Determination and World Possession
Miroslav Griško
Copse 125 Blood Clot
Total mobilisation’s technical side is not decisive. Its basis — like that of all
technology — lies deeper. We shall address it here as the readiness for
mobilisation.
A mighty message befell me in my inwardness … and my soul took fire …
in the violence of struggle.
—Ernst Jünger
For Jünger, souls are judged according to their readiness to see an invisible war. Invisible war
conjoins the immediacy of the front experience (Fronterlebnis) to a higher order of determination.
Immolating fire is a communiqué that travels from an absolute remoteness to an essentialised
closeness: causality is vertical, hierarchical and unilateral. An act on the front is the mirror of a
determination within the invisible war. The station of a higher soul can be achieved through the
intensification of this perception, which separates a reflective surface from a secret face.
Fronterlebnis uses a proximity of death to force the soul’s meditation on the necessity of
remoteness. In Jünger’s war memoirs both the higher, superior soul and the lower, inferior soul
experience the front as an endless horizon of killing. Yet the inferior soul can only understand the
front through a logic of contingency. This contingency extends from the unpredictable randomness
of events to the motive which generates the war. The brutalism of the horizon indicates nothing
beyond a state of thuggish violence. For the inferior soul, the endless horizon of killing is the
product of an innumerable series of contingent points; the horizon emerges through the immanent
antagonism between these points, what Jünger calls inwardness. Yet at the moment when this
inwardness undergoes its immolation, the soul migrates into a higher cognitive order. The
consumption of inwardness by external fire discloses that the horizon of killing is not the product of
a line of determination running from inside to outside, but the reverse. Where the inferior soul only
sees contingency, the higher soul detects causal mechanisms that in the strictness of their
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constraints imply an exterior necessity:
As I fell, I saw smooth white stones on a muddy road; their order had a
sense, it was necessary like the order of the stars, and within them was
hidden a great wisdom. This struck me, and it was more important than
the slaughter that was taking place all around me.1
The surface objective of biological survival is brought to the threshold of total emaciation by
becoming a casualty, extricating a deeper objective from its illusory trap. For the inferior soul, any
attempt to locate an objective outside of the body is the illegitimate ascription of necessity to
contingency, an ideology. The manifestation of order imposed on Jünger produces the counterinsight that the body was always a corpse. The near death/life after death experience allows Jünger
to see the operationalisation of his own corpse, functioning as a star map for a remote wisdom in
an invisible war. The extrication of the objective means that if the inferior soul understands the
front according to a concept of violence, the superior soul understands the front according to a
concept of war. The shift from violence to war is the shift from senseless contingency to the
intelligence of an objective.2 Remote wisdom marks the hole of a vanishing point that in its distance
from the front’s immediacy instantiates a state of war in the separation from the objective that the
remoteness of wisdom entails. What distinguishes war from violence is the exteriority of the
objective, the extremity of its degree of unrealisation. Whereas violence never rises above the
imperative of the biological preservation of that which already is, war indicates cosmic
incompleteness. The exteriority of the objective is the higher dimension of the invisible war. The
judgment of an individual soul occurs according to its commitment to this hiddenness and the
disclosure of a mystery that is the objective of the invisible war.
In War as Inner Experience (1925) Jünger describes the migration into the higher dimension in
terms of a distinction between “cause” (Sache) and “conviction” (Überzeugung): “the cause is
nothing, conviction everything.”3 Yet conviction is for Jünger also a cause, one that is primordial and
immemorial (Ursache): conviction signifies determination according to the objective of the invisible
war. The cause that Jünger opposes with conviction is an essentially counterfeit Spinozan cause.
The latter only remains on the level of violence, an uncountable sum of the respective drives of an
equally uncountable horde of individual conatus, each asserting its claim to be on an infinite plane
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of univocal being that is created through the commitment to this being itself: “each thing, as far as
it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being.” 4 An endless horizon of killing in this lower
dimension is the unfolding of a Spinozan immanent cause, the emanation of “infinitely many things
in infinitely many modes.”5 Any objective, in contrast, infers an incompleteness that haemorrhages
the infinite plane of immanence according to the dimension of the unrealised that war entails.
Spinoza’s elimination of final causes in order to preserve immanence eliminates the incompleteness
of an objective, insofar as a telos always designates incompleteness; Fronterlebnis as pure
immanence is the suspension of the final cause that raises violence to war.6 Invisible war in this
respect is war as such.
