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Ernst Jünger and the domination of the world by the Worker – Joachim de Brescia – PHILITT – May 12th 2020

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

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In The Worker (1932), Ernst Jünger wrote, “The peasant who begins to work with horse power instead of horses no longer belongs to any ‘estate’. He is a worker in particular conditions” Henceforth the peasant on his tractor, or the soldier using his machine gun no longer belongs to any “estate.” They personify the seizure of power by a new type of man: the Worker.

The Worker is a piece that the German author never reworked, contrary to his habits. He would agree to re-release this piece for the first time in 1964, but he added “complementary notes” to it, which would form the volume Maxima-Minima, an update comparing the Figure of the Worker to that of Titans like Antaeus, Prometheus, and Atlas. The Worker appeared in this piece as a telluric and mythic figure, a son of the earth and an enemy of the gods. Thirty years later, Jünger noted the irrefutable character of his analyses: the contemporary world henceforth solidified the domination of the Figure of the Worker.

By “Figure” Jünger means a spiritual reality reality that confers a meaning. The Figure is “a whole that encompasses the sum of its parts.” By assuming the Figure of the Worker, the individual inserts himself into a great hierarchical order of Figures. He becomes a symbol, a representative of a superior order, of a vocation, and of a destiny. The notion of Figure is a resurgence of the Platonic “Idea”, a kinship that Martin Heidegger would address during a seminar in 1940. Jünger, who didn’t appreciate this comparison, preferred to compare his Figure to Leibniz’s monad, or Goethe’s “Urpflanze” [Translator’s note: archetypal plant].

“Technology is the art and the manner by which the Figure of the Worker mobilizes the world”, Jünger notes in The Worker. It’s not a neutral power. Technology inevitably delivers the means of power that permits the domination of the Worker, the only Figure capable of utilizing it. The replacement of the lamp by the perpetual presence of the electric light-bulb highlights a universe henceforth foreign to religion. The writer remarks accurately that the instinct of Christian preachers to equate the empire of technology with the empire of Satan is far from lacking sense.

This new domination leads to the replacement of the “individual” by the “type.” The “worker” is not irreplaceable. Actually, every dead one can be immediately replaced by another “worker.” Bourgeois constitutions are replaced with a “work plan”, liberal democracy replaced with the democracy of labor or the state. Total mobilization renders the distinction between wartime mobilization and peacetime mobilization moot, like the distinction between “combatant” and “non-combatant.”

Jünger also notes in a striking manner the change in the physiognomy of his contemporaries, whose faces assume the appearances of masks, devoid of traits and giving a metallic impression. “The bone structure thrusts markedly forth, the features are sparse and taut. The gaze is quiet and fixed, trained in the contemplation of objects that are captured in situations of high speed.” He also notes the increased role of masks in daily life, whether it’s masks protecting the face in sports and from high speeds or protective masks for people working in zones that have become too dangerous.

The replacement of the bourgeoisie by the Figure of the Worker

In The Worker, Jünger mentions the replacement of the bourgeois by the Worker. The Great War constituted a decisive experience, accelerating the advent of new type of man, a new Figure. The resurgence of deep, telluric forces, in the deserts of fire in the material war permitted the advent of a new human type, whose mode of action was “total mobilization” of life through technology. This new type no longer belonged to an association or a party, but to a group of partisans. He forms a New Order, silent and invisible, a new aristocracy whose slogan is “heroic realism.” For him, the sacrifice of life is the ultimate good, and the supreme art of command “consists of showing purposes worthy of this sacrifice.”

In the epoch of mass revolutions, crowds of individuals flowed into the streets, followed by determined commandos, seizing the vital centers of cities with precise technology. The targets are no longer the personal representatives or individuals of the state, but communication centers, broadcasting antennae, or factory warehouses. If the mass is no longer capable of attacking, nor defending itself, the police henceforth effectively possess sufficient means to crush a revolutionary crowd in a few seconds.

