Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Georg Jünger – Dominion and Machine

Abstract

In this chapter are confronted the different visions of the machine in the work of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. By Ernst Jünger we analyzes: (a) the concept of total mobilization (Die Totale Mobilmachung). With this notion Jünger means that real process which, thanks to the development of technology, makes it feasible in practice to mobilize the totality of the power (Macht) available in the universe. For Jünger, power is not the accumulation of a substance waiting to be developed and completed, but the rapidity with which energy is converted; (b) the idea of perfection of technology, the ultimate expansion of total mobilization, the final settling of the technological dynamism in the spatial domain, will be complete when that immovable point of balance is achieved where the machine has completed its conversion into an organic form, i.e. when the human body, in the Typus of the Worker, will have definitively acquired the structure of the mechanism. By Friedrich Georg Jünger is the distinctive way in which the machine mobilizes the world can be elucidated more clearly by looking at the category of over-exploitation (Raubbau). Friedrich Georg uses this term in the sense that it acquired in the German language in the technical vocabulary of the timber industry: Raubbau precisely indicates the practice of cutting down trees without reintegrating the stock to make up for the plants being destroyed.