For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: On Jünger

  • Bernasconi, Robert
  • Blok, Vincent
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.197) This change in the appearance of the world together with the way people deal with it, leads Jünger to conceive of a new turn of ‘Being’ – the Gestalt of the worker - which is capable of “guaranteeing a new certainty and new rank order of life” (Arb 99). ‘Being’ is understood here in line with the metaphysical tradition, as a Gestalt, form or measure in which reality appears as ordered (see for further details on Jünger’s concept of Being §2). In the case of Jünger’s Gestalt of the worker, this form or measure must be found in work: that...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.198) Nietzsche sees the nihilistic character of Platonism, the denial of life in its conception of the Gestalt. His reversal of Platonism takes its point of departure precisely from within the world of becoming and conceives the Gestalt as the product of the will to power of life. The Gestalt is a Herrschaftsgebilde amidst the world of becoming, which serves the power-preservation and power-enhancement of life. The Gestalt is a necessary condition for the power-preservation of life, which would otherwise evaporate in the face of relentless variability (becoming). Nevertheless, this Gestalt is not stable and everlasting, because all stabilization destroys becoming,...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
      (p.201) According to Heidegger, Jünger is the only real follower of Nietzsche, because he doesn’t speak about Nietzsche and his doctrine of the will to power. He sees beings as will to power without describing them: “his way of thinking is itself a Gestalt of the will to power; in Jünger’s language: thinking itself has “work-character” [Arbeitscharakter]”. 25 Jünger calls his own way of thinking heroic realism, because he does not only see the reality of the work-character (Arbeitscharakter) of people and things in the world, but also affirms this in such a way that his own way of thinking has...
    • "An Indication of Being—Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger" (2011)
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.63) Despite Heidegger’s criticism of Jünger’s metaphysical position in the period of 1934–1940, a more nuanced picture shows itself if we look at Heidegger’s concept of work in the beginning of the 1930s. In  The German Student as Worker from 1933 for instance, Heidegger argues that work “confronts us with beings in a whole.”  1  “Work displaces and inserts the people in the radius of action of all essential powers of being. The structure of  völkischexistence, which is shaped and constituted  in    its work and  as    work, is the state. The National Socialist state is the work-state.”  Work seems...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.65) In  a  lecture  about  the    Basic  Concepts  of  Aristotelian  Philosophy  in  the  same  period  (1924),  this  world  of  equipment  and  work  is  explicitly  con-nected with the concept of work. In his productive appropriation  12  of Aristo-tle’s basic concepts, Heidegger explores what primarily encounters us in the world: “A being thus in the world is there and can, as  dunamis, at the same time be something usable.  Dunamis, ‘not yet,’ can mean: is usable for . . ., transformable into. . . . This being that is there thus, as there completed and usable for . . . is characterized...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.67) When  we  compare  Jünger’s  description  of  the  total  mobilization  in  the  First  World  War  with  Heidegger’s  description  of  the  work-world  in Being and Time, we encounter one similarity and one difference between the two. Jünger’s  description  of  the  total  mobilization,  in  which  man  and  things  appear as function or operative, is comparable with Heidegger’s description of the ready-to-hand world, which is extended to the whole of being. Also for Heidegger, the whole of nature appears as ready-at-hand equipment or work, which derives its meaning from its productivity (serviceability, usabil-ity): “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.69) Also in the beginning of the 1930s, Heidegger saw the mission of thought in the destruction of philosophy, i.e., “ the end of metaphysics out of a more originary question regarding the ‘meaning’ (truth) of being.” 34  But when he discusses the concept of work at the beginning of the 1930s, the worker is no longer the one who is absorbed by the ready-to-hand world of work. Contrary to  Being and Time, the worker is precisely the one who is transitory toward a way of human existence that is concerned about the meaning of being. In  The German Stu-dent as...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.70) Following Jünger, Heidegger rejects economic conceptualizations of work and worker, just as conceptualizations of the worker as a class. Heidegger conceptualizes work in the following way: “The word work  is  ambiguous.  It  means  on  the  one  hand  work  as  enactment  of  specific behavior. On the other hand, it means work as a product, the result or success of this enactment. According to this broad and doubled meaning, all human behavior, provided that it is  about something, is  work and  care.”  
