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  • Ernst JüngerA Dialectician of Treason
  • Marcus Bullock (bio)

¡Socialismo o muerte!

—Fidel Castro’s wall slogan, 1991

Georges Braque, the French cubist painter, wrote in his journal: “As socialism becomes more complete, war will become more and more total” (Braque, Notebooks, 68). Although the record does not indicate an exact date when Braque wrote that comment, we do know that it could easily have coincided with a visit to his studio in Paris by Ernst Jünger during the Occupation, for which we do have an exact date: October 4, 1943. Certainly, Braque’s words sound like a rather precise reflection on Jünger’s notion of “totale Mobilmachung” or “total mobilization” as a new development characteristic of modernity. Where social organization marshals all of a country’s resources and energies within the disposal of the state, a regime acquires the capacity for the first time in history to invest the totality of national life in warfare.

Like Jünger, who sees the forms of power as the determinant of their own direction or expression, Braque’s formulation does not incorporate distinctions that might reflect differences in intention on the part of a socializing policy, or differences of circumstances that permit a different choice to guide the national will. His further comment in that context, where, dismissing the conventional faith in progressive policies, he notes: “Utopia is a myth whose consequences people foresee. The people are wrong” (68), also aligns him with the position at which Jünger had arrived after all his hopes for the collective realm in the 1920s and 1930s had foundered in disappointment. Nonetheless, the characterization of socialization in this historical function delivers a critical shock to the notion of socialism that we [End Page 52] would expect to find operating in Braque’s understanding of international relations since we know him to be in every general sense a man of the Left. Certainly, this statement should not be taken as his final and defining word on political power, nor indeed should we expect to find fully articulated insights about politics and history in his notes. Yet the way it shows up so unexpectedly in the midst of these pages from the world of a painter might give us an equally unexpected opening into the critical force exerted by the world of Jünger’s vision.

The difficulty of documenting the exact connection between Jünger’s visit and Braque’s response need not impede us in turning it to account in solving a major problem in assimilating the idea of that vision to the larger scale of European reflection on politics and history. It lies in the nature of Jünger’s project to articulate rather commonplace elements of modern phenomena, even though he appears to speak from an extreme position in the warrior’s heroic encounter with violence. Part of the solution offered here will involve an effort to show that there really is a problem in the first place, or to demonstrate the degree of misunderstanding that he provokes by drawing on a series of rhetorical strategies aimed at couching all his thought in an idiom of extremity. The problem, therefore, takes the form that his extreme rhetoric is treated as an unequivocal expression of identity with the persona that he creates in his literary medium. Neither side of the ideological division over Jünger’s ideas seems willing to separate his observations on the phenomena of modernity from his identity as a man of the Right. The ideas that he depicts through these images of enraptured response are not really treated as ideas at all, as themes to be experimented with and explored, but rather as exempla of a broad political orientation, as symptoms of a predetermined theoretical outlook. That preconception strongly underplays the literariness of Jünger’s work, the fictional quality by which he creates impressions that do not effect the mere propagation of a singular theory. It obscures the extent to which his writing generates citations from various established idioms of such propagation. The implicit location from which he reaches into those conventions of language preserves his value as a literary figure, or an effective authorial subject...

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