The Worker is distinguished by a new relation to the elementary. The term “elementary” designates profound forces, those of faith, struggle, and passion, but also the four original elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The combatant youth experienced the elementary on the front, thanks to the extreme proximity with death, fire, and blood. They experienced the pleasure of absolute offerings, the maximal satisfaction of action. They passed through anarchy, through the destruction of old bonds. They crossed the zone of combat without being destroyed itself, and consequently possessed a new power. There is an ideal continuity uniting the combatant youth of the Great War with the figure of the Worker.

On the contrary, the bourgeois appears as someone who tries to escape danger by seeking refuge in a would be utopian security, that of glass walls and asphalt. The bourgeois forms the race of the defeated, the race that believed elementary power could be mastered by the old order, excluding it from danger in fortified enclosures, its secured citadels. Its slogans like “order and peace” or “pacifism” are equally slogans reflecting its weakness withing the new order.

New aristocracy or the terminal phase of civilization?

According to Julius Evola, the advent of the Worker is not the advent of a new aristocracy, but it further symbolizes a phase of leveling and dissolution. In the traditional model, spiritual aristocracy, warrior aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie correspond to different types, different “estates” and the Worker doesn’t escape this rule. Jünger’s Figure confirms the “Fourth Estate’s” seizure of power and the suppression of other castes by a new form of civilization.

In this twilight world that is the ultimate stage of advanced civilizations, all human activity is effectively transformed into “work.” Within this landscape of work sites, Jünger admits that generations of Workers will not leave behind savings or monuments, but only “a certain level, like a tide-mark of mobilization.” Nevertheless this Figure, who henceforth possesses an unequaled technical arsenal of surveillance, repression, and propaganda in its service, is more redoubtable than ever.

In The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Guénon reminds us that he who invokes the brutal forces of matter must necessarily perish by these same forces, forces of nature or forces of the human masses. It is always the laws of matter that crush anyone who believes he could dominate them without elevating himself beyond matter. It is written in the Gospel: “Any house divided against itself cannot stand”; this quote perfectly applies to the world forged by the Worker, which can only, in essence, incite conflict ad division everywhere.

In the Treatise on the Rebel, Jünger mentions two other figures who will come to add themselves to the first. Firstly the unknown soldier, bearing the burden of the sacrifice of his life on the front, to the benefit of the Worker’s domination. Finally, the Figure of the Rebel, the Figure of resistance to the domination of technology, and the refusal to accept its consequences. He is someone who holds his own against the propaganda forged by fear, particularly fear of death. The Rebel is consequently capable of overthrowing giants, whose strength is terror.

If the twilight Figure of the Worker can justifiably provoke fear in some people, it is interesting to reread these lines from the philosopher and jurist Walter Schubart: “It’s not in the balance of the bourgeois world, but in the thunder of apocalypses that religions are reborn.” (Europe and the Soul of the East). Actually, according to René Guénon, everything indicates that we are henceforth in the final phase of the Kali-Yuga, in the darkest period of this “dark age.” If a restoration must happen, it will not be a simple recovery, but a total renewal, a rebirth.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2020/05/12/ernst-junger-et-la-domination-du-monde-par-le-travailleur/

Interview on Ernst Jünger – Julien Hervier – PHILITT – March 15th 2018

28 Tuesday Aug 2018

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On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Ernst Jünger’s death, PHILITT spoke with Julien Hervier, his translator, friend, and biographer who reflected on the life of one of the great German writers of 20th century.

PHILITT: Ernst Jünger is known today for his war writings which would establish him as a major author, from his first book Storms of Steel, published in 1920. The war was destruction but also revelation for him. What did it reveal to him?

Julien Hervier: The truth of the Man. At the start of the Great War, Ernst Jünger was a young man from a bourgeois family, adventurous and psychologically unstable. He was immersed in the Christian morality proper to the society of his time, although his family was rather distant from religion and his father was a fervent rationalist. In the course of the conflict, he discovered what Freud had perfectly analyzed in the same era, but far from the fighting: the unleashing of instinct that breaks all moral barriers erected by civilization. It revealed itself to him without God – he then call himself totally atheist – man was disoriented in the moral scheme. There is, on this subject, a beautiful passage from his novel Lieutenant Sturm: the hero seduces a young prostitute and confesses his instinct to kill and his violent impulses during the assault. It’s as if he was seeking a form of forgiveness in which absolution is given, not by a priest, but by a benign person. We can compare this reaction with an episode from Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, in it an old Republican peasant dramatically describes the loss of his belief in God; he finds its leaves him helpless before the necessities of war, as if he sees himself forced to kill, to whom could he confess his error and how would he be absolved of his sins?

