/lit/ - Literature

>>16379109
>On Pain, is somewhat outdated.
Why do you think it's outdated?
It's certainly an interesting idea of nihilism, and a more useful interpretation of Nietzsche. From within it one can sense the nihilism of much of the current right-wing, of its nietzschean elements as forged characters of the world process. Their inability to understand our current situation, or simply their disappearance from it, suggests that they are heralds of the continuation of the catastrophe, or at least an enduring sign that nothing can be resolved from within levels of the mundane.

It's ironic that Junger resolves much of the Nietzschean question through Stoicism and Christianity. But of course the Christian response to eternal return has always been there, the apocalyptic vision is the great test of the Christian and it is a wonderful testament that the Catholic conservatives fell to pessimism just as Nietzsche fell to a Protestant irony. The Katechon doctrine is equally the destruction of Europe and the fateful beginning of the problem of technology; the Protestant ethic is the proper relation of joy before the catastrophe, a reinvigorated apocalyptic vision in keeping with the spirit of the era. Salvation from within the forest, transfiguration of the religion of religions.

From this perspective, the vulcanist interpretation may have been a misstep. This was the Roman conception, and while it was a part of the German industrial vision - the martial form, the last hold of the spirit of bronze - this may only occur as another mythology. To historicise it is for it to be nothing more than a reaction of the greater humanist myth. To unearth the martial world is only to encase it within the process of instrumentation; the white stone set against the sewage character of surfaced bronze indicates the fateful advantage humanism had over its subject states. The form of the grossraum and its mirrors, the greater earth forces within white marble are undeniable. And rather than titanism this relation to the earth may be understood in the sense of a false sacrifice, no longer set against Zeus but the Titans. Gypsum is everywhere today, a substratum of the technological defense network.

Uranianism is perhaps the closest Junger came to finalising the question of technology, in it the question is one with nihilism and the spirit of the era. Any distinction between vulcanism and neptunism disappears, even questions of Asclepius are contained therein. "The end of the world in great order and beauty." To tie mythology to the question of being is the greatest heresy, the greatest form of nihilism. And in this understanding of the form of technology I think Junger also returns the question to that asked by Schmitt. It is itself a force of the formless, the very territory of the neutralisation process, a crystallisation of Nothing. This is the great question of our era, why does the Nothing achieve its form?