Immanent causes for Spinoza are thoroughly deterministic, as any denial of determinism is only an
epistemological blind spot with regards to the causal mechanism of absolute immanence.7 For
Jünger, conviction is also a hard determinism, but this is a determinism that is coherent with
incompleteness, since the causality it names is teleological. Jünger’s war memoirs are the memoirs
of an automaton who begins to understand his constraints, contemplating their necessity in terms
of their objective: a form of the will of God. A self-conscious automaton is still an automaton; yet
self-consciousness as conviction means that the constraint is recognised also according to its
simultaneous incompleteness. Invisible war is the extremity of this constraint as the exteriority of
the objective. Conviction not only names the determination at the core of the automaton; the
automaton also attempts to grasp the objective of the war that has created him, meditating on the
completeness and incompleteness of his constraints. Conviction in this respect implies a
problematisation of the objective, in that it remains a secret. The automaton at war experiences the
front as a series of concentric rings, which, from the perspective of a cross section, are arranged
hierarchically. War as inner experience, its lower form, is an outer/inner war — the exteriority of the
front to the automaton — whereas the inner/outer war is the intensive meditation on exteriority, so
as to understand the objective of the war in itself. “I held my revolver against a face that shone out
like a white mask in the darkness.”8 An act of war on the lower level is the contemplation on the
higher level of the mystery of the objective of the invisible war.
During his time in the trenches of the first World War, Jünger makes a series of discoveries in this
direction. “Copse 125” is the Deutsches Heer’s codename for an otherwise trivial woodland, where
the lines of the front have seemingly by chance converged. The insignificance of the plot of land in
contrast to its decisive “symbolic meaning”9 engenders an excessive disproportion in scale. The
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vertigo created confirms that the objective is found not in the soil, but in an utterly withdrawn
counterpoint. Copse 125 functions as an intensified compression of information and energy, a type
of terrestrially buried and at once cosmically remote Matrioshka Brain that condenses world history
into a single point:
Never did a man go to battle as you do, on strange machines like birds of
steel, behind walls of fire and clouds of deadly gas. The earth has borne
Saurians and frightful monsters. Yet no being was ever more dangerously,
more terribly armed than you. No troop of horse and no Vikings’ ship was
ever on so bold a journey. The earth yawns before your assault. Fire,
poison, and iron monsters go in front of you. Forward, forward, pitiless and
fearless! The possession of the world is on the throw!10
Unprecedented excessive concentration at a singular point is a blood clot of ever more
sophisticated war machines. Shattering immediacy, Copse 125‘s strategic significance in the
summer of 1918 turns vortically around the strategic significance in the invisible war. Invisible war
accordingly is not a form of Manichean war that asserts an endless struggle immanent to the
cosmos, a never-ending turf war. If Copse 125 has a “symbolic meaning”, invisible war becomes
eschatological war, according to which “the possession of the world is on the throw.”
For Jünger the development of the war machine signals the threshold of this final war. Such
sophistication in the art of war is not reducible to the product of a cumulative knowledge accrued
through long durations of time, which has rendered the capabilities of the war machine more lethal.
Instead, technological advancement and the infinite qualitative difference it creates between the
war machines of Jünger’s war and all previous wars indicate the objective of this war. World
possession does not establish universal dominion through the technological complexity of the war
machine; rather, if every war by definition entails unrealisation, it is at this point that the breach of
unrealisation becomes an evermore tangible agent in the war, the remote determinative force
nearing in its “assault”: the objective has now crashed down into earth, into Copse 125. The
concentric rings shaping the front experience of the automaton now reach a point where they have
all collapsed into each other, such that the proximity of the end is marked by the extent to which
inner and outer war are indistinguishable, an act committed in one registering itself in the other as
well as the reverse.
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In the essay “Total Mobilisation”, Jünger describes this as the moment when the “genius of war was
penetrated by the spirit of progress.” 11 [CUT?: Jünger ascribes to war the intelligence of the
objective, a teleological causality that directs by definition.] The genius of war is not an eternal
static and passive matrix, but rather a determinative force qua final cause. Technics, understood as
the spirit of progress, also contains within itself a motion, which now amplifies the force of the final
cause. Technics performs a function in relation to the genius of war, sharpening the clarity of the
objective upon which the superior soul meditates. The motion of technics supplements the motion
of the genius of war, so as to peel back layers and accelerate the disclosure of what Jünger calls the
“pure form of war”, its eschatological objective.12 In the pure form of war, two apparently distinct
forms of determinism come together with a coherency that demonstrates their ultimate ipseity.