PHILITT: What was Jünger’s place in this intellectual abundance of the interwar German Conservative Revolution?

Julien Hervier: Following the war, there was a whole nebula of extremist movements, on the right as well as on the left, which spent their time dividing themselves. Ernst Jünger collaborated with a certain number of small magazines on the nationalist right. He then appeared as one of the most remarkable personalities of this movement, because of his glorious war experience, symbolized by his exceptional decoration “Pour le mérite.” This decoration was actually given to numerous superior officers, but very rarely to simple infantry lieutenants. He possessed an exceptional combatant’s prestige which would then serve to protect him from Hitler. Moreover, intellectually, he was considered the most brilliant writer in this nebula. From the point of view of style or thought, he is incontestably the most prestigious. In the philosophical scheme, his brother Friedrich Georg had received a much deeper philosophical education than his; furthermore Heidegger considered him a better philosopher than Ernst. But very rapidly, from his arrival on the front, he was seriously wounded and thus didn’t have the occasion to distinguish himself and attain the same military prestige as his brother. Younger and not having experienced the war, though having combat experience in the Freikorps, Ernst von Salomon was also a representative writer of this German right, but he doesn’t situate himself on the same literary level.

PHILITT: Jean-Pierre Faye, in the line of Albert Béguin, didn’t hesitate to write “Thus three friends, Schmitt, Jünger, Heidegger – the strange trio of thinkers – contributed to the language of this Reich that devastated Europe in the Second World War.” What response do you have to these excessive, to say the least, statements?

Julien Hervier: You know Talleyrand’s quote: “All that is excessive is insignificant.” What Faye wrote is purely ideological and of little interest. Here we’re denying a complex reality. What is true on the other hand, it’s that there were degrees of compromise more or less elevated. The altitude at which Carl Schmitt’s thought moves is undeniable, but he was also a careerist eager for honors and success. And at the level of simple moral decency, the moral decency of Orwell or Camus, he behaved in an inadmissible manner when he justified the massacres of the “Night of the Long Knives” by raison d’État. His initial engagement on the side of Hitler was indeed scandalous, even if he then became more critical and ended up being viewed negatively by the regime. Heidegger was in turn a philosopher who didn’t understand what Nazism really was. Against a flood of scientist and purely materialist enthusiasm for technical progress, especially among the Anglo-Saxons and Russians, he thought that this new German party could allow the philosophy of being to resist decline. It’s quite clear that he could only have been disappointed; furthermore he recognized this major error, this “big mistake.” Ernst Jünger, unlike the other two, never joined the Nazi party; and his allegorical novel On The Marble Cliffs was considered at the time, as much by Hitler’s partisans as by his enemies, as a novel of opposition to the Führer, as a work of resistance. The judgment of his contemporaries has more weight than ours.

PHILITT: The Soldier, the Worker, the Rebel, the Anarch, all of these are at the heart of Jünger’s work. What do they tells us about his era?

