The Essential Anarch - quotes on the anarch from Eumeswil

As an aid to anyone aspiring to live as an anarch in the sense developed in Ernst Jünger's novel, Eumeswil, through the character of its protagonist, Manuel, I have compiled a complete collection of all quotations from the book that elaborate on this critical Jüngerian theme. 

However impossible such a choice may seem given all the unique ideas Jünger has given us, I do find the concept of the anarch the single most important contribution he has provided the world. Personally, It helps me understand and maintain my distance from the affairs of our world and thus, where they affect me, manage them better in my own interests. I firmly believe that only individuals have any chance of eluding the powerful forces of control in our world and realizing their destiny despite the efforts of these powers.

The quotations are given with hopefully enough surrounding text to provide context, but without comment so that each reader may - must - come to their own personal understanding. Precisely the ability to differentiate one's own personal, yet objective understanding of reality is a fundamental task of an anarch. 

The quotations are listed in order of appearance in the book, and descriptive titles are provided along with a selection of keywords. The quote titles are compiled into a table of contents and the key words into an index. For anyone new to the book, a short list of key characters and terms should provide enough context to understand each quote on its own.

Naturally these titles and key words are subjective and non-exhaustive, but they should make the document more navigable. Seriously-minded anarchs will in any case have their own copy of  Eumeswil on hand for reference, in which case this document can serve as a handy reference tool. 

The pdf below may be viewed as embedded here, but it is best downloaded and viewed since the convenient links in the table of contents will then function. 

An epub version is also available for download here.

Between Order and Disorder: Ernst Jünger on the Marble Cliffs - by Francisco Carmo Garcia

(From VoegelinView, 16 Feb 2021)

There are several examples that help us grasping that particular zeitgeist lived in the first half of the 20th century. A book such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain gives us a description of the moral and spiritual decomposition of the then bourgeois society. At this time, in the bashed and defeated post-war Germany, nihilism had turned to be a dominant moral disposition. Oswald Spengler announced the decline of the West amidst the hubris of the Great War; Nietzsche’s will to power was convincing posthumously a younger generation of German intellectuals; and Heidegger was caught exasperating at the end of philosophy. This aura of decadence marked the period, and to that faith in the inevitable progress of humanity so specific and characteristic of the 19^th century there followed an intellectual and existential despair. Ever since the moment when the idea of progress was contested by the destruction caused by the war, that a sense of moral disorientation had necessarily to follow.

It is this crisis of the idea of progress that we can feel all over Ernst Jünger’s oeuvre, from his famous diaries of his experience in the Great War (In Stahlgewittern), to his “prophetic” work Der Arbeiter and his late novels. But one book of his in particular allows us to penetrate in the nihilistic zeitgeist of the inter-war period: his Auf den Marmorklippen, published at the zenith of Hitler’s power, in 1939. This little book – On the Marble Cliffs, in English –, forgotten in the same way which its author is neglected by the intelligentsia, tells us more about our own times – which are also times of crisis – than several of the “scientific” works that are widespread today, and which denounce a supposedly evident return of fascism. In this jüngerian tale, the despotic figure of the tyrant appears in its most violent essence, as the result of a cosmological disorder that hits society in all of its foundations. On the Marble Cliffs is a book that needs to be remembered, the meaning of which seems today almost as intelligible – and appropriate – as when it was first published.

Review of Jünger's WWII diaries in English translation - by Michael Lewis

A Dandy Goes to War

Review of 'A German Officer in Occupied Paris' By Ernst Jünger

• SEP, 2019 
 
• BY MICHAEL LEWIS

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

One might ask why it has taken 70 years for Jünger’s diary to appear in English translation, for there is no more detailed account of the occupation from the German point of view. But Jünger was always controversial, up to his death in 1998 at the age of 102. In Germany, polite opinion has never forgiven him for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I that saw in the experience of combat an ultimate test of manhood. “The finest, most visceral account of battle since the Iliad,” according to the New Statesman, his book made him a hero among German nationalists and ensured his privileged status in Nazi Germany. As it happens, Jünger was anything but a Nazi.