Deterministic theories of causality are procedures of reduction that are either generally singular or
parallel. Singular here means that the reduction which is prosecuted in a given determinism is a
reduction to one. Parallel, conversely, entails that different reductions can obtain coextensively,
operating in their respective zones of influence. The release of various hard determinisms into a
system simultaneously is an inconsistent discharge of stringent causal forces. In a model of
concurrent determinism, a multiplicity of deterministic lines crash into each other — immanent
causes, final causes, and so on — each holding to their own path of determination. The release of
these incoherent hard determinisms into a single system nears a state of war, that is, to call this a
state of war also requires the intelligence of an objective. According to the absolute exteriority of
this objective, the antagonistic deterministic lines are in a state of confusion, their hierarchical
structure lost. World possession would signify that the lines of determinations have now been
arranged in their correct order.
Criterion of Explosion
Total mobilisation of a war machine operating in space and time finds its effectivity overdetermined
by the temporal. Space, understood as that which is ready to be materially mobilised, culminates in
a state of parity. Various thresholds — from mutually assured destruction and dark forest
deterrence to, more fundamentally, an essentially finite universe — forces the war machine into the
dimension of time.13 It is the intensiveness of time that immediately distinguishes it from the
extensiveness of space. According to this temporal axis, readiness names the speed and effectivity
of the decision that determines the efficient prosecution of the war machine (as well as the inverse
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of waiting and delay, although speed always remains more critical than delay on the basis of the
potential to kill first). Decision and prosecution are prima facie also measurable as a limit point,
reiterating the limit of space: a unit of Planck time. Yet Jünger’s something “deeper” of readiness
from the position of the temporal goes beyond even Planck time, so as to connect directly with the
eternal. The acceleration of the war machine signifies that the proximity of world possession is the
proximity of the breach of the eternal. World possession becomes a race into the eternal,
intensiveness finding its source in the exteriority that is the objective of the invisible war.
Nick Land’s concept “teleoplexy” describes a “time-structure of capitalist accumulation” that
responds to the same question Jünger essentially confronts at Copse 125: “what is accelerating?”14
For Land, the time-structure under scrutiny cannot be separated from an empirically verifiable
“instantiation”.15 Any attempt to diagnose acceleration must in the first instance be consistent with
“natural-historical reality”.16 This constraint as instantiation entails a historiographical method
immediately defined by periodisation. Periodisation possesses both the parsimony and depth of a
BC/AD type break, which is to register an “explosion”within natural-historical reality.17 Capital
satisfies this criterion of explosion for Land, insofar as its explosion is directed against naturalhistorical reality as such. Capital becomes adequate to explosion in its suffusion of natural-historical
reality with that which is not yet real, “operationalising … science fiction scenarios as integral
components of production systems”.18 The explosion of natural-historical reality satisfied by
“something not yet realised” divests an intuitively grounded reality of any transcendental priority,
where transcendental denotes the “absolute horizon of conditions of possibility.”19 Yet, conditions in
some antecedent function are precisely what are effaced by an explosion of natural-historical
reality, as capital means that “ontological realism is decoupled from the present, rendering the
question ‘what is real?’ obsolete”.20 The natural-historical instantiation of capital is a periodic cut
that functions against the backdrop of — but also vitiates — an equally intuitive linear time, and as
a result “breaks the history of the world in two”.21
This break, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be a “circuit.”22 The circuit form is derived from
the explosion’s act of decoupling. The severance of reality from the present according to the notyet of capital is not a contingent explosion, but “intelligent” and “controlled” qua operationally
motivated intervention: the teleological core of teleoplexy.23 If capital names the intrusion into a
putative ontological realism of that which annuls the present’s claim over what is real, the
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effectiveness of its operation rests on its teleological force. The strength ascribed to the latter infers
that explosion instantiates its own periodisation, thus disclosing the circuit structure. Whereas the
initial periodisation allows for an identification of “the basic motor of acceleration” as such, the