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
      (p.71) In the “advancement” and “insistence” of the German student as worker, Heidegger sees an indication that our  Dasein begins to shift toward another way  of  being,   43   i.e.,  to  a  way  of  being  of  the  people  that  exposes  itself  to  the meaning or truth of being. Work therefore no longer  prevents access to the meaning of being, but arises out of, and provides access to the experi-ence of being. The essence of work consists here in the care for being. And as Jünger saw the harbingers of the new worker type in the soldiers of the Great War, Heidegger saw...
    • "Heidegger's Ontology of Work" (2015)
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.77) Heidegger concentrates on this identification of the subject of  The Worker(worker) and the way this subject is being discussed in Jünger’s book (work). “Is the essence of the worker determined out of the  essence of work ? . . . Or is the essence of work put forward out of the essence of the worker? . . . how does Jünger decide? Does he see this question at all, does he notice its weight?” 5   On  the  one  hand,  the  subject  (worker)  is  the  basis  for  the  work  character  of  the  world  as  its  object.  On  the  other  hand,  the ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.79) For Heidegger, “being” cannot be associated with work and workers. Work and workers designate in the first instance (human) beings in the world, and so concern in this way metaphysically understood  beings, whereas “Being” concerns the way reality appears together with the way people deal with it. In the epoch of the worker, reality appears as produced and represented (will to power) for representing-producing humanity (will to power). According to Heidegger, this means that the essence of the work-world ( totale Mobil-machung)  has  to  be  found  in  the  machination  of  beings  (  totale  Mobil ma-chung).  12   Machination  indicates  the  makeability ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.80) Jünger’s  absorption  by  the  work-world  is  however  not  primarily  his  mistake  or  fault.  According  to  Heidegger,  it  belongs  to  the  inner  logic  of  machination that it conceals itself all the more as it unfolds itself.  19  We can understand  this  self-concealment  of  machination  if  we  remember  Heideg-ger’s analysis of the movement of work in  Being and Time (see Section 6.1); all works are characterized by a double movement of their withdrawal as equipment  in  favor  of  their  presence  as  work.  In  1934–1935,  Heidegger  conceptualizes this double movement in terms of the concealment of machi-nation as the essence of the work-world...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
      (p.81) We can conclude that Heidegger, at the beginning of the 1930s, seemed to  be  quite  revolutionary  in  heralding  the  other  beginning  of  philosophy.  Inspired by Jünger, he developed a destructed concept of work and will to characterize  his  own  way  of  philosophical  thinking,  and  was    willing  the  overcoming  of  the  metaphysics  of  the  will  to  power.   30   But  from  the  con-frontation  with  Jünger,  Heidegger  learned  that  every  “overcoming  of  the  metaphysics of the will to power” is doomed, as long as it is characterized by work and will.  31  Working and willing is absorbed in the circular course from ...
    • "Jünger’s Concept of the Gestalt of the Worker as the Consummation of Modernity" (2015)
  • Bullock, Marcus Paul
  • Costea, Bogdan; Amiridis, Kostas
    • "Ernst Jünger, total mobilisation and the work of war" (2017)
      (p.480) as battle acquired the character of technologically-driven work, Jünger maps a change in soldiers’ experience of themselves. Fear of the distant and continuous assault of the machines began to combine with an instinctive understanding that a new kind of agency had become available to each of them. If a soldier could comprehend the logic of the machines, it would bestow not simply flexibility and ‘readiness’ for effective reaction, but would also allow a rapid work-like fusion of human skill with technology and its requirements. He wrote, in a shorter sketch based on his diaries, We have to transfer what lies...
