Günther Anders’ Philosophy

of Technology
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Günther Anders’ Philosophy
of Technology

From Phenomenology to Critical Theory

Babette Babich
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 Contents

List of Figures viii

Preface ix
Gratitude and a Prefatory Note on Acknowledgements xi
Acknowledgements xii
Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1
Black Stars 1
On the “We” of the “With-World” and Social Media 4
Life and Legacy 6
A Star Among Other Stars 7
Suppression: Positivity and Neutrality 10
Consumers and “Situations” 12
Nomen est omen: “Other” Reflections 14

Part One A Critical Theory of Technology 19

1 Criticizing Technology 21
Questioning Being-in-the-World, the Work of Art, and Technology 21
On the Intersection of Sociology and Anthropology, Critical Theory, and
Technology: Günther Anders and Power 21
Insiders and their “Discounted” Others 25
Oblivion 26
Whither? 36
Whose Critical Theory? 38
Media Branding: How to do Politics with Programming and iGadgets 40

2 Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 42

Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ “Humanism” 42
Jemeinigkeit: On Becoming a Question to Oneself 44
Anthropologism and Psychologism 45
Heidegger on Dasein and the Seinsfrage 47
“Who,” Then, is Dasein? 48
On Animal Dasein: Anders and “Other” Others 49
Sein and Dasein without God 53
vi Contents

3 Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt: Love, Triangles, and the Political 58
Philosophical Triangles: Students, Scholars, Lovers 58
Triangulating the Triangle: Arendt–Heidegger–Anders 63

4 Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke: Love Songs to God 69

Kafka 69
Rilke 71
Angels 74
Elegies: Poetry and Hearing/Poetry and the Schma 76
The Cherry Slaughter: Back to Love 82

5 Between the Lines: Benjamin’s Angels of History and Anders’ Apocalypse 88

Having Been 88
Angels of History 89
Time 92
Heidegger and Time: New Rules 94
Time/Space 101
Whose Holocaust? Which Genocide(s)? 106
Once More, With Feeling 107

6 Anders and Adorno: Genocide 110

On What We Have Done 110
Singulare Tantum: Whose Genocide? Which Genocide? 114
Thinking the Holocaust 115
Colonialism and the Exploitation of the Globe 118

7 From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 123

Economy, Power and Possibility, Impotence and Sexuation 123
From Consumption to Biotech 125
Manufacture and Art: Homo Materia 129

Part Two Anders, Media, Music 135

8 Radio Ghosts 137

Ghosts 137
Radio Transforms: Politics and Music 138
Phenomenology’s Ghosts: Anders’ Phenomenology of Radio Listening 141
Media-Induced, Collective, “Autism” 148

9 Being-in-Music 152
Music Critique and Musical “Situation” 152
Situational Phenomenology: Underway to a Hermeneutics of Music 154
 
Contents vii

Positive Attunement: Sociological Reflections on the Musical “Situation” 160

Transformation and Transfiguration 163
Critical Sociology of Music 165
Being-In 166

10 Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance”: From Anders’ “Radio

Leash” to Tracing 168
“Ground Control to Major Tom” 168
Political Philosophies of Technologies 169
The Skies Down to Earth: Being Without Time 176

11 Pop Music (and Jazz), and Covers (and Copies) 181

Transitioning: From Anders’ Radio “Leash” to Cohen’s Hallelujah 181
Death and Taxes 183
Pop as Contemporary Music: Fortunes and Futures 184
Cover Culture 187
Darker Stars: Death and Silence 193

Part Three Schizotopic Thought: Planetarism and Apocalypse Blindness 195

12 Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 197

From the Holocaust to Hiroshima: “Chernobyl is Everywhere” 197
Other Than, One More Time 197
“Seit ein Gespräch wir sind” 202
Violence Contra Violence 205
What about Violence: Yes? or No? 207

13 “The Devil’s New Apartment” 209

Apocalyptic Thinking 209
Nightmare 210
Counting Industrial Revolutions 213
Weather Talk: How to Do Things with Clouds 215
The “Modern Prometheus” 221
Geoforming, Masks, and Us 221
“Cosmic Parvenus” 223

Notes 227
Bibliography 278
Name Index 312
Subject Index 318
 Figures

1 Film scene of Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang. Photo credit: bpk
Bildagentur / Horst von Harbou / Art Resource, NY 31
2 Film scene of Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang. Alfred Abel,
Brigitte Helm, Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Photo credit: Adoc-photos/
Art Resource, NY 31
3 Hans Baldung Grien, “Weibermacht.” Woodcut of Phyllis seated on
Aristotle on all fours, with Alexander peering from the parapet. 1513.
Wikicommons. Public domain 60
4 Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, New York City. Photograph, Babette
Babich, December 12, 2018 73
5 Günther Stern and Hannah Arendt, January 1, 1929. Photo credit:
Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust/Art Resource, NY 80
6 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem;
Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo credit:
HIP/Art Resource, NY 90
7 Paul Gustave Doré, Dante, Paradiso, Canto 31. The Saintly Throng in the
Form of a Rose. Wikicommons. Public domain 104
8 Trinity atomic bomb explosion, Rapatronic image. July 16, 1945, 05:29:45,
Mountain Wartime. Alamogordo Test Range, Jornada del Muerto Desert.
Courtesy of US government Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Wikicommons 104
9 Ferdinand Barth (1842–92), Der Zauberlehrling (1797). Goethe’s
Werke, 1882, Ink drawing. Wikicommons. Public domain 173
 Preface

This book was begun before the Covid-19/Coronavirus crisis of 2020 (as of this
writing, still ongoing), and yet Günther Anders (1902–92), the philosopher of
modern media technology, is perhaps more significant than most philosophers today
not least because his was explicitly a philosophy of isolation, what Anders called
“home-working,” a kind of labour distinguished by being mediated and effected by
the media. Anders argued that such homework focused on the homeworker, was
conducted alone, and potentially without limit. In addition, this homework was often
self-elected, without any direct connection between the worker and the industry that
profited from that labour and that that ‘homework’ was often self-financed to boot:
one paid in order to have the privilege to provide such work on behalf of corporate
benefit, a kind of sharecropping practice in the age of what Anders’ named the
“second industrial revolution” and which we know as the age of social media. For
this reason, Anders’ argument seems uncannily relevant to the conditions of life as
we live today, even before recent social distancing restrictions, as many of us ‘lived’
online, by way of and through the screen, the cell phone, the tablet, and laptop/
computer.
This makes Anders worth reading, and yet, like other scholars of his era, other
thinkers in the tradition of philosophy called, for want of a better designation,
“continental” as opposed to “mainstream” or “analytic” style university philosophy,
simply in order to begin to read Anders, one must have a sense of his antecedents, his
teachers, his tradition. It adds complexity to note that Anders, as one of the founders
of the early Frankfurt School, having been present from the start along with his first
wife, Hannah Arendt,would preserve his allegiance to critical theory throughout his
thinking and his life.
But philosophers and cultural and critical theorists whether in sociology or
ethnography or political theory have their habitual references, and Anders is not quite
included among such references. When a proper philosophical biography is available—
and this must await a full understanding of his thought—one will be able to argue that
Anders was obscured from a light that, by any number of rights, he should have shared.
The reason for this is not a matter of accidental or incidental inattention but at times
calculatedly academic: scholars refused to read him, experts asked to vet translation
proposals refused, presses that commission such expert judgement declined to publish
his work, both his creative efforts and his theoretical writings or else, especially in the
case of the former, delayed publishing until such time as it ceased to matter for the vital
communicative energy essential for the life of scholarship. I have for years sought to
draw attention to what is missed via silencing, failure to mention, failure to note. There
is no way I can make up for this in this study, but in general I try to footnote references
to alternate interpretations as well as further reading.
x Preface

To be sure, this seems to be changing, and Anders is increasingly read. At the same
time, access is often advanced in a narrow fashion that ignores or else dismisses other
readings, other perspectives. A blinkered approach, if common in academia, given
‘received views,’ insider circles and publication cartels and such like, is not the best
way to approach Anders, if only owing to the critical question of breadth: reading
Anders requires all the background indicated earlier. One needs the resources of
phenomenology, hermeneutics, including both theological and literary hermeneutics,
sociology, including sociology of music and literature, media studies especially but not
only radio and television, film and print media, all in addition to taking the politics of
Anders’ own life, his own ‘situation’ very seriously and very much in his own way, read
according to his own very particular and stylistically distinctive slant.
In addition, though this text can only graze this theme, Anders enjoyed a gnostic
view of the world, even more so perhaps than Jacob Taubes or Hans Jonas, both
of whom, unlike Anders, enjoyed a wide readership. The text to follow will only
obliquely point to this dimension, fitting for the esoteric. At the same time, this text is
predominantly philosophical, focused largely on technology. For this reason, it cannot
encompass all arenas of Anders’ thought, though it seeks to do more than most as
this is dictated throughout by Anders’ own focus as he mixed his own themes. There
is always more to be done than has been done by other authors, and this book offers
another perspective on Anders than can otherwise be found. There will, of course, be
more to say.
 Gratitude and a Prefatory Note
on Acknowledgements

In Anders’ own spirit, it is hoped that there will someday be a broad and vital
community of interlocutors for the sake of scholarship and critique. Essential for such
hoped-for community cannot but be mutual engagement, citation, and cross reading:
scholar to scholar.
I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of a key webpage initiated and, most
importantly, maintained by Harold Marcuse on Anders’ life and work, chronicling
research on and translations of his work.
I am grateful to Günther Anders’ nephew, David Michaelis, the son of Anders’
sister, Eva Stern, for engagement and support via email and, indeed, social media: his
encouraging words were sustaining.
I thank those who made it possible to give lectures on or to publish work on Günther
Anders, whether directly or indirectly. Thanks are owed to Andreas Beinsteiner, Roger
Berkowitz, Dmitri Ginev, Annette Hornbacher, Christopher John Müller, Vallori
Rassini, David Rasmussen, Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépaly, Georg Zenkert, and, most
recently, for a kind invitation to Galway, Felix Ó Murchadha as well as his colleague,
Rod Stoneman.
Here, too, I acknowledge, with gratitude, Bloomsbury’s Lucy Russell and Liza
Thompson. I also thank Joseph Gautham and Giles Herman. Thanks are owed to
Michaela Latini along with Alessandra Sannella for inviting me to contribute a lecture
for a conference on “Violence” in Cassino, Italy. The opportunity, even after so many
years, to visit a landscape and architectural sites still marked by the contour of death
was important for this book. And I thank Teodosio Orlando.
The New School philosopher, Jerry Kohn, has my admiration for his scholarship
and gratitude for his kindness in writing to me on some of the work relating to the
current project.
I thank Tracy Burr Strong for his insights on the array of complicated topics that
make up the current study.
And, despite his efforts against Anders, or perhaps because of these, I thank my
Stony Brook teacher, Don Ihde.
 Acknowledgements

Books grow out of an author’s earlier essays, scholarly debates and exchanges,
retrospective reflections, collegial conversations. I thank my indirect interlocutors:
these are those numerous authors who have written on Anders in German as in French
and in English. Some of their names are found in the bibliography. I have also noted
conversational partners earlier, including scholars and not less those editors who have
published my writing on Anders. And, although in every case, substantially revised for
the present book, I draw here on my published work developed over many decades on
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Ivan Illich,
Jean Baudrillard, and not less on Günther Anders himself. Because of the changes
made and updates needed for the sake of the constellation that is the current book, it
would be misleading to list previously published chapters but I do draw on all the work
listed under my name in the bibliography.
All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are the author’s own.
 Abbreviations

AM I Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der
zweiten industriellen Revolution.
AM II Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen; Zweiter Band. Über die Zerstörung
des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten Industriellen Revolution
EH Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
FW Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
GT Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie
KS Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt
MS Anders, Musikphilosophische Schriften
PC Stern/Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy”
PM Anders, “The World as Phantom and Matrix.”
QCT Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
SZ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
TA Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air
xiv
 Introduction

Black Stars

The OED tells us that a “schlimazel” is a “consistently unlucky accident-prone person.”1

The meaning I grew up with (between Brooklyn and Manhattan) references bad luck
inherited, as it were, from birth: no amount of decency, hard work, or effort can shift
the odds in such a person’s favour. Thus, for the etymology, a slimazel is a Yiddish term
combining the old High German slim—in today’s German that is schlimm—with the
Hebrew, mazzāl, meaning luck. If Günther Anders might seem to fit such a description,
he also utterly lacked any sense of fated ressentiment all the while being fully aware that
favours were often denied him.
To this extent, this book seeks to avoid the typical Anders-cliché that one can
find in many publications: emphasizing that Anders was, as indeed he was, one of
the most persistently ignored thinkers of the twentieth century. Instead, attention to
the complexities of ill-aspected fortune or luck can underscore that it is arguably the
extent of Anders’ thinking that complicates his reception, as his thought ranges over
Frankfurt School–style critical theory as well as phenomenology and hermeneutics
via Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger, but also over sociology and
literature and music, including literary theory and the sociology of music as articulated
across the spectrum of music history and theory, composition, and performance
practice, and also popular reception and musical critique, expression, and reception,
quite in addition to a philosophical anthropology in the lineage of Scheler and Walter
Benjamin, who was Anders’ cousin, and Theodor Adorno.
And then there is media criticism.
And then there is technology.2
Anders undertook to raise the question of the human being in an age of
technologically intensified reproducibility, much along the lines that Benjamin had
written about this technical capacity/promise. Rather than addressing the work of art
as such, despite Anders’ interest in art as such, including music and literature, as well
as, although critical reflection on this exceeds the limits of this study, Anders’ own
creative writing as essayist and novelist, thinking the working of the literary work as
art, and reflecting on the performative dimension of actively composing–, actively
playing–, and actively listening-to-music, Anders was also interested in the soul.
Such was the topic of his first book on the outdated/antiquated human being whose
“soul” Anders understood by way of a certain attuned or musical sense with reference
to the Judaic tradition and its acoustics as also with reference to St Augustine and
his musical examples intertwined with a reflection on time. This includes allusion to
2 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Kant and Husserl and Heidegger as a gnostic dimension, although as I have already
noted, fully tracing out this last will be beyond the current focus, except in the most
liminal way.
In a series of iterations, Anders’ book on “the second industrial revolution” is
addressed to readers including both atheists and theologians in the era of not the
Hegelian but the Nietzschean ‘death of God.’ For Anders, this is characteristic not
of religious experience but its “frustration” at least as expressed variously by Rilke,
Kafka, and Beckett, authors Anders counts as those—notice the formula—who “do
not experience God. [daß sie Gott nicht erfahren]”3 Spanning two world wars, the
instauration of the industrial turn in the twentieth century installs the human being, for
Anders, in express counterpoise and, hence, note thereby Anders’ reference to shame
and inadequacy, to a different kind of genesis, illuminated as deficient by contrast with
the manufactured object, the Gerät, the gadget, the tech fetish or consumer product in a
serried scheme and component part of the same industrial assembly Heidegger named
Ge-Stell. Although a critic, Anders assumes and presupposes the Heideggerian Ge-Stell
as the assemblage essential to the perfection of the Gerät, as the “must have” as this
variable object changes in a social-historical constellation, materially speaking, from
moment to moment. Our technological absorptions are thus articulated as a series of
metonymic sediments, via the machine, as Kant epitomized the schema inherited from
Descartes and Spinoza and, above all, Leibniz. Not a clock, not a computer (and today
one can add genomic and nanotech technologies to the mix), in an era confident of
the machine’s perfectibility and its progressing-accession, what is key is the next “new”
thing. Different from Gilbert Simondon’s more popular object concerns, Anders’ soul
musing in his “anthropological phenomenology”4 explores the fate of the human in a
nihilistic era quite in place of deity and by phantasmatic contrast with a technological
product of a system of technology and its products—Anders never forgets that this is
a capitalist constellation, even in post-war cultures that claim the flag of communism
or socialism—for the members of that technological society. There are parallels to be
made with the work of the sociologists Jacques Ellul, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio
in terms of symbol and sign and not less fetishized design qua mark of “distinction”
and thereby also parallels with Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau and others.
Thus, one can speak of sociology and anthropology or ethnography, as of psychology,
but always in a philosophical and, for Anders, expressly phenomenological context.
Characteristic of Anders—and here perhaps the best parallels would be with
Ivan Illich and, in a more contemporary voice, with Giorgio Agamben and, again,
Virilio—is a clear focus on the postlapsarian condition. This all-too-human condition
was expressed via the language of shame: the shame of having been born as such
but not as contrasted with deity in its eclipse, much as Heidegger also emphasized
following a long theological tradition of reflection on silence as speech and as
medium of encounter. Anders’ focus on the soul was also a focus on technology, and
to this extent he undertook a theological turn in critical theory, raising questions
that were not always received and were often otherwise unasked with respect to “the
world,” as Anders spoke of it, as “phantom and matrix,” adumbrated through the
spectral echoing of radio broadcasts, ghosts of television and film, and doubling
and displacing humans in what had been a different situatedness in the world, now
 
Introduction 3

directed by a set of programmes to which the human being himself or herself actively
attended, directed, and curated and, ultimately, in which they lived their lives. For
Anders, this is all about copies in the age, as Benjamin spoke of it, of technological
reproducibility and digital reproducibility. This is our world today, and Anders can
help us to understand it.
Anders’ two main works correspond less to conventional academic monographs—
Anders lacked an academic position which also meant that he was free from the
tribal tithes required of the same—than collections of expositions, deliberately
arrayed variations in the spirit of the phenomenological tradition in which he was
trained. Thus, the aforementioned focus on the soul [die Seele] could be allied to
musical sociological and phenomenological anthropological reflections articulating
nothing less than the world around the human being, the human in medias res of
the world, music, radio, film, television, literature, and theatre but also war and
in particular the atomic bomb that made wartime a never-ending affair. To this
extent, Anders offers us a philosophical reflection on what may also be named a
phenomenological anthropology of the human being, and to this same extent he
tends to steer clear of the Hegelianism that had in his era so dominated the twentieth
century and that still continues to reign, typically associated with other names, in
the twenty-first century.
If Anders argues in his first book that the human soul had undergone a series
of transformations in the second industrial, technological epoch, in his second
book (collection) he reflected on the transforms effected by the third industrial age,
inaugurated, as he wrote of the succession of such eras and well in place by the mid-
twentieth century. In each case, the human being was antiquated/outdated by no less
effective means than that of his own projections, against which that same human being
found himself or herself lacking. In his first book, the shame was in being a creature
rather than a precision product manufactured to specs, corrigible and thus perfectible
to infinity. Today’s GMO/mRNA transforms fit this as well, if more concerned with
‘gain of function’ (again to spec) and trackability.
Anders’ phenomenological anthropology is thus articulated as a critical theory
of technology; its concerns include broadcast media and, given his own cultural
theoretical interests, music. In addition, and this addition presented for some readers
a certain dissonance, Anders includes a reflection on violence, personalized and
reflected and unremitting. These reflections range from not only the First World
War, which he observed in France as a member of a youth corps, but also the Second
World War, including the violence in the Pacific as well as, on its cusp, the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through to Korea and Vietnam and a range of
wars that followed, including, at the end of Anders’ life, Grenada and the Gulf War
itself, mediated via television and embedded or circumscribed reportage. Anders’
philosophy takes us beyond his century into our own, as we meet the new face of war,
increasingly conducted from the sky and with the sky, and now given air pollution
and socially mandated masks, through the air we breathe (or do not breathe), all the
way to the force multipliers of climate manipulation, with scalar and sonic warfare,
uncontrolled forest fires, earthquakes, and geo-forming, along with drone warfare at a
distance, literal weather warfare, and geoengineering.
4 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