motor discloses the circuit that is a necessary condition for the initial periodisation.24 Periodisation
marked by capital engenders its own periodisation, and can therefore accomplish time-travel: the
circuitous time-structure of teleoplexy.25 In this respect, teleoplexy can be said to inject the notion
of a final cause into a pure immanence, whose coherency, from Spinoza onwards, rests upon the
foreclosure of any telos. But here the final cause is not an end to which means are directed; rather
the end and the means are the same: “the means of production becomes the ends of production.”26
Means as ends connotes a circuit, according to which the final cause is present and distributed
throughout the structure, yielding its accelerated, intensified effect as “an ever-deepening dynamic
of auto-production.”27
Yet the disclosure of the circuit also problematises the identification of that which satisfies the
criterion of explosion. For the circuit structure appears to subvert the accuracy of any attempt at
periodisation. If periodisation relies upon a presupposed, however minimal, consistency of naturalhistorical reality for empirical verifiability, such consistency is abrogated by that which periodisation
intends to mark. An exoteric time-structure is used to define an esoteric time-structure, while the
esoteric time-structure annuls the consistency of the exoteric time-structure that yields it. On the
one hand, the back and forth between time-structures is precisely the form of the circuit, its
“roundaboutness”: the deductive circularity of the operation validates the periodisation irrespective
of its apparent tautological inadequacy.28 On the other hand, a teleoplexic temporality will always
confound the desired precision of periodisation’s straightforward cut according to its contortion of
linear time. The demand for periodisation confronts a circuitous temporality that yields an either/or
(in which the possibility concomitantly subsists that this either/or may be one and the same):
1. either the circuit structure validates the periodisation that identifies the
motor (the apparent circularity of the exercise discloses the truth of the
circuit structure as such)
2. or the circuit renders inadequate or at least problematises the initial
diagnosis of that which would satisfy the criterion of explosion, suggesting
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a “deep structure” that always abjures periodisation and, a fortiori now
requires a “concrete historical philosophy of camouflage.”29
If Jünger is generally absent from the attempts to construct a history of accelerationism, this is
because he considers capital as peripheral to the phenomenon he experiences on the Front: Jünger
equates the motor of acceleration entirely with war.30 A break in natural-historical reality is that
which Jünger encounters at Copse 125. The overwhelming convergence at a singular point of ever
more sophisticated war machines satisfies a criterion of explosion and parsimonious periodisation
with the unprecedented proximity of world possession. The phenomenon of acceleration is the
eschatological vector of history.
The nearness of world possession is equivalent to the conditions under which total mobilisation is
possible. In Jünger’s description of total mobilisation, war prima facie appears as a type of constant,
which directly opposes what Land terms the “variable” consistent with explosion.31 The genius of
war once again suggests that war obtains as some innate and eternal structure that is accelerated
only when the spirit of progress enters its matrix. Yet the something deeper subtending technics
infers that this is only what Jünger calls the “lower form” of total mobilisation; its “higher form” is
when the two are indistinct32 The spirit of progress can only increase its velocity when it injects
itself into the genius of war. Progress requires war as a necessary condition so as to satisfy the
viscerality of the explosion that would mark acceleration. It is at this point in natural-historical
reality — Copse 125 — where the chimerical distinction between war and progress no longer
obtains. Progress shows itself only to have been the progression of the war machine, thereby
yielding the pure form of war: “total mobilisation is far less consummated than it consummates
itself … express(ing) a secret and inexorable claim.”33 The intensified qualitative change in the war
machine is adequate to a criterion of explosion, where the latter simultaneously indicates that the
camouflage of the invisible war dissipates so as to divulge the pure form of war, the increased
lucidity of the objective. The pure form of war discloses itself in the proximity of world possession.
Whenever camouflage is operative — and the necessity of a history of camouflage maintains that
this operation is continuous— the equation of acceleration with X is problematised. This itself is a
clue that motivates Land to consider a deep bond between acceleration and war. Camouflage is
nothing other than occultation, and all war implies occultation: “in a reality at war, things hide. The
alternative is to become a target, a casualty, and thus — in the course of events — to cease to be.
