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Dissertation
Total Mobilization and Standing Reserve: Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger on Technology and History
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Year: 2017 Publisher: Leuven KU Leuven. Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte

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Abstract

Heidegger possessed a language of crisis and danger throughout his career which he never relinquished. He suspected that the western world was descending into nihilism, and that hope for philosophy and the sciences was threatened in their essences. The source of this threat in his view was modern technology, seen as the consummation of the history of metaphysics. At one level, Heidegger’s thinking is representative of many contemporaries in German interwar conservative and reactionary circles. Yet Heidegger’s notion of modern technology was especially shaped by the works of Ernst Jünger. Their relationship, and the relationship of their ideas can illuminate what Heidegger had in mind when he questioned technology, and the vision he had both of history and of the future. Despite the broad insights they share, Jünger and Heidegger however, end up with significantly different dispositions; whereas, the former exalts in technology and the age it brought about, Heidegger expressed fear and apprehension. This paper will seek to explain Jünger and Heidegger’s respective approaches to technology and history, and furthermore identify the precise points of resonance between them. It shall follow their vision in order to understand why Heidegger concluded that Jünger’s reading of history and technology was not only incorrect, but dangerous.

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Dissertation
Rethinking the Future: Imagining an Accelerationism of Technology and Time

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Technology plays a critical role in shaping how we conceive of time. It has opened up countless possibilities of what to do with said time and historically accompanied the promise of a better future. Despite this, sociological and psychological research reveals that today we face chronic time pressure, a lack of time. This pressure alters how we understand events and act politically. Theorists of social acceleration, and accelerationists have have expressed the view that contemporary society pathologically struggles to imagine the future at all, as if we are subject to cultural and political presentism. Theorists of acceleration have explained the processes which accelerate technological innovation, the pace of life, and rate of social change. Accelerationists argue that these processes should be intensified. These two discourses have until now not entered into conversation. This paper aims to explain accelerationism in terms of the theory of social acceleration found in the works of Reinhart Koselleck and Hartmut Rosa. We claim the theme of technology is a bridge between the two discourses. We argue that acceleration and accelerationism puzzle over the same question of how acceleration in modernity produced our expectations of a novel future, yet today no new future is expected. All authors we examine make use of technology to illustrate how this came to be about. Accelerationists argue that it should be used to accelerate certain aspects of life, to regain a sense of a future on the horizon. However there is disagreement over technology’s role in history and what forms of acceleration are desirable. To disambiguate accelerationist positions we begin by suggesting a rubric for the evaluation of a position’s technological determinism. Then, using insights from Koselleck and Rosa, we suggest a new taxonomy for understanding accelerationists. Rather than divide accelerationists using the old labels of right and left, we use their stances on technology and time to understand them anew.

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