    • "Ernst Jünger, total mobilisation and the work of war" (2017)
  • Grigenti, Fabio
  • Hales, Barbara
  • Hemming, Laurence Paul
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.234) Heidegger became intrigued by Jünger’s work after the publication of “Die totale Mobilmachung” and he refers in several places to discussions he organised on Jünger’s Der Arbeiter both shortly after its publication (with Heidegger’s Assistent Werner Brock and a small circle) and again in 1939/1940 (Heidegger 2000a; cf. Heidegger 2000b, p. 375), until, he says, “one was, however, not surprised that an attempt to elucidate ‘Der Arbeiter’ was watched and finally forbidden” (Heidegger 1996, p. 390).6 This remark was itself made in the context of Heidegger’s final confrontation with Jünger, in the 1956 version of his essay “Zur Seinsfrage” (“On...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.242) If God is dead, then the consequences of this are that total mobilisation becomes not just possible, but required, both to make visible the death of God and God’s analogue, the monarch (and insofar as an analogue has made itself present, a split has opened up), and to become visible as an individual at all. Moreover, the will to power fulfils the will of God by replacing it. “God” as “being in general” is now understood as, and through, work: the working out and working up of the real. The indeterminate “substance” of the subjectivity of the subject must both...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.243) the type of the worker is counterposed to the type of the feudal lord, the king, the bourgeois: the worker is that one best able to take command of the means of total mobilisation and, at the same time, the worker is that one produced by the means of total mobilisation. The worker is the “product” of technology and of technique, and work is the making manifest of the will to power. Jünger says that “means and the powers of life become possible”, which means “become the same” (Jünger 1941, p. 58).26 Put this way, the worker does not work,...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.244) In the protocols from a seminar session of 1937 on Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht entitled “The Biological as Economic Basic-Position”, Heidegger notes that “the opposite of what the common herd desire is necessary for the elevating of the typical man” (Heidegger 2004a, §53, p. 66).29 The typical man is in every case the subject as subject, who distinguishes himself in his very self precisely with respect to, and over against, what he perceives to be what the common lot seek out and seek after. We may note in passing that on this account, the typical man is precisely a cultural...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.245) Jünger comments that the contemporary situation, the time of the worker, demands the establishment of a new form of power and rule, which, inasmuch as it is a claim to freedom, is the claim of work. Work produces the legitimation of power, of rule, and of freedom: “every claim to freedom within the work-world is therefore only possible insofar as it appears as a claim of work” (Jünger 1941, p. 65).34 Rule is, however, essentially ordering, it is essentially what orders into hierarchy and distinction, and so difference as such. The appearance of the worker as the form of the...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.247) Here the fundamental difference between Heidegger and Jünger can also be seen, one that even lets us glimpse Heidegger’s own political understanding, for if Jünger is interested in bringing to description the typus of the worker and relating it to Nietzsche — the essence of the age — Heidegger himself is interested in origination and the “jointure” of beings as such, what lets beings be seen both for themselves and in relation to each other — what the Greeks name as arche, ordering source, the essence of essence (das Wesen des Wesens). The difference is in an ordering to time....
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
      (p.248) If the worker is typified in the forms of fascism (Nazism), communism (Bolshevism), and Americanism, these are for Heidegger only the means by which the underlying metaphysics of valuation eclipses what Jünger refers to as the latest political forms (after the feudal, monarchial, and others). “World democracy” is not, therefore, either for Heidegger or for Nietzsche, a final form, understood as presence, but the manner of an overcoming, an emerging presencing, something on its way and coming from before us. World democracy, as the triumph of something European (of which the American is only a later form) on a planetary...
    • "Work as total reason for being: Heidegger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter" (2008)
  • Hüttemann, Felix
  • Ibáñez-Noé, Javier A
  • Kittler, Wolf
    • "From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger" (2008)
      (p.79) 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...
    • "From Gestalt to Ge-Stell: Martin Heidegger Reads Ernst Jünger" (2008)
  • Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray
  • Loose, Gerhard
  • Nawratek, Krzysztof
  • Nevin, Thomas R; Nevin, Thomas
  • Ohana, David
    • "Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger: From nihilism to totalitarianism" (1989)
      (p.754) In the Feschtschrift for Junger’s sixtieth birthday, Heidegger wrote: ‘Your work Der Arbeiter (1932) provides a description of European nihilism in the stage which succeeded the First World War. “Die totale Mobilmachung” (1930) is derived from your study; Der Arbeiter belongs to the stage of active nihilism’.20 Heidegger connected Junger’s modern technological vision with Nietzsche’s metaphysics. As he said: ‘The being in its entirety appears to you within the light and shade of the will-to-power, which Nietzsche interpreted as a doctrine of values’.
