Der Arbeiterone of Jüng’s most famous works, was born in the context of the decline of the Weimar Republic, with the aim of analyzing the relationship between technique and freedom within a modernity at the same time seductive and disorienting. In this scenario, the worker, emancipated from his class of belonging, transforms himself – while social distinctions dissolve – into a universal figure.
Two schools of thought have alternated in the long dispute on the translation of the term Arbeiter as “worker” or “worker”. The choice of lexical surrender varied over time, influenced by the desired context and interpretation. Already in 1935, Delio Cantimori adopted the expression “soldier of work”, bringing it closer to the figure of the warrior. Andrea Anselmo, in the preface to the volume of Alain de Benoist, The worker between the gods and the titans: Ernst Jünger “seismographer” of the era of technology (who is now re -proposed by Polemos Editrice, with afterword by Alessandro Autiero), expands the perspective by introducing the concept of “architect”, considered more suitable for expressing the desire for alchemical transmutation inherent in this figure.
However, we jump at the foot that, at first glance, can appear as a quibble and we remain to the analysis of Alain de Benoist, also because Jünger not only deeply reworked his texts over the decades, but also manifested a certain indecision regarding some titles, having for example recalled several times that, In steel storms He should have named Red and graywith explicit reference to Stendhal: the red of the blood and the gray of the weapons. If the translation is important to fully understand every single term, it is therefore even more useful to refer directly to the songs of Jünger.
We start from established elements, such as the fact that Total mobilization go read as a sort of introduction to The worker. It is paradoxically the war experience that represents the turning point on the theoretical level: it is in that context that “the uniform and the typical replace the only and individual”. This will happen thanks to a type of man who embodies impersonality and who, with his anonymous and functional style to mobilization, has already emerged in the trenches of the First World War. In Boschetto 125the description of the commander of the assault troops anticipates all the distinctive features: «The men who march their men’s head, those who handle the assault wagons, the plane, the submarine, are all of the surprising technicians : And it is from them that the modern state is represented in battle ».
A mobilization that is total, because it involves every aspect, so as to use the term Interregnum To define a phase in which new forces are preparing, different from those of the past. These forces will not follow the ancient systems, the institutions or parties, but will open the doors to the era of the Titans. The feeling that derives from it is to be immersed in Nicciana temporality, in which the old values have not yet completely disappeared and the new ones are only at the beginning, but also in a process that, in some respects, recalls the visions of Evola e Guénon on Kali Yuga. The interregnum opens to the new, but keeps a link with what it has been. At this stage, Jünger does not consider technique an instrument of evil, but rather the element capable of facilitating the overcoming of individuality and, consequently, the forms, intended for annihilation to leave room for the new ones, in order to release the dawn of a new cycle.
De Benoist underlines the evident affinity between the concept of Gestaltclosely linked to the vital and cosmic dimension, and the Urpflanze of Goethe, the original plant evoked by Jüngger himself in a letter to Henri Plard in 1978: “The concept of figure appears more to the monad of Leibniz than to the Platonic idea, more to the original plant of Goethe than to Hegel’s synthesis”. Therefore, to read the Jüngerian codes, we are at the dawn of something unpublished. The time of the individual has set; The transition is not perceived only as a novelty, but as a positive phenomenon. The individual’s individual is mainly the bourgeois one, whose rapid extinction opens the possibility of a recomposition and a transvaluation to a higher level, since Jünger believes that the man expresses the utmost energy when he puts himself at the service of a command. In a perspective of this type, the question of freedom also finds its fulfillment in total adhesion to the kingdom of work. In the new era, the willingness of freedom will coincide with the will of work, and freedom will no longer be determined by the census, birth or financial resources, but by the degree of intensity and participation in the figure of the worker. The more this adhesion is intensified, the more new men will emerge capable of transfiguring existing forms, because work becomes the means through which the form bends the world to itself.