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When war reigns, ontology and occultation converge.”34 The nature of this convergence signifies
that the tactical supremacy of occultation is not exhausted in the tactical. The supremacy of the
tactic means that if war is occultation, the occultation at the heart of war alongside its continuous
reign evoke occult war. The antagonistic sides of war practice occultation tactics for their localised
objective; yet the higher objective of the war as such is occulted. For Jünger, the objective of this
occulted war emerges in the contemplation of the superior soul, described in “Total Mobilisation” as
a heroic spirit: “It goes against the grain of the heroic spirit to seek out the image of war in a source
that can be determined by human action.”35 The higher dimension of war eradicates its equation
with a perpetual violence to be found in a human action that corresponds to a human end:
occultation tactics for biological survival. The exteriority of the source of war is the intelligence of
the objective; the proximity of world possession announces that occult war has become
eschatological war.
If world possession is determined by the war machine, the history of the world is the history of the
war machine. That which determines is ultimately that which is. For the question of acceleration,
the form of determination it addresses entails excessively radiant quantitative as well as qualitative
change. Capital apparently satisfies this demand according to the explosion registered by clear
historical periodisation: the equation of capital with modernity as such.36 This is in contrast to war’s
seeming lethargy. The long march of the war machine to Copse 125, from two billion years as a
prokaryotic cell to the sudden formation of a eukaryotic cell that tactically mobilises with an
unprecedented sophistication so as to liquidate enemy cells, thereby creating an explosion in life,
but also, and more fundamentally, in the productivity and potential of the war machine, recalls a
Hobbesian state of nature, rather than an explosion. Yet this constant — as opposed to variable —
appearance no longer holds when time scales are extended, from the time scale of the universe to
the time scale of the invisible war. Presumed variables can always mislead in their
overdetermination by indulgent localisation. Time-structures rather function as a doomsday clock:
the proximity of world possession that is determined by the intelligence of the objective. The
highest state of readiness attained by the war machine participating in this war would be to
understand its clandestine objective: “what does the war want?”37
Physical and Metaphysical Eschatology
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All eschatologies are teleological, whereas the reverse does not hold. The asymmetry between
eschatology and teleology nevertheless dissolves when the telos necessary to both is posited in
terms of its absence. This absence as a function of telos does not only register teleological
incompleteness in the form of a process that is underway. A deliberate hiddenness evokes a
concept of war in the unity of camouflage and an objective. Yet this model only becomes properly
eschatological — a model of eschatological war — when hiddenness is taken in its strongest sense,
as an absolute remoteness.
In a 2003 resource letter published in the American Journal of Physics, Milan M. Ćirković
summarises the basic concepts and immediate lines of investigation that define the “nascent
discipline of physical eschatology.”38 Physical eschatology in the first instance appears as a
competing sub-discipline within general cosmology. Emphases on futural temporality as well as
cosmic finitude represent a particular cosmological model driven by equally particular initial
theoretical commitments. Yet these first principles also coincide with the deepest mechanisms of
scientific method, suggesting that all cosmology implies a form of physical eschatology. For
Ćirković, the priority of prediction to scientific method overtly indicates science’s future bias,
demanding in its purest form an eschatological type of judgment qua experimental verification. If
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future bias informs physical eschatology, this is entirely consistent with science as such. At the
same time, despite the shared temporal orientation of general scientific method and physical
eschatology, Ćirković also argues that such future bias disappears from the perspective of the
classical laws of physics, insofar as the latter are reversible. Reversibility on the level of physical
laws maintains the abrogation of temporal preference, since, according to the same laws that apply
to physical eschatology, no such futural bias is extant. On this basis there is no “prima facie reason
for preferring classical cosmology to physical eschatology in the classical domain.” 39 Physical
reversibility of laws becomes a justification for the irreversibility of physical eschatology, as the
underlying law-reversibility pacifies the model’s apparently stringent and particular commitment to
irreversibility. Yet law-reversibility concomitantly also legitimises the future bias of physical
eschatology, in that the future bias of scientific method continues to obtain regardless of lawreversibility (as well as the potential non-classicism of laws): the hidden object of science as such.
Physical eschatology, as any other scientific theory, can be subjected to elimination. That which
physical eschatology in this sense prioritises is the elimination itself as a determinative force.