On the “We” of the “With-World” and Social Media

It is a characteristic of reflections on Anders that these typically begin by focusing on the
fact that Anders’ name is not his name. Thus the name Anders is often read as a mark
of distinction. Anders means “other,” or “otherwise,” and to this extent, underscores the
character of an outsider, Aussenseiter, a Fremdling, a word Anders also uses to describe
himself.5 But it is characteristic of human nature that those who are other, those excluded,
are often regarded as an object of some envy by the groups that excluded them. This
dynamic is certainly part of what Hegel analyses as his master–slave dialectic, and yet
we need more, if only because the Hegelian dialectic as such will not suffice, not after
Nietzsche,6 nor, even more specifically, after Anders himself as not after Adorno (given
his Negative Dialectics),7 nor after Horkheimer, or Paul Virilio or Jean Baudrillard. “Etc.,
etc.,” just to quote Anders’ own tribute to the excess that belongs to any such listing in the
recollected course of his recollection of his conversations with Hannah Arendt.
The dynamic between exclusion–persecution and resentment–envy is complicated.
Thus, Anders observes that everyone in a technological age can take himself or herself
to be an outsider, to be as Moses once found himself, a stranger in a strange land, a
designation taken over by a popular science fiction author for a crucial and crucially
successful novel in the genre. Anders himself would not have success with his own
novels, but he nonetheless characterized today’s very human condition: today we
are all outsiders, no one more than anyone else; all of us are onlookers, spectators,
consumers captivated by programmes (today that can be no more than a social
media feed) advertising the newest news along with the newest consumer products.
Here the parallel is with Nietzsche’s language of the “all-too-human” rather than the
numinous constellations that underly “posthuman” ambitions. Anders thus advanced
the consequences of the claim that we are alienated from ourselves, “shamed” by
means of nothing less “concrete” than radio programmes and television broadcasts,
transmissions, and mediations. These are the vapours Marx and Engels allude to when
they write in 1848 in their Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at
last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind.8

Marx’s allusion to what becomes “antiquated” resonates in the title of Anders’

constellation of intersecting reflections on human antiquatedness, Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen.9 At the same time that Marx foregrounds, quite as Anders does, the “constant
revolutionizing of the instruments of production,”10 ageing before time (think of new
products and new ages, space-, computer-, information-, digital-, Anthropocene-),
including for Marx the transformation of guilds and traditional mastery, Anders
highlights the becoming-antiquated effected by ghosts, shadows, on and with radio,
the projections of film, programmed television broadcast, permanently returned in
closed circuits, cable or wired access, wirelessly networked, now streaming, live or on
 
Introduction 5

YouTube or social media videos on demand, with- or without-your-leave in public

squares, on mass transit, in taxis, in sports bars.
Pocket convenience turns out to be the mode for Dick Tracy-style wristwatch
walkie-talkies, Star Trek-era communicators not at all unlike (depends on the model)
our cell phones. Today’s smartphones and tablets do the same job: we are become-
cyborg via the same transportable means Anders describes invoking transistor radios,
and connected or meaning to be connected at all times, we carry our instruments of
alienation on our person, or even embedded as digital hacks or via injection, more
conventionally, at all times. In a literal sense, we are all Americans-by-proxy, living
as global citizens, quite as Nietzsche described the new world ethos of American
ambition, driven by speed, “One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, the one eats one’s
midday meal, with one eye on the financial papers, one lives as if one way continually
might ‘miss out on something’” (FW, §329).
Anders’ term seems to be Dick Tracy dated, “gadget-envy,” but it is an enduring
condition to this day. Hence, by updating Goethe’s 1797 tale, Der Zauberlehrling,
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,”11 Anders appropriates the second-century (CE) Lucian’s
morality tale, complete with mystery cults and roses and the seemingly as if made
for TV, transmogrifications that could turn a boy into an ass, and Shakespeare draws
on the same magic, transmogrifications that trap him in that new condition—the
Pinocchio story simply tells this account in reverse, ditto the mechanical mystery dolls
of the Tales of Hoffmann. Anders tells the same cautionary tale by way of Goethe, who
himself took over Wieland’s translation of Lucian’s account, in order in the middle of
the 1950s to tell us ourselves in the age of the gadget quite up to the current day as we
await not the second coming but the next iPhone, apple computer, new camera, new
car, new booster shot. But by now we are talking about transhumanism.
Today, this is mediated by pocket electronics, “pocket robots,”12 as such things
are the hacks that rather than jetpacks turn out to be the essence of the transhuman.
For some, especially among the young, but also among the disaffected, this complex
dynamic of voyeurism and trolling characterizes all of us. Richard Seymour writes
in his book titled with reference to Paul Klee’s 1922 painting of the same name, The
Twittering Machine,13 that “we are all addicts” and “we are all trolls”—whereby both
addiction and trolling are effected, and this is the beginning point of my The Hallelujah
Effect, by nothing more than the miniscule feedback of a click—liking or sharing or
retweeting something.
It was to analyse media programming on social media, Facebook and Twitter, that
I began the reflections that led to The Hallelujah Effect, musical observations initially
published in an online music magazine, with the glorious name PerfectSoundForever.
The essay focussed on YouTube music videos, specifically Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah
(and k.d. lang’s interpretation and gender norms and expectations and so on), on the
face of it a vastly more innocuous phenomenon by contrast with the attention shock of
Seymour’s example, as he begins by describing a series of self-curated suicide videos.14
Here we note the ongoing consequences of homeworking in extremis, as Anders had
already analysed in “The World as Phantom and Matrix,”15 already published in English
more than half a century ago as the world-estranged “situation” of the human being
in a technologically mediatized epoch, not metaphorically but even before Lockdown:
6 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

“Only after the human being has closed the door behind him, does the outside world
become visible to him; only after we have been transformed into windowless monads,
does the universe reflect itself in us.”16
The mix of distracted fascination, as Adorno and Anders (and so I would argue
Nietzsche likewise) tell us, using the first-person plural form for emphatic inclusion—
“we” like what we recognize—combined with the transient urgency of responding to
this in real time, the sooner the better — for Seymour, “we are all celebrities,” or, as I
remark in a lighter mode, regarding our affective lives: “we are all royals.”17
This can shed further light on the “outsider” condition that is a consequence of
sustained self-preoccupation. In his Art & Fear, Paul Virilio highlights some of the
darker consequences of the streaming human condition that has for some time
corresponded to video culture.18 And there are compounding factors, as recently the
analytic philosopher Kate Manne has described a phenomenon called “himpathy,”
a phenomenon of kipped sympathy, in this case a tendency to privilege the male
offender over his (often) female victim, which is no exception but mainline.19 This is
also the dynamic of George Orwell’s dystopian 1945 fantasy, Animal Farm, where some
are more favoured—the current global “pandemic” only dramatizes this with greater
urgency—and some are more “equal” than others.
The mix in these foregoing introductory reflections of themes (and more besides)
is necessary to read Anders. He approached the problems of his day—problems that
continue to be contemporary problems—with insights drawing upon and across classical
philology and theology, anthropology, sociology, and musicological and musical critical
reflections which made up his particular stylistic kind of continental philosophy (I have
argued that continental philosophy is primarily a stylistic distinction,20 as opposed to a
geographic one or as opposed to subject matter or focus on any given historical figure).
Earlier I referenced Kate Manne’s notion of “himpathy” because it may illustrate what
can seem to be strangely characteristic of the privileged, who can tend to insist on the
singular quality of their own sufferings, claiming exceptionality in all respects, including
the “exceptionality” of exclusion, even persecution as one can see this in the phenomenon
Manne also analyses of men’s rights groups, including their self-designation as “incels.”
This last complex of privileged self-absorption is the stuff of psychology—about which
Anders knew a great deal from his earliest years—his psychologist mother analysed and
publicized his childhood—as it is also about competition. In our media-driven, exposed
age, this can appear as the desire to claim exceptional status (the tag line of Garrison
Keilor’s radio comedy show, Lake Woebegone, “where all the children are above-
average”), deserving of consideration, compensation, sympathy, and understanding
and, above all, more regard than others, has never been more widespread.

Life and Legacy

Analyses of addictive self-absorption are not rare but Anders was a born Aussenseiter.
Born as Günther Stern in Breslau, on July 12, 1902, he died on December 17,
1992, in Vienna. There have been a number of books on Anders in the decades of what
 
Introduction 7

nonetheless continues to be dampened reception, and one of these exemplifies what

has become cliché in the interim, introducing him as “the most neglected German
philosopher of the twentieth century.”21 In addition, Anders’ scholarship tends to be
insular (specialized scholarship is generally so); thus, the claim is less than accurate.
Thus, Christopher John Müller and David Mellor can point to an explosion of interest
in his work, counting some fifty books over the past two decades.22 But this is not to
say that today scholarly inattention has been overcome, and Anders’ name retains its
outsider qualities largely because his concerns, as I argue, are not reflected in today’s
mainstream philosophical canon. In addition, Christian Fuchs argues that Anders is
not prominent in media studies.23 To the disciplinary roster, as I have already-noted
theology and political theory, anthropology/ethnography and sociology, hermeneutico-
phenomenological approaches are rare enough in any case, and I hardly need to add
music studies despite the fact that there are studies of Anders and music. That Anders
also has vital contributions to critical cultural theory more broadly, including poetry
and aesthetics, has had the effect of making it harder, and not easier, to receive him,
even after all this time, quite in spite of the efforts of many scholars, generating a
kaleidoscope of various claims to have “discovered” him.
To be sure, there are similar issues when it comes to other “outsider, outlier”
thinkers like the reception/non-reception of the already-noted Jacques Ellul or Ivan
Illich (parallels may also be found in the reception, as it comes and goes, of the more
mainstream Michel de Certeau). But what can be done? It seems scholarly habitus, to
echo Bourdieu, to constitute pockets of scholarship that turn on themselves. In this way,
fiefdoms are established, and scholars exclude in their own turn consideration of other
authors who work on the same thinker, while other scholars similarly tend (quite for
the most part) themselves to exclude others in their turn as opposed to including other
scholars on the same path. This is done with a good conscience as one from time to time
reflects that one cannot read everything. The conundrum haunts the academy if it is,
at the same time, the precisely normativizing essence of what Thomas Kuhn defined as
“normal science.” Indeed, outsiders conduct themselves quite as insiders in their turn.
The point here with respect to Anders goes beyond inadvertence or neglect. There
is a legacy of scholarship on Anders, and yet, and at the same time, this scholarship
is insular, excluding, unless one takes pains to do otherwise, attention to different
voices. This exclusion plays out on many levels, ranging from analytic or mainstream
philosophy to so-called “continental” philosophy with the result—the tactic is self-
destructive—that such scholarship tends in turn to be ignored.24 “Nevertheless”—to
quote Katherine Hepburn’s response to a hostile German captain in the 1951 film,
The African Queen, challenging the fact that she and Bogart successfully traversed a
putatively unnavigable swamp—Anders remains an essential thinker for our over-
surveilled, digitally absorbed era, and this is a book about him.

A Star Among Other Stars

Anders’ fame is of the metonymic variety as he is associated with the well-known.
And Hannah Arendt begins her “Introduction” to the translation of the collection
8 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations by writing about fame, under the title of the
Roman goddess Fama: observing of “posthumous fame” that it is hardly to be
aspired to—“rarer and least desired”25 (an odd contention given that Kant himself
predicted philosophical fame as at best to be attained only after an interval of a
century, and Nietzsche described himself as “posthumous,” and Heidegger, her
former lover, apparently dedicated himself, so it has been argued, to the pursuit of
little else). Even more perplexing is Arendt’s twofold contention, the first part of
which is indisputable but the second (regarding the lucrative value of the work)
precisely not so, whereby “The one who stood most to profit is dead and hence it
is not for sale. Such posthumous fame, uncommercial and unprofitable, has now
come in Germany to the name and work of Walter Benjamin.” And all of this is true
of Benjamin.
It is almost inevitable that I start with Arendt and Benjamin, as Anders is arguably
the most famous ex-husband in philosophy—as Arendt’s first husband—or else the
most famous relative—Anders was Benjamin’s cousin26 and, in the same lineage,
Anders was the brother of the Holocaust hero, Eva Michaelis-Stern.27 He was also,
as already noted, famous as a child for being a child: the subject of a certain intimate
notoriety as mid-born son of famous experimental psychologists in a book authored
by his father and mother, William and Clara Stern (complete with scenes from his
childhood featuring in a popular case study account of child rearing) and a further
Tagebuch published by his mother.28 Name-wise, Anders was also his father’s son, his
father having been the famous William Stern, inventor of the IQ test.
Besides his ex-wife and his famous cousin—for many, Benjamin has more star
value than both Adorno and Heidegger put together—and apart from serving as case
material for his famous father’s research in developmental child psychology, Anders
was also a student of leading philosophical movements of the day, both the famous and
the faded. He studied with Heinrich Wölfflin and Wolfgang Köhler, among others, as
well as Husserl and Heidegger. In 1924, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on situational
categories and logical propositions under Husserl.29
Anders went on to work (with less-than-concretely positive results) with Paul
Tillich, and he was from the start a member of the original Frankfurt School—which
one must say to distinguish it from what it became after Adorno’s death from the 1970s
onwards—with Adorno, Horkheimer, the elder Marcuse, and others. This proximity
led some (Hannah Arendt) to blame Adorno for Anders’ lack of advances, while others
faulted the then-increasing Nazi politics in Frankfurt. Although Anders worked with
Max Scheler (he was briefly his assistant) and with Helmut Plessner on philosophical
anthropology,30 he sought to habilitate himself with a project in the situational sociology
of music under Tillich: Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen.31
The habilitation project failed to come to fruition for a host of reasons—things of
this kind are fairly overdetermined—but most decidedly because Tillich asserted his
incompetence as reader.32
Anders published his doctoral dissertation, quite as one must, along with a
monograph on the nature of “having,”33 reflecting the influence of Husserlian
phenomenology. The latter was to influence Gabriel Marcel, who took it over.34
Importantly, given Anders’ hostility to him, Heidegger’s influence is patent both in
 
Introduction 9

Anders’ monograph on having/not having (published one year after Being and Time)
and Anders’ musical phenomenological reflections on “listening-to.”35
In his musical phenomenology, beginning 1927 onwards and under the influence
of Husserl and others, Anders, who played piano and violin, followed the experimental
psychology of Carl Stumpf, the research framework being practically familiar to him
from his own father’s technical study (and invention) of the tone variator (a device used
in psychological research to study tone perception).36 Anders thus raised the question
of the phenomenology of music from the experiential perspective of the musician,
especially the composer but also the performer who lived, as it were, “in-music,” to
use Anders’ lived experiential term. His existential-phenomenological orientation
afforded Anders a perspective from which he might underscore the difference between
lifeworlds, as he argued that the musician counted his “real life” not as the life of the
everyday lifeworld but “in-music.”37
In exile from his country and lacking the security of university employment
enjoyed by many post-war émigrés, Anders, in his 1956 book, Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen,38 wrote one of the most prescient accounts of the human relationship to
technology in terms of the human relationship to the very media we today name
“social media.” Often rendered, doubtless owing to a Francophone influence, as The
Obsolescence of Humanity, the rendering is inapt not least because Anders ascribes
the term “obsolete” to Ernst Bloch, lamenting his resistance to “even considering the
event of Hiroshima” (AM II, 20). Arguably, The Antiquatedness of Humanity would
suit as “Antiquiertheit” includes many of the meanings associated with the English
“antiquated.” At issue is being “outdated”: périmée.
It is relevant to note that Anders would use the same title for a second volume of
his essays, subtitled Concerning the Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial
Revolution, published in 1980.
I have suggested that Anders does not offer a systematic monograph but to say this is
not to say that his work is not systematically executed. What will be important to note,
and in what follows I will try to highlight this, is Anders’ style together with his attention
to his titles, systematically arrayed. Thus, the first volume of The Antiquatedness of
Humanity, subtitled Concerning the Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution,
begins with a reflection “On Promethean Shame,”39 followed by “The World as Phantom
and Matrix,” a chapter published in the very same year in English. Indeed, adding
Anders’ intermezzo in his first book, “Sein ohne Zeit. Zu Becketts Stück ‘En Attendant
Godot’”—available since 1965 as “Being Without Time: On Beckett’s Play, Waiting for
Godot”40—to his “Reflections on the H-Bomb,” it is significant that as of the current
writing, more than the half of Anders’ first book is extant in English. But still there is
inattention, and part of the reason may have to do with the entirety of the third section,
published as it was more than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dedicated to
what will become a lifelong engagement with atomic weapons/power: “Concerning
the Bomb and the Roots of our Apocalypse-Blindness.” Although some of Anders’
writings on atomic power are also available in English,41 Anglophone philosophy can
be inclined to distinguish such concerns from philosophy proper, regarding them as
activist or politicized or part of a peace movement, or anti-war/anti-atomic power
movement. This tendency testifies to the various ways that a thinker like Anders (and
10 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

like Ellul, like Illich, like Virilio, and Baudrillard, etc.) can remain marginalized in
philosophy proper and most perniciously in philosophy of technology.
Both of Anders’ volumes on The Antiquatedness of Humanity have been available in
French as of 2002 and 2011, respectively. And, as noted, the first portions of Anders’
The Antiquatedness of Humanity have already been in English for more than sixty
years, a point that should be coupled with the presence in English of Anders’ Kafka
book (as of 1960, with an early essay available in 1949), such that some part of Anders’
enduring invisibility has to be ascribed to scholarly inattention rather than a simple
lack of translation. Still, it matters to attend to Anders’ own systematic articulation of
his own endeavour and in the important and perhaps all-too-timely second volume
on “life” in the era of the third industrial revolution, Anders, who was preternaturally
fond of lists (and ‘commandments’), lays out a systematic array of variations, as it were,
on Antiquatedness. Thus, if I emphasize that the Francophone “obsolescence” does not
quite convey the force of “Antiquiertheit,” it is firstly because Anders himself uses the
German equivalent of obsolescence but also because what is at stake is more ancient,
more outmoded, and more out of date, than the simply obsolete. As Baudrillard would
remind us, the latter is always part of, which is to say that the latter assumes, a “system”
of objects.42 And the problem for Anders is older and more complex than that—which
is why he needs a reference to both Aeschylus and Genesis.
In the second 1980 collection, comprised of essays composed after 1956, Anders
offers an account of not merely his “three industrial revolutions” (1979) but also of
the outmodedness of appearance (1979), materialism (1978) and products (1958)—
and it should be noted that these essays are themselves divided into significantly titled
subsections, such as the first section here, crucial for the young Baudrillard: “Serial
products are born for death” (AM II, 38ff),43 is succeeded by the human world (1958/1961),
the masses (1961), work (1977), machines (1969), philosophical anthropology as such
(1979), the individual (1970), ideologies (1978), conformism (1958), limits — with
reference to atomic weapons (1979), privacy (1958),44 dying (a single page from 1979),
reality (for a symposium on mass media, 1960), freedom, history (1978), fantasy (1955), of
space and time (1959), seriousness, concerning “happenings” (1968), “meaning” (1972),
application (1979), incapacity [Nichtkönnens] (1975), and signally, the antiquatedness
of evil, with a first section on the transfigured sorcerer’s apprentice (1966), along with
a methodological retrospective (1979). I’ve added the dates to indicate the durability of
Ander’s thought but also because the constellation makes up the force of his book.