Julien Hervier: The Worker (Arbeiter in German) is a figure linked to the evolution of technical thought, itself arising from the philosophical thought of the West. It is part of a historical logic of the development of Western civilization, and the man of technology is currently present everywhere. Nevertheless, we must be specific: translated into French, Arbeiter can also have a very particular meaning: that of “worker,” especially since the industrial revolution as analyzed by Karl Marx. But the Jüngerian Arbeiter is a vaster figure, he can also be a general as much as a businessman. Jünger defines him as someone whose values come from technology and its prodigious development over the past past three centuries. He’s a figure of reference, ontological in nature, linked to the essence of civilization. The figures of the Rebel or the Anarch are moral figures. In order to define them, Jünger often used the image of the Leviathan, to which they are contrasted. Leviathan, such as the state conceived by Hobbes in the 17th century, or the present technological state, a state whose omnipotence we see reinforcing itself, thanks to modern means of control over the individual. We are in a world where Big Brother’s control is pervasive and resistance is needed. The “Rebel”, it’s a French translation, but the original German word, der Waldgänger, evokes someone who seeks refuge in the forests. It’s for that reason that in French the book is entitled “Treatise on the Rebel or the Recourse to the Forests.” Jünger refers to the old Icelandic practices in which rebellious people banished from society found refuge in the forests. But Jünger always insisted that, in the modern world, the Rebel doesn’t necessarily hide in nature but he can hide in the most populous cities, camouflaged in the eyes of the state. With the Anarch, he wanted to go further in his analysis of resistance. It must totally shift in relation to the scale of value they seek to impose on us. If we only want to invert it, we are lost, as Montherlant pleasantly wrote: “There is nothing that resembles a torpedo boat more than a destroyer.” Starting from the moment where you accept the problem as posed by your adversary, you are lost. You only reverse his values. The Anarch refuses this game. He doesn’t create a party, and this sense, he distinguishes himself from the anarchist. He is alone while the anarchists are part of a collective movement.

PHILITT: Reading his Parisian Journals, one is instantly struck by a certain passivity, a comfortable atonia during the Second World War. The man of action then disappeared, replaced by the contemplative spirit that he would remain until the end of his life?

Julien Hervier: Jünger couldn’t show what he thought. In a totalitarian regime, if you say that you’re against it, you are immediately shot or sent to a concentration camp. So showing his opposition in an explicit manner would be suicidal and useless. So he only followed the assassination attempt planned by Stauffenberg from afar. He could have still been executed as an accomplice if they reported him; it was punishable by death, even if he was not actively engaged in the operation. One of the motifs of his mission in the Caucasus, at the end of 1942, was to gauge the reactions of officers on the Eastern front, in case of an attempt against Hitler. Furthermore, high treason against the state was incompatible with his vision of the soldier. In his journal he mentions the Roman general Coriolanus, the subject of Shakespeare’s play, who revolted against his country and dreads his fate.

PHILITT: Regarding his work, Jünger mentions “an old and a new testament.” Do you share this vision of two Jüngers?

Julien Hervier: It’s true that an enormous difference exists between the young 20 year old thirsting for action who found the bourgeois world stifling, and the man who matured and became a sort of old sage, absorbed by his research on insects whose progressive disappearance he deplored in an ecological spirit. His evolution is incontestable.

PHILITT: You just wrote a book on Drieu la Rochelle. Une histoire de désamours (Gallimard); what intellectual and personal links did the two men entertain in Paris during the Occupation?

Julien Hervier: They only met rarely, but Drieu la Rochelle had an admiration for the author of Storms of Steel. It was a reciprocal esteem. Rapidly wounded on the field of battle many times, the French writer spent relatively little time on the front; on the contrary, Ernst Jünger fought for the entire duration of the entire war, despite numerous wounds. Their service records had nothing to do with each other, even if Drieu was also very courageous and experienced the exaltation of war. For him, modern war has two aspects: the exhalation of the charge, when he took part in the assault on Charleroi; and panicked terror in the face of the superpower of technology, which expresses itself in his cry of absolute terror at Verdun, under the bombardments that they had to passively endure. This battle embodied all the horror of modern industrial war. What brings these two writers closer together is both the exaltation of physical courage and the vision of war as the revealer of human truth. Neither of them were followers of Rousseau, neither of them believed in fundamental human goodness. However, they diverged on their analyses regarding technology. As from a certain side, we can consider The Worker as an apology for technology: Jünger considers it as something that imposes itself with the same obvious character as the laws of nature. The evolution of Western society cannot escape it. We observe it even more today: for example, how to organize de-growth today, without putting millions of people into unemployment? We are caught in the gears, the world has entered into total dependence on technology. The two authors were great readers of Nietzsche but on this precise point, at the time where he wrote The Worker, Jünger was more Nietzschean than Drieu, as for him, we must day yes to the state of the world as it is. It’s useless to oppose it.