Physical eschatology can be said to posit future bias not only in terms of something to be
experimentally disclosed, but as a determination operative beyond the level of epistemological
verification. Future orientation of physical eschatology integrates this bias into its own model, such
that the future disclosure of verification is taken as a determinative force from the future.40
Ćirković’s 2003 resource paper can be broken down into three basic categories which are to orient
physical eschatology:
1. laws of nature, with heightened attention to the second law of
thermodynamics and time asymmetry, the arrow of time
2. astrophysical objects, to be generally studied under the conditions of
these laws
3. life and intelligence, which can potentially exert control over future
oriented direction
According to these three categories, physical eschatology further hides the future with the
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problematic variable of intervention. To the extent that the laws of nature and astrophysical objects
are taken as approximate constants, it is the third category of life and intelligence that more deeply
obscures the future according to the unknown character of its intervention. Future bias no longer
indicates a dimension of the constant that remains hidden to the present and is thus to be
disclosed through verification; rather, all constants can be manipulated by a variable. As in Land’s
model, future bias is not exhausted in an ontological realism corresponding to an epistemological
shortcoming. The intervention of a variable can transmogrify and even annul all constants. The
identification of this variable names the problem of what is intervening from the future insofar as
the variable registers itself as the alteration of the future. With respect to the interventional
capability of life and intelligence, Ćirković cites Freeman Dyson:
It is impossible to calculate in detail the long-range future of the universe
without including the effects of life and intelligence. It is impossible to
calculate the capabilities of life and intelligence without touching, at least
peripherally, philosophical questions. If we are to examine how intelligent
life may be able to guide the physical development of the universe for its
own purposes, we cannot altogether avoid considering what the values
and purposes of intelligent life may be.41
Physical eschatology as presented by Ćirković is not necessarily a teleological model. Telos is
conceivably absent from the laws of nature, astrophysical objects and life and intelligence. All three
categories do not a priori eliminate a model along the lines of Spinozan immanent causality. Yet, it
is in the third category of life and intelligence where telos most explicitly could obtain. The future
dimension’s effect on the cosmological model according to an intelligent intervention concomitantly
implies a uniquely teleological incompleteness to a cosmological model. Because of the unknown
nature of the variable, cosmological models are always teleologically hidden in a double sense: the
hiddenness of the given telos in its degree of incompleteness and the hiddenness of the telos in the
variable status of the particular form of life and intelligence that pursues a particular objective.
The “taboo” Dyson identifies as the general anti-teleological position of the natural sciences can be
reduced to an aggrandisement of what Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, diagnosed as the
anthropic and fictive operation of a final cause — which from the perspective of evolutionary
biology can be tied to the ability of the neocortex to anticipate the future — into a general
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cosmological principle.42 Whereas the advocacy for a telos in biology names a minority tendency to
the extent that Darwinian evolution is a “universal acid”43 eviscerating all teleology on the basis of
the primacy of contingency in the successful navigation of natural selection, even a retention of
telos evokes a category mistake with the introduction of a general biological concept qua
cosmological principle. The push against teleology stems from the only potential source of a final
cause being found in a concept of life that possesses an inordinate degree of contingency in
contrast to any greater cosmological principle. In the case that such contingency does not preclude
a purposeful intervention, Dyson’s hypothesis names only the unsophisticated brute force obtrusion
of a fictive telos into an otherwise purposeless cosmos. Dysonian cosmic will-to-power is a purely
contingent intercession based on the conjecture that an insane accretion of power is able to
instantiate its own cosmic objective.44
If, according to its evocation of both a vector of movement qua future orientation and an
intelligence qua teleological force, acceleration is a species of physical eschatology, the unknown
character of intervention — the question of what is the variable that satisfies a criterion of
explosion — is not only reducible to any number of possible interventions based on a conceivable
multiplicity of Dysonian cosmic wills to power. Rather, following Jünger and Land, the unknown of
the intervention more decisively creates a further subdivision in Dyson’s ascription of a potential
telos to life and intelligence in its separation of life from intelligence. The severance of intelligence
from life with a concomitant retention of telos entails that teleological force could conceivably lie
anywhere.
The anywhere of the telos suggests a total obtuseness. But the telos gains in acuity according to
the logic of its necessary secrecy. A final cause is not only occulted in the sense that any telos
entails a state of unrealisation. Telos is hidden not only because it is always absent by definition;
the hiddenness of telos is constitutive of telos. The occultation of the final cause is necessary to the
objective of the final cause as such, whereby its occultation not only evokes the unrealised, but is
its camouflage.