Suppression: Positivity and Neutrality

Anders’ work remains muffled. This muffling has incidental and accidental
components—many authors are unreceived, after all. But, quite by contrast with the
French and Italian tradition on Anders (the German tradition is its own separate
story), in philosophy of technology in the Anglophone world, inadvertence to Anders
is certainly, at least in part, the direct result of a tactic of suppression. Anders was
silenced by the Stony Brook philosopher who was also one of my teachers there,
 
Introduction 11

Don Ihde (1934–) who made a name for himself initially owing to the simplicity or
“accessibility” of his work as well as his explicit aggression contra any and all thinkers
apart from himself. This initially meant that he would seek to exclude reference to past
thinking; this is the rather literal force of ‘post-phenomenology’ as he conceived it, such
that he would favour, and this made him wildly popular among contemporary scholars
only contemporary scholars. Now at work here is a distinction between primary and
secondary scholarship. Secondary literature comments on a primary author and,
sometimes, on other secondary sources. By not commenting on other secondary authors,
consider the case of Stanley Cavell, say, one has a greater chance of being considered, it
worked in the case of Cavell, a primary author. More specific to Anders, here I draw on
his own account of it, Ihde nixed a proposed translation of Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit
des Menschen — The Antiquatedness of Humanity. Ihde’s reasons for this derived from
his emphasis, in addition to excluding past voices, on avoiding any hint of luddism
and thus the importance of approbative or expressly positive takes on technology. The
result could not but cool Anders’ reception. Even more than Heidegger and Marcuse,
and more than Ellul and Illich, Anders was an uncompromising critic of technology.45
Here, I follow Anders thematically and stylistically. To this extent, I engage some
of Anders’ more controversial positions, in particular his critical perspective on
technology. It is for this reason that I took care to note Ihde’s view that philosophy
of technology was best advanced by explicitly sidestepping critique: no Heidegger,
or as little Heidegger as possible, no Ellul, no Illich, no Baudrillard, no Virilio, and
no Anders. Ihde’s techno-positive approach dominates philosophy of technology
especially but not only in the Netherlands where Ihde’s influence is marked—a tad
ironic given that one of the first books on Anders and technology was written by the
late Paul van Dijk.46
Anders himself writes of the presumption of techno-neutrality—this is the thesis
that it is not the tool but the motivation or use that determines the effects of any given
technology:

Nothing is more misleading than the (to be sure rarely explicitly elaborated, but
in both right and left wing politics presupposed as self-evident) “Philosophy
of Technology,” which claims that instruments [Geräte] are in the first instance
“morally neutral,” and are freely available at our disposal for whatever use;
the sole issue that matters is only how we use them; what use we subsequently
impose on them: be it moral or immoral, humane or inhumane, democratic or
antidemocratic. (AM II, 216)

The idea here is that one is to have one’s tools and use them too, that is, that through
our good intentions we manage to avoid being, in Thoreau’s sense, in Bert Dreyfus’s
sense, and most particularly as the popular Neil Postman propagated this, the “tools of
our tools”47—being free to use them, quite as Heidegger argued as a high goal, the goal
of Gelassenheit, quite as if already a given. But for Anders, as he emphasizes repeatedly,
a tool, a technical object, is already its application or use.
If Ihde’s pro-tech imperative continues to reign, if scholarship has found ways to
advance positive assessments, if not quite “how to stop worrying and learn to love the
12 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

bomb,” from the subtitle of a film current in Ihde’s era, pro-transhumanist accounts
seem the order of the day as we may read in techno-salvific thinkers like Stefan Sorgner
with respect to a certain take on Nietzsche and with Steve Fuller making common
cause with Sorgner in sociology among to be sure many others writing on technology
and nihilism and so on.48
Sherry Turkle’s reflections on her own trajectory are instructive,49 quite where she
might have given Ihde some pro-tech competition at the start of her career but where
the course of her research brought her to the spirit of her Alone Together,50 a book in
which, quite independently, Turkle repeats Anders’ insights as he details these in “The
World as Phantom and Matrix,” the paradoxical means whereby screen media isolate
us from one another,51 creating a nation of what Anders called “homeworkers.”52
“Homeworker” is, once again, the term Anders uses for the “work” the consumer
does at home, in what was or would traditionally have counted as his free time, gratis
for both the government and for commercial interests, working on himself or herself
to produce himself or herself as a consumer.53 The product thus created at home is
fabricated by nothing more than favour, enthusiasm, interest, attention, “likes,” and
such. Anders and Adorno, and later Baudrillard, would emphasize this as in effect
fabricating or manufacturing a product sold, that is: our work on ourselves, as many
theorists tell us, as the content—‘you are the product’—of so-called “big data.”54 What
we have most recently (re)”discovered” in the phenomenon of “surveillance capitalism”
is the same culture industry Adorno and Horkheimer write about along with Anders,
but today this cannot be understood without the phenomenology of simulation and
illusion arguably best articulated between Debord and Baudrillard as well as, for another
tradition, Ellul and Illich and Postman.

Consumers and “Situations”

Anders maintained that consumers became “homeworkers” simply by consuming
mass media. Anders initially refers to radio and to television and print media and only
the internet in its earlier modalities and thus, some commentators may assume, apart
from the interactive interface we today take for granted. Nevertheless, tracked and
“surveilled” as we are, that interface remains unidirectional or programmatic, quite
as Jean Baudrillard always took care to emphasize the lack of response constitutive of
new media. This is the third point Anders emphasizes in his “The World as Phantom
and Matrix”: “Because the receiving sets speak in our place, they gradually deprive us
of the power of speech, thus transforming us into passive dependents” (PM 17). This
is the precondition for programming as much as it is the precondition for what we
name “fake news.” Here, despite his criticism of Heidegger, Anders emphasizes the
consequences of this shift in terms of the loss of language itself, reflecting:

For humanity’s inward life, its richness and subtlety, cannot endure without the
richness and subtlety of language; the human not only expresses himself through
his speech, he is also the product of his language. (PM 19, citation slightly altered)
 
Introduction 13

Elsewhere I emphasize the consequences of this same deficit with respect to music and
the culture of its iterative variation-replication or “cover” phenomenon keyed as this is
to recognition or what Anders analyses as “pseudo-familiarity.” Non-response is trained
via the illusion of instant response—“click here,” as the social commentator Evgeny
Morozov teases in a politicological context55—that makes such media engagements/
non-engagements as addictive as they are.56 Thus, simply by listening to radio, by
following television programmes, clicking on Facebook videos, Instagram, etc., the
consumer works tirelessly at this self-assigned, unpaid task. Nor was this homeworker
housebound, as Anders emphasized the then already utter transportability of
homeworked mobility: one could work as easily from home as on the road. Today, to
be sure, we do know what he means as we dedicate ourselves to working on our online
selves: living our lives in the private/public sphere dedicated to fabricating ourselves
as mediatic consumers. Anders liked to highlight the fact that we are eager to do this
homework all by ourselves, paying for the privilege of doing so.
The radio “homeworker,” like the television homeworker, like the new smartphone
or internet homeworker, paying as they go for a cellphone or an internet subscription,
not to mention the cost of equipment, accessories and upgrades,57 “works” from
“home” as they likewise “work” on the job, on the road, wherever that worker happens
to be. And it is work, even though we are not compensated as traditional homeworkers
might have been, even though we pay for the privilege of fabricating ourselves into
“consumers,” masses consuming mass goods created in self-absorbed bubbles of
isolation, all the more perfectly as the act of creation of ourselves in this image is
tweaked and is consumed or enacted at the same moment in a virtual, digital, socially
mediated age.
For Anders, reflecting in 1979 on observations he had already worked out in the
mid-1950s:

In such cases it is not actually the products themselves that serve as means of
production, but our acts of consumption—a truly shameful circumstance, inasmuch
as our human role here is reduced to guaranteeing, by way of the consumption of
products (for which, in addition, we also must pay), that production continues.58

The other side of Promethean shame, as Anders speaks of this, is not merely our tech-
anxiety, our desire to be the machine or to match the machine we have made (as if we
had a choice, assuming we wish to use the machine), with all the perks we imagine
that it has (thanks to advertising), but the attribution of responsibility. The “shame”
in question corresponds to a certain techno-theological reflection, and our acts of
consumption ensure the ongoing circumstance, be that matters of media or plastics in
the ocean, industrial farming and fishing, or indeed the mining of rare earths and the
extractions of fossil fuels flooding the ocean and the land with deadly pollution spills,
and the explosive damage done by fracking: we make ourselves consumers, but we also
make thereby the material conditions of many other problems that have for some time
been wreaking planetary havoc. Greater than the damage done to our psyche and our
health as consumers is what is done to the world by those same acts of consumption.
This aspect of Anders’ critique remains ongoing.
14 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Nomen est omen: “Other” Reflections

Misses and near misses can seem to have characterized the life of a man named “star”
[Stern], who, quite as if he declined the name Stern that was his own, also set himself
under a different star, one that resolutely refused to support him. According to a
popular story, owing to a surfeit of Stern surnames on a Berlin newspaper masthead,
when asked by an editor for another byline, Stern casually suggested (there is an echo
in German) “Anders” (something else, something other), which, if it is unlikely to be
literally true, is surely ben trovato.
Indeed, in her introductory essay to her collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings,
Arendt invokes what she calls “the element of bad luck,”59 citing Benjamin’s fondness for
the German fairy tale image of the “buchlicht Mannlein,” a cripple or hunchback, who
constantly interferes, a rather more literally destructive daemon than the cautionary
negative influence Socrates invokes for his part, the unanticipated misfortune that
seems to come along to add to one’s troubles, like the phrase ein Unglück kommt selten
allein, or as Arendt tells us that Benjamin’s mother would say to him (and thus one
cannot but imagine that Arendt herself heard the same from her own mother, not
uniquely but quasi-universally as a theme inherent in the “mother tongue” that Arendt
would underscore in a famous interview as missing in her own years as expatriate):

like millions of other mothers in Germany, used to say, “Mr. Bungle sends his
regards” (Ungeschickt lässt grüssen) whenever one of the countless little catastrophes
of childhood had taken place.60

Arendt quotes the adult Benjamin reflecting, not unlike the disposition, in two
senses of ‘disposition,’ of the angel of history constantly cited in the literature: “In
consternation he stands before a pile of debris.” And Arendt tracks this influence/
perturbation/identification in Benjamin’s life to Benjamin’s commentaries on the
letters of famous and not-so-famous figures: Deutsche Menschen, noting the array
of subtitles, their importance, and so on. The words Arendt cites are not quite to be
ascribed to Benjamin, deriving as they do from the publisher’s suggestion for the title,
and feature as subtitles on the cover, beautifully printed, all three lines:

Von Ehre ohne Ruhm

Von Grosse ohne Glanz
Von Wurde ohne Sold61

Certainly, Benjamin’s appreciation for the “right word” holds for Arendt as it served as
palimpsest for her introductory words.62
Arendt reads Benjamin reading Kafka as she could just as well have been reading
Anders, although she does not say this:

“an understanding of [Kafka’s] production involves, among other things, the

simple recognition that he was a failure)” (Briefe II, 614). What Benjamin said of
Kafka with such unique aptness applies to himself as well: “The circumstances of
 
Introduction 15

this failure are multifarious. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual
failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream.” (Briefe II, 764)63

The reference to hope, as we will see in the following text with respect to Anders as
indeed Adorno, can be traced here, as Arendt reminds us that this is not taken from
Kafka but Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “Hope passed over their heads like a star that
falls from the sky.”64 The language of the “bungler” is borrowed from Benjamin’s essay
on Kafka: “It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is
hope.”65
With respect to bungling, as it were, little seems to have turned out well for Stern/
Anders, be it his marriage(s) or unsuccessful efforts at habilitation or his literary efforts
or with respect to the academic reception of his published works given the lack of
resonance. On the other hand, success is its own trap for a scholar, and it may have
been owing to his lack of reception that Anders was able to become the clear-sighted
witness that he was to the force and violence of his century.
Who is who? Put the question differently, rather in the way Anders seeks to raise,
phenomenologically as he conceives the question of music and “musicking” as this
can be extended to academic presence: Who gets to be who? Who gets to be received?
How so?
For Anders, as it turns out, the “who” question is crucial, quite as it was for
Heidegger in Being and Time. Thus, Anders raises the same questions with respect to
what he names “musicking,” that is, music making. Who, Anders asks specifically, gets
to musicize? Who gets the opportunity to make music, to play music, to arrange it, to
listen to it? Related questions concern performers who are recorded: performers whose
songs are taken up by contrast with those whose songs are not. In a later chapter we will see
that in a “remix” culture, a culture of musical “covers,”66 this is related to the tendency to
credit some musician’s names above others.67 As Adorno asks, thematizing the culture
industry as fait accompli, who gets plugged on radio (this is a paid arrangement on the
part of the recording industry and not a matter of ‘pop’ reception) and consequently
listed on a chart? Which performers are booked and celebrated, and which reviewers
are “allowed” to “review” music? Who is received, mentioned, or heard?68 In the case
of art in general or what we count as “culture,” the case of music is interesting because
one can tend to assume both timelessness and absolute neutrality for the “artwork” in
general: one does not assume it has a genesis, an “origin,” as Heidegger reflects, or a
“birth,” as Nietzsche writes (or indeed, as this is Nietzsche’s theme, a death).
How do names become canonic? What forces disperse these names, excluding
them from scholarly attention, intellectual focus, collective memory? Who is Günther
Anders? Who was Günther Stern? What themes capture and hold our interest? How
do we pose the philosophical questions we regard as urgent in any age? What is the
question of “having”—a question Anders made his own, influencing no one less than
Gabriel Marcel who subsequently came to be associated with the same theme? And
what of what Anders called the “situation,” a term related to what Jaspers spoke of, what
Adorno spoke of? What of his critical reflections on Rilke, Kafka, and Goethe himself?
What of Anders’ relation to Husserl? Scheler? Plessner, Heidegger? What about
Adorno? And what about Nietzsche—just to the extent that attentive appropriation
16 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

by mainstream thinkers often works to obscure a thinker’s proper concerns, turning a

recondite classicist, a specialist in Greek meter and rhythm,69 into a bad-boy moralist.
In recent philosophy, there has long been attention to the “other” as such. This is
largely filtered through Levinas and Buber. And to a certain extent such a focus has
excluded not only Günther Anders but also Michael Theunissen, himself another
student of Heidegger’s towards the end of his life, a friend of William J. Richardson’s,
and author of an important study on the theme of The Other: Studies in the Social
Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber.70 The subtitle of Theunissen’s study
makes it plain that certain names of those concerned with the other can tend to be
obscured—or ‘othered’—on the terms of mainstream attention to “the” other. Such
names not only include Anders, importantly, as well as Sartre and de Beauvoir, and
Merleau-Ponty but also Michel de Certeau, just the names we know in addition to
names that new attention to diversity has been recalling, those that are also long known
as such, like Camus and Fanon, and so on. Thus, other “others” remain obscure: names
like Illich to an extent and perhaps parallel to Anders to the extent that Illich’s focus
never meshed with that of the mainstream, not on education71—such that scholars
to this day prefer Paulo Freire and the more apt reflections of Jacques Rançiere—and
especially not regarding what Illich named “medical nemesis” where Illich remained
as indomitable in his own way as Anders,72 or with respect to technology where Illich
offered his own ‘convivial’ take.73
In great measure, what we call “thinking,” even including what Heideggerians call
“thinking,”74 is a matter of fashion when it comes to reception, engagement, discussion,
insight. Thus, in a lecture presented in German in Normandy in 1955, Was ist das die
Philosophie?, Heidegger reprises a point he had already raised in a 1944 Freiburg lecture,
Denken und Dichten, Thinking and Poetizing, a key point echoing the forestructure and
externality of the very transmission of, or thinking of, philosophy as such: what is
presupposed is that those to whom one speaks of philosophy or thinking or poetry
“stand initially outside of it.”75 As ever, Heidegger, as thinker of the question as such,
wants to remind us that what is at stake in questioning is less to avoid the circle that
is the hermeneutic circle but much rather how to get into it: “the aim of our question
is to enter into philosophy, to tarry in it, to conduct ourselves in its manner, that is ‘to
philosophize.’”76
For a parallel illustration, Nietzsche wrote on The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit
of Music, thinking to connect both the scientific research he had done on metre and
ancient lyric with the possibilities for a rebirth of culture. Little came of Nietzsche’s
philosophico-musical project apart from the erroneous certainty that all Nietzsche had
ever been on about was a certain advocacy of Wagner’s own dream of a transformation
of art culture. To this day, in Nietzsche’s case, his legacy is less his own philological
project but more his incidental genealogical reflections on morality and a book and a
figure—Zarathustra—written as a piece of dynamite to toss to the masses who otherwise
are slow to pick up his thinking on the untimely, on the utility and detrimentality
of history, on the all too human. Nothing else Nietzsche would write could change
this reception, not even his Gay Science written in two instaurations to reprise the
themes of his first book on tragedy, a text in which Nietzsche emphasizes that he was
the first to raise the question of science as a question. But it is to this same extent that
 
