University of California, Los Angeles
The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics
In my dissertation and first book, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013), I traced the origins of Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric in general, and the German movement known as Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy), in particular. By following the popular anti-Semitic thinker Ludwig Klages, and his circle, I traced the evolution of this movement from an avant-garde circle interested in “fundamental aestheticism,” during the early 1900s, to a radical political philosophy in the early to mid-1920s, and finally its “Nazification” in the late 1920s. Viewing Lebensphilosophie from the perspective of its formation rather than its catastrophic end, I attempt to shed light on its success among atypical audiences; if during the 1910s and 1920s German-Jewish thinkers such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin were still fascinated by its notion of immanent life, by 1930 pro-Nazi philosophers such as Ludwig Klages and Alfred Bauemler turned its radical aestheticism into a racist split between the “worthy” and the “unworthy of living.” The Philosophy of Life and Death has drawn praise and acknowledgment from the TLS, German Studies Review, Central European History, American Historical Review, Weimarer Beiträge, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Nitzan Lebovic is a full professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. He studied in Tel-Aviv and in Munich, Germany, before continuing his studies for a PhD in intellectual history, at UCLA. Nitzan won a series of prestigious post-doctoral fellowships before accepting an offer from Lehigh University. He considers himself a political activist, next to his academic work, and is among the founders of a number of political forums, among them Academy4Equality, the largest academic organization for Progressive academics in Israel-Palestine.
He has authored several books and articles, including The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013) focuses on the circle around the Lebensphilosophie and anti-Semitic thinker Ludwig Klages. Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi came out in Hebrew in 2015 and was published in English in June 2019 in the New Jewish Philosophy and Thought series at Indiana University Press. Homo Temporalis: Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan is forthcoming (Dec. 2024) with “Signale” at Cornell University Press. Professor Lebovic is also co-editor of The Politics of Nihilism (2014), and of Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept (2014), and has authored special issues of the journals Rethinking History (“Nihilism”), Zmanim (“Religion and Power”), the New German Critique(“Political Theology”), Comparative Literature and Culture (“On Complicity and Dissent”), and Political Theology (“Prophetic Politics”).