I’ve never seen Wilson mention Junger, but the affinities, in their thought at least, are striking. Junger was a highly decorated German soldier in the First World War and served in Paris during the second. He was a scathing critic of both the Weimar Republic and Hitler, who he opposed, though only passively, from Nazism’s right flank among the mandarin military class. His essays and fiction made him a central figure in Germany’s “Conservative Revolution.” Where Nietzsche had developed “the myth of the superman as an aristocratic alternative to democratic leveling,” writes Stanford professor of comparative literature and Telos editor Russell Berman, “the conservative revolutionaries, and especially Junger, tried to identify a new heroism emerging precisely out of the technological world of the new mass society.”
“Junger represents a new kind of political romanticism, one that links technology to the primordial forces of the will,” writes historian Jeffrey Herf. Earlier German reactionaries sought to restore a pastoral order broken by industrialization, but Junger charged headlong in the opposite direction, into technological change. He reimagined the conservative opposition to liberal individualism through an apotheosis of man and machinery. Junger’s ecstatic embrace of technology as a political agent anticipated, by a half century, the recent vogue for singularity theory, transhumanism, and other tech-themed glosses of apocalypse and utopia.
Still, history — and especially modern German history — was not kind to Junger’s exuberant futurism. Before the Nazis, Junger celebrated mass society as the forge of a new heroic identity. In the decades after the war, as he also began taking a lot of acid and mescaline, he pondered how to preserve the individual against the threat of mass society. Culminating with the 1977 novel Eumeswil, Junger developed a new theory of heroic individualism embodied in the character of the “anarch.”
The world of Eumeswil, Berman writes in the novel’s introduction, is a “dystopia of the managed society. Not only do the dictator and his apparatus maintain a system of extensive surveillance, but the inhabitants themselves participate eagerly in their own oppression.” The result is the loss of the individual within a “depoliticized culture that nonetheless generates broad loyalty to the regime.”
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To escape the administrative-surveillance state, Junger devised the anarch. While “anarchists slide into ideology and a repetition of domination,” writes Berman, “in contrast, the anarch strategizes to maintain independence in the face of the challenges of the existing order.” The problem is distinguishing the real specimen from counterfeit versions. “It is especially difficult to tell the essential from that which is similar to and indeed seems identical with it. This also applies to the anarch’s relation to the anarchist,” wrote Junger.
Eumeswil’s titular anarch, Martin, defines his philosophical outlook by his need to “live in a world which I ultimately do not take seriously.” Here, by contrast, is what Cody Wilson says when a documentary camera is pointed at him: “Of course it’s O.K. to kill. That’s got to be high up on people’s lists. That’s gotta be one of the first options you do to solve a problem and everyone knows it. You must allow aggression and violence to be central to your philosophy or you’re not serious.”
Junger began with a wish to see individualism subsumed in a totalizing state geared perpetually toward war. But he ended his life trying to save the individual from authoritarian mass society, through the cultivation of a remote inner life. Somewhere between anarch and anarchist, Wilson oscillates between these unreconciled poles of Junger’s thought.
“Reactionary modernism” was Jeffrey Herf’s term for the proto-fascist milieu of Junger and his peers. The crypto-anarchist-alt-right alliance, by extension, is reactionary postmodernism. It combines skepticism towards progress with faith in technology, elitist contempt for the masses (a tic eloquently described by Baffler writer Angela Nagle), and related disdain for the corrupt elite. And it is, in a typically postmodern sense, suspicious of the relationship between narrative and reality. Binding this set of hostilities and doubts together at the level of political theory is the conviction that our reigning administrative and cultural powers form an interlocking regime that stifles all dissent even at the level of the imagination.
