Another Language: The Relationship between War and Politics in Ernst Jünger’s Early Political Writings

This article analyzes the linguistic means Ernst Jünger employed to construct the relationship between war and politics in his early political writings. These include military metaphors, the topos of transferring elements from war to politics, depicting politics as the continuation of war by other means, the opposition of pen and sword, and the topos of “another language.” Jünger relied on expressions from Carl von Clausewitz yet inverted Clausewitz’s arguments, considering war the primary category even in peace. He “temporalized” the quasi-Clausewitzian continuity thesis, arguing that nationalistic politics should be merely an extension of World War I violence. His interrelated arguments downplayed the differences between war and politics, indirectly justifying political violence. Given Jünger’s explicit rejection of any characteristically political means, we should read him as a military thinker calling for the continuation of war by the same means, rather than as a theorist of autonomous politics. This is a rhetorically constructed and self-imposed problem, resulting from his chosen argumentative framework.