Introduction 17

when Anders reflects on Nietzsche in the 1940s, Anders will draw not upon a scholar’s
specialist knowledge of Nietzsche but Anders’ affinity with a life of non-reception as
Anders seems to fulfil the destiny of his adopted name: another, otherwise, other than.
How do we, in a world framed by certain names and the thought associated with
them, begin to read the neglected, the marginalized, the obscure? In cases where a
thinker is completely overlooked, it can perhaps simply be enough to read their work,
locate intersections, and so on. Where a thinker gradually enters the public eye, it is
almost inevitable that some will seek to institute a canon to exclude divergent voices,
and this is so in Anders’ case.77 In addition, there are intersections with the Frankfurt
School, and Anders’ obscurity seems to have gone hand in glove with the cohort with
which he grows up—Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno—along with his teachers—Husserl
and Heidegger as well as other less well-known names.
For his part, Anders would follow, after fleeing Berlin for Paris, a shared trajectory
of German political emigres before/after the war, like Horkheimer, Adorno, Arendt.
But part of the reason for reflecting on what might seem, as mentioned at the outset of
this introduction, to have been a “black star” haunting Anders is the clear difference in
reception and engagement at the same time that Anders was certainly part of a common
cohort, namely the trajectory that was likewise shared by not only Leo Strauss, and
Hans Jonas, but also Dietrich von Hildebrandt and including both Ludwig Marcuse
and Herbert Marcuse, among others, some remembered, some less so, some not at all.
The guiding or unifying thread, and here we may also count in Carl Schmitt, is
technology. The passion behind the ontic concern is a focus on broadcast sound
transmission, thus a focus on radio for Beckett and Arnheim, Heidegger, and Anders
and, of course, Adorno, foregrounding both social reception and the technical
conditions of acoustic reproduction as this transfigures music above all. This element
was key for Adorno but it was Anders who brought a critical and phenomenological
reading to these two concerns and never forgot, as many managed to forget, the war
that continued after it had ended, with two atomic bombs and a lifeworld altered
forever, if invisibly, by the same.
18
 Part One

A Critical Theory of Technology

20
 1

Criticizing Technology

All the technical arts [τέχνες] have by Prometheus to mortals been given.
—Aeschylus, Προμηθεὺς Δεσμώτης (Prometheus Bound)

Questioning Being-in-the-World, the

Work of Art, and Technology
Despite his early and unremitting criticisms, Günther Anders’ techno-philosophy
cannot be conceived without reference to Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics,
including Heidegger’s own reflections on tools, situated in a life of purposes and
projects, being-with and -in-the-world in Being and Time. To this same extent, Anders’
reflections on technology must be read in conjunction with Heidegger’s lectures in the
1930s, given in three instaurations,1 on “The Origin of the Work of Art” as well as his
post-war lectures on technology, including “The Question Concerning Technology,”
lectures delivered in Bremen, Freiburg, and Munich.2 And there is the constellation
in thematic order of time between Heidegger’s 1955 Gelassenheit lecture in Messkirch
and Anders’ 1956 Die Antiquirtheit des Menschen/The Antiquatedness/Outdatedness of
Humanity.
Reviewing Anders’ thinking in connection with power, including his reception on
the issue of power and politics, this chapter explores the contributions of the original
Frankfurt School of which Anders (along with Adorno, Horkheimer, Ludwig Marcuse,
and so on) was an original member. Here we might also count, technically speaking
and in ancillary way, Hannah Arendt, reading Anders’ critique of technology together
with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially their reflections
on what Adorno analyses as The Culture Industry for the sake of beginning to read
Anders’ The Antiquatedness of Humanity.

On the Intersection of Sociology and Anthropology, Critical

Theory, and Technology: Günther Anders and Power
Anders’ work is marked by both the depth of his insight and the sheer range of his
thought. But if depth is a good thing, breadth is not, and it is the breadth of his
22 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

concerns that makes Anders difficult to categorize as philosopher and political theorist
who philosophized about anthropology, power, violence, logic, and what he calls, quite
technically, the “situation,” as well as music and media, specifically radio and television but
especially in the lived context of society, specifically as an émigré observer, American
post-war society. To be sure, at the time, these were common themes, especially for
someone who was as Anders was, a student of both Karl Mannheim and Max Scheler
in addition to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Yet where even Scheler is
only slowly gaining attention, and that too in an attenuated or mainstream sense, few
political theorists are familiar with Anders such that Mannheim is better known in
social studies of knowledge and Heidegger in political studies of technology along with
Benjamin and Adorno. To be sure, gatekeeping scholars seeking to define the Frankfurt
School in institutional terms (not the happiest for critical theory as such) exclude
Anders as a “member,” while many count in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.
Most such demarcational efforts articulate the origins of their authors who tend to be
students in the lineage of Jürgen Habermas or else Raymond Guess, and so on.3 It is for
this reason that it is not far off to regard Anders as “stepchild of the Frankfurt School.”4
And then there is Hannah Arendt, Anders’ first wife. From the start, then, Anders
would be inscribed in the political, a thinker of critical theory. Yet readers tend to
find Anders’ reflections on political power somehow elusive precisely as reflections
on power, despite the fact that he speaks about it and expressly thematizes war and
violence.5 Indeed, it can seem that even more than philosophers, intellectual historians,
and media studies scholars, it is, perhaps, above all, political theorists, including the
same thinkers who read Arendt, who have trouble engaging Anders’ thought.6
Philosophy of technology has its own complex of allergies to critical theory
inasmuch as the critical in Anders’ case exceeds the meaning of critique in an academic
and philosophical sense, for Anders and for Heidegger (and indeed, for Nietzsche in
an earlier era) notably deriving from Kant. Making matters worse, qua theoretical
terminus, “critique” is often taken conventionally such that “criticizing,” holding a
negative view of technology, for example, can seem to be no more than an affective
orientation, quite as emphasized in the introduction, whereby conventional and
mainstream scholars seemingly anxious to avoid being saddled with the term Luddite7,
or characterized as “negative,” highlight only positive elements, dangerous for a host
of reasons and not least, human as we are, forward thinking as we are, we are also very
typically unable to project or anticipate (with any accuracy, this is a key limitation to
judgement) downsides to any practical project.8
I’ve noted the mainstream distrust of critique and negativity in philosophy of
technology.9 Anders’ writing bristles with both. In addition, the style of his writing
style can be difficult to follow (he is not part of the mainstream and is thus under
no compulsion to use the academic conventions and emphases mainstream thinkers
take for granted). Arguably, this is less because Anders’ style of writing is elusive—
though it certainly follows its own rhythms and inheritances—than for substantive
reasons. Anders’ approach to questions of politics as to questions of media and musical
experience has been systematically avoided in thinking about politics, about power
as indeed about media and especially about music, which is not to say that there is
no scholarly tradition of receiving his work. Matters are not improved by the fact
 
Criticizing Technology 23

that Anders wrote unsparingly and concentratedly about technology—quite as most

political philosophers and, indeed, most political theorists, with few exceptions, do
not. Thus, standard academic reflections on technology and sociology,10 technology
and anthropology,11 technology and politics,12 with certain exceptions, are more about
the ancillary discipline than technology but, contra certain “empirical” or “material”
claims, the solution is not to focus on technology alone. “To the things themselves”
as a phenomenological orientation was never meant as tactic for dispensing with the
lifeworld but as a means or method to thereby bring that world into view, arguably as
Husserl showed, for the very first time. Heidegger—and Anders—would only take that
phenomenological turning further, in quite distinct directions.
Hence, for example, George Kateb, the Princeton political theorist, writes about
technology,13 his themes fit certain paradigmatic schemata appropriate to political
theory, and not quite parallel to Anders or Adorno, and to this same extent Kateb steps
clear of a critical account of technology and does not quite as Anders does, conceive
technology-as-such as “political.”14 John McCormick too, in the same broader spirit,
writes on Carl Schmitt and technology, with the upshot that technology, politically
speaking, can seem an adjunct to the argument.15 By contrast, and he has been less
received than perhaps he should have been, there is Langdon Winner, whose initial
doctoral thesis, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political
Thought, won him the unwelcome sobriquet of Luddite as did his The Whale and the
Reactor, though he excludes Anders and many others so decidedly that one is left to
imagine this to be a conscious choice.16
“Luddite,” “romantic,” and “anti-technologist” are terms favoured by post-
phenomenological writers on technology. This is the reason I noted Ihde’s conscientious
efforts (once again, quite as he himself maintained),17 to “block” any effort to bring
Anders to an English-reading public. At issue then is an exploration of some of the
elements underlying what Gadamer called Wirkungsgeschichte—in this case negative—
with respect to Anders’ reflections on the “antiquatedness,” typically translated (one
supposes in homage to the language of fabricated obsolescence, planned and otherwise,
characteristic of the era of the 1950s and 1960s): the “obsolescence” of humanity.
The same negating or “silencing” effect would be imposed on Dallas Smythe in
the different field of political theory, a silencing which consigned Smythe to utter
invisibility, and in sociology the term would be applied to Jacques Ellul.18 Thus, and
overwhelmingly, popular technology and media studies prefer popular accounts like
Sherry Turkle or Jaron Lanier, or any of the mainstream reflections cited earlier or, for
another generation, Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman.19 Heidegger’s critical reading
remained unassailable but also obscure enough that it seemed unclear to many what it
was that he was saying, so much so that some Heidegger scholars undertook to claim,
perhaps not altogether successfully, that Heidegger meant to argue that it would be
technology itself that he proposed to advance as “the saving power.”20
It is appealing to seek to make the case that things today are changing. However,
calls for change tend to be calls to introduce novelty, and opposed to efforts to draw
attention to older names, such as Anders. And the anxiety about critique remains as
present as ever in discourse related to the philosophy of technology. Scholars who
write on technology rarely introduce critical elements. Exceptions can include in
24 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

the front line, thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk as well as, to name
younger names, Byung-Chul Han,21 among important others like Yuk Hui, but I am
only pointing now to those who are “received” or are well known, and I am (deliberately)
leaving out the phantom of technological transcendentalism.22 Thus, Sloterdijk,
in particular, knows how to frame, politically as well as mediatically, a critique of
technology, but such framing can leave one adrift when it comes to philosophy of
technology as such. Can one think it? Can one frame a critique of technology? As
Heidegger writes in the so-called Black Notebooks, which, as I argue, he intended
for a posthumous publication (quite as if a kind of message in a bottle), reflecting on
the complex conventionality of the Nazi view of technology, as if telegraphing one’s
alignment to the “spirit,” “one continues to view ‘technology’ ‘romantically,’ as mere
‘deviltry’ [‘Teufelei’] and romanticism.”23
Ihde’s apotropaic measures might strike one today, now after the fact of Anders’
increased relevance, as simply high-handed, but the method he used is standard in the
academic world, today arguably more than ever matching the bubble world of curated
scholarship within which we live, complete with peer review exclusions and inclusions
but increasingly complete with outright censorship. Importantly, other mavericks in
the philosophy of technology (and it is not “good” to be such) like the already-noted
Ellul24 but also Illich and Virilio and Baudrillard raise challenges of their own only to
be neglected by mainstream philosophy of technology.25
To this extent, what is needed is not a re-reading of Anders, as if he had been read,
but and here I follow Heidegger’s recommendations regarding Nietzsche in his own
Nietzsche lectures given under Nazi rule in Germany, and even if Heidegger himself
never seemingly did this, to follow as hermeneutic rule, a strategy of reading, in this case,
namely to read Anders as one would read Anaximander. It is noteworthy that Anders
read Aeschylus in this fashion. In addition, here there is the question of reading Anders
and literature, which perforce involves literary scholars (and thus too their concerns
and their values), including Anders and Rilke26 and, more commonly, Anders and
Kafka,27 and perhaps more significantly, as I will seek to suggest, Anders and Goethe,28
and so on. To this extent, Daglind Sonolet’s discussion of Anders, Arendt, and Adorno
as “Interpreters of Kafka” alludes to Bourdieu’s habitus and, thereby, to the intersection
of philosophy and sociology and the conjoining of “Literature and Modernity.” And
how should one read between the lineages (this is Bourdieu’s habitus) of class and
privilege and milieu with respect to literature and not less to art and philosophy and its
questions, especially if one does not, as Anders did not, forget Heidegger?
In addition, and this adds a further layer of complexity, there is the question of
style, that is, Anders’ own contribution to literature as such, not only with his essays on
literary figures—and a reflection on his style is already problematic as it bears on his
philosophy—but also with his poetic and literary compositions including his absurdly
delayed novel, Die molussische Katakombe: Roman, published, as if the publisher
had quite intended to ensure mere posthumous impact, only upon Anders’ death.29
Thus, Astrid Nettling could apostrophize Anders as a “lonely herald in the desert,”
witness to nothing less consummately apocalyptic than “totalitarian threat” [totalitären
Bedrohung] in a radio broadcast given, very fittingly as medium, upon his death, a few
weeks before the publication of his novel.30
 
Criticizing Technology 25

Insiders and their “Discounted” Others

As noted earlier, and one will have to continue to note it again and again, names
counted in and names counted out are not incidental: the “insiders” constitute
the history of academic reception, positively (and negatively) along with the value
judgements intentionally (commonly) or accidently attached thereto.31 We are, post
Sartre, Fanon, Levinas, Derrida, Vattimo, and Virilio, not utterly without resources
when it comes to taking the perspective of what Sartre called “the eyes of the least
favoured.”32 But in the case of Anders, the question is different because to us it is also
invisible: we do not see those we discount, devalue, and often literally so over time,
because uncited it is almost as if these authors never wrote, never existed. How are
we to recover a thinker passed over so thoroughly in the past that adverting to his
lack of reception, as we began by noting, has become a sobriquet, and assuming,
as one should now assume a certain reception, how to avoid the almost inevitable
petrification in terms of the view that is called “received” because, quite on its own
say so, it brooks no alternatives? At the very least, it makes for good copy. Thus, and
the example can be varied, Anders can be the source for an “Undiscovered Critical
Theory of Technology.”33 Nor do I disagree, except of course that Anders is not
exactly ‘undiscovered’ qua critical theory both in German language reception and in
Francophone theory of technology, as well as among those who had read him in his
lifetime, and so on. Here what is at stake is the politics of the academy and that is both
more trivial and more complicated.
What makes Anders “undiscovered,” or better perhaps, as-yet-unrecovered, is the
high or explicitly critical component many theorists avoid in practice, meaning to be
optimistic rather than pessimistic concerning technology, quite in order to avoid
being denounced as backwards, uninformed, insufficiently au courant, Luddite,
or, as Heidegger wrote on the cusp of the 1940s in Nazi Germany, as we cited the
concern then, all too “Romantic.” For many, it seems, and certainly in Ihde’s wake,
this “backwards” status could only correspond to an inability to keep up with new
developments, as if only a backwards disposition would lead one to raise any questions
concerning, let alone criticize, technology. But the more one knows, the more critique
one can—and must—afford. Critical thinkers on technology ought to, at the very least,
include criticisms of technology. And such thinkers exist, for instance not only Ellul
but also Baudrillard and Virilio, Illich, and, no less, Heidegger himself, as already noted
earlier, and it is relevant in the current context that they too be reviewed a little. Today
we also noted Sloterdijk along with, somewhat more complicatedly, Latour, crossing
political theory from the side of Latour’s Actor-Network theory.
But philosophers of technology like the Ihde enthusiast, Peter-Paul Verbeek, or like
the late Bernard Stiegler, even those inclined to read their Deleuze with Simondon and
Bachelard, tend to a certain optimism, if not quite at the level of the two Steves, the
cheerfully mainstream and highly bankrolled level of a Pinker,34 or, in sociology more
conventionally academic, a Fuller.35 Here what may be key to note, by way of difference,
is that like the Vienna-born Illich, perhaps in the first measure, writing as Illich did
from the perspective of history on related questions,36 Anders wrote contrary to and
thus against academic or intellectual expectations.
26 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

I have mentioned philosophy, as well as, latterly, sociology, and I have also
mentioned media theory referring to David Berry and others like Baudrillard, but
there is also the late Friedrich Kittler, who can seem to be a tech-enthusiast to the
extent that readers can overread his critique, especially of war technology, including
communications,37 and who made his alliance with Heidegger clear but who often
inspires readers less than familiar with Heidegger. I cited the more specifically playful
dimension of Kittler’s philosophy, as this is also a characteristic of Anders’ work and
his style.38 In addition, there are exceptions among practical and moral philosophers
who also engage with the Frankfurt School such as the contemporary critical theorist,
Arne Johan Vetlesen.39 There are other systems-theoretical names such as Arnold
Gehlen, Niklas Lühmann, and Günther Ropohl, and there are mystical eschatological
names, like Hans Jonas, already mentioned, for better or worse, and Jürgen
Habermas.40 I mention these last theorists, although, conspicuously given Anders’
long-time precedence in just this regard, most of the aforenamed do not engage
Anders. There is no way to properly bring all these themes and names together, but
the one focus that continues to matter is the exclusion of Günther Anders, such that
one can argue, seemingly again and again as many of the scholars who write on
Anders as I cite them do tend to repeat, that one must attend to his work. Scholars
who engage Anders can find themselves isolated from mainstream thinking especially
on the themes that concerned Anders, especially Hiroshima studies, philosophy
of technology, philosophical anthropology, and not least media studies. If Anders
brought these themes together in his writing, the cost he suffered, namely exclusion
from philosophical reception, continues.