PHILITT: Novalis, the poet, the figure of Romanticism from Jena, exercised a considerable influence on Jünger. Was he the last of the German Romantics?

Julien Hervier: There is indeed an entire aspect that underlines Ernst Jünger’s romanticism, particularly concerning the dimension of the dream. He presents very beautiful narratives of them in his journal. His most beautiful novel, in my opinion, On the Marble Cliffs is also a reinterpreted dream. A dream that he had during a voyage to Rhodes by boat which is not far from the visions of the Apocalypse in the Christian tradition. This dimension of the dream, of the relation to nature, to the unconscious, this refusal of a mechanized vision of the world: all this links him with the German Romantics but also the French symbolists. He is much closer to Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who he admired, than the French Romantics.

PHILITT: We are very familiar with Jünger the warrior, but much less so with Jünger the dabbler in drugs. What was he seeking in what he called “psychonautics?”

Julien Hervier: Precisely, he sought to break the purely rational and materialist comprehension of the world. He was a man of risk who wanted to touch the boundaries. He wanted to see what was on the other side. As much on the field of battle, in violent action, as in the framework of psychological experimentation, but always under the control of instruments of reason. Thus he had did first LSD experiments with his friend Albert Hoffman, the inventor of this drug, and practiced these experiences under strict medical control.

PHILITT: A writer who converted to Catholicism at the end of his life but whose writings nevertheless reveal a profound pagan mystique, what was the place of religion in his life?

Julien Hervier: Having spoken with his wife about it, I can affirm that his conversion to Catholicism at the end of his life was purely social. The Catholic readers of Jünger often want to imagine this moment as a true conversion. But Jünger’s entire body of work tends to show that there is a religious dimension and a form of spirituality among all peoples. He was not far from believing that it was of little import if one worships the Christian Trinity, Jehovah, or Allah … Thus there are texts by him where he says he’s willing to adopt the religion of the place where he finds himself: if he had lived in a Muslim country, he would be a Muslim. In his elderly years, he was perfectly integrated in the Swabian and Catholic world of Wilflingen, whose parish priest he was close to. He believed that in contemporary Western civilization, where death was skirted around, Christian religion remained capable of honoring human beings when they passed. In this sense, his interment was one of solemnity and grandiose simplicity. That’s Chateaubriand genius of Christianity. That’s the reasons for his conversion.

PHILITT: How would you analyze the difference in the perceptions of his work between France and Germany?

Julien Hervier: He’s read a lot more in Germany than in France, even if, among us, there is a little circle of people inspired by Jünger. But in comparison with Germany, his readers are relatively less there. In the “Society of Friends of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger”, there are very few French people. Only three or four of us are coming to the Heiligkreuztal colloquium this year where I’ve sometimes found myself to be the only French person. For a long time, in France, we appreciated literary quality above the political opinions of writers. People hardly questioned their political color then. In Germany, after the fall of Nazism, the question was much more sensitive; unfortunately in France as well, now we’re tending to enter in this logic. Just look at the problems currently posed by Céline and Maurras, though nevertheless commemorations do not mean that we admire people, only that we recognize the importance of the historical role they played. In this domain, the contemporary French mentality tends to blandly join the German mentality.

Source: https://philitt.fr/2018/03/15/julien-hervier-pour-ernst-junger-le-monde-est-entre-dans-la-dependance-totale-de-la-technique/

The Magic Cancellation of Crisis and the “Physiognomic Method” of Ernst Jünger – Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°123/125 – 1995.

02 Thursday Nov 2017

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Jünger saw in the figure of the Arbeiter the central category around which the modern world, subjected to the planetary domination of technology, was called to organize itself, in “total mobilization” though and in labor. More precisely, a response adapted to the rise of nihilism in the modern era could be deployed through the technological mobilization of the world. With it, he salutes the advent of a new figure of man, modeled on the Nietzschean superman.

