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 Telos Press · Thursday, October 13, 2016 “When a man fell, the others stood together over his corpse; their gazes met, dark and deep. But when death stood over the trenches like a storm cloud, then it was every man for himself: he stood alone in the darkness, howling and crashing surrounding him, blinded by sudden flashes, with nothing in his breast but endless desolation.”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the soldiers awaiting attack during the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, September 29, 2016 “It wasn’t death that frightened him—that was a certainty—but rather the element of chance, the tumbling movement through time and space, which could descend any second into annihilation—this feeling of having worth and yet not being more than an ant that could be squashed in the street by the heedless step of a giant. Why, if there were a Creator, had he given men the desire to penetrate into the essence of a world that he could never fully fathom? Wouldn’t it be better if men lived like animals or plants than always with this terrible anxiety lurking beneath the surface of everything that they said and did?”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, September 20, 2016 “He tried to imagine how he looked: a trembling bundle in a torn uniform, with a blackened, sweat-streaked face and staring eyes. . . . He stood and tried to calm his nerves through a series of curses. He thought he had talked himself back into heroism, when a new and even more terrible impact hurled him back into his hole. A second that followed immediately upon the first broke off a huge piece of the trench wall and almost buried him. He writhed free from the mass of earth and ran along the trench. No man could be seen at his post. Once he stumbled over a heap of debris under which lay a dead body. Somehow, a long, jagged board had penetrated his body; his eyes, glassy and bulging, stood out of their sockets.”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, September 13, 2016 “Today words like ‘persevere’ and ‘hero’s death’ had been so ceaselessly bandied about that they had long since acquired an ironic sound—at least wherever there was actual fighting. . . . Once, before an attack, Sturm had heard an old sergeant say the following: ‘Kids, we’re going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen’s rations.’ It was the best battle address that he had ever heard. That was surely something good in the war—that it destroyed glorious-sounding phrases. Concepts that hung fleshless in the void were overcome by laughter.”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, August 30, 2016 “When a man fell, the others stood together over his corpse; their gazes met, dark and deep. But when death stood over the trenches like a storm cloud, then it was every man for himself: he stood alone in the darkness, howling and crashing surrounding him, blinded by sudden flashes, with nothing in his breast but endless desolation.”
—Ernst Jünger, Sturm, describing the soldiers awaiting attack during the Battle of the Somme, whose centenary is this year.
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