The author turns to the intellectual heritage of Leonid Lipavsky - a member of OBERIU, the Leningrad literary and philosophical avant-garde group. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct one of the main ideas of Lipavsky`s philosophy, temporal misalignment between human and nonhuman reality, on the basis of the texts-«experiments» «Treatise on water» and «Study of horror». The author clarifies Lipavsky’s thesis about the ontological incompleteness of human being in terms of the philosophical tradition of negativity (Hegel-Sartre). This technique allows us to systematize the conceptual moves in Lipavsky’s texts and show the productivity of his philosophical intuitions.