Among the adepts of Marxist ideology, very few have analyzed the thought of those they call “pre-fascist”, or outright “fascist”, including Ernst Jünger, who would evidently be one of the figureheads. Armin Steil is one of the rare Marxist ideologues who has analyzed the paths of Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger with pertinence, depth, and especially clarity in his work Die imaginäre Revolte : Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt und Ernst Jünger (The Imaginary Revolt: Inquiries on Fascist Ideology and its Preparation with Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger).

Focusing on Der Arbeiter, Steil notes that Jünger’s logic, starting from his “fascism” or more precisely his “revolutionary conservatism,” is not a theoretical logic, a constructed logic, based on the observation of causes and effects, but a metaphorical, poetic, imagistic logic and language. Facing a chaotic socio-economic and political reality, facing the crisis of German society and culture, Jünger wanted to master its perverse effects, its dysfunctions through aesthetics: so his “fascism,” his “revolutionary conservatism,” would essentially be aesthetic in nature, contrary to Marxism, which molds itself on material realities and resolves crises by operating on socio-economic matters themselves, without idealist recourse, without recourse to transcendence or to an aesthetic. Steil very justly concludes: “The book [Der Arbeiter] wants to teach [men] to have a sovereign attitude in the face of social attitudes.” Cold, dispassionate, microscopic observation thus forms the “magic key” that would permit an elite to master the crises, to put an end to chaos and the corrosive disparities that hinder the proper functioning of societies that are subject to them.

To be Hyper-Perceptive Eyes

The willing spirits that thus desire “to take the bull by the horns,” to act on the political terrain, to fight against crises and their effects, should not bind themselves to building a mechanical system of ready made ideas that perfectly match and fit together, but should be hyper-perceptive “eyes,” capable of describing the phenomena of everyday life: what Jünger calls the “physiognomic method.” It allows one to see the essence of a thing in its simple appearance, grasping the unity of essence and appearance, which is the “form” (Gestalt), invisible to all inattentive, distracted observers, not used to wielding the “physiognomic method” with the desired dexterity. All valuable, fruitful phenomena thus bear in themselves a “form,” more or less hidden, a potential force that it captures and puts in the service of a political or historic project. On the other hand, every phenomenon that only appears as “normal” is consequently a phenomenon without further “form”, without “force.” Such a phenomenon would be an early warning sign of decadence, a sign indicating a reshuffling of the cards, forms die, thus obeying a hidden logic, which prepares the advent of new forms, of unbroken forces.

The observation of the phenomena of everyday life, of the details of our daily settings, gives a glimpse of where the fall and death of forms manifest themselves: neon, garish lights, loud and artificial modern cities, are a patent indication of this fading of forces, masked by colors and intensities without real life. Modern traffic in the big cities burdens the pedestrian, the only physical being in this universe of concrete, asphalt, and metal, on the barely tolerated margins are the sidewalks, tracks reserved for the “least speedy.”

The “Arbeiter” uses the “Physiognomic Method”

So the “Arbeiter” is the figure that makes use of the “physiognomic method,” observes, deciphers, plunges into this universe of artifice to seek buried forces, in order to mobilize them for a purely imagined project, “Utopian” in the Marxian and Engelsian sense of the term, Steil explains. This recourse to the imaginary, as the Marxist Steil explains, proceeds from a logic of doubt, which aims to give meaning to that which does not have it, at any cost. It aims to convince us that behind the phenomena of decline, of de-vitalization, an “Order” and laws emerge, which are avatars of the one God refused by the advocates of historical materialism. This “Order”, this Gestalt, this “form”, integrates the infinite diversity of observations posed by people, but it is not, like in the case of historical materialism, a reflection of social relations, but rather a total vision, intuitive, going directly to the essence, that is to say the original form. It is not the objective and positive enumeration of causes and effects that allows one to decide and act, but, on the contrary, a piercing look what allows one to see and grasp the world as the theater where forms confront or cooperate with each other.

