By Ross Etherton · Wednesday, April 29, 2020 Ross Etherton’s “Reading against the Gun: The Machine Gun and Sturm” appears in Telos 190 (Spring 2020): Economy and Ecology: Reconceiving the Human Relationship to Nature. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats. Ernst Jünger’s Sturm, published in English translation by Telos Press, is also available in our store.
 This essay examines the role of the machine gun in Ernst Jünger’s 1923 serially published novella Sturm, arguing that an examination of the novella’s key technological actant is at least as beneficial as an examination of the text’s human protagonists. It posits that reading Sturm in light of the machine gun and in the context of the material and cultural conditions of its original serial publication allows for a different understanding of the novella’s treatment of reading and writing under the conditions of modern mechanized warfare. The essay not only links the technical process at the heart of the gun (continuity derived from explosive interruption) to the explosive interruptions within the novella; it also links this interruptive continuity to the arbitrary, irregular breaks in its original serial publication. This technical-literary approach connects the literary scholarship on Sturm (primarily by Peter Uwe Hohendahl and David Pan) with one indebted to philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who sought to redress humanity’s profound alienation from technology and technical objects. The essay first outlines its approach to Sturm, and then provides readers with an overview of Sturm‘s publication history, contextualizing it within Jünger’s early works. It then examines the explosively interruptive moments of the novella, tying them to the machine gun and to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific, philosophical, and poetological discourses. It closes by gesturing toward the importance that the gun and the concepts embedded in it would have for Jünger in the decade following Sturm.
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By David Pan · Monday, June 17, 2019 Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.
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By Jo Ann Oravec · Wednesday, March 15, 2017 Recent initiatives to utilize household and personal mobile technologies to further specific security, surveillance, and counter-terrorism objectives pose significant challenges to civil liberties and personal well-being. The social and political statuses of these technological systems are just emerging: they are rapidly being infused into home settings and mobile devices, apparently under the control of users but under at least the partial monitoring and operation of various governmental and corporate entities. Individuals are being increasingly surveilled by sets of security-related mechanisms in their home automation and mobile communications devices as well as by other manifestations of the “Internet of Things” (IoT).
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The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear has called ontological vulnerability: the possible collapse of our world, that is, the collapse of the taken-for-granted way of life that guides and orients us in our everyday practices. In this paper, we take up Lear’s claim that in the face of the impending collapse of one’s world, a peculiar form of hope, radical hope, is called for. According Lear, radical hope means holding on to a “commitment only to the bare possibility that, from this disaster something good will emerge.”
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, January 11, 2017 Writing at the Claremont Review of Books, Aaron Zack reviews the new English translation of Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea, now available from Telos Press. Purchase your copy in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20.
Telos Press’s new edition of Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation) provides an essential guide for understanding sea power. . . . Schmitt provides an intriguing analysis of the link between the sea and the modern project’s culmination in creative, free-thinking individuals moving and acting within a liberal, global order . . .
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By Jon Wittrock and Richard Polt · Monday, December 12, 2016 Telos 177 (Winter 2016) is now available for purchase in our store.
 While the term Anthropocene was used in the USSR already in the 1960s to refer to the late Quaternary era, it rose to prominence more recently when introduced by Eugene F. Stoermer and Paul J. Crutzen. As the very word indicates, this is an epoch when humanity has taken center stage in the sense that its activities now have a major, global, and lethal impact. The shadow of human-caused global destruction and mass death haunts this epoch, and indeed, humanity’s newly acquired capacity for devastation is one of the Anthropocene’s most marked traits. While mass extinctions are hardly new phenomena and while the specter of the extinction of humanity due to some sudden catastrophe was there even before human beings were aware of it in scientific terms, the actual capacity of humanity to extinguish itself along with a large swath of other species on the planet is new, and the stakes of human action are higher.
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