Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Ernst Jünger's Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene (NDPR Review)


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Ernst Jünger's Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene
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2017.10.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Vincent Blok, Ernst Jünger's Philosophy of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene, Routledge, 2017, 153pp., $140.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781138737594.
Reviewed by Robert P. Crease, Stony Brook University

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was a writer, novelist, author, and philosopher whose significant influence on 20th century thought was twofold. The first is via his notion of "total mobilization," a description of the technological age as characterized by a wholesale transformation of human life into exploitable energies and resources. The second is via his impact on the thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the greatest of 20th century philosophers. This influence is manifested particularly in Heidegger's notion, in The Question Concerning Technology, of the Gestell or "Enframing," a mode of existence in which beings of all sorts, including human beings, appear as means towards ends. Blok's book is a narrow exposition of both of these aspects of Jünger's thought.


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