Elemental Powers

Examining the conflicted legacy of Ernst Juenger's thought and its relationship to critical theory

In the 1920s, Ernst Juenger's journalistic advocacy of a militaristic, antidemocratic nationalism played a central role in the rise of German fascism. At the same time, Juenger developed an increasingly acute account of how the mobilizing force of industrial technology embodied a will to power that, on the one hand, anticipated an authoritarian state but, on the other, assumed a planetary perspective that made national identifications redundant. What he called the Gestalt of the worker expresses the "elemental powers" that, he believed, mark the limits of Enlightenment conceptions of historical progress.

Today, Juenger appears in intellectual history primarily as a representative of protofascist decisionism, reactionary modernism, or the so-called conservative revolution. Andrew McCann puts these aspects of Juenger's early work into dialogue with the posthistorical orientation that he developed after the Second World War, in order to offer a fresh reading that demonstrates how Juenger's obsession with the transience of cultural and historical forms displays deep structural affinities with the idea of natural history developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. By tracing this thread in intellectual history, McCann charts the currents of influence and confluence between what are usually understood as sharply polarized political positions and the conceptual postures that accompany them: immanence and transcendence, reason and myth, class and nation, relations of production and the forces of nature.