    • "Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger: From nihilism to totalitarianism" (1989)
      (p.755) The First World War was a watershed point which witnessed a ‘growing transformation of life into energy’.25 Work and war as manifestations of energy for energy’s sake were metaphorical actions deriving from the metaphysics of the will-to-power. Man’s metaphorical mastery of the universe was made possible by modern technology. Man’s mastery of technology had no purpose except mobilisation for its own sake; the result was total mobilisation, in work or war. It represented an active nihilism, or a nihilistic will-to-power. 
    • "Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger: From nihilism to totalitarianism" (1989)
      (p.756) As Heidegger pointed out in his series of seminars on Junger which he gave from 1936 to 1940 and from 1940 to 1946, Junger’s ‘worker’ is to be understood first and foremost as a metaphysical prototype which emerged from the modernism of the beginning of the twentieth century.3J This prototype was influenced by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, an embodiment of the metaphysics which prepared the way for the new man, in the same way as Rilke’s angle, Trakle’s stranger, Spengler’s barbarian, Sorel’s syndicalist, Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist and the Italian and Russian futurist. Junger wished to depart from traditional European history: unlike Max...
    • "Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger: From nihilism to totalitarianism" (1989)
  • Patel, Kiran Klaus
    • Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933-1945 (2005)
      (p.329) The Labor Service also failed to respond to a much more elaborate and polished intellectual offering. In his 1932 book Der Arbeiter(The Worker), Ernst J ̈unger had interpreted the age in which he was living as the transition from the disintegrating bourgeois society to the rule of the worker. He de-manded labor conscription as the “morning gift [Morgengabe] of the worker to the state.” It was to be the successor to general military conscription and should assume the latter’s role with respect to “education, penetration, anduniform discipline.” Moreover, J ̈unger wanted to do away with the “silly arrogance” of regarding...
  • Poggeler, Otto
    • "Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding" (1992)
      (p.211) Junger's essay "Die totale Mobilmachung" sees a  decisive historical turning point in the First World War, but at the same time he sees it as a civil war, world war as world revolution. In the concept of total mobilization junger wants to show that "wars of workers" are now succeeding the wars of knights, kings, and citizens. No longer is it monarchs who, after consultation. with their ministers, bring about a tactically calculated confrontation of armies. In those days the City Magistrate of Berlin could announce after the battle of jena and Auerstidt that now, where the king has a ...
    • "Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding" (1992)
      (p.221) The Holderlin lecture course from summer 1942 again emphasizes the "historical uniqueness" or .. historical singularity" of National Socialism. This singularity is not understood, particularly by those aca-demic partisans and fellow travelers who find in the Greek polis "politics" as it is proclaimed in the twentieth century and required by National Socialism. For Heidegger the Greek polis is the place of what is question-able, where even masters and slaves must come to differentiate them-selves. On the other hand, "(t]he 'political' is the accomplishment of history. Because the political is  thus the technical-historical certainty at the basis of all action, the 'political'...
    • "Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding" (1992)
  • Roberts, David
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
      (p.22) Junger’s cold and penetrating gaze serves his apocalyptic construction of world history: the destruction of the hated bourgeois world and the dawn of the age of the totalitarian Worker State, in which the figure (Gestalt) of the Worker embodies the destiny of man to master the earth. Junger’s new man is the Nietzschean Superman, who is capable of facing and welcoming the terrifying annihilating reality of the world as Will to Power, revealed in the Great War. His ‘heroic realism’ separates the Worker from the ‘bourgeois’ individual who anxiously clings to life and security as his highest values. The invasion of bourgeois space by the ‘elemental’ powers...
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
      (p.24) Power, in Junger’s Nietzschean reading, is inherently totalitarian. The Worker mobilizes the world through technology, a process that declares war on all historical systems and religious institutions and reaches its conclusion with the destruction of all nation-states. They will all be swept away by the revolution of the Worker, which installs itself as the superior race. The machine, we may say, ends as with Spengler by emancipating itself from its masters because the Worker, the self-enslaving representative of power, ‘transcends’ the distinction between masters and servants, even if Junger (like Hitler and Himmler) accords a privileged role to military orders...
    • "Technology and modernity: Spengler, Jünger, Heidegger, Cassirer" (2012)
  • Sokel, Walter H
  • Stiegler, Bernd
  • Stoneman, Ethan
  • Tralau, Johan
  • Ulf, Mellström
  • Werneburg, Brigitte; Phillips, Christopher
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