The totalitarian spirit of the technique on the body.

Nihilism and technique.

By Glenda Jensen

The discourses of Modernity on security, freedom, and technique imply modern science and
the State as responsible and guarantors of them. As they are also responsible for the
catastrophic results that lead to the excessive use of these. It is in this way that the totalitarian
spirit of the technique shapes the landscape of reality and transforms it. We are witnessing a
total deployment of power through the technical means, exercised by increasingly totalitarian
and threatening States, which are equipped with conventional weapons and have all kinds of
warlike weapons. The deployment of the technique reaches the objects and the human being.
The human aspect of man and the character of thing of things dissolves, Heidegger notes. To
the extent that man technically constructs the world as an object, he also obstructs his gaze
towards himself and towards nature.

The threat to man is the imprint that the technique gives the world, the totalizing
objectification. That spirit that surrounds through the new technical order, according to
Jünger, has occupied very advanced positions. The organizing capacity, the discipline and the
training capacity confirm that we are definitely in the final phase of nihilism.

The concept of nihilism is not only counted today between the confused and discussed
concepts; It is also used controversially. However, Jünger affirms that nihilism must be
sensed as a great destiny, as a fundamental power, to whose influence no one can escape;
previously; for Jünger, the nihilism in Nietzsche is expressed in the devaluation of the
supreme values; in Dostoevsky nihilism acts in the isolation of the singular person; on his
departure from the community. Nihilism is the Great Destination.

The decline of values is the decline of Christian values, and corresponds to the inability to
conceive, this leads to pessimism and it develops in nihilism.

For a representation of nihilism, Jünger highlights three major orders: the sick, the chaotic
and the bad. This is where political systems are activated. Nihilism can harmonize with broad
systems of order, and it is where it is active and develops its power. Nihilism harmonizes
with world-wide orders and remains active on a large scale, order belongs to its style.

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One of the characteristics of the nihilistic world has a direct link with the reduction. By its
essence the nihilistic world is reduced and reduced more and more, moving towards the zero
point.

The feeling that prevails is that of reduction and that of being reduced. Abundance is
exhausted, and man feels exploited in multiple relationships. The reduction is spatial, psychic
and spiritual. This aforementioned reduction is intimately linked to the force of the
deployment of power and the penetration force in all areas of such power, as Foucault
maintains that happens with biopolitics and anatomopolitics.

Therefore, taking Jünger back, the power of the totalitarian and technocratic states is based
on nihilism, on that fright before the interior emptiness experienced by both the one who
holds power and the one who suffers it. This explains how when one of the forms of
manifestation of the despotic state falls, in the nihilistic societies new despotic powers
reappear. The void of values and faith demands it and forces the human being to submit to
any authoritarian form of domination, be it technical or political. The individual, already
devoid of values and goals, needs an authority that dictates what he has to do; In short, he
needs another that exempts him from the responsibility of working his personal destiny.

The lack of values and faith is translated both in political forms of domination and in
technocratic societies governed by the absolutizing the value of efficiency.

The object of discussion proposed by Jünger is the "zero meridian", the "line" of nihilism in
which the old values vanish, in which the old orders become obsolete and whose form is
determined by the technical acceleration in the mode of a state of "total mobilization" (totale
Mobilmachung). The jüngerian analysis of nihilism as a totalitarian that has become the
"normal condition" of the epoch refers, in particular, to the fragments of Nietzsche of the
1980s and to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, as the two "great sources" of knowledge
of nihilism ". Throughout the text Jünger also mentions Faulkner, Malraux, Lawrence,
Hemingway, Kafka, Gottfried Benn, Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Bloy Leon, etc. This
is an aspect of great importance, since it draws a difference, which is not merely gender, with
Heidegger's writing, for whom literature could not account for nihilism in a radical way,
because it can only be done from the point of view of the history of the being, of its
destinations. The consistency of the debate is defined at the same time by a fundamental
agreement and a difference, in function of which other aspects are organized. In the first