Cultura e Censura nell'Età della Tecnica - Ciclo Conferenze Associazione Eumeswil 2016

Ecco gli incontri dell'anno 2016 dell'Associazione Eumeswil (English translation below):

CULTURA E CENSURA NELL' ETA' DELLA TECNICA

Dal punto di vista della filosofia del diritto, la censura è quella attività repressiva esercitata dallo Stato mediante preventivo controllo per impedire il diffondersi di notizie o di opere letterarie che potrebbero risultare lesive del buon costume oppure dell' ordine pubblico. In un' epoca in cui si assiste alla scomparsa del buon costume e alla parodia sempre più marcata dell' ordine pubblico, si potrebbe credere che la censura non abbia più motivo di esistere. Invece nel corso del ventesimo secolo la sua forza si è enormemente accresciuta. Se prima si sopprimevano alcune righe di un testo, ora si sopprime un intero libro e talvolta il suo stesso autore.

Il ciclo di incontri promosso dall' Associazione Eumeswil si propone di indagare quali sono i motivi e le modalità di questo fenomeno apparentemente contradditorio, il cui risultato è l' impoverimento della cultura e l' affermazione del blablà o "pensiero unico" per mezzo della tecnica. Download programma

Con la speranza di averVi fatto cosa gradita, inviamo cordiali saluti,
Segreteria, Associazione Eumeswil

Conference series 2016 of the Association Eumeswil in Florence:

CULTURE AND CENSURE IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Sat 19 March 

The case of Guido Morselli and the responsibility of publishers

Speakers: Valentina Fortichiari and Mario Baudino

The Forest Passage - old freedom in new clothes

Another short excerpt from the forthcoming publication of "The Forest Passage" by Ernst Jünger, naturally with the permission of the publisher Telos Press. It will be available from Telos sometime in December - stay tuned!

(... from Chapter 31)

"As we see, predicaments arise which demand an immediate moral decision, and this is most true where the vortex is deepest and most turbulent. 

This has not been, and will not always be the case. Generally speaking, the institutions and the rules associated with them provide navigable terrain; what is legal and moral lies in the wind. Naturally, abuses occur, but there are also courts and police. 

This changes when morality is substituted by a subspecies of technology, that is, by propaganda, and the institutions are transformed into weapons of civil war. The decision then falls to the individual, as an either-or, since a third position, neutrality, is excluded. From this point forward, a particular form of infamy lies in non-participation, but also in making judgments from a non-participating position. 

The ruling powers, in their changing incarnations, also confront the individual with an either-or. This is the curtain of time, which rises perpetually on the same, ever-recurring spectacle. The figures appearing on the curtain are not the most important point - the either-or facing the individual has a quite different aspect. He is led to the point where a choice must be made between his directly bestowed human nature and the nature of a criminal.

How will the individual stand up to this interrogation? Our future hangs in the balance on just this point. Perhaps it will be decided just where the darkness appears blackest. Alongside the autonomous moral decision, crime forms the other option for preserving sovereignty in the midst of the loss, in the midst of the nihilistic undermining of being. The French existentialists recognized this much correctly. Crime has nothing to do with nihilism; on the contrary, it offers a refuge from nihilism’s destructive erosion of self-awareness, a way out of the wastelands to which it leads. Chamfort already said: “L'homme, dans l'état actuel de la société, me paraît plus corrompu par sa raison que par ses passions.” *

Ernst Jünger - Goethe Preis Rede

Und hier den Radio Vatikan Artikel dazu.

Francois Mitterand to Ernst Jünger on his 100th birthday - 1995

"Here is a man who is free. 

Embroiled to the point of risking his life in the turmoil of the century, he held himself apart from his passions. Nothing can appropriate his name, nor his gaze, except perhaps that butterfly in Pakistan now called "Trachydura Jüngeri", which is his pride. Because this rebel chases glow-worms, this soldier writes novels. A philosopher, he possesses an appetite for living, which time has not wearied. Few life works are more diverse, few minds more restless. As inheritor of Goethe, of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, but also of Stendhal, Jünger's thought unites the riches of the Enlightenment with those of Romanticism, the rigour of the one with the generosity of the other.