However, this is not a stale reproduction of Nietzsche’s super man, who, according to him, compared to the worker now appears “paleontological”, as he wrote in a letter to Walter Patt in August 1980, because it is a figure Titanic, the first of the Titans to manifest itself in our time. It is the only one to have an authentic relationship with the “total character of work”.
Jünger claims that the technique is the tool through which the worker affirms himself in the world, dominating it thanks to the total deployment of work and collective mobilization. So that the single can give way to the typical, to the uniform, embodied by the worker as the bearer of new structures.
Each manifestation of the contemporary world aimed at the structuring of reality, every use of energy, imposes itself on every social sphere and, for this reason, cannot be traced back to a specific class: «The time of punch, thought and heart, The life that flows day and night, science, love, art, faith, worship, war, everything is work; And the vibration of atoms is also work, and the strength that moves the stars and solar systems ». The will to power is manifested through work, and this hegemony (Herrschaft) is “today possible only as a representation of the figure of the worker”.
We are in the midst of “heroic realism”, a phase in which man reaches such a level of impersonality that it is no longer enslaved to technique, Marxism, bourgeois world or old religions. In this perspective, and in the face of the planetary ascent of the figure, the first signs of an abandonment of any nationalistic vision begin to emerge. The man frees himself from the last residues of the past, including nationalism, despite the fact that some unwary have wanted to interpret the adoption of the term Arbeiter as an implicit bond, also by assonance, with the initials of the Nazi party (Nationalsotialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). National Socialism is in fact called “museological thought”, characterized by a “plebeian style” and, above all, very far from its perception of the world, especially for its racial characterization, as already anticipated in 1926: «The word race begins to become the same, I think, in the current use, as the word tradition».
Jünger intends to reiterate the concept according to which the technique represents the carrier of the mobilization of the worker and is the only force capable of giving him the dominion over the world. The worker manages to control the technique through the full implementation of the work and a collective movement of mobilization. In this way, the individual and the original are supplanted by the typical and homogeneous, and the unrepeatable leaves room for the worker “which occupies the proscenium as type and bearer of typical structures ». Even Niekisch himself will recognize that this is the point where Jünger pushes himself to conceive a possible collective revolution, before taking, only a few years later, a more intimate and personal path.
This transformation develops through an intermediate phase divided into three levels: at the base, the mass, understood as a passive human potential; In the center, the “active type”, or the individual who tries to emerge from the shapeless chaos; At the top, the type that fully embodies the absolute essence of the work. A subdivision that, always Niekisch, interprets as a reformulation of the classic Prussian tripartition. However, if for Niekisch collectivization – as implemented in Russia – represents the means to govern the technique, the key to a new process does not see in this unpublished and bizarre individualism, while recognizing, to Jügerian reflections, surprising affinities with Marxism. Jünger had been part, for a limited period, of the Company for the study of the Piano Economy in Russia And he had analyzed the five -year development plans, but, considering the historical progress independent of the economic factors, he could not welcome the Marxist principles since the source. Instead, it captures the metaphysical dimension of work, going beyond the simple sociological configuration. In reality, behind this interest in the events of Soviet communism, there is an even simpler truth: it was the years in which the high Nazi hierarchies exercised strong pressures so that it took an active part in their policy, and that was almost a provocation.
At this point, we can also close the circle with the long dispute on the surrender of the term Arbeiter Since De Benoist notes that, with the total mobilization, the figures of the worker and the soldier have merged into a single entity, despite the term “soldier” should not be understood in a generic sense, since Jünger refers to a precise type , that of the warrior. In Eumeswilmany decades later, he will distinguish the warrior, moved by intuition and courage and near the Anca, by the soldier, who follows the chain of command and remains linked to the institutional structure.
To conclude: this is the phase in which Jünger looks to the technique in an almost positive key, in clear contrast with his brother Friedrich. When he returns to the subject in Maxima –minima – work that precedes analytically precedes The worker – he will show a position already closer to Friedrich, finally reaching a metapolitical model that will then culminate in the Essay on pain.