Oblivion
I noted earlier that a kind of oblivion seems to follow Anders, possibly because of
the metonymy pointed out earlier: Anders is better known by triangulation, via his
relationships to his first wife, Hannah Arendt, or as Walter Benjamin’s first cousin or as
the son of his famous psychologist father and so on. And then there were the circles he
seemed to have shared, to continue the resonance of inbred familiarity, including the
original circle of scholars associated with Adorno and the Frankfurt School in addition
to having been a student of Husserl’s and of Heidegger’s.
Anders made the question of technological mastery or excess along with the
correspondent notion of human obsolescence his life’s work. Not only that. Anders
kept his observant powers throughout his long life, in this not unlike Kant’s late-life
productivity. Nor did Heidegger himself quite achieve this (as Arendt tells us and
as Gadamer also attests). But what is still more significant, Anders kept his powers
sharply attuned to the changing technological times.
Not that this mattered in terms of his lack of influence on the academy which
then, as now, pays attention only to “important” names (and these are usually younger
names we already know). And notwithstanding Anders’ sustained philosophical focus,
even as already mentioned, though it can hardly hurt to repeat that philosophers
of technology such as Ihde and technoscience and social theorists such as C. Fred
 
Criticizing Technology 27

Alford do not even mention, let alone engage, Anders; even Latour does not do so,
despite Anders’ reception in French technoscience. Surprisingly, even the activist
scholar Stanley Aronowitz, himself very like Anders, and whose work is indispensable
for a social and political theory of technology, does not refer to Anders, just as those
interested in discussing crimes against humanity typically do not refer to Anders.
There may be good reasons for this in addition to the perennial scholarly desire to
reinvent, all by oneself, whatever it is that one wishes to claim to be first to talk about
or to mention. Thus, the point noted to begin with as this often appears at the start of
most discussions of Anders, highlighting the rarity of said discussions, is that the claim
that no one writes on him, or that he is the least “well-known,” be it in general or in the
Anglo-Saxon world, is overdone in Anders’ case. Dozens of books (and still growing)
demonstrate the contrary, as noted in the introduction. Yet the number of books on/
about Anders does not seem to alter an ongoing lack of familiarity. Anders is not a
name like Arendt or like Benjamin.
This is the quality of the outsider, and one cannot understand the outsider
unless one understands the insider culture of academic cartels, peer groups, groups
of friends, in-groups, and not less: ideologies. Thus, John Gray insists that the
humanities “can’t be saved.”41 Gray does not err when he points to the importance
of ideology, and this is the point of mentioning citation—and hiring—cartels. Not
only the Straussians engage in this. And to be sure, no one, today, gets a PhD or
appointment, much less tenure (this is the reason Gray cites Kimball’s dated study),
without paying due fealty to prevailing ideology and the latest trends. As Gray, a
political commentator, credits Kimball, the mechanism is identical with that of the
academy itself and what is central; this is also the key insight to Kuhn’s notion of
normal [read: normativized] science:

it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura

decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the
party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future
in academic life.42

For most, this is an invisible tribute, unnoticed because they believe in it, and quite for
the same reason, one cannot advert to it.
Beyond this question of academic inbreeding and self-absorption (these are
the same), there is also the question of science as a problem as Nietzsche spoke of
problematizing it. But with respect to Anders, the issue is more than the matter of
the academy as such, although Anders was a dyed in the flesh academic, and beyond
the question of science, is the question of method and substance as he himself
would insist on this, especially in his own writing on music but also philosophical
anthropology, as part of which discipline he himself would characterize his The
Antiquatedness of Humanity. Withal, Anders followed his own course, and this made
him difficult to boot. From some perspectives, this would mean that Anders, here
not unlike Jacob Taubes, could be difficult to deal with, a bit like Ivan Illich, who was
however, being a priest, the kinder sort of heretic. This means that anyone writing
a biography of Anders for English readers, where such things do not go without the
28 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

need for extensive explication, will need to explain the significance of his birth (in
Breslau) , and that he would, after returning from the United States, make Vienna his
adopted home town with his second wife, Elisabeth Freundlich, and then his third
wife, the pianist, Charlotte Zelka, who married him later in his life (Zelka performed
as accompanist on a range of classical recordings) and who, to Anders’ clear
bafflement, left him perhaps for the same reasons that she married him—although
they never divorced as such and although, in the aftermath, as if to complicate things,
Anders reconciled with his second wife. If, as can be thought, Anders exemplified a
“strong” personality, as the Germans speak of this, it can seem he was himself able to
deal with comparably strong personalities. Thus, and significantly, he remained on
speaking terms with Adorno.
Significantly, perhaps, Anders, like Adorno, was a teaser whose teasing, again as in
Adorno’s case, was unbearable for Americans as it tended to illuminate how much he
knew and how much his interlocutors did not and which was inclined as a result to
be perceived as mockery. Unlike the kind of “critical thinking” that involves thinking
just and only what status quo science (“the” science) tells you to think, critical theory
requires considerable breadth just to begin to be critical. Anders knew an enormous
amount about both Greek and Hebraic cultures, including Augustine’s Latin, as he
knew about music, about art and literature, about Hegel and Marx, about Kant, and
about Husserl and Heidegger. To this must be added the social sciences, and this last
addition, which to be sure he shared with Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt
School, distinguished him from Heidegger and company. Like Nietzsche but perhaps
better said given the epoch of the twentieth century as such, and like Ivan Illich, the
philosopher and social critic of education, medical science, and technology/ecology,
Anders was also, and this is perhaps the most rare of all — I used the word above to
speak of Illich, himself a believer — a committed heretic, that is, the sort of critical
thinker who meant what he said and who acted on it at the expense of his career—and
he did this from the start—and who suffered for this in terms of his reputation (he was
for a long time not even mentioned) and his livelihood. Thus, Anders did what most
social critics do not do and sometimes even suppose cannot be done: throughout his
life Anders walked the talk.
What is more, the views Anders opted to champion were out of kilter, unpopular.
Indeed, like Illich’s political views, Anders’s views were anti-popular. Thus, and instead
of talking about the Holocaust as a Jew and as he might well have done (though he
did this too, he did all kinds of things, including music and literary theory to boot),
Anders made Americans (that would be the good guys in the Second World War from
his perspective, and he should have been more grateful, etc.) uncomfortable by talking
as incessantly as he did about Hiroshima.43 Thus Anders would count off, almost
kabbalistically, the dates of Hiroshima, where the bomb detonated on August 6, 1945,
and of Nuremberg, where just two days later, on August 8, 1945, the legal rubric for
defining crimes against humanity would be spelled out, followed by the bombing of
Nagasaki the next day, on August 9, 1945.
Like many others of his era, Anders thought that the problem of evil was the bomb.
And like his nemesis, Heidegger, he also insisted that the evolution of that same
problem had to do with what, unlike Heidegger, he had seen from the start as the
 
Criticizing Technology 29

problem of humanity itself as standing reserve in Heidegger’s terms, a bioresource that

however would need, desperately need, ‘improving.’
This Anders called the shame of being born human, a shame that carries with it its
own mark or sign, that is, the shame of a navel. For the mark of creation, as a creation
at the hand of god, which is (and here Anders concurs with Sartre) the perfected dream
of modernity, is that we as human beings are the ones who, as Nietzsche’s madman tells
us, have “killed” God — “And we have killed him” (FW §125) — a deed done with our
own hands, so that the sacred as Nietzsche puts it, bleeds to death as we watch (but
then, what about the blood, and Nietzsche goes in for excessive realism: What about
the stench? Gods, too, so he tells us, decompose!).
Much more than merely murdering God — this, after all, would be a piece of cake for
Anders as a Jew, a secular Jew no less — we want to take his place. But that’s the kicker.
The problem for us is that we are born and not made. Above all, we are born, and
this is the Heideggerian point, as we are born, thrown as we are thrown, and we are not
designed in accord—this is the anti-Cartesian impetus—with our preferences as we
might have specified them (had anyone asked).
Anders’ most dissonant insight — vying with anything Levinas argues about the
Face as it also vies with anything Heidegger argues about death and thrownness, and
with everything (and in the case of Anders, this is not by accident) that Arendt writes
about natality — is that the whole of our problem with modernity begins and ends with
our awful shame at having been born (oh gosh and now we begin to remember all the
Theweleit anxieties about war, about Jews and others as very patent anxieties about
women). What we much rather want to be instead, and there is always an instead, is the
machine: perfectible, replaceable, immortal. Thus as Anders articulates the modern
human fantasy today, the “dream” as he calls it, “was naturally to be like our gods, the
apparatus, better said, to belong to these (mechanical) gods completely, to be to an
extent co-substantial with these gods: homologoumenōs zēn” (AM I, 36). Our desire
is to ‘be’ the machine or, as in the current era, to become one with the digital realm,
hormonally augmented, virally enhanced, genetically tweaked.
Thus, and ultimately for Anders, our desire is to be manufactured, to be fabricated,
to be a product, maybe one with serial numbers, perhaps an ISBN, quite such that we
can market and upgrade ourselves: the point here would be interchangeable parts (AM
I, 39). If something breaks, fix it; when something wears out, replace it.
Towards the end of his life, Anders would recollect his own collision with the spirit
of the times after the First World War. No kind of poetic experience “on horseback,”
this was a direct confrontation with changes made by the medical technology of the
day coupled with modern transport. The result of these technological transformations
of human life at the very limit of everydayness, here retrospectively conceived as a
Heideggerian everydayness, shattered that everydayness for him. Beyond anything
so theoretically to the point of the ready-to-hand quotidian, more than Heidegger’s
misplaced or broken hammer, Anders recalled the dissonance of this vision, at the age
of fifteen, as he was on his way home after the First World War:

On my way back, at a train station, maybe it was in Liege, I saw a line of men, who
strangely seemed as if they began at the hip. These were soldiers who had been set
30 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

on the platform on their stumps, leaning them against the wall. Thus they waited
for the train that would take them home.44

These broken “fragments” of human beings, in Anders’ foundational trauma as

he encountered this—and we will have occasion to recall this again—are already
transhuman. No one will ever need to tell them that their canes, their wheelchairs, and
their prosthetic limbs are their extended selves. This they know.
To translate the little hymn Anders gives us for musically monotone Molossians, as
this echoes the metric rhythm of the shuffling footsteps of the workers’ change of shifts
in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:

But if we ever succeed

in throwing off our burden
and stand as [iron] bars
fitted into [iron] bars

As prosthesis to prosthesis
in intimate conjoining,
and the flaw was what had been
and shame was yet unknown — 45

The rhythm is one thing.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Figures 1 and 2) articulates the catastrophic juggernaut
that is modernity and the capacity, thus the robot image that captures theatrical
imagination as the playwright Karel Čapek first sees in his human fabrications in his
1920 play, R.U.R, quite as Lang realizes the same ideal on film using, this is Lang’s
genius, an iconically stylized iron maiden that automatically (of course) evolved/
morphed into human form. The filmic magic is in the dissolve, the cuts that effect the
glorious streamlined vision of the robot together with its subversive metamorphosis
into a “gynoid” otherwise indistinguishable from the human. This is leagues away
from the clunkiness of Čapek’s rigid players, which certainly continued as B movie
robot ideals up to the television “ninny,” as Jonathan Smith named the “Robot” in the
1960 television series, Lost in Space. But beginning with Lang’s filmmaker’s device,
the illusion of the ideal transhuman, the metamorphosis into a machine is that the
actor who plays the human Maria is the actor who plays the mechanoid almost-Maria
(Figure 2)—Lang famously insisted that Birgitte Helm had to be physically inside the
heavy armour in all shots although, as she complained, one could not see her—and
of course, Helm also plays the evil, gynoid, Maria (the humanoid version otherwise
indistinguishable from the original).
These ancillary points are relevant here, as a “cover,” to use this language, of
Pygmalion. This includes the notion/detail that the first female robot would also
exemplify the characteristics of both an industrial fetish and a sex doll, a reflection
Anders includes; it is part of the language of shame as he speaks of it, if a full elaboration
necessarily exceeds the present context.46 For his part, Lang sought artistic redemption
of the heart, which will include eros, and the hand or work. This vision illuminates
 
Criticizing Technology 31

Figure 1 Film scene of Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang. Photo credit: bpk
Bildagentur / Horst von Harbou / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 2 Film scene of Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang. Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm,
Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Photo credit: Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY.
32 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

the streamlined aero-tech city that is Metropolis, the bodies are those of the workers
sacrificed in the bowels of the city hidden beneath the surface (cf. Figure 1).
And the Maria-robot, as the fully transformed, “gynoid” copy designed to function
as a changeling under the command of the rulers/owners to replace the Maria-
human, who agitated on behalf of the workers, now betrays them by leading them into
destructive frenzy, in a dance that quite matches the phrase we read in Anders himself:
“hammering the syncopated rhythms of the machine god into the body” (AM I, 84).
Thus, Anders describes “Jazz as an Industrial Dionysus Cult” (AM I, 83). Thereby—and
note that Anders’ analysis helps to understand why just this would work to undermine
any revolutionary impulse in Lang’s film—such a mechanized, (pseudo) wild dance
is calculated in order to “transform animalistic into mechanical energies” (AM I, 83).
More critically in this respect than Adorno, Anders writes of the kind of jazz that by
contrast with conventional claims evoking “‘visceral memories of desert and jungle
drums’; is much rather (or at least equally) ‘machine-music’” (AM I, 83). This kind
of dance is associated with the age of the “industrial revolution”; count the techno
ways, whereby “what the dancer dances is not only the apotheosis of the machine
but at the same time a festival of renunciation and coordination [Abdankungs und
Gleichschaltungsfeier], an enthusiastic pantomime of its own total defeat” (AM I, 84).
Like Arendt and like Heidegger and Jonas (and so on), Anders enjoyed a classically
German classical education, including both Athens and Jerusalem, which is why
Anders speaks of aidos, shame. The issue is having had a father, a progenitor, rather
than a fabricator, an inventor. Neither a “product” nor a god — think of Sartre’s very
Cartesian, existential articulation of this dream — we are just and merely creatures
born with every “creaturely inadequacy” (AM I, 36).
Finite and limited, we’re only human as we say. But if we were as gods, could we but
be manufactured to precision standards at the consummate height of the technological
engineering we are so sure is coming our way? We imagine that everything would be
so much better, and the tech dreamers behind the mass vaccination schemes follow
lockstep in this conviction.
Anders’ figural analogy, God = Product, is compelling, thoughtworthy, as Heidegger
would say. The product is God. As Anders goes on to say at this point:

The attempt to prove his “thing piety,” endeavouring an imitatio instrumentorum,

one has no choice but to undertake a self-reformation: at the very least and in the
smallest degree to undertake effort to “improve” [today apologists for transhumanism
prefer to say “enhance”—BB] himself, rectifying the “sabotage” suffered owing to
original sin: the legacy nolens volens of birth, now for once reduced to the smallest
conceivable degree. (AM I, 36–7)

For Anders, we want to correct the mistakes in our make-up: the errors that cause us
to become ill, to suffer, to die. An imperfect rather than a well-made product, as René
Descartes had already pointed out as part of his philosopher’s proof of the existence
of god (the Parisian theologians did not a miss a beat with this one), a proof that just
also happened to condemn God’s manufacturing specs: had he, Descartes, fabricated
himself, he would have done it better. We will need to return to this.
 
Criticizing Technology 33

For Anders, we have already, at the time of his writing in the mid-1950s, begun
to undertake this same rational and Cartesian enterprise which we call, and it is
instructive for those who believe in the logarithmically accelerating evolutionary
trajectory of technoscientific engineering and design that we use, rather the same
terms that Anders emphasizes in 1956, and formulated in English as “Human
Engineering.”
As a corollary, so Anders reminds us, the human being is manifestly a “defective
design,” (AM I, 32) especially when regarded from the perspective of technical devices
(error tends, as we know, to be “human error” rather than a result of a deficiency in the
machine, whatever the machine might be and quite to the extent that to use a machine
requires that we conform to it).
In this way, the first chapter of Anders’ The Antiquatedness of Humanity: On the
Soul in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution is titled “Concerning Promethean
Shame,” prefiguring the evolutionary drift or longing of the human towards a literally
technological rapture. Note that the word “rapture” is not an overstatement. What is
at stake is the resurrection in human time, here and now, of the body, replacement,
consummation, salvation, transfiguration — and like the technical problem attendant
upon the theological (or Disneyesque) problem of the resurrection of the body, what
to do with the old iPhone when the new one arrives? This is an already-present and
growing problem for iPhone owners all over the world with the most recent and
coming 5G models (no one but no one thinks of the bees), adding to the collection
some owners have in a drawer somewhere.
For Anders, Descartes’ musing that God had created him with deficiencies (this
would be the true maker’s mark, this would be the Promethean shame), can rightly
be kicked up a notch. Here we see that like Arendt, Anders too is Heidegger’s good
student, and thus he moves from Descartes to Kant. Thus, we move, Anders argues,
“into the obligatory.” In “other words,” as Anders explains, “the moral imperative is
now transferred from the human being to the gadget” (AM I, 40).
What ought to be, and what should be, is now the tool, the device, and the gadget.
We want technology; and as we ourselves become our own technology, so much the
better. This is the transhumanist dream: let there be not merely the human but high
technology, and let us not forget, as we reflect on this, as transhumanists are often in
the business of selling technology: let there be stuff to buy.
Anders repeats for his part the maxim that Heidegger identified in his Contributions
to Philosophy as the maxim of fascist technoscience (whatever is technically possible
should be actualized as quickly as possible) which, as Heidegger had anticipated and
Anders could not but corroborate, applied with fairly dispassionate equal measure to
Soviet and capitalist aka American science alike:

What can be done counts now as what ought to be done. The maxim: “become
the one you are” is today perceived as the maxim of the gadget. . . . Gadgets are
the gifted, the “whiz-kids” [in English in the German original] of today. (AM I, 40)

But for all the claims that are made on his behalf (claims Anders happily echoed
for his own part), to the effect that Anders opposes Heidegger, just as he similarly
34 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

opposes Adorno, Anders also takes over (quite as Adorno also charged) and radicalizes
Heidegger’s critique.
Hence, Anders begins The Antiquatedness of Humanity by reflecting on the
impossibility, as it were, of criticizing technology, that is to say of “refusing” or distancing
oneself from technology: an impossibility that found expression for Heidegger himself
in his Gelassenheit — and a critical impossibility that has hardly been ameliorated, let
us be careful to underscore this, in the interim:

As I articulated this thought at a cultural conference, I was met with the

counterclaim, in the end one always has the freedom to turn off one’s technological
devices, indeed one even has the freedom to decline to buy any such, and dedicate
oneself to the “real world” and just and only this world.

Which I disputed. And indeed, just because the one who strikes is at much as
the disposition of technology as is the consumer: whether we play along with it
or not, we play along, because we are played. Whatever we do or fail to do — that
we increasingly live a humanity for whom there is no longer “world” or world
experience but a phantom of world and a phantom of consumption, no part of
this is altered by our private strike: this humanity is today the factical with-world,
which we must take into account, to strike against this is not possible. (AM I, 1)

Elsewhere I underline that to follow Heidegger always means that we find ourselves in
contestation with him, just as Michael Theunissen also reminds us. But this also means
that we are called to question as Heidegger questions. To this same extent, Anders
thinks Heidegger’s critique as Nietzsche would recommend thinking critique in his
own reflections on Kant, through to its “furthest consequences.”
Here we recall Heidegger’s allusion to Rousseau and to Schiller at the start of The
Question Concerning Technology, “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to
technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (QCT, 4). When Anders reflects
on the ultimate impossibility of denying or refusing technology, inasmuch as we are
human beings in a world with others, he repeats a point Heidegger had underlined early
in Being and Time, where Heidegger writes “Dasein’s being-in the world is essentially
constituted by being-with,” underscoring that this remains even when Dasein is alone,
“even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived. Even Dasein’s being-
alone is being-with in the world.” (SZ, 120)
But as Heidegger later articulates this problem in “The Turn,” one of the original
lectures he presented in 1949 in Bremen, warning in perfectly apocalyptic tones
attuned to the cybernetic technology of the day and effects of which continue on the
internet that is the current form of the broadcasting technology Heidegger describes:
“we do not yet hear, we whose hearing and seeing are perishing through radio and film
under the rule of technology” (QCT, 48).
In an age where the technical gadgets of which Anders speaks, that is, again,
the Geräte, “technologies,” as we speak of them, have become more indispensable
than ever, we have cell phones and seemingly cannot live without them, facilitating
government surveillance by the most complicit means imaginable, short of cyborg
 
Criticizing Technology 35

hacking or injection. We carry our own spying and tracking device with us, and we
keep it fully charged and close at hand.
As Anders reminds us, no matter what we do, and in this he handily includes every
imaginable luddite expedient, we remain constitutionally incapable of renouncing
their use:

What holds true of these devices holds, mutatis mutandis, for everything. . . .
To maintain regarding this system of devices, of this macro-device, that it is a
“means,” saying that it is at our free disposal to be set to whatever purpose, would
be completely senseless. The system of devices, the apparatus, is our world. And
world is something otherwise than means. Something categorically otherwise .
(AM I, 2)

In addition to his Heideggerian anticipation of Bruno Latour’s claim that it is difficult

to draw the line between ourselves as actants and “things” as actants, whereby we can
scarcely distinguish between ourselves and our tools/technologies, for Anders we
coincide with, we “are” the technological things of our lives, as these adumbrate our
lives, and reflect ourselves to ourselves as such.
Anders highlights the already-given and determinate character of the modern
consumer, determined as we are by our modern advertising. Thus, as we like to say,
here making it all-too plain that we speak from the perspective of the advertisers, we
live in and on the terms of and as a consumer society. This is the heart of Heidegger’s
analysis of Ge-Stell as Anders continues to analyse it, here without reference to the
term per se.

