Work in progress : Jünger, Nietzsche and the problem of work

Costea, Bogdan (2019) Work in progress : Jünger, Nietzsche and the problem of work. Rowman and Littlefield.

Abstract

This volume explores the influence of Nietzsche’s thought in the works of Ernst Jünger, focusing on the essay Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker: Dominion and Form) published in 1932 (translation forthcoming in 2016 with Northwestern University Press). Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) is well-known as one of the greatest memorialists of the First World War – in In Storms of Steel (1919) and Copse 125 (1925). Less well known is that these same texts also contain powerful insights not just into the nature of modern war, but also into the nature of work as the central and defining character of our times. This volume examines Jünger’s 1932 The Worker: Dominion and Form, in which he explores work as the very ground of the most important values of our time: individuality, society, freedom, power, danger, and technology. In Jünger’s work we encounter a Friedrich Nietzsche unknown from the post-war Nietzsche, one whose energy and vision make Jünger’s probing dissection of the Twentieth Century so prescient, because the question of work itself is the one which has never ceased to be the central political, cultural, economic and social problem for our own condition. Jünger shows how no aspect of contemporary existence can be separated from it.