERS

Beth Blum teaches modern and contemporary literature at Harvard University, where she is the Harris K Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities. Her first book, The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature was published in 2020. Her second book, On the Difficulty of Being Present, is slated to appear with Columbia University Press in 2026. She has published academic articles in PMLA, MLQ, Modernism/modernity, and ALH, and is the British and Anglophone Book Reviews editor for the journal Contemporary Literature.

Jimena Canales is an author and historian of science. Her books include Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, and A Tenth of a Second: A History. Her essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Artforum, Aperture, Nautilus and WIRED and in numerous scholarly journals. She was previously Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University and the Thomas M. Siebel professor for the History of Science at the University of Illinois.

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Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women's and gender studies and in support of the women's movement and the achievement of gender equality. Her selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming, Duke University Press). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda-Henkel-Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship, Los Angeles.

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Amir Engel is a Professor at the German department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and currently also a visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University in Berlin. He studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at Hebrew University and completed his Ph.D. in the German studies department at Stanford University. He specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' German, Jewish, and Christian cultural and intellectual history. His scholarship concerns the relation between aesthetics, modern Western spirituality, and politics. His first book Gershom Scholem: an Intellectual Biography came out in 2017. He also published essays about Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Martin Buber, Jacob Taubes, Salomon Maimon, and others. His second book manuscript, temporarily titled The Politics of Spirituality: Jewish Mysticism, Christian Spirit, and the German Nation will be published next year.

Anoush Ganjipour is a researcher at the CNRS. He is a specialist in Islamic thought and comparative philosophy. Among his recent publications are Palestine, Israël et nous: une discussion orientale-occidentale (co-authored with Jean-Claude Milner, Cerf, forthcoming 2025), L’ambivalence politique de l’islam : pasteur ou Léviathan ? (Seuil, 2021). He is also the editor of Monothéismes et politique : modernité, sécularisation, émancipation (CNRS Éditions, 2022), Politique de l’exil. Giorgio Agamben et l’usage de la métaphysique (Éditions Lignes, 2019).

Eva Horn is a professor of modern German literature at the German Department of the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on politics, secrecy, and modern fiction, disaster imagination, the cultural history of climate, and the Anthropocene. Together with Hannes Bergthaller, she published The Anthropocene - Key Issues for the Humanities (Routledge, 2020). Her most recent publication is a perceptual history of climate: Klima. Eine Wahrnehmungsgeschichte (Fischer, 2024).

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Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Univeristät in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Resling, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Zeta Books, 2010).

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.”

Jesse Matz is John Crowe Ransom Professor of English at Kenyon College. His work includes Modernist Time Ecology (Hopkins, 2019), Lasting Impressions: the Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture (Columbia, 2016), and a number of articles on narrative temporality, modernist culture, and related subjects. His current project, "Montage Diversity," studies montage formats for the representation of diversity from Whitman to the present.

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Shira Miron is a PhD candidate at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research explores aesthetics as a mode of investigation for human experience and social formation and studies the particularities of different artforms alongside their conceptual and practical cross-pollination. She pursues theoretical questions as they relate to history and culture and vice versa. Her dissertation project, Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950, explores the advent of western polyphony as a modern aesthetic, communicative, and ethical phenomenon that extends beyond the field of music. Shira published on the relationship between music and literature, German-Jewish literature and culture, visual studies, theories of dialogue and communication, and on a wide range of authors including Novalis, Adorno, Kleist, and Gertrud Kolmar. Shira holds B.Mus. and M.Mus. degrees in piano performance from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and studied German literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, she is a DAAD research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin.

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Caroline Sauter teaches Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her work focuses on translation, translation theory and literary theory, and on the interconnection between literature and theology, particularly in German-Jewish thought. Caroline is the author of a monograph on Walter Benjamin’s translation philosophy (Die virtuelle Interlinearversion, 2014) has numerous scholarly articles and is the co-editor of several books.

Her translation into German and edition of Jacques Derrida’s “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’?”, together with Esther von der Osten, has recently been published with Transcript. She is currently completing a book manuscript about the biblical Song of Songs (shir ha-shirim) in (post)modern (literary) theory, focusing on Goethe, Herder, Scholem, Rosenzweig, Kristeva, and Cixous. Caroline has studied in Düsseldorf (HHU, Dipl.-Literaturübersetzerin) and Paris (Paris III, Licence, Maîtrise), completed her graduate studies in Munich (LMU, Dr.phil.), and has held academic positions in Berlin (ZfL), Frankfurt (Goethe University), and Cambridge (Mass., Harvard). In 2017/18, she held a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe (since 2023).

Willem Styfhals is an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. He is the author of No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism in Postwar German Philosophy (Cornell UP, 2019) and Apologie van het Schrift (Grafische Cel, 2022).