Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, Edited by Ernst Junger

1979; Duke University Press; Issue: 17 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/488013

1558-1462

Ernst Jünger, Walter Benjamín, Jerolf Wikoff,

Intelligence, Security, War Strategy

LUon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet, who was himself an important writer and a leader of France's Royalist Party, once gave a report in his Action FranCais on the Salon de l'Automobile which concluded, in perhaps somewhat different words, with the equation: L'automobile c'est la guerre. This surprising association of ideas was based on the perception of an increase in technical artifacts, in power sources, and in tempo generally that the private sector can neither absorb completely nor utilize adequately but that nonetheless demand vindication. But vindication can only occur in antithesis to a harmonious balance, in war, and the destructive power of war provides clear evidence that social reality was not ready to make technology its own organ, and that technology was not strong enough to master the elemental forces of society. Without approaching the surface of the significance of the economic causes of war, one may say that the harshest, most disastrous aspects of imperialist war are in part the result of the gaping discrepancy between the gigantic power of technology and the minuscule moral illumination affords. Indeed, according to its economic nature, bourgeois society cannot help but insulate everything technological as much as possible from the so-called spiritual, and cannot help but resolutely exclude technology's right of co-determination in the social order. Any future war will also be a slave revolt of technology. Today factors such as these determine all questions of war and one would hardly expect to have to remind the authors of the present volume of this, nor to remind them that these are questions of imperialist war. After all, they were themselves soldiers in the World War and, dispute what one may, they indisputably proceed from the experience of this war. It is therefore quite astonishing to find, and on the first page at that, the statement that it is of secondary importance in which century, for which ideas, and with which weaspons the fighting is done. What is most astonishing about this statement is that its author, Ernst Jiinger, is thus adopting one of the principles of pacifism, and pacifism's cliched ideal of peace have little to criticize each other for. Even