His thought challenges fashions and attracts disputes. Lovers of systems hanker in vain to find them in it. Truth is to be sought in it like an equilibrium amid contrary forces. Between engagement and resistance, respect for the real and rejection of the predestined, Jünger charts the space of human freedom and its authentic struggles. Because its origins lie in its enthusiasm for life, it contemplates and faces contradictions: between mind and matter, nature and history, reason and dream.

Der kosmische Ernst Jünger

Hier ein Text über "Auf der Marmorklippen" - ich finde ihn sehr lesenswert, auch für seine Betrachtungen über unsere eigenen Lage. Und ich bedanke mich für den Hinweis bei dem Verfasser, Philippe Guichard....

Der kosmische Ernst Jünger.

  

In "Auf den Marmorklippen" erinnert die Prosa von Ernst Jünger an die "Illuminationen" des Arthur Rimbaud. Es sind Sätze eines "Sehers", die eine wohl geordnete Traumlandschaft schöpfen. Das Buch stammt aus dem Jahr 1939. Die Tagebücher zwischen 1941 bis 1945 veröffentlichte Jünger unter dem Titel "Strahlungen", ein technisches Wort, das sein kosmisches Wesen aufs Schärfste trifft. 

"Auf den Marmorklippen" beschreibt eine Idylle, die Zeiten an der "großen Marina", einer Weingegend, in der die Seele im Herbst die Frucht der Körperarbeit erntet: "wenn in den kleinen Städten und Dörfern die Torkel zu knarren begannen und der Geruch der frischen Trester um die Höfe seine gärenden Schleier zog, stiegen wir zu den Wirten, den Küfern und Weinbauern hinab und tranken mit ihnen aus dem bauchigen Krug." Im Frühling findet sich die Harmonie auf dem Marktplatz im Fackelschein beim Maskenaufzug wieder: "die Männer gingen als Vögel und die Frauen waren in Prachtgewänder vergangener Jahrhunderte vermummt. Sie riefen uns mit hoher, verstellter Spieluhrstimme Scherzworte zu, und wir erwiderten mit schrillem Vogelschrei."   

Ernst-Jünger-Haus: die Wiedereröffnung (aus der F.A.Z)

Juenger-Haus.de

Auf der Titelseite:

Stehende Zeit - In Wilflingen endete jetzt eine Art Ernst- Jünger-Moratorium: Die Sachen des Schriftstellers sind in das Haus zurückgekehrt, das er 47 Jahre lang bewohnte. Und in dem er, 1993 war es, seinen Gästen Kohl und Mitterrand das "titanische Zeitalter" vorhersagte: "Die Technik wird sich nicht kontrollieren lassen. Es wird ziemlich ungemütlich werden." Doch die Politik lässt sich nichts vormachen: Hier werden Atome außer Kraft gesetzt, dort ruhen die Bagger. Von Fukushima über Berlin bis Stuttgart und Wilflingen reichen daher die Seiten 2, 4, 7, 10, 13 und 29.  

 

Text: F.A.Z., 30.03.2011, Nr. 75 / Seite 1

Hier saßen Helmut Kohl und François Mitterand: Ernst Jüngers Wohnzimmer. dpa

Und im Feuilleton: 

Wohnhaus letzter Hand

Dieses Domizil ist mehr als eine Gedenkstätte: Es ist ein Gesamtkunstwerk. Im neu eröffneten Ernst-Jünger-Haus wird die literarische Bedeutung des Autors erst wirklich begreiflich.

The anarch on May Day

Today, May Day 2008, we came across a relevant passage in Eumeswil, which happily also deals with the anarch/anarchist contrast we need to clarify at this early stage in our blog. Martin Venator, Jünger´s model anarch in this book, is discussing political changes in a prelude to the following quotation, in particular the overthrows of governments that happen periodically in the state of Eumeswil, indeed in any society.

“For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree.

For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.” Eumeswil, Page 114

COMMENTARY
As Jünger makes clear here, seasonal political changes have no essential meaning for the anarch, other than their practical implications for his survival. Regimes change like the seasons, flags are like leaves on a tree, with practical meaning but no higher sense in and of themselves. New leaves grow on the ancient tree of civilization and at the end of their natural season their life blood is cut off, they dry up, fall, and become no more than compost for the new leaves of the next season. In this earthly progression, there is no human progress, no net spiritual gain, only external cycling in time. This can be observed by the historian in his objective studies of the past and by the anarch in his neutral observation of the changes of his present world. As the historian does not identify with particular moments in the continuous flux of history, so the anarch does not identify with (or against) the personally-random political situation he finds himself in at any one moment.