For, taken in all precision these are not just so many “preliminary decisions” but
the preliminary decision instead. Yes. The. In the determinate singular. For an
individual device does not exist — the entirety is what is at stake in reality. Every
individual device is consequently nothing more than part of a device, merely a
screw, merely one piece in a system of devices, a piece partially directed to the
requirements of other devices, its existence in part exigent upon other devices
which in turn compel the necessity for new equipment. (AM I, 2)

Although describing Heidegger’s fate as a thinker and critic of technology and science,
Anders analyses the reasons for our silence as intellectuals in the face of technology
and its effects as indebted to nothing more effective and egregious or tragic than simple
socialization: in order not to be supposed a “reactionary” (AM I, 3). Nor has this fear
of being thought reactionary (or technologically backward) changed in the interim.
Hence, his further reflection also bears repeated consideration:

that a critique of technology has already become a question of moral courage

today is consequently unsurprising. In the last analysis (so thinks the critic) I can’t
afford to permit anyone to say of me . . . that I was the only one to fall through the
cracks of world history, the one and only obsolete [Obsolete] human being, and far
and wide, the sole reactionary. And so he keeps his mouth shut. (AM I, 3)
36 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

For just this reason, Anders could not but be a reactionary.

As author, Anders was haunted by his lack of reception. Thus, his books, both
academic and literary, would not be published and perhaps more significantly for the
philosophical history of reception, his peers refused to receive his work even as he
was fitfully engaged and certainly acknowledged, for example, by Adorno. In addition,
and beyond academic small-mindedness—the sort that inspires quips concerning the
minimality of the stakes involved—Anders also violated the pro-tech ethos ruling
theoretical studies of technology before and after both world wars, accelerating post
the 1950s and onwards. To this extent, as Heidegger also underlined this in his lectures
to the Club of Bremen and in Freiburg, it is always troublesome, “dangerous,” to
question in the wake of technology.47

Whither?
When it comes to technology, to machines and the question of (human) mastery, I
maintain the Andersesque hope that unlike Adorno, who, as some might argue, perhaps
heard Anders’ explicit suggestions to him as insults, we might yet find ourselves willing
to take up the charge, and maybe even, as Anders suggested, to take the lead in a
moment of human freedom.
Once again, we can cite Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology,
“Everywhere we remain powerlessly chained to technology, whether we passionately
affirm or negate it.”48 The language includes the term “unfrei.”49 The very point echoes on
the first page of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man,50 and Anders takes over Heidegger’s
insight that it is impossible simply to renounce technology, as if this were an option
and for the very early Heideggerian reason that we are human beings in a with-world,
Mit-Welt, among other beings in the world and, above all with others: Mit-Dasein.
At stake is the Marxist and critical challenge of action. More than Heidegger
certainly and even more than Horkheimer or Adorno, Anders was a scholar who acted
on his politics, as radically conceived as they were, in the real world, the engaged life
of human action. And what often goes by the title of political agency, be it reading the
paper, voting in a two-party or parliamentary system, along with the everyday politics
of whatever given public sphere, should be contrasted with Anders’ activism as this last
involved the kind of life action that would seem to have been technologically eclipsed
until the events sponsored, aided by today’s technology, said to have been, though this
is debated, cellphones, however short-lived in the end, in the so-called Arab spring or
the failed American movement, Occupy Wall Street—now a nearly forgotten venture.
For the most part however, for most of us, especially we academics, we think ourselves
“activists” if we sign a petition or click on an email link and hit return.
I’ve more than once emphasized that it cannot be said that no one writes about
Anders.51 As indicated by the aforementioned references in the text (and in the notes
to be sure), Anders was factically “engaged” from his childhood years qua “known”
entity, so to speak. People knew who he was. In addition, and along with Heidegger
and Benjamin, Adorno and Arendt, Anders was part of a prime circle of influential
thinkers. And yet, and this is the “reception effect,” despite the changing regimes of
 
Criticizing Technology 37

academic reception history, Anders’ name consistently manages to fall by the wayside.
Inasmuch as I do not think that there is no reason for that constant sidelining, it may
be that the easy expedient of noting his work, or “discovering” his discoveries, may not
suffice to bring Anders to scholarly attention.
I have suggested, as will also be illustrated by the chapters to follow, that some
part of the reason for Anders’ lack of reception has to do with the scholarly range
of his interests and his interdisciplinarity. Thus, scholars who variously specialize in
philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, philosophy of media, political theory
or philosophical anthropology overlook Anders’ work. Anders’ philosophical sociology
of music, phenomenologically articulated as it is, only complicated matters. Music as
such both charms us and confounds us when it comes to philosophy; just think of
the related case of Nietzsche, where, apart from quoting his very quotable apothegm,
without music, life would be a mistake, philosophers seem able to do little more than point
to the fact that Nietzsche liked music, emphasizing his favourites by way of their own
enthusiasms (what kind?, opera, what kind?, Wagner, to be sure, or Rossini, or Bizet),
all the while managing to overspring Nietzsche’s emphatic interest in Beethoven and in
Greek music, including rhythm. Or else, if we like, more proximately, we may think of
Adorno and the generations of scholars both within and outside philosophy of music
to simply focus on jazz, as one imagines Adorno’s views on jazz to be as one imagines
these: negative and benighted and nothing more. In the case of Anders, we need for the
sake of a reflection on his understanding of technology, including the antiquatedness,
datedness, of the concept of humanity (as opposed to the post- and transhuman), as
indeed for his radio and broadcast theory to include Anders’ early reflections on music52
as this resonates throughout his complexly stylized study of the human being in eclipse.
And we could not agree more; we are more than ready to be posthuman,
transhuman,53 waiting for an upgrade, hardware, software, wetware, the next booster
shot, quite as we are primed to wait for the next-generation consumable to purchase,
like an iPhone, say. If anything, here in this respect like the online complaints about the
much-delayed and the much-hyped final short season of The Game of Thrones, badly
written and even less fortunately executed, consumers turn out to seek only more of
the same, intensified, more and ever more. Hints of the pitching and pacing of iPhone
models seem underwhelming rather than overwhelming, just as in the case of the
HBO screenwriters’ hasty completion of George R.R. Martin’s script inspired online
expressions of anger and protests. Both the original author and HBO meant to move
on to other things. But fans tend to hold—this is what is means to be a fan; this is the
point insisted upon as key to the culture industry as Adorno and Horkheimer and
Anders analyse this—to the patterned schema they’ve been “programmed” to expect.
And this is how priming works.
These resonances also underscore that Anders himself hardly intends his title
in the sense of today’s transhumanist projections of technological perfectionism/
enhancement fantasies (how could he?) an issue when it comes to contemporary
media studies. Anders is (how could he not be?) a child of his era, and yet his analysis
of his era and the media of radio and television and film remain so prescient that we
can benefit from an engagement, particularly where this is also echoed, and, inevitably,
updated in Baudrillard’s analyses.54
38 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Whose Critical Theory?

There should be many different critical theories of technology; one should be able to
amplify the range as circumstances change. To be sure, this is not at hand, and a good
part of the reason why it is not has to do with our “enlightened” conviction that the
problems that led to twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars and revolutions had a
great deal to do, if not everything to do, with a failure of reason.
Thus, Habermas and co., that is, adherents of today’s “Frankfurt School” professing
to teach critical theory, owe their success, that is their posts as such, to their unswerving
dedication to the ideal of rationality.
Anders took his stance contra such conventions, a tactic that excluded him where
his inclusion ought to have been assured. But he did more than claim a counterposition.
Anders wrote in such a way that the leading theorists could make no sense of him;
he could not be co-opted to the standard line, the standard way of writing, standard
points of view. And as more than a few commentators have observed, Anders was
unrelentingly hard-necked on the position he took. Only a few commentators, like the
exceptional Lüdger Lütkehaus, have had the prescience and readerly stylistics capable
of matching Anders’ achievement. The issue concerns Anders’ style, tone, or voice as
many readers find this a particular challenge.55
This challenge in turn underlines a point that is hermeneutically significant
as one must read through one’s own prejudices when it comes to reading any
thinker. Student as I am of Gadamer, this is key. Even when, precisely when, we
have understood another thinker, another position, a historical era, we understand
otherwise. Always. What this means is that understanding is neither a Hegelian nor
a Thomistic achievement: we do not attain to transparency, with the success that
leaves us, this was Bernard Lonergan’s modern Thomist ideal, with the sense that the
inquiry has attained its goal: no further questions needed. This means that we must
read and reread, engage and re-engage. Failure to do so inevitably imposes our own
thinking, our own interpretation in place of the text, and then, as Nietzsche warns
us, the text cannot but disappear underneath or beneath the interpretation. The only
way to safeguard ourselves against this tendency is to leave the awkward aspects
in place and that entails that we attend to them, hear them, without imposing our
certainties in the process.
It will hardly come as a surprise to note here that Anders was not as adept in
his critical interactions with others as we might imagine that he could have been,
given current ideals of social interaction and engagement. Thus we earlier cited his
introduction to his first book where he begins by emphasizing just this socialized ethos
contra criticism, especially in terms of the precarity of any criticism of the machine
(“Die prekäre Machinenkritik” AM I, 3) and in terms of the equation of criticism with a
reactionary stance (“Kritisch gleich reaktionar” AM I, 5). Anders had trouble with this
anti-critical ideal as he rightly recognized this as the effective instrument of mediatic
totalitarianism: we will all have (or we should have) the same tastes, otherwise the
channels broadcasting the “hits” would have to be curated for as many tastes as there
are listeners. And although YouTube would seem to permit such diversity, it tends to
monotone virality and is, to boot, liable to censure. Thus as Adorno and Horkheimer
 
Criticizing Technology 39

also argued for similar reasons the tastes that conduce to “virality” were themselves
already manufactured to order by exposure, conditioning the listener.
Thus, and we will have occasion in a later chapter to come back to this, Anders,
citing the iconic era of American jukebox culture, argued that the very-material reality
of the jukebox as such meant that tastes of one’s neighbour could not but be imposed
on any listener in the acoustic neighbourhood of the same. One’s nickel or dime, or
quarter (and the increasing coinage value says a great deal here), ensured the music one
opted to pay for would be broadcast, imposed on all in earshot, and if a customer were
to object, as Anders attempted to object (with predictably disastrous consequences),
the objection simply could not hold. The alternative option given multiple table-top
jukeboxes, playing a piece of one’s choice, yielded the kind of cacophony we today
(pre-Lockdown) could take for granted in US eating establishments, especially in New
York City.56
These days earbuds securing a perfectly social a-sociability, as studying social
media posts on our smartphones, also helps social isolation, the Happy Days charm of
a table-top jukebox problem can seem strange to us. Today, the problem has morphed
into the complete or consummate fulfilment of what Adorno named “standardized
ubiquity” and which Anders described for his own part variously as imposition and
complicity/compliance. The “radio,” pars pro toto, imposes a taste and a background
voice that today accompanies all one’s activities in almost every respect, at home,
and owing to portable radios and automobiles, this includes music streaming on
demand and GPS everywhere one might travel.57 Thus, the “compleate” audiophile is
equipped with a radio circa 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980, and if anything has changed,
it will only be the narrow range of radio broadcasts/streaming/on-demand. With
the new media, with smartphones and smart tablets and such, the consumer is free
to take his or her cue from the very same standardized ubiquity now available “on
demand.”
The theme of controlling consumer consciousness is common to critical theory
in its older modalities, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and no less, Anders. In my
own essays, I point to parallels with Dallas Smythe and Jean Baudrillard, but as I also
argue in The Hallelujah Effect, social scientists like political theorists and sociologists
commonly tend to walk back the efficacy of advertising. The suggestion offered by
academics is thus that advertising doesn’t really work. But the claim is absurd, given
advertising’s omnipresence and given the current pandemic orchestrated by little other
than government and social media advertising.
But, say the social scientists, dominated as they are by the ideal of rational choice,
advertising only serves as prompt, leaving the consumer free to act on his or her own
free will, as he or she sees fit: “rational choice” rules. No social engineering, no social
media hacking of consciousness or perception. At the same time, a feeding frenzy on
“fake news” and the so-called post-truth era would seem to put paid to this conviction.
For if media influencers did not influence, be they located in the White House or fake
Twitter followers, or on Facebook and otherwise, what is our concern?
With the exception of Baudrillard, most scholars proceed as if there were no need
for critical theory: as if the thinker, the consumer, the citizen might simply read popular
journals and newspapers (nota bene: in online versions) and watch network television
40 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

or check Facebook and Twitter (surely I should provide a trigger warning here) and
proceed to make up his or her mind according as he or she judges.
None of this would accord with the view offered in the middle of the 1940s by
Horkheimer and Adorno (and, as I argue, also, if unexpectedly so, Heidegger), the
views Anders argued in 1956 and again in 1980. Baudrillard and Kittler pick up some
of the slack, but I would argue that we have all we can do to try to read Anders.

Media Branding: How to do Politics with

Programming and iGadgets
Beyond media, that is to say, beyond the “effect” of programming social consciousness
and complicity, Anders also offers a critical theory of manufacture and of mass
goods, well in advance of the current empirical turn in the philosophy of technology
and thing ontology more generally. Anders reflects on our way of being and having,
including the having of things, which having becomes our identification with them, our
competition with them and aspiration to be them: this is our Promethean shame. This
last constellation is arguably the most complicated because this is his gadget-thinking,
that is, his precisely material theory of technology and his reflection on style and allure
that we associate with technology on a precisely physiognomic, embodied, material,
manufactured, hyped basis. The hype in question is what I name the “Hallelujah Effect.”58
Talking about the sound as we can hear this at once, immediately and not via some
inference, rational or otherwise, which allows the listener to differentiate between
different makes of automobile, Heidegger himself participates just because he replicates
this same material and auratic dimension. Thus, we hear the mark of the kind of car
that is “a” Mercedes, as Heidegger writes, quite in opposition to the brand that is an
“Adlerwagen.” Anglophone readers have little notion of the brand in question, that is to
say: we don’t recognize the make in question; thus, the translator (and philosopher of
technology in his own right), William Lovitt, helpfully renders the term “Volkswagen,”
useful in spite of being inaccurate as such where it is the precision of the specific brand
of automobile as we hear it that corresponds to Heidegger’s point, just as it would be
to the point of an advertisement for the vehicle as such, or some other market item. Is
it live, or is it Memorex?
Marcuse, whose One-Dimensional Man remains to the current moment one of the
best critically theoretical discussions of modern technology and culture, focuses on
what he names “repressive desublimation.”59
Marcuse rightly saw, here quite in alignment with Anders, that we identify with
the products we surrounded ourselves with: these are Anders’ gadgets, products
Marcuse argued to have been less a matter of personal acquisitive choice than specified
accoutrements, de rigeur for materialist, bourgeois life in America. Marcuse’s books
analysed what was thereby lost in the trade, articulating, as he wrote, the “enchantment,”
especially the “eros,” sacrificed in the wake and working effects of what Horkheimer
and Adorno named the culture industry and analysed as disenchantment in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment.60
 
Criticizing Technology 41

The focus here is on Anders, and Lacan for his part characterized this phenomenon
as I also seek to do in terms of desire, and there are elements of that same focus, to
name a current, popular intellectual (and not incidentally a Lacanian), in Slavoj Žižek.
Elsewhere I point to some of the limitations of that language qua eros, less Norman
O. Brown than Woody Allen as the “erotic” is for the most part adumbrated in and
through the imaginary-for-the-male. Here, without speaking of male and female desire
(as such) and the difference-that-is-no-difference (I argue that the male perspective
seems to be the only one on offer precisely because the male is not offered for female
enjoyment or celebration, assessment or appreciation, a point made more generically
by the analytic philosopher Kate Manne),61 there is the matter of alienation and
recognition. We see ourselves in our possessions, according to Marcuse, in what we
consume, and so too according to both Adorno and Anders. Anders will argue that
more than identification with our technical objects, we measure ourselves by our
gadgets; better said, we measure ourselves against our tools. And as Anders emphasizes,
we come up short in our own fantastic projection of the results.
Today we use our gadgets to orient ourselves in the world, thereby changing our
focus on the world to just the limited scope our gadgets can convey. Our eyes are
affected, our minds are affected, our world is diminished, and it cannot be said that we
notice this, much less that we mind. Here at issue is not a question of dystopian techno-
analytic thinking as one may find this in the pages of magazines or websites dedicated
to contemporary popular psychology. Rather for Anders, mirroring our tools, we
aspire to the status of the tool and thus to make his point in contemporary language,
we match ourselves to AI, even when we have not (yet, so we say) designed an AI worth
worrying about (so we say) because, although sheerly imaginary, we project ourselves
in the image and likeness of the instruments we make: our gadgets, ourselves.
 2

Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther

Anders’ Neg-Anthropology

Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ “Humanism”

As Heidegger’s student, Anders allied himself early with those who criticized Heidegger
on a number of matters, most particularly, as Adorno would echo this, Heideggerian
“authenticity” [Eigentlichkeit].1 Most well-known is Anders’ indictment of Heidegger’s
“Pseudo-Concreteness.”2 But, like the then-omnipresent terminology of “situation,” as
Anders also used this language, the “concrete” is complicated.
Here it can be helpful to recall Adorno’s reference to Anders’ essay—note, too, the
spectral allusion—in a footnote to his Negative Dialectics:

The word “concretion,” most affectively occupied in German philosophy between

the two World Wars, was drenched with the spirit of the times. Its magic used the
feature of Homer’s nekyia, when Ulysses feeds blood to the shadows to make them
speak.3

