A general demobilisation
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 1, 2026
In 1932, Ernst Jünger published Der Arbeiter, The Worker (or, perhaps more precisely translated, The workman — Marx’s Arbeiterklasse translates to “the working class”), in which this new figure of human being defined the new world order. The centrality of labour corresponds to the dominance of technology. By carrying out concepts he articulated two years earlier in his essay, Total Mobilisation, Jünger writes: “technology is the way in which the form of the worker mobilises the world”. Such a diagnosis — which revisited Marx’s analyses from a radically different perspective — exerted considerable influence across both the political right and left.
It is all the more surprising that this crucial epochal figure has now vanished over the past few decades. Technology continues to rule the world and has certainly increased its power everywhere, yet it is no longer “the way in which the form of the worker mobilises the world”. On the contrary, in the form of artificial intelligence, it rather seems to imply the decline of the centrality of labour which Jünger had in mind. Instead of the servitude linked to exploitation and mobilisation, technoogy — by progressively blurring the lines between social strata and classes — appears now to aim for an unprecedented subservience through a sort of general demobilisation.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, October 1, 2026
In 1932, Ernst Jünger published Der Arbeiter, The Worker (or, perhaps more precisely translated, The workman — Marx’s Arbeiterklasse translates to “the working class”), in which this new figure of human being defined the new world order. The centrality of labour corresponds to the dominance of technology. By carrying out concepts he articulated two years earlier in his essay, Total Mobilisation, Jünger writes: “technology is the way in which the form of the worker mobilises the world”. Such a diagnosis — which revisited Marx’s analyses from a radically different perspective — exerted considerable influence across both the political right and left.
It is all the more surprising that this crucial epochal figure has now vanished over the past few decades. Technology continues to rule the world and has certainly increased its power everywhere, yet it is no longer “the way in which the form of the worker mobilises the world”. On the contrary, in the form of artificial intelligence, it rather seems to imply the decline of the centrality of labour which Jünger had in mind. Instead of the servitude linked to exploitation and mobilisation, technoogy — by progressively blurring the lines between social strata and classes — appears now to aim for an unprecedented subservience through a sort of general demobilisation.
(English translation by I, Robot)