But seasonal change is real, with causes that lie deeper than any social expression of it. May Day, once a pagan feast day dedicated to the Great Mother, is usurped by the state, which subverts the natural revitalizing energy of the spring season for its own propaganda purposes. The holy-day has been profaned, and now each new regime merely provides new faces, new ideals, for its self-celebratory feast. As Jünger says, a pair of lovers in the forest celebrates seasonal renewal far more profoundly than any great processions. Moreover, in the forest, every individual tree still stands as a freedom tree.

In the midst of the seasonal change of the flags, the anarch is essentially unaffected. While the flag was blue, he wore a blue uniform, partly to blend in and maintain anonymity, partly as the costume his role in the world comedy required. The uniform was in any case unessential, he never identified with it, never confused it with his own skin. He can thus throw it off and assume a different colored one, one that will best aid, or camouflage, his personal cause in the social reality .

Underneath the unessential covering lies his essential spiritual freedom, which, in the moment between the fall of the old system and the implementation of the new one, between his ditching the old and putting on the new uniform, he can bring into the objective world and live out. In the anarchic interim, the anarch can momentarily express what was already his objective inner state. His inner freedom can manifest in the world for a time. On the other hand, when anarchy becomes the order of the day, the anarchist is no freer than he was before. For he is unfree in himself, he has no free self-identity and thus needs the uniform he defines only in negative relation to the normal one imposed by the hated state. During anarchy, he loses his defining cause, the hated state, the hateful external rules and restraints, and in this vacuum he loses all control. This quickly leads to his confinement or elimination by the new powers.

Personal happiness and the anarch

"It is no coincidence that precisely when things started going downhill with the gods, politics gained its bliss-making character. There would be no reason for objecting to this, since the gods, too were not exactly fair. But at least people saw temples instead of termite architecture. Bliss is drawing closer; it is no longer in the afterlife, it will come, though not momentarily, sooner or later in the here and now - in time.

The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. "Make thyself happy" is his basic law. It is his response to the "Know thyself" at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.” Eumeswil, page 192.

COMMENTARY

In this quote, Jünger discusses one of the anarch’s basic goals in life, personal happiness. He begins with an observation that illustrates where most people, in contrast to the anarch, look for happiness. When religions still breathed real life, when gods still had credible forms, man looked for his final happiness through their means and methods. As belief in the gods declined, so man began to look for happiness in the mundane world, through the non-transcendent means of politics. Politics, with the aid of technological progress, began promising personal happiness in the material here and now. In a similar manner to his ineradicable illusion that social progress is about to outlaw war forever, so is man reassured and continues to believe, despite ever-repeating disappointment, that his personal happiness is also around, if not this, then the next corner. Politics thus capitalises on one of man’s chronic ailments, the all-pervasive disease of “tomorrow”.

But on this point, we should not conclude that the anarch is necessarily on the side of the gods, for as Jünger says, they, or at least their cultic representatives in religions, also promised man happiness in the hereafter, while treating him unfairly in the present. The anarch is not automatically on anyone’s side, but decides for himself when and to whom he gives his allegiance. “No god above me”, as Manuel states elsewhere in Eumeswil. (Touching on the anarch’s relationship to art, Jünger comments that at least the gods brought more attractive forms along with them, art instead of machines, temples instead of termite mounds.)

The anarch, in contrast, keeps thing simple – he looks to no external providers or guarantors of happiness but makes himself responsible for it. He is thus untouched by the promises and failures of religions and regimes; he neither hopes in nor is disappointed by what worldly powers or gods offer him. “Make thyself happy” - and to the degree that he also knows himself, understands his own measure, he knows how to make that happen.

Again, the self-reliance of the anarch is emphasised. He does not look outside himself - to religions, regimes, or insurance companies - for his happiness and security, but finds them within and creates them for himself without.