This book examines the work of Jünger and its effect on the development of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It offers a unique treatment of Jünger’s philosophy and his conception of the age of technology, in which both world and man appear in terms of their functionality and efficiency. It demonstrates Jünger’s influence on Heidegger’s conceptions of will, work and gestalt at the beginning of the 1930s. At the same time, Blok evaluates Heidegger’s criticism of Jünger and provides a novel interpretation of the Jünger-Heidegger connection: that Jünger’s work in fact testifies to a transformation of our relationship to language and conceptualizes the future in terms of the Anthropocene.
In this book Krzysztof Nawratek explores the possibility of a post-capitalist city, and in so doing, reclaims and develops the idea of total mobilisation as originally formulated by Ernst Jünger. Nawratek formulates the idea of ‘accumulation of agency’ the ability to act, to replace the logic of capital accumulation as a main driver of urban development. He argues that this ‘accumulation of agency’ operates already in contemporary cities, and should not be seen as essential element of capitalism, but as a conceptual gateway to a post-capitalist world.
As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed. Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that meets its own ends. No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book. "A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process.”—Harper's “One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself—unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs.”—The Nation “A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance.”—Los Angeles Free Press
Never has the cold, ruthlessness of the systematized, technological society been subjected to such a profound, penetrating critique as the one which Friedrich Georg Juenger (1898-1977) presents in this book?now for the first time published in English in the author?s final edition (the fourth German edition) and under its correct title. And many would claim this book?s central thesis and attendant insights, all deeply rooted in Juenger?s personal synthesis of the best traditions of European humanism, have never been refuted.?We will start from an observation which no one who has ever made it can forget,? writes Juenger. ?Is there not a direct connection between the increase in knowledge concerning mechanically exact processes, and the fact that modern man, in a strange manner, loses his individuality, loses his balance, his grip upon life, feels increasingly endangered and susceptible to attack...??When it was first published in Germany in 1946 and in the United States in 1949 (as "The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without Purpose"), this unsettling book confronted readers with this challenging question and others stemming from it?all of them more relevant in our age of computers and biotechnology than they were then. No one has probed as deeply as Juenger into the reasons that the instruments promised to bring ever greater freedom to man threaten to become the means of his economic, political, and social servitude. Topics include: the delusion of the saving of labor; the pillaging of the earth by industry; the invasion of life by the automaton; technology?s attack upon law and property; the profound difference between technical training and education; how and why technology usurps the state; the mechanical sterility of modern sports; and the unsettling coincidence of the rise of the industrial masses and the advent of imperialism.
Ernst Cassirer's thought-provoking essay Form and Technology (1930) ascribes to technology a new dignity as a genuine tool of the mind in equal company with language and art. Translated here into English it is accompanied by critical essays that explore its current relevance.
Ernst Jünger's The Forest Passage explores the possibility of resistance: how the independent thinker can withstand and oppose the power of the omnipresent state. No matter how extensive the technologies of surveillance become, the forest can shelter the rebel, and the rebel can strike back against tyranny. Jünger's manifesto is a defense of freedom against the pressure to conform to political manipulation and artificial consensus. A response to the European experience under Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, The Forest Passage has lessons equally relevant for today, wherever an imposed uniformity threatens to stifle liberty.