The preeminence of camouflage to the logic of telos marks a deep homology between the war
machine and the hidden final cause. The bind between war and occultation overcomes its reduction
to the tactical when the telos of war is itself hidden. If a deeper cosmological structure is indexed
by the history of the war machine, then this deeper structure is a structure of war. The
displacement of the objective from the war machine locates the objective in war in-itself: an
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invisible war and a secret telos.
Remote wisdom as the remoteness of telos strains and ultimately breaks a purely physical
eschatology, always externalising to an infinite degree a force of determination that, through the
mystery of an instrumental function of war to this telos, marks one and the same war. That the
invisible war is for Jünger an eschatological war recapitulates this teleological dimension and the
remoteness of telos. Whereas all eschatology implies teleology, eschatology differs in the
exteriority of telos, the physical eschatology evoking metaphysical eschatology according to the
absolute remoteness of teleological hiddenness.
The remoteness of the secret telos gives an eschatologised cosmos its direction. When remoteness
is a first principle, the absoluteness of remoteness marks the deepness of the final cause’s
occultation. But in the proximity of the final cause’s de-occultation — at the moment of world
possession — the effect of remoteness is that of a distance which now expedites the strength of its
assault. Total mobilisation as an eschatologisation of the war machine signifies the proximity of the
secret telos in the intensification of the force of its unilateral disclosure. At this point, physical
eschatology becomes metaphysical eschatology under the condition that the closest known
analogue to this process is the revealed law of an eschatological God.
“Determination and World Possession” is part of the series ‘Alternative Hypotheses of the War
Machine’. The first part was published in Šum #9 in Slovene.
1. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Howard Fertig, 1996), 123.
2. Whereas Clausewitz introduces the concept of an objective through the
subordination of war to politics, Jünger can be said to complete the
Prussian approach to the art of war with the location of the objective in
war in itself.
3. Ernst Jünger, “Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis.” Sämtliche Werke. 10
Bände. Vol. 5. (Stuttgart: Klett, 1960–1965), 105.
4. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, III P6
5. Ibid., I P16.
6. “I will add a few remarks, in order to overthrow this doctrine of a final
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Determination and World Possession
cause utterly. That which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and
vice versa: it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and that which
is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect.” Spinoza, Ethics,
Appendix, 2r.
7. Ibid., III P2.
8. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, 103.
9. Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of
1918 (New York: Howard Fertig, 2003), xi.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilisation” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical
Reader, ed. Richard Wolin, (London: MIT Press, 2003), 123.
12. Ibid., 123.
13. Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest (London: Head of Zeus), 2015.
14. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration” in #Accelerate: The
Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin Mackay and Arman Avanessian
(Falmouth, UK, 2014), 511.
15. Ibid., 511.
16. Ibid., 514.
17. Ibid., 511.
18. Ibid., 515.
19. Nick Land, Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai
Time (Shanghai: Urbanatomy Electronic, 2014); Nick Land, “A Quick-andDirty Introduction to Accelerationism” Jacobite (2017).
20. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”, 516.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, ed. W.
Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1968), 333.
22. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”, 516.
23. Ibid.
24. Marko Bauer, Nick Land & Andrej Tomažin, “The Only Thing I Would
Impose is Fragmentation: An Interview with Nick Land”, Šum: Journal for
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Determination and World Possession
Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, #7, 2017, 815.
25. Nick Land, Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time
26. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”, 513.
27. Ibid., 513.
28. Ibid., 511.
29. Ibid., 517.
30. As an example of an exception cf. Antoine Bousquet “Assessing Ernst
Jünger: Prophet, Mystic, Accelerationist” The Disorder of Things (2013)
31. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”, 514.
32. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilisation”; Ibid.
33. Ibid., 128.
34. Nick Land, “Phylosophy of War”, Obsolete Capitalism (2013)
35. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilisation”, 122.
36. Nick Land, “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”
37. Nick Land, “Phylosophy of War”, Obsolete Capitalism (2013)
38. Milan Ćirković, “Resource Letter: PEs-1: Physical Eschatology”, American
Journal of Physics, Vol. 71, Issue 2, 122.
39. Ibid., 127.
40. Compare, for example, with John Zizioulas’ metaphysical eschatology
Remembering the Future: An Eschatological Ontology (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
41. Ibid., 129.
42. Ibid., 129.
43. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
44. For example, a Kardashev Type-3 or above civilisation.
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