Working paper
Three principles of "political theology" in the Stefan George circle
Михайлов(2012)
The article is concerned with the study of a number of illustrated books of World War I ("the Great War documents") which were edited by the right wing Weimar intellectual Ernst Junger. It is his concept of the Total Mobilization which allows me to demonstrate a genetic connection between photography and cinema as "modern mass-media" and the phaenomenon of a technical war. For Junger a technical war and technology in general are the art and way, in which the figure of The Worker is mobilizing the world and aims for a global dominance. Thus the illustrated books of the Great War appear as documents of a global transformation and indicate a new heroic experience of a modern technical reality comparable with films of Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl or Fritz Lang.
The article deals with the philosophical views of Gerhard Nebel (1903-1974), one of the German conservative thinkers after the WWII. The article focuses on the "new theology" of G. Nebel - a doctrine elaborated under influence of his mentor Ernst Jünger.
In 1957 Ernst Kantorowicz published a book that would be the guide for generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. In The King's Two Bodies, Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the "King's two bodies"--the body politic and the body natural--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a "political theology."
The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation "The king is dead. Long live the king."
Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this "political theology." It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.
The article is a critical survey of the recent biography of German lawyer and political scientist Carl Schmitt written by R. Mehring. The author focuses on the particularity of Mehring's approach to the biography and reveals the characteristic examples which are the evidence of Mehring's outstanding work full of unique historical facts, although he does not create the unified and methodically coherent Schmitt's story of life.
In the article, the author analyses the conception of people as a political body (corpus politicum) described in the text of the “Siete Partidas” of Alphonse X the Wise, king of Castile and Leon (1252–1284). In the frame of this theory, the people are considered as a whole body and the king as its soul, heart and head. The multitude can become the people only being united by the love to the king. The author criticizes the hypothesis according to which the principal sources of Alphonse's political theory were the works of St.Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury and proposed the other version. According to his version, such sources were, first of all, the texts of the tradition of political Augustinism, i.e., the “De civitate Dei” of St.Augustine and the “Sententiarum Libri tres” of Isidor of Seville.
This is a contribution to the French-Russian Conference on Joseph de Maistre. Joseph de Maistre was a famous theorist and proponent of counter-revolution. He criticized the theory of the popular sovereignty of Rousseau and elaborated his own theory of the royal sovereignty. However, he was no advocate of the so-called decisionism, as Carl Schmitt depicted him in his writings on political theology.
The article is concerned with the study of the philosophy of technology of Hans Freyer (1887-1969), who was the fi rst representative of the academic sociology in Germany. His program developed in the essay Towards a philosophy of technology (1929) is discussed as the reactionary modernist response to the cultural criticism of the German Lebensphilosophie (L. Klages, G. Simmel, M. Scheler). From the positions of the sociology of culture and political sociology it aims to integrate the modern technology into the organic life of a modern nation. After the World War II H. Freyer has shifted his heroic-realistic position on technics developing the criticism of industrial society and technocratic modernity which has formed the philosophical discussion on technology in 1950s-70s and infl uenced the Ideologiekritik of the later Frankfurt school. H. Freyer's philosophy of technology is examined in the broader politico-ideological context of the conservative revolution.
This important new book offers the first full-length interpretation of the thought of Martin Heidegger with respect to irony. In a radical reading of Heidegger's major works (from Being and Time through the ‘Rector's Address' and the ‘Letter on Humanism' to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art' and the Spiegel interview), Andrew Haas does not claim that Heidegger is simply being ironic. Rather he argues that Heidegger's writings make such an interpretation possible - perhaps even necessary.
Heidegger begins Being and Time with a quote from Plato, a thinker famous for his insistence upon Socratic irony. The Irony of Heidegger takes seriously the apparently curious decision to introduce the threat of irony even as philosophy begins in earnest to raise the question of the meaning of being. Through a detailed and thorough reading of Heidegger's major texts and the fundamental questions they raise, Haas reveals that one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century can be read with as much irony as earnestness. The Irony of Heidegger attempts to show that the essence of this irony lies in uncertainty, and that the entire project of onto-heno-chrono-phenomenology, therefore needs to be called into question.
The Eastern or Crimean War (1853–1856) phenomenon is the reflection of fundamental conflicts of the era: the clash of empires’ interests and emerging centers of capital – financial elites. The Crimean War can be referred as a protoworld war even by just considering the number of participants. The participants were not united by a common interest, but rather by a common rival. With the commencement of military actions, a common rival became a common enemy. Wars of such a scale usually occur in transitional phases of history, for example, a period of transition from political stability to political fragmentation, or vice versa. The Crimean War was related to the phase of the first type: it destroyed international political stability – the Vienna system, and opened the gate for political instability. The war had a chronocultural sense and this is one of the Crimean War’s secrets.
The article is concerned with the notions of technology in essays of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. The special problem of the connection between technology and freedom is discussed in the broader context of the criticism of culture and technocracy discussion in the German intellectual history of the first half of the 20th century.