The “Arbeiter” is precisely the one who possesses such a “piercing look”, and who replaces the bourgeois, who reasons strictly in simple cause and effect. Steil notes the gap between this vision of the “Arbeiter” and the Marxist and empirical vision of the “Proletarian”: the figure forged by Jünger places himself high above socio-economic contingencies; while the proletarian conscious of his dereliction operates at the heart of these contingencies, without taking any distance, without detachment. The “high flight” of the Arbeiter, his aquiline perspective, gives him a mask: metallic or cosmetic, the gas mask of the combatant, the drivers helmet with the men, makeup with the women. Individual traits disappear behind these masks, as should individual human, all too human, imperfections disappear. The figures of the Arbeiter are certainly imaginary figures, excessively idealized, de-individualized and examined: they act like Prussian soldiers in the Frederician era of practice. Following their leaders, these lesser (but nevertheless necessary) avatars of the Arbeiter and the Prussian soldiers from the “war in lace” [Translator’s note: referring to the ornate uniforms worn by soldiers of the 17th and 18th century] certainly lose the imperfections of their individuality, but also abandon their doubts and disorientation: rules and Order are safety anchors offered by the new elite community of “Arbeiters,” virtuosi of the “physiognomic method.”

The Apparent Independence of the Proletarian

Steil protests that Order, as an imaginary projection, and the “physiognomic method” are instruments against the empirical and Marxist notion of “class struggle,” before clearly giving Jünger’s version: to leave the laborer, the worker, in the grasp of socio-economic contingencies is to leave him in a world entirely determined by the bourgeoisie, arising from the bourgeoisie and ultimately controlled by the bourgeoisie. By occupying a designated place in the bourgeois order, the worker only enjoys an apparent independence, he has no autonomy. Every attack launched against the bourgeois order from this apparent position is also only apparent, destined to be recollected and reinforce the establishment. “Theoretically, every move takes place in the context of an outdated social and human utopia; practically, each brings to dominion, time and again, the figure of the clever business man, whose art consists in bargaining and mediating,” writes Jünger. For Steil, this definition radicalizes the Sorelian vision of socialism, which desires to transform politics into pure means, without a limiting objective, inscribed in contingencies.

To Restore “Auratic” Work

A Marxist will see, in this idealism and in this purification of politics as pure means, an eliminations of politics, a will to put an end to the destructive violence of politics, which is only, in the Marxist view, “class struggle.” But technology operates to sweep away the dead forms in order to establish new forms following a planetary confrontation of extant forms, still endowed with more or less intact forces. So technology destroys residual or obsolete forms, it makes the permanent war of forms planetary and gigantic, but the “Arbeiter,” by coldly instrumentalizing the “physiognomic method,” gives a final form to technology (a desire that is never realized!). This final form will be artistic and the beauty emerging from it will have a magic and “sacral” function, like in so-called “primitive” societies. The restoration of these forms, writes Steil, will be achieved through the restoration of “auratic” work, eclipsed by technological standardization. The Aura, the impalpable expression of form, of the essence of represented phenomenon, restores the sacred dimension, proclaims the return of the cult of beauty, by qualitative replacement of the dead religiosity from the bourgeois era.

“Heroic realism,” the foundation of the new socio-political Order, will be carried by a dominant caste simultaneously exercising three functions: that of retainer of knowledge, that of new warrior forged during the battles of material in the Great War, and that of producer of a new aesthetic, a medium integrating social differences.

Armin Steil, in his Marxist critique of the “pre-fascism” of Sorel, Jünger and Schmitt, clearly lays out the essence of a work as capital as Der Arbeiter, where the mania for fabricating systems is refused in favor of great idealist affirmations, disengaged from the overly heavy contingencies of bourgeois society and proletarian misery. The Jüngerian path, in this view, appears as a disengagement from the yoke of the concrete, as a haughty retreat ultimately leading to a total but external domination of this concreteness. But in the piercing look, demanded by the physiognomic method, is there not, on the contrary, an instrument to penetrate concreteness, much more subtle than simple surface considerations of phenomena?

Reference: : Armin STEIL, Die imaginäre Revolte. Untersuchungen zur faschistischen Ideologie und ihrer theoretischen Vorbereitung bei Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt und Ernst Jünger, Verlag Arbeiterbewegung und Gesellschaftswissenschaft, Marburg, 1984