The Worker: Dominion and Form
| Author | Ernst Jünger |
|---|---|
| Original title | Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt |
| Translator |
|
| Language | German |
| Publisher | Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt |
Publication date | 1932 |
| Publication place | Germany |
Published in English | 2017 |
| Pages | 300 |
The Worker: Dominion and Form (German: Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt) is a 1932 book by the German writer Ernst Jünger.
Summary
[edit]Influenced by the experience of World War I and the fragility of the Weimar Republic, Jünger sought to formulate a sustainable model for modern life through something he called the "worker". A central argument in the book is that what may appear as nihilism may instead be understood as failures to recognise shifts in the dominating metaphysics of a society, and the worker is presented as someone who keeps up with the shift away from bourgeois values. The arguments of the book are related to concepts Jünger had developed in his 1930 essay "Total Mobilisation".[1][2]
Reception
[edit]Scholars and critics have discussed what the book means with its terms "worker" and "Gestalt", and how its content relates to the Enlightenment, bourgeois society, history and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.[1] The book had significant influence on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology.[3][4]
Jünger published a comment on The Worker in 1964 titled Maxima–Minima. In this and other later works, such as An der Zeitmauer (1959) and Der Weltstaat (1960), he developed his views of technology and the worker. He argued that war is what drives technology and science, and that the logic of war, which is the basis for the logic of the worker, cannot be tamed by rules and laws, and the worker is by extension in conflict with both the nation state and the individual.[5]
References
[edit]- ^ a b Fitch, Richard (15 December 2017). "Vincent Blok: Ernst Jünger's Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene". Phenomenological Reviews. 3. ISSN 2297-7627. Retrieved 21 April 2024.
- ^ Casewell, Deborah (2020). "The worker: dominion and form: by Ernst Jünger, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Translated by Bogdan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming, Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 2017, 232 pp., $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8101-3617-5". Political Theology. 21 (8): 738–739. doi:10.1080/1462317X.2020.1748791.
- ^ Blok, Vincent (2011). "An indication of Being – Reflections on Heidegger's Engagement with Ernst Jünger". Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. 42 (2): 194–208. doi:10.1080/00071773.2011.11006739.
- ^ Quinn, Timothy (2021). "Ernst Jünger's The Worker: Dominion and Form". Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual. 11: 290–297. doi:10.5840/gatherings20211116.
- ^ "Representation and the unrepresentable". The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt: Law, Politics, Theology. Routledge. 2016. pp. 125–126. ISBN 978-1-138-82293-1.