Where both Heidegger and Husserl had sought to avoid the charge of “anthropologism,”
a criticism then and now indebted to a Kantian distinction, Anders, a student of the
social (human) sciences, embraced “philosophical anthropology,”4 and in this sense
one may read the first volume of Anders’ The Antiquatedness of Humanity as an explicit
(if negative) “philosophical anthropology.”
Adorno, as Anders’ more acerbic, Frankfurt School colleague, reflects on the
philosophical “situation” of our times when it comes to the social scientific discipline
of anthropology, writing:

We cannot say what the human is. Humanity today is a function, unfree,
regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant—except perhaps for
the defencelessness and neediness in which some anthropologies wallow. He drags
along with him as his social heritage the mutilations inflicted upon him over
thousands of years.5

We are by now in the philosophical domain well beyond the hype of the ‘singularity’
but still absorbed by the humanist allure of the posthuman, the transhuman,6 typically
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 43

without having first inquired into, as Adorno here asks almost as Heidegger or as
Scheler might have done, “what the human is?” For however modified, trans- or post,
the human goes without saying even when undefined or indeterminate or “overcome.”
The language of “overcoming” is Nietzschean enough, and yet what Nietzsche
meant when he called for such an overcoming does not mean what some theorists
of contemporary post-truth and transhumanism suppose it to mean. To this extent,
as Anders would have recognized, it is no easier to read Nietzsche in the service of
transhumanism than it is to read him in the service of theism. This does not mean that
such readings cannot be or have not been offered.7 Thus Nietzsche’s parodic (an emphasis
typically unnoticed) Zarathustra first proclaims his “teaching” of the “Overhuman”—
“Ich lehre Euch den Übermenschen”8—with the declaration that the “human is something
that shall be overcome” [Der Mensch ist etwas das überwunden werden soll],” a claim
repeated, mantra-like, throughout Zarathustra’s “Prelude” [Vorrede]. For Nietzsche,
the great thing about the human being “is that he is a bridge and not an aim . . . a
going over [Übergang] and a going under [Untergang].”9 At the same time, a detail that
causes confusion among scholars (both Nietzscheans and those who write on his work
without being familiar with it)10 this dramatic impetus—there is a tightrope dancer in
the background as Zarathustra speaks, literally going over and literally going under—is
not what we tend to mean when we speak of transhumanism for the religiously founded
reason that the idea of transhumanism is itself a millenarian notion.
In the consumer culture that is late capitalism, product updates urge consumers to
buy the latest thing, the newest “gadget” as Anders already wrote on this transhuman
product-inspired ideal. For his part, Heidegger, who argued the untenability of “merely
instrumental, merely anthropological definitions of technology” (QCT 23), included
“the man at the switchboard, the engineer in the drafting room” (29), within what he
named the technological constellation, that is the set-up, or Ge-Stell.
Triumphalist humanism is long-standing in the Western tradition which typically
not only sets the human as deiform—imago dei—but which also drives the notion that
the human can be improved upon, a point Descartes repeats among his arguments for
the existence of God (once again: had he, Descartes, created himself, he, Descartes,
would have done a better job).11 In just this way, today’s transhumanist ideal tends to
translate to “long live the human” or in Descartes’ formula: “and thus I should myself
be God.”12
To just this extent, transhumanism is a humanism.
Still, we have the problem of definition: What is human? The question, to go back
to Heidegger, as Anders reminds us, is a “what”-question13 opposed for Heidegger to
the that-question and, indeed, to the who-question (SZ 45). Orienting the question of
Being in Being and Time, Heidegger offers a traditional definition:

Das Dasein, i.e., the Being of humanity is in common as in philosophical

“definition” comprehended as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, the living being whose being is
essentially determined by the capacity for speech.14

Here, Heidegger refers to Plato and to Aristotle on language, along with Rousseau and
so on, but he also, as Anders emphasizes, refers to Kant’s What is Enlightenment? For
44 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

his own part, Anders (himself a son of a famous psychologist father, “the” William
Stern) emphasizes the challenge of emancipating oneself from one’s minority status
contra the father, in accord with Kant’s language of Mündigkeit.15
To the extent that Heidegger’s definition repeats an Aristotelian-cum-Platonic
commonplace, one can specify ἄνθρωπον in place of ζῷον. Here, we recall that
Aristotle underlines the hierarchical schematism of plant nutrition and growth, animal
perception, sentient awareness, or consciousness, and human contemplation: thinking
thinking and it is with the last that Heidegger remains.

Jemeinigkeit: On Becoming a Question to Oneself

Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology includes a famous turn to what he calls
“mineness” speaking of Dasein, articulating the force of his title Being and Time:
“Das ‘Wesen’ dieses Seienden liegt in seinem Zu-sein.” The “essence” of this entity,
this Dasein, lies in its to-be. Dasein is at issue, in its being, for itself, distinctive in
its mineness: “ist je meines,” specifically “mine to be in one way or another [meines
wiederum je in dieser oder jener Weise zu sein]” (SZ, 42). Here what Heidegger says
is basic enough, even self-evident, drawing upon a tissue of conventional references.
Yet, despite the immediacy of the being that is to be investigated (nota bene: for
the sake of the Seinsfrage), the “me” in each case turns out not to be authentically
mine but always already characteristically and almost incorrigibly “unowned.” As
Anders observes: “even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by
inauthenticity.”16
Although scholars continue to bristle at the conceptual dissonance involved
when Heidegger informs his readers that the inauthenticity of which he speaks does
not correspond to a “lower” degree of Being [“»niedrigeren« Seinsgrad”], Heidegger
intensifies the point, as he very habitually does,17 by explaining, note that Anders echoes
him here, that it is “inauthenticity” that determines Dasein in its “fullest concretion.”18
Indeed, and contra Anders’ assertion of Heidegger’s merely “pseudo-concreteness,” the
“concretion” in question encompasses ways of being human on a day-to-day basis:
“when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment” (SZ, 43).
To this same extent, invoking intentional exemplification, Heidegger is able to
remind us of a perplexing reflex towards the conclusion of Augustine’s Confessions,
where the saint asks what, after all, could be closer to me than myself to myself: “Quid
autem propinquius meipso mihi?” (X, 16). If Augustine’s phrase is well known, it also
tends to be underread, which is hardly to say that it is not discussed. To this extent,
inattention remains even as the phrase is a commonplace, even as we may note the
beauty of the formula Augustine finds confounding, just where the entire text is
submitted before God from the outset—the entire text can read like a prayer for today’s
secular eyes, and still we can read the beauty and reflexive precision, a question I have
become for myself: “mihi quaestio factus sum” (X, 33). Augustine’s successive reflection
concerning time and his understanding of it, which also includes a variation on this
questioning after himself, echoing his own proximity to himself, compounds the
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 45

problem.19 The logical proximity of mineness, immediacy—concreteness being part of

this—is key. This Heidegger seeks to unpack.20
Once again, somewhat contra Anders’ hyperbolic rebuke of Heidegger’s pseudo-
concreteness, it is also patent that what becomes existentialism in France likewise
attests to a certain concreteness (this is why Adorno finds it necessary to attack
French existentialism and its “humanism”),21 and other readers of Heidegger, like
Husserl, fault him precisely for his “anthropologism.” The same “mineness” that invites
Heidegger’s reader to read along with him means that we are “free” to fault Heidegger’s
observations (as Anders does, as many do), because we, of course and collectively,
know better. Similarly, Augustine’s writerly style invites the reader to follow his
confessional modality which can result in a-historic solecism, at least in Augustine’s
case.22 If Nietzsche’s style exemplifies the same invitation, it also intriguingly, as David
Allison shows,23 sidesteps some of the same risks, although style, as such, has never
managed to prevent misreadings.
For his part, Heidegger proceeds a bit as Anders does, in the mode of Husserlian
phenomenology, challenging his own teacher as he challenges Husserl’s project, to
argue as Heidegger does that the Being question and thereby the existential analytic of
Dasein, here understood in a rigorously Kantian sense as a science, that is as “a priori
basis” has to “come before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly in advance
of any biology” (SZ, 45). The emphasis contra Husserl is repeated as title for the
following section: How the Analytic of Dasein is to be Distinguished from Anthropology,
Psychology, and Biology (SZ, 45).

Anthropologism and Psychologism

Like its cognate, “psychologism,”24 anthropologism as rebuke follows from Gottlob
Frege’s admonition “to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the
subjective from the objective.”25 What is sought is the (“objective”) truth, not (human)
psychology, not (humanistic) anthropology/ethnography.26 In addition to Husserl
(after Frege), Heidegger repeats Kant’s own distinction, precluding empirical recourse
to what human beings (in fact) practice. In this way, Kant distinguishes his inquiry
into practical reason from “anthropology.” Here we should recall that Kant emphasizes
that what belongs to a science—properly said as he underlines this—requires what
neither anthropology nor psychology (nor indeed chemistry, which is a topic of
some contestation in philosophy of science) admit, namely mathematics, as Kant
writes in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: “a doctrine of nature can
only contain so much science proper as there is in it of applied mathematics.”27 The
point of underlining that chemistry is not a science, leading the editors of a volume
on the philosophy of chemistry to begin their reflections by asking a prototypically
hermeneutico-phenomenological (and thus none-too-analytic) question, “But what
are all those chemists doing?”28 is quite that this issue can be extended to the range
of other, non-physics sciences, including, as Rom Harré did not fail to note, sciences
like geology. From this perspective, like chemistry, sociology and ethnography/
anthropology cannot but remain “improper” sciences, as, from a Kantian point of
46 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

view, the theoretically unguarded quality of the social sciences permits a fair amount of
free play in its definition by its professional practitioners throughout the last century,
such that, as quoted from Adorno at the outset, its topic or subject matter, humanity,
turns out to be “a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as
invariant.”29 The upshot “vetoes any anthropology.”30 This veto is in line with Frege.
For his own part, Heidegger emphasizes that

in the existential analytic of Dasein we also make headway with a task which is
hardly less pressing than that of the Being question itself as—the task of laying bare
that a priori basis which must be visible before the question of “what man is” can
be discussed philosophically. (SZ, 45)

For Heidegger, as already noted above, the analytic of Dasein precedes anthropological
questions, not to mention questions of the proper/improper, for good Kantian reasons
as the analysis is not to be limited to the human being per se (quite whereby Kant takes
his own prescriptions to apply to extraterrestrials, explicitly so, and, supernaturally,
a bit more elliptically, to the “holy one of the gospels”31). Today, concerned as we are
with AI, we would seem to have made little progress when it comes to animal- and
plant- and even rock intelligence (as Thales is attributed to have ascribed this last to
the lodestone), that is, non-human intelligence, not to mention questions of value and
dignity. As Adorno observes, as Adorno was more a friend to animals than Anders (or
most philosophers to this day):

In the experience of nature, dignity reveals itself as subjective usurpation that

degrades what is not subordinate to the subject—the qualities—to mere material
and expulses it from art as a totally indeterminate potential, even though art
requires it according to its own concept. Human beings are not equipped positively
with dignity; rather, dignity would be exclusively what they have yet to achieve.32

Adorno takes his own reflection in the direction of art and the aesthetic constitution
of the human being after Schiller’s ideal of aesthetic “education” or formation, a
programmatic constitution that, as Anders could not but phenomenologically,
hermeneutically observe to have fallen off, irremediably. For Adorno, unquestioning
conviction had a distinct benefit, one enhanced to no small degree by failing to
question:

Under the sign of the dignity that was tacked on to human beings as they are—a
dignity that was rapidly transformed into that official dignity that Schiller
nevertheless mistrusted in the spirit of the eighteenth century—art became the
tumbling mat of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which in aesthetic reflection
forced valuable art out of the way of what the broad, polluted mainstream of spirit
drew in its current.33

Anders has his own reflection on human dignity, and this, he argues, is abrogated
by the total mobilization of humanity for the purposes of the current post-war, post-
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 47

atomic, and now we can underscore as transition: today’s transhuman, in an age

of Lockdown, ongoing or relaxed, masked and socially distanced life. As Anders
reflects, we have the ability to repress the events of the past, foregrounding one of
the most conspicuous of these events and one that continues to be repressed to this
day, “the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”34 But the repression or forgetting is
less Anders’ concern, as he writes, than the fact that the repeatability of these events
cannot be similarly excluded from our awareness, oblique or dark as this is. In an
alarming way, so Anders argues, we have consummated what Ivan Illich regarded as
the expropriation of death,35 rending the human being as exactly outdated as Anders
argues here, using not the term “Antiquierten,” antiquated, but “obsoleten,” an obsolete
option qua “natural death.”36
I have argued that the efforts of the theorists of transhumanism are ways of
celebrating humanism by other means, sponsored by corporate interests to be sure.
Thus, robot rights, AI values, and cyborg and transhuman configurations turn out to
be human, all too human,37 made by ourselves and fashioned in our own image as
opposed to what is genuinely other than ourselves and other than what we have made,
whether it be plant or animal or other “life.”38
The agenda is clearly that of the original Frankfurt School. Adorno points out the
ideological dangers already inherent in categorizing nothing more neutral, seemingly,
than art movements via “isms” and suchlike,39 and yet, and by general contrast, the
term “anthropologism” (and “psychologism”) foregrounds, as any “ism” can do, a
deficiency or lack.
To this extent, it is useful to recall as Martin Kusch reflects that:

[a]ccording to Wundt, Husserl had exchanged psychologism for logicism. Wundt

defined the two positions as mirror images of one another such that things would
not seem to have progressed much since 1884: “Psychologism wants to turn logic
into psychology; logicism wants to turn psychology into logic.”40

Heidegger on Dasein and the Seinsfrage

It is crucial to note the risks of equivocation. This is especially true in the face of
Adorno’s reading of both Anders and Heidegger, characterizing the persistence of the
so-called “the existentialist misunderstanding of Being and Time,” as Reiner Schürmann
(referring to neither Adorno nor Anders who happened for his part to have been
influential in the French reception of Heidegger) explains that Sartre selected “some
themes from Being and Time—being-towards-death, dread, etc.—developing them
into a so-called ‘ontology of human existence.’”41
For Schürmann, by contrast with the French existentialist tradition,

in Being and Time, Heidegger is preoccupied with the question of Being as such—
whatever that will turn out to mean—and only therefore with the question of
Dasein.42
48 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Françoise Dastur exploring “The Critique of Anthropologism in Heidegger’s Thought”

by reading Husserl and Sartre together with the German “romantic” tradition,
including Schelling and foregrounding Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, goes beyond
Schürmann’s emphasis.43 From a different angle, Dan Dahlstrom reminds us that “the
suggestion that his thinking is alien to humanism seems prima facie wrongheaded and
Heidegger says as much.”44
Note again that for Heidegger, what is at stake concerns ontological, even scientific,
as Heidegger always remains a Kantian, rigour. How can one raise the question of being
as a science? How can one ask about it, methodologically speaking? Heidegger’s first
reflections begin here but it is always worth recalling Nietzsche’s claim to have been the
first “to raise the question of science as a question.”45 Nietzsche makes this claim in his
(likewise Kantian) “Attempt at a Self-Critique,” appended to his first book on tragedy
concerning what Nietzsche named “aesthetic science” [ästhetische Wissenschaft]. In
addition to his distinctive focus on questioning, Heidegger raises, as Husserl also does,
the question of the human sciences,46 noting that these depend for their data, that is,
their least interpreted “facts,” upon a prior or pregiven “foundational” conception of
that same science itself. It is at that foundation level that Heidegger reflects

heretofore our information about primitives has been provided by ethnology. And
ethnology operates with definite preliminary conceptions and interpretations of
human Dasein in general, even in first “receiving” its material, and in sifting it and
working it up. Whether the everyday psychology or even the scientific psychology
and sociology which the ethnologist brings with him can provide any scientific
assurance that we can have proper access to the phenomena we are studying, and
can interpret them and transmit them in the right way, has not yet been established.
(SZ, 51)

“Anthropology” thus presupposes a defining orientation such that that anthropology

stands in need of hermeneutic phenomenology properly conceived: “Ethnology itself
already presupposes as its clue an inadequate analytic of Dasein” (SZ, 51). Thus, Heidegger
emphasizes that “neither” the human sciences nor the so-called “positive sciences” can

or should wait for the ontological labours of philosophy to be done, the further
course of research will not take the form of an “advance” but will be accomplished
by recapitulating what has already been ontically discovered, and by purifying it in
a way which is ontologically more transparent. (SZ, 51)

Referring to human beings in the context of the humane sciences—

Geisteswissenschaften—Heidegger invokes the social world by speaking of das Man as
of a Menschending, a “human thing.”

“Who,” Then, is Dasein?

It was earlier useful to underline Anders’ (fairly Schelerian) reference to the traditional
distinction between What- and Who-questions. Emphasizing that Dasein is “that
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 49

entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue” (SZ, 42), at issue ultimately
is the insufficiently pressed question concerning whether Dasein is to be limited to
the human as such. For Schürmann, as noted earlier, the human is the “subject.” This
subjective dimension informs metaphysics, ideology, and religious sensibility. Thus,
many scholars suggest that only human beings are “able” to be Dasein, by which is often
meant, and some say as much, the literal there, the Da of Being.47 But Heidegger himself
is a little different, as he opens the question of the I that he foregrounds in his famous
book, as the I-connect, the I-myself self of Dasein, the subject of his interrogation of
the same preoccupation of Dasein with the issue of its own being, quite as this may
turn out, in the conceit of the questions Heidegger didactically proposes to ask, to be
other-than supposed or assumed.48 Theology with all its advantages and all its aporia
follows hard on the heels of this train of inquiry.49
On Schürmann’s account, there is an additional reading that looks to a different
conception of the subject, if all such readings “locate Being and Time within the
tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity.”50 Thus, the great bulk of Being and Time
seems to be “about” Dasein. As Schürmann counts for the reader: “of the 83 sections
of Being and Time, 75 deal with an analysis of what Heidegger calls Dasein, for which
there seems to be no English equivalent.”51 Indeed: once we undertake to read those
seventy-five sections, our chances of recalling Heidegger’s point of departure in his first
eight sections “are often more or less forgotten.”52
Rigorously, for his part, note, once again Schürmann’s point that Heidegger

is preoccupied with the question of Being as such—whatever that will turn out to
mean—and only therefore with the question of Dasein.53

The “therefore” is scholastically key. By taking Heidegger at his word, contra William
Richardson’s convention of Heidegger I and II, to the extent that Heidegger himself
begins by denying that “there is a break in his thought” or that he abandons “the intention
of Being and Time,” Schürmann is able to sidestep the division of Heidegger into a I and
a II, arguing as the Black Notebooks would only seem to confirm in retrospect, that we
will need to take the later writings into account in reading Being and Time.
At issue then is the question less of existentialism (and humanism) than
anthropology, quite as Husserl seems to object. Accordingly, Heidegger’s Being and
Time elaborates a hermeneutics of phenomenology. For all the emphasis on Aristotle
and given his own research on scholastic or school logicians, for all the references
that we would/should be following with respect to Descartes and Kant, and hence and
therefore to Husserl, Heidegger’s project follows a dialectical schema, in terms of this
same preliminary exposition. But just this leaves him vulnerable to Anders’ critique.

