"From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger"

by Kittler, Wolf (2008)

Abstract

Reading Der Arbeiter together with Heidegger's essay "Questioning after Technology" after many years, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was struck by the number

Key Passage

Reading Der Arbeiter together with Heidegger's essay "Questioning after Technology" after many years, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I was struck by the number of parallels in  both the arguments and the terminology of these texts, not only with Benjamin's essay "On the Origin of the Work of Art in the Age of  Mechanical Reproduction" but also with his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." It is, of course, easy to locate Benjamin, on the one side, and Jünger and Heidegger, on the other one, to the so-called Left and Right of the political spectrum, but in doing so we should at least be aware of two facts: One, Jünger's work rejects such simple classifications, which more often than not amount to a refusal to think. And two, his book places itself explicitly above and beyond this distinction because it dates back to the seating order of the French Convention, the foundational body of bourgeois societies. (p.79)

Keywords

Heidegger, Technology, Junger, Benjamin, Nationalism, National Socialism, Germany

Themes

On Jünger, On Heidegger

Links to Reference

• http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475477
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/25475477?casa_token=XVlullzbERsAAAAA:wscC0Nw3bhNMXoV3QagEc8m9qP6wWMJUY-_yi_xWJ4lhb1kv404-nz0Kr0bulitHJsVgLLI7poeYRKjjLfRiSobNocXZmj6lxqaKs8KXxMlv2X-5sQ
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25475477.pdf?casa_token=vPThAwxhZLcAAAAA:qqiN0Nc2E_VJAc5HCYeXR7xplQ_gPMOFqO6GR0NHsYDVGtg492DKYc7QwqmNTk4eXBWMHu6X6ofnEjg-U0UsKx_8ycP4zXNTlUHPsM1lh42VdmxXbQ

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