It is interesting how English language interest in Junger has gone up so much in recent years, I think it's mostly driven by the new right. There seems to be quite a strong little community of anglophone Junger-studies now. The uncertainty with technology, along with the need to keep one's true self buried in a regime you find distasteful or corrupt are very modern feelings.
His works have such vastly different levels of accessibility too - Eumeswil is a dense battle to get through, but his earlier works are much more direct and readable.
I find some of the interviews conducted in the last couple of decades of Junger's life particularly interesting. The interviewers always seem to take any political statements that Junger makes at face value, suggesting they're unfamiliar with his personal history and concept of the anarch.
On a parallel track, I found a recent book, Last Days in Old Europe, an excellent read. It involved a writer travelling in the former AH empire and seeing the remaining places and people of the Empire and first world war before they passed away.
Certainly the new right is responsible in part, but those concerns about technology clearly resonant with the left, especially a left that is becoming more environmental. I think the Clemens and Hausdorf quote from early on in my piece makes this case well.
The tendency of the interviewer to assume a transparent interviewee never ceases to amaze me. There's a wonderful essay on Foucault that begins by suggesting a oft cited remark of his about his (positive) intellectual relationship to Heidegger may have been more than a bit ironic, given the other (negative) comments he occasionally makes about Phenomenology and Phenomenologists. The remark in question is of course from an interview.
I have a copy of Last Days in Old Europe lying around, though I have yet to crack the spine. Good to know it lives up to the promise of its backmatter.
Very good short essay, somehow comes right at a time when I was about to read Junger.
I would like to say though, I feel like there is something positive to be said about the Anarch in this day and age: the need to preserve oneself in spite of an overwhelming informational onslaught and its addictions, the need to be an Anarch against those techno-standardizing forces that so easily flatten minds nowadays much like war did for Junger's generation.
First of all thanks for reading Anton, I appreciate it. Second of all your point on the Anarch is fair enough, but I would say that the Anarch in Junger comes with a militarist ideal of self discipline and a certain elitism. It is not at all clear how it can, in the fundamental sense, be distinguished from other theories of self cultivation and resistance that don't possess the baggage Junger attaches to it.
It is interesting how English language interest in Junger has gone up so much in recent years, I think it's mostly driven by the new right. There seems to be quite a strong little community of anglophone Junger-studies now. The uncertainty with technology, along with the need to keep one's true self buried in a regime you find distasteful or corrupt are very modern feelings.
His works have such vastly different levels of accessibility too - Eumeswil is a dense battle to get through, but his earlier works are much more direct and readable.
I find some of the interviews conducted in the last couple of decades of Junger's life particularly interesting. The interviewers always seem to take any political statements that Junger makes at face value, suggesting they're unfamiliar with his personal history and concept of the anarch.
On a parallel track, I found a recent book, Last Days in Old Europe, an excellent read. It involved a writer travelling in the former AH empire and seeing the remaining places and people of the Empire and first world war before they passed away.
Certainly the new right is responsible in part, but those concerns about technology clearly resonant with the left, especially a left that is becoming more environmental. I think the Clemens and Hausdorf quote from early on in my piece makes this case well.
The tendency of the interviewer to assume a transparent interviewee never ceases to amaze me. There's a wonderful essay on Foucault that begins by suggesting a oft cited remark of his about his (positive) intellectual relationship to Heidegger may have been more than a bit ironic, given the other (negative) comments he occasionally makes about Phenomenology and Phenomenologists. The remark in question is of course from an interview.
I have a copy of Last Days in Old Europe lying around, though I have yet to crack the spine. Good to know it lives up to the promise of its backmatter.
Very good short essay, somehow comes right at a time when I was about to read Junger.
I would like to say though, I feel like there is something positive to be said about the Anarch in this day and age: the need to preserve oneself in spite of an overwhelming informational onslaught and its addictions, the need to be an Anarch against those techno-standardizing forces that so easily flatten minds nowadays much like war did for Junger's generation.
First of all thanks for reading Anton, I appreciate it. Second of all your point on the Anarch is fair enough, but I would say that the Anarch in Junger comes with a militarist ideal of self discipline and a certain elitism. It is not at all clear how it can, in the fundamental sense, be distinguished from other theories of self cultivation and resistance that don't possess the baggage Junger attaches to it.
Hm okay, I will have to read Eumeswil then, I have it on my shelf