On Animal Dasein: Anders and “Other” Others

Throughout his provocative and fairly unreceived career, Anders urged a differently
minded move, not unlike Adorno’s when it comes to what Adorno named a life
50 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

“wrongly lived.”54 To Heidegger’s hermeneutic approach to phenomenology, Anders

adds an engagement with spirit, not as a reference to Hegel but rather to the religious,
to deity, including a reference to Augustine and the biblical tradition along with angels,
dark and light. In this angelic spirit, when Heidegger emphasizes that he means to
attribute no kind of demonry to the essence of technology,55 Anders, does not flinch
at the notion of the demonic, specifically the idea of the devil, affirming the religious
dimension silenced as to deity in the factic wake of history, in its complexity and
essential to any philosophy meaning to consider both the dominion of the world and
the damage wrought by beings such as ourselves, inasmuch as humanity, as Anders
understands the human condition, has far less to do with “being” as such than with
“having” which Anders takes to include reflection on what has been done:

With these formulas—which also define our status religioso—a fracture in our
existence (and for the first time, our current existence) has been described, a
disjunction, which surpasses in importance or, more precisely, makes the fracture
that once existed between flesh and spirit, or between duty and inclination, or
however such differences that were once considered to be so decisive might be
denominated, not appear to be so serious. What is our “capacity” for robbery
or adultery, or blasphemy or murder compared with our “capacity” to commit
genocide or, even worse (I must introduce this term), globicide? (AM II, 410)

We will need the greater part of the chapters to follow to begin to be able to consider
this claim as set at the end of Anders’ second volume on the outdated human.
For the moment, we note that it is our religious legacy that affords humanistic
licence for global destruction; thus, Anders describes our “Promethean” “capacity”—
the language is calculatedly Kantian—as fait accompli. To this day, we regard climate
change, in the age of the Anthropocene, as having the character of revelation, a
circumstance in which we somehow find ourselves and about which something
might be done and today’s health pandemic as it is named as such (following certain
mathematical models, which means that it is more a matter of projection or anticipation
such that every measure undertaken is done preventively, or, as Fuller/Lipinsky would
say, in a “proactionary” mode). This is a “soft” or social media war (of all the small
people against all the small people). Thus, in his introduction to his “three industrial
revolutions,” in a note to a section tellingly titled “Post-civilizational Cannibalism,”
Anders writes:

This terrible general-license, which renders nothing taboo apart from the human
and which assumes that everything has been created for the human, that is,
that everything is at his disposal, has never existed apart from the monotheistic
domain of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Genesis 1, 26-28): neither in the systems
of the magi nor in the multifarious systems of polytheism. This is the defect of
our “Western” ethic. Only in the framework of the anthropocentric tradition in
which the world was regarded as “subordinated” to the human being, as servant,
object, and means of survival; and in which the human, although still creatura,
was not regarded as part of nature but as unlimited lord of all creation; solely
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 51

within this frame could natural science arise and with it technology and with it,
finally, industrialism. That the human being should be the goal and the world a
means, such anthropocentrism was the common denominator (rarely interrupted
by pantheistic intermezzos) of the European philosophies and vulgar worldviews,
whose innumerable differences are hardly significant by comparison with their
commonalities. (AM II, 433)

If Anders emphasizes animals in a passage from the Kirschenschlacht,56 the animal is

not his concern. Rather his argument there, articulated in tribute to and in memory
of Hannah Arendt, is that we have not progressed beyond the post-Renaissance
heirs of Copernicus precisely in terms of biology, qua students of post-Darwinian
evolution. We human beings are those (unfinished) “animals” who do not hold
themselves to be “animals,” supposing as we do that the universe itself, the globe was
either specifically designed for us or else that it is effectively “ours” by violent default:
acquisition.
Despite Anders’ foregrounding of our thorough anthropocentrism, together with
our fantasy of what we should, by rights be, and hence our “shame” at having been
born, in our “natum esse” (AM I, 24), Anders himself is a humanist. To this extent,
Anders remains closer to Heidegger (and Arendt, although he for his part focuses on
“fathering”) than he is to Adorno. Thus “incarnationist,” Anders critiques Heidegger’s
“concreteness” as a seeming or pseudo-concreteness. For Anders, “nature” is
ontologically ordered to Dasein for Heidegger, emphasizing further on the level of
embodiment that Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time despite its explicit focus on
being in the world, leaves out (this is not a matter of “bracketing”) questions of hunger
and sex.57
To be sure, this too we will need to unpack, but earlier I noted that what is at
issue when it comes to animals is not the liberal notion of intelligence (nearly always
disappointingly defined) or “moral-political agency” (a stipulated term defined in such
a way that even human beings can be excluded, such that the whole point seems to
be about privilege); the closest philosophical convention for this concern is Kantian,
a bloodless and theoretical respect for the dignity of animals an sich, and as “other”
beings.58
Elsewhere I draw attention to the importance of Heidegger’s discussion of
mechanized or industrialized agriculture given its all-too-literal force: agribusiness,
the meat industry as such, is in fact, as Heidegger writes in Das Ge-Stell, “the
manufacture of corpses.”59 Note too that is useful to follow Adorno’s observation
when he notes the logic of our inattention, what we manage not to notice whenever
we dismiss what is done to animals by saying (by simply thinking) that, and after all,
they’re “just animals.”
The locus here is Adorno’s Minima Moralia in the title of an aphorism encapsulating
Levinas’ reflections on the look, the regard, the gaze. “People are looking at you.” Derrida
to be sure takes this from Adorno.60 The context, as this is Adorno we are reading
and his style escapes most readings, is elliptical or difficult to the extent that Adorno
emphasizes “scotosis,” blindness, as key to anti-Semitism, qua constitutive failure to see
“Jews as human beings.”61
52 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

The ceaselessly recurrent expression that savages, blacks, Japanese resemble

animals, or something like apes, already contains the key to the pogrom. The
possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally-
wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this
gaze—“after all, it’s only an animal”—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to
human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that
it is “only an animal,” because they could never fully believe this even of animals.62

Anders offers a dialogical reflection on “phantasmatic” realism, as what is via

imagination and concomitant inattention given to be seen which is by the same token
unseen, inconspicuous. The language ranges between Adorno and the same Levinas
who, to be sure, translated Anders into French63:

Your face. Or mine. In mine you know me. In yours I see you. With all things, more
or less, as all of them have a face. Animals too. Machines too. Also a house. Even a
summer’s day. (AM II, 322)64

Unlike Heidegger who focuses on the human in order, from the positionality of the
most proximate, to pose the question of Augustinian immediacy concerning the who
that I am myself, for the sake of raising the question of being qua being, Anders is
focused on the human qua human but without the usual concessions human beings
tend to grant themselves: an enduring state of exception.
Anders glosses, and this is just in passing and does not quite count as a focal concern
as it does for Adorno, Kant’s contention in his Lectures on Anthropology, that with
respect to “[irrational animals] one may deal and dispose at one’s Discretion” (AM
II, 433), pointing out in passing that today’s whalers as indeed recreation or trophy
hunters, including “collection” in the name of science, be it for university labs or for
museums, quite as much as for the fishing industry, could invoke the same claim to
justify their dealings. Thus, we saw that Anders emphasizes the crucial importance of
the Judaeo-Christian tradition as assuming that “everything is created for the human
being” (AM II, 433).
Nietzsche foregrounds a similarly key consonance between Western thinking in
religious and moral values and Western science. Anders, as noted earlier, takes this in
the same critical direction, if not towards, a “genealogy” of morals but as indicative of
deficient or “negative ethics.”
This Judaeo-Christian tradition of anthropocentrism Anders connects, as Nietzsche
does, with Western science and technology, but Anders goes further than Nietzsche
because the connection with the Western tradition turns out to be, as we well know,
compatible with both theism and atheism:

Today, of course, the natural sciences and technology, which would never have
come into existence lacking theological anthropocentrism, have also found
ground among those peoples, such as the Japanese, for example, that did not
originally possess the requisite theological presuppositions for them. However,
these presuppositions have also long been forgotten in Judeo-Christian cultural
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 53

circles. Moreover, the technocratic countries are no longer united by a single faith;
to the contrary, what unites them is (rarely as articulated but exercised) atheism
that (despite the occasional proclamations of faith on the part of physicists) is the
basis of the natural sciences. (AM II, 433, emphasis added)65

Sein and Dasein without God

Anders faults Heidegger for excluding elements of hunger and sex, excluding the
incarnate body with all its needs from his thematization of that Dasein for whom its
being is at issue. Anders also shows that those human cares can tend to be concerns that
are not at issue for Heidegger. If Heidegger’s focus on the tragic question of humanity
in his Introduction to Metaphysics foregrounds the uncanny, this is because his question
is as as Schürmann says the “being question,” hence neither the existentialist question
of the human nor, indeed, as some theologians claim, “meaning.”
What excites our interest in reading Heidegger goes beyond the where, the here, and
the there of our being on this earth to touch the gods in flight. It is where Heidegger
reads Nietzsche on the unfinished animal and it is where Heidegger reads Hölderlin,
as he speaks of divinities in their passage, calling to them, where are you? wo bist du?
To inspire readers in this fashion is no small achievement. We find it hard as Nietzsche
says to see beyond our own shadow, and Heidegger seems, for some readers, to bring
us a little into a certain light with his focus on the transcendental schlechthin. Thus, in
Being and Time, as Dan Dahlstrom points out:

the transcendence that makes up the very being of being-here encompasses

a relation to oneself as well as a correlative relatedness to the world at large.
Heidegger attempts to capture this distinctive transcendence with the metonym,
“being-in-the-world.”66

Still and at the same time, we remain lost. If the thinkers of existentialism sought in
Sartre’s voice at least to claim their movement as a “humanism,” and if the human face
became the cause of a philosophical generation, we are now in the age of Anthropocene,
which is more than even Anders had imagined it, the Anthropo-obscene confronted
with a different, another, and more invidious way to read the reflection Heidegger
borrows from his friend, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, to make his own, to close
his Question Concerning Technology, one of the key places he speaks decisively of the
human, beginning his essay with a chained reference, unmarked, to Rousseau as also
to, on the side of the promise of cultural redemption, Schiller. Few of Heidegger’s
readers have come to terms with Heidegger on technology but foremost among those
who have, and both take a Marxist point of view, are Kostas Axelos67 and Dominique
Janicaud in his Powers of Rationality.68 Perhaps this is a fault of translation or of
philosophical fashions but what is at stake concerns the history of reception, meaning,
once again the lack of interlocutors. Thus, if Janicaud invokes Illich, he still seeks as
his title suggests a different envisioning of the future, de-technized, and his imagined
interlocutors are analytic or mainstream, regrettable as mainstream scholars do
54 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

not engage his work, and Janicaud was simply absorbed and co-opted into what he
condemned as the “theological” turn.
Heidegger introduces his reflection with a reference to Nietzsche who names
humanity a “skin disease of the earth,” emphasizing the hopping and the blinking
tendencies of that same terrestrial “inflammation.” This is arrogance, like the tiny flying
creature Nietzsche invokes at the beginning of his essay on truth and lying, arguing
from a rather different point of view than does Wittgenstein when he speaks of the
lion, that like ourselves, as Nietzsche writes:

If we could but communicate with the Mosquito [Mücke], we would learn that it
too swims through the air with this same pathos and feels within itself the flying
centre of this world. (Über Wahrheit und Lüge)

Heidegger, speaking of what he names the “danger,” “not just any danger but danger
as such,” explains that the human is “endangered from out of destining” (QCT, 26).
Here the “fall” that threatens is a human inversion, as the human “precisely as the one
so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth” (QCT, 27). It is no
accident that Heidegger cites Heisenberg’s “Das Naturbild,” the same Heisenberg who
articulates the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics as the Uncertainty
Principle,69 whereby

the real must present itself to contemporary humanity in this way. In truth,
however, precisely nowhere does the human today encounter himself, i.e., his
essence. (QCT, 27)

The structure that thus unfolds, the “Ge-Stell,” is occluded for the human, preoccupied
as the human being is with himself in every case,

he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear
in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation
or address, and thus can never encounter only himself. (QCT, 27)

Heidegger challenges human exceptionalism, “For there is no such thing as a human who,
solely of himself, is only human” (QCT, 31). By contrast, Heidegger thinks Hölderlin’s
reflexive word, Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch. The “questioning that is the piety of
thought” (QCT, 35) is to be thought in “the presence of the gods, bringing the dialogue
of divine and human destinings, to radiance” (34). In this spirit, there is no way to read
the final line of Heidegger’s “The Turning” other than as a kind of archaic, gnomic prayer:

May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the
truth of being near to the essence of the human, and so gives the human to belong
to the disclosing bringing to pass that is a bringing into its own. (35)

One can pray as Heidegger seems to do, to whatever divinity or else, absent piety, one
can reflect on enlightenment without enlightenment, as Anders did in 1936, in the
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 55

ambit of Heidegger’s lecture On the Origin of the Work of Art, as of the proletariat, as
Anders writes, without proletarian consciousness, the work without a worker, which is
also to say, “The self-made man as mystic.”70
If Heidegger kept as clear of critical theory’s disenchanted enlightenment as of the
real implications of political rhetoric, Anders took a lifetime to engage the horrors of
war and not less the real danger that is academic blindness to the same real, all-too-real
horrors, foregrounded in Anders’ 1985 reflections not so much via Heidegger but on the
blindness, be it incidental or deliberate, that also characterized Max Scheler and Georg
Simmel—both of whom advocated on behalf of war—cheering not only its outset but
throughout (KS 54). “And that they were sufficiently clever enough to have found the
means,” Anders writes, “to have remained so very naïve? In order to allow themselves
to be abused as bona fide free whores?” (AM II, 407).
The force of this language can surprise us—it is written late in life, hyperbolically,
provocatively, more so perhaps than even Marcuse or Adorno, as Anders kept well
to the side of all academic spheres, as it can seem (not having an appointment
has this as consequence). Nevertheless, calling thinkers like Scheler and Simmel
“whores” seems excessive (and complicated enough that we will return to it). But the
language is deliberate. Thus, the reference to calculated advantage cuts to the quick
of the problem, as Max Weber already underlines this in his Wissenschaft als Beruf/
Science as Vocation, and as Lucian had already written in the second century AD in
his Philosophies for Sale, which will always be about the practice of philosophy as
profession: a paid job rather than a vocation one follows, paid or not, for the love
of it, as Anders did. To the same extent, the great majority, that would be nearly all
philosophers in Germany during the war, as everywhere else before and after the war,
tended to take the side of what the great naïve of the 1960s and 1970s of the last
century called “the establishment.”
For Anders, “Scheler’s dictum” was crystallized in the contrast between his own
disposition to “believe” as he did “in the devil (in contrast to the theologians of his
own generation who believed in the existence of god but not the devil)” (AM I, 407).
Dependent on Scheler and Heidegger, as his teachers, Anders also invokes some of the
most influential voices of his generation (his invocation would irritate Hannah Arendt
on the same topic), citing Denis de Rougement on the idea of the devil in America
society:

The Devil’s first trick, remarks André Gide, is to make us believe that he does not
exist. This trick has never better succeeded than in the modern epoch. All America
has fallen into the snare.71

Once upon a time, not only with Arendt but also with Maritain, and centuries of
Augustinians and Thomists, not to mention the refinements of the Dominicans,72
the question of evil was significant. More recently, tracking the analytic history
of philosophy, the question returns with Susan Neiman, upending the sense of
Nietzsche’s conception of evil, along with the sometimes as harmless but always by
no means incidentally Hegelian question of ugliness.73 Thus, the question of evil
had been a theme historically and after Arendt, for the Holocaust, but otherwise,
56 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

in an age of nonbelievers, it became an “outmoded” question that fit into notions of

Gnosticism and magically anticipatory catastrophism—as if activism against the bomb
post-Hiroshima was somehow an overstatement. Recently, Covid-19 shut down the
Vatican itself, conspicuously enough for those interested in theological punctuations,
on Easter Sunday 2020, and all other churches (synagogues, temples, mosques) along
with it. Thus Anders’ formula concerning the devil’s new apartment or address has to
be read in an era that takes zombie pandemics in stride, virtually speaking with, The
Walking Dead, along with a literal televised version of the apocalypse for prime time,
with the 2019 BBC series Good Omens, and the deaths of collective folk deities with
the still-running 2017 cable television series American Gods and HBO’s little-noted
2003 and 2005 Carnivàle, along with Twilight and True Blood and the magical realm
of Hogwarts, all spells and wand-waving included. And why ever not? We have had
orcs and half-orcs for years. What was once fiction for readers of Tolkien, amused
provocation for C.S. Lewis with his version of Wormwood, very different from Alan
Rickman’s invocation, is more harmlessly, as we suppose, lodged in our collective
unconscious gaming fantasies. I will return to this at the end, as it concerns what
Wolfgang Palaver, citing Pierre Dupuy’s “enlightened catastrophism,” characterizes as
a “prophylactic apocalypse.”74 We can read as we do about disaster capitalism as about
surveillance capitalism because catastrophe capitalism, pharmaceutical and quasi-
militarized enforced home-confinement, is (or can easily again be) the order of the day.
To cite Baudelaire (the source, pace Arendt,75 for de Rougemont’s repurposing of
Gide):

My dear brothers, never forget, as you undertake to vaunt enlightenment progress,

that the most beautiful of the Devil’s tricks is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.76

Speaking of the devil, we have the same saying in English, is a German commonplace,
if it also has, post Luther, a vulgar dimensionality to it. Anders takes this over as
well from Goethe, who writes his Mephisto with a touch of urbanity and bumbling
pathos, prerequisite for sympathy well beyond Milton’s tragic Satan in Paradise Lost. If
Anders also draws on Scheler to invoke the devil, the formula may be found in Kafka
and in Buber’s 1953 expression of the age of God’s eclipse77 along with Sartre’s more
existentialist writerly vision of nihilism, which is Hell itself (and the durably wretched
claim that other people suffice for this) or the classic contrast between Le Diable et
le bon Dieu. This is Anders’ reference to the devil’s “new address” (AM II, 410). For
Anders: we disattend to the category of evil quite where we think we have nailed it
down with Eichmann or indeed and after the Black Notebooks, with Heidegger. The
point here, as both Bloch78 and Anders remind us, is that by assigning the lion’s share of
evil to Hitler/Heidegger, one may be seduced into the confident illusion, we have this
in the meme of the moment—hunting Nazis, punching Nazis—that one had thereby
permanently categorized and enclosed it.
If everything that is