iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

It was not Steve Jobs and Apple who invented the iPhone4 - they only gave birth to what Ernst Jünger had intellectually conceived in 1949 in the novel Heliopolis and continued into Eumeswil (1977). By a nice coincidence, Ernst Jünger's "universal communicator" has essentially the same name - the phonophore.

iPhone4 or iPhonophore?

Below is a rough translation of the most relevant passage from Heliopolis - only a brief commentary is useful, so obvious are the parallels. (See also my previous blog on the Phonophore.)

(Originaltext auf Deutsch ist unten ...)

Praise for the new English translation of Jünger's Der Waldgang

The Forest Passage is available from Telos (and other major booksellers) as of today. Some comments from the Telos site on the book:

Ernst Jünger's The Forest Passage explores the possibility of resistance: how the independent thinker can withstand and oppose the power of the omnipresent state. No matter how extensive the technologies of surveillance become, the forest can shelter the rebel, and the rebel can strike back against tyranny. Jünger's manifesto is a defense of freedom against the pressure to conform to political manipulation and artificial consensus. A response to the European experience under Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, The Forest Passage has lessons equally relevant for today, wherever an imposed uniformity threatens to stifle liberty.

Praise for The Forest Passage

"In a strikingly poetic political statement written soon after the Second World War, Ernst Jünger rejects the two reigning ideologies, democracy and communism, in favor of an individualistic stance anticipating what we now call libertarianism. The ideal that Jünger projects for us is a metaphorical 'passage through the forest' in which we remain constantly put to the test, with the result that we emerge self-sufficient, rebellious, heroic."
—Herbert Lindenberger, Stanford University