New from Telos Press: Approaches: Drugs and Altered States, by Ernst Jünger. Order the paperback edition today in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20. Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com.
Approaches: Drugs and Altered States
by Ernst Jünger
Translated by Thomas Friese
Edited and with an Introduction by Russell A. Berman
Telos Press Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of Ernst Jünger’s Approaches: Drugs and Altered States, now available in English translation.
In Approaches, Jünger describes his experiences with drugs over the course of his life, ranging from youthful drinking sprees, through experiments with hashish and morphine, to more powerful psychotropic substances like mescaline, peyote, and LSD. Taking his readers on a remarkable journey from beer to hallucinogens, he provides fascinating vignettes from key moments in Germany’s troubled twentieth century. Approaches is also a fundamentally philosophical, even spiritual journey toward hidden dimensions of existence that, in Jünger’s view, have been eclipsed by the ambient noise of modern life. The ecstatic altered states provided by drug use, he claims, can help us approach them and find a deeper truth.
Praise for Ernst Jünger’s Approaches
"No other author of the past century has explored the dimensions of being 'on the verge' more fully than Ernst Jünger. Unlike the typical secular intellectuals of modernity, Jünger never abandoned the desire to reach zones of reality and truth inaccessible to the rational ways of the human mind. In Approaches, Jünger gives us an existentially moving and epistemologically sophisticated impression of how far he got in this effort through different forms and degrees of self-intoxication. In a present whose intellectuals tend to abandon transcendence as a dream and illusion of the past, this work deserves our attention."
—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus, Stanford University, and Distinguished Professor of Romance Literature, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem
"Jünger's penetrating intensity makes him a fascinating writer on any subject. Approaches, a book that could at first glance be mistaken for Jünger marginalia, turns out to be gripping and timely as the veteran of the trenches turns his attention to the varieties of intoxication. Opiates may remain the opium of the masses, but hallucinogens like LSD and peyote, which Jünger chronicles, are more like battlefields for armies of peacetime moderns; sites of mystery and exuberance. Drug taking is no longer the preserve of philosopher-adventurers and mystical aesthetes. But at a moment when addicts are dying by the thousands in the wealthiest cities in the world, Jünger reminds readers that intoxication promises a way of trading suffering and boredom for transcendence, and for many of us the risk is worth it."
—Jacob Siegel, senior writer at Tablet magazine, columnist for UnHerd, and cohost of Manifesto! A Podcast with the novelist Phil Klay
"As psychedelics crest back into the mainstream, Ernst Jünger's heady tales of intoxication, exhilaration, and pure ecstasy provide an articulated lens for altered states of consciousness unmatched by any modern-day writer in the so-called psychedelic renaissance. Exemplified through Approaches, Jünger was masterful at working with psychedelics, his capacity to translate the untranslatable, superb. A true Jedi before his time, Jünger utilized the revelatory insights from altered states as an impetus for genuine reflection on the truth of what is. The Dionysian self—that sensual, spontaneous, and emotional self—is in deep gratitude for bringing such a beautiful piece of German literature to the worldwide canon."
—Paul F. Austin, founder of Third Wave, psychedelic pioneer, and author of Mastering Microdosing
About Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was one of the most complex and controversial writers of twentieth-century Germany. Born in Heidelberg, he fought in the German Army during World War I, an experience that he would later recount in his gripping war memoir, Storm of Steel. Though Jünger would serve as a German officer during World War II, his 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs daringly advanced an allegorical critique of Hitler’s regime. Over the course of his long literary career, Jünger would author more than fifty books, some of which are available from Telos Press, including Eumeswil, The Forest Passage, The Adventurous Heart, On Pain, and Sturm.