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place, both thinkers share the conviction of nihilism as "great destiny", as a "fundamental
power" and a way of appearance of things that consumes a long history. Heideggerian
meditation also receives a decisive influence from one of Jünger's fundamental theses: the
one that links nihilism to order rather than anarchy and chaos; to health rather than disease; to
force rather than weakness. And, mainly, the link between nihilism and technique. Jünger
maintains regarding nihilism that it is a possible overcoming of the "zero meridian"; and for
Heidegger, Jünger's reflection, insofar as it encloses, a willingness to cross the line, still
moves in the field of representation. For the rest, Heidegger points out the medical nature of
Jünger's text, divided into prognosis, diagnosis and therapy, and its consequent "pretension to
cure." Wanting-overcoming, wanting-healing, wanting-going through, are for Heidegger
completely wrong pretensions with respect to the essence of nihilism, which thus remains
unthinkable. "The attempt to cross the line is banished in the domain of a representation that
belongs to the domain in which the oblivion of being dominates. That is why it is also
expressed with fundamental metaphysical concepts (form, value, transcendence). The same
spirit that surrounds reality also touches on the most important events of the 20th century,
such as the two world wars. In spite of conceiving a character in nihilism totalitarianism that
emerges as arrogance and pain (Schmerz) and "to whose influence no one can escape",
Jünger draws from both the Nietzschean experience and Dostoevsky a certain "optimism",
derived from the warning of favorable signs within nihilism, which preannounce the passage
to a new condition; that orient the state of things towards other situations. Jünger refers to the
"productive force of pain" within the abandoned technical collective of all transcendence and
indicates three significant facts: a new metaphysical concern for humanity; the emergence of
the particular sciences of the Copernican space, in favor of other scenarios (that allow "a
more acute and human vision"); and the introduction of theological themes in world
literature. "These three facts ... are positive elements of great importance, which can be
opposed with full right to an evaluation of the purely pessimistic situation, or oriented to the
decline". "The crossing of the line," says Jünger, "the passage through the zero point divides
the show; which indicates the means, not the end. Security is still very far away. This is why
hope will be possible. " The moment of the passage does not imply any overcoming, but
rather the moment in which "the weather is better, more open". Although Jünger admits the
impossibility of a definition of nihilism (since "it is impossible for the spirit to reach a
representation of nothingness ", Is to say that" out of nothing cannot be formed neither an
image nor a concept "), his writing rehearses a description of the characters that manifest it.
The nihilistic world, in the first place, is not primarily linked to weakness. According to its

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operation "only the regulative values remain, and therefore critical: the weak ones are broken
before them, the strongest ones (Stärkeren) destroy what does not break, and the absolutely
strong (Stärkesten) overcome the regulative values and advance more far. Nihilism can be a
sign of weakness, but also of strength.

Secondly, against the opinion that links it to the chaotic (Das Chaotische), nihilism is rather
harmonically articulated "with large order systems where it becomes active and deploys its
power and is even the rule. The order is for him a fertile substrate ... "1. Jünger mentions the
strongly stratified organization of the parties, the army, the state, etc. Also, "Even in those
places where nihilism shows its most sinister features, as in the great fields of physical
extermination, sobriety, hygiene and strict order dominated until the end". With the same
caution, Jünger warns finally, it is necessary to consider the belief that associates nihilism
with disease. Jünger argues that rather it is linked with physical health, with the
encouragement of sports, the cultivation of the body, etc. Crossing the zero meridian clears
an opening in which the "weather" becomes "more open" and from which the
characterization of the alluded nihilism is possible -which does not touch the essence of
nihilism, Heidegger will say, even if it arrives in the most penetrating way to the forms of its
emergence, according to the "literary" model -, as a reflection on possible gaps, fissures,
hiatus not yet reached by the devices of enhancement: acceleration, productivity, reduction,
simplification, hierarchical precision, increasingly effective drives towards economic goals,
etc. Nihilism reaches its consummation at the moment of its omnipresence, that is, when all
the consistencies express it and it is not possible to conceive an exception to its domain; or,
with Juenger’s words, when it has become a "normal state".

The unfolding of all the essential possibilities of nihilism marks the moment of its
consummation; but on the one hand this consummation does not imply a limit, nor an end (on
the contrary, nihilism has just begun at the time of its essential exhaustion), and on the other
hand this display of essential possibilities, says Heidegger, can be thought of as the extent to
which we accede to the essence of nihilism, being that the essence of nihilism is nothing
nihilistic. Pain is overlooked and being vanishes in time losing itself in the world of
technology. Both Jünger and Marguerite Duras, show us pain from an anthropological

1
Jünger E. , Über die Linie, Barcelona: Editorial Paidós 1994.

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perspective. The proximity to the catastrophe, where the maximum illustrations of pain are
present, indicates that we are in the final phase of nihilism. Here it appears to the productive
force of pain. The moment is that crossing the line will bring with it a new donation of the
Being.

April 2018