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Actaeon Press Profile picture
Actaeon Press
@SchattigeDer
Literature, with a focus on Jünger. https://t.co/spbrcTzHkM Check out our books: https://t.co/WgpwzWbLzw https://t.co/nYb12Z1Tro
Feb 27 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is entirely wrong. You can't understand Schmitt by studying the philosophy of friendship from other thinkers, particularly the mechanisms and social aspects of friendship. What Schmitt means by friends-enemies is an intensifier following the end of natural law and Europe's Image
Image facing the end of Public Law. Friends and enemies are the groupings which form out of real political decision and shifting historical conditions.
It is easier if we think of the designation set out by Cortes,
Mar 31, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
A lot of false claims are made about the English translations of Storm of Steel. There are various reasons behind this, but the first thing to remember is that the original English edition is not the original in German.
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Image The 1929 English edition is based on, I believe, the 1924 German edition which was itself heavily edited. More nationalist sentiments were added due to the conflicts at the time. The English edition released by Penguin is based on the last complete version released in German.
Feb 24, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
FG Jünger says of World War I that it was not the heaps of dead men that were horrifying, but the mechanical transformation of entire landscapes, the total ruination which nevertheless solidified man's place in the material battle.

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Image Western man was not traumatized by the mutual annihilation, he saw very well in his own cities just what these young men were being sent into. It was the destruction of the European spatial order since the Medieval period that met its end on the field of battle.
Feb 17, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
There are several versions of the Concept of the Political, the 1933 version begins, "The authentic political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy."
The 1932/1963 version begins differently, "The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political."
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Image Already we have a contradictory image, which is to be expected given that Schmitt was attempting to reveal a "res dura", a difficult nature. He will tell us that the friend-enemy distinction introduces too many difficulties to serve as the beginning of a concept.
Dec 18, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
"Compared to the wealth of Achilles, Odysseus is a sack full of change that takes a long time to count, but you are through with the gold much quicker."
~ Hölderlin

What would it mean to look towards the Greek ideal and see only character traits, a type? It would mean psychology over mythology, taxonomy over poetry, value-theory over the noble lies of the Muses. We would lose sight of Homer's style and the subtle appearance of law in each character, their contests and the divine judgement which forms along with simple objects.
Nov 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Why Americans Devote Themselves more to the Practical Applications of Science than to the Theory"

Despite Alexis de Tocqueville being a historian rather than Counter-Enlightenment figure this is an excellent chapter to study because of the clarity and counter-intuitive ideas. From the very beginning equality and science are presented in an unfamiliar way:

"Equality fosters in each individual the desire to judge everything for himself. It inspires in him a taste for the tangible and the real in all things as well as contempt for traditions and forms."
Nov 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Tocqueville on technology during the Chinese decline:

"They continued to use formulas without seeking to fathom their meaning. They held on to instruments though they had lost the art of modifying or reproducing them. Hence the Chinese could not change anything." "They had to give up making improvements. They were forced always to imitate their forebears in every respect lest the slightest deviation from the path laid out for them in advance plunge them into impenetrable darkness."
Oct 6, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The problems with the tenets of NETTR are rather simple:
1. Defeat of the Left does not give power to the Right, at most it would reintroduce the question of democratic sovereignty. True political power rests in the world state, which has subsumed Left and Right to its conflicts. 2. The definition of the Left as "those who hold leftist ideology" says nothing, it is a tautology. The existential force of politics is not even touched upon here.
Sep 17, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"If everything went wrong, conservative forces are to blame."
~ Ernst Jünger

I have been researching Jünger's thoughts on conservatism and Germany's defeat. "Nationalism and National Socialism" is a good starting point here, although the conflict begins with the Peasants' War. Image It is essential that Germany exists in an intermediary state, between revolution and counter-revolution. The state is indecisive throughout its history, and the Left never has any real ground, although one may say the same of the Right.
Jul 28, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
BAP is correct regarding the fear of crime, it is essentially a conservative fear of losing the economic norm, although I think economy and crime now march in step.
The Western public is so weak-willed that it can see little more than the management of a passive economy. This cannot be separated from the War on Crime of the past decades, largely a response to the economic dangers posed by rampant criminality, particularly in New York (note that Conservatives introduced these laws, as they did the anti-terror laws).
Jul 26, 2023 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
I have described Jünger's relation to Nietzsche like that of Nestor to Achilles. He did not attempt to one up Nietzsche, which would be a fool's errand – in the end great men are tested by time. Jünger's method, and my own, is something other than critical philosophy. This goes back to the Counter-Enlightenment, what is called metacriticism. In short, one re-mythologizes ideas rather than allowing them to take on autonomy. We see today how much of Nietzsche's thought has become autonomous, it has nothing to do with his intended philosophy.
Jun 24, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Jünger describes modern architecture as a great furnace, and also military encampments – they crop up overnight and are torn down as if magically. The World Wars increased this style, buildings have to be as defensible as bunkers, and the materials easily transported, maximized. Efficiency is essential, the total mobilisation of soldiers and non-soldiers requires absolute destructive power, but also logistics in which everything is replaceable. The soldier kills with dynamite and subsists on margarine.
May 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Anti-Germanism, I think, develops as part of the anti-war character of democracy.
Bloy gives an early lesson from the Franco-Prussian tensions. When d'Aurevilly was solicited by a prostitute he politely refused, but was then met with cries of "Prussian spy!" This was "more fearsome than machinegun fire." He was nearly killed by a mob.
It is interesting that for Schmitt the Franco-Prussian war was one of the last wars before the collapse of European public law. After this, international law tends towards a discriminating character.
May 16, 2023 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
"Body-building, as effected by specialized sports, does not achieve beauty, because it lacks proportion, something a body devoted to special training no more can have than a mind narrowed down to highly specialized interests."

Jünger thread on sport and nihilism 🧵 Image Many are surprised that Jünger was so critical of sport, and to such an extent that he saw in it one of the great images of nihilism. Why did he see sport in this manner when today it is so often regarded as the height of manliness and a solution to nihilism? Image
Apr 2, 2023 • 26 tweets • 8 min read
It is a crude way of seeing the world, grounded entirely within modern thought. As mentioned before, the pagans would not have missed the divine signs of Christianity, and would not have seen anything like slave morality.
The mythologically weakened body is a sign of total law. Plebs in the Colosseum would have a more refined view than "winners and losers". The completely unrefined perspectives on the world have no value. They are products of automatic forces and reason.

Apr 2, 2023 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
'We act, we create realities, and people are left to study what we do. By then we are already creating new realities.'
This was the logic of the Bush administration, creation of realities through superior power and action. We all know the result of this vision and initiative. "Values and value theories are not capable of founding any legitimacy; they can only ever valuize."
~ Schmitt

Pure power does not say anything of quality, nor the superior and lesser values attached. With master and slave we must consider what is bound qualitatively.
Apr 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
To use Nietzsche's image of foundation and scaffolding, the BAPists want scaffolding, to rise upwards; the primordialists want a foundation, to spread outwards. And BAPists promote warrior ideals, which would be closer to Tyr, both in the myth and your framework. This gives us a lot of conflicting images of the trad and the revolutionary. In a sense, building a foundation is trad, yet in the modern concept of space and hierarchy spreading outward is the very essence of revolution.
In symbol, Odin is down-going, and Tyr over-going.
Feb 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"While the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis."

Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is an interesting companion piece to Jünger's writing on chess. He compares chess to draughts, card games, and games of chance. It is in what exceeds the rules of the game that the game is really played. Where chance and a series of unseen elements factor in, the strength of analysis and wit increases. One has to account for the countenance of the opponent, his counting up and placing trump cards.
Feb 22, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Materialism means something specific in philosophy and nationalism, the dominance of the object, in particular the abstract object. This is opposite to idealism, in which the individual, the subject, is the first question. (Your 'materialism' is really a descendent of idealism.) If we expand this to the nation, a materialist nationalism would be to place what is external to the state first, that is, objects other than the sovereign in itself. An idealist nationalism looks to the sovereign as the origin of order, whether the monarch or the people
Feb 8, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Ernst Jünger on shipwrecks.
A thread which may help in understanding his commentary on the Titanic. ImageImage Image
Jan 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Jünger says there is no eternal return, that there is return of the eternal – it occurs once, time is captured, hunted down. In his usual style, following Hamann, there is little elaboration.
The eternal return is the greatest weight, the justification of absolute becoming. 'If there is an end state it has already occurred, long ago.' We are the sun and its destruction. We replace Hyperion who will never escape Tartarus. The defeat of the titans is already the Death of God. This is not linear or circular time, and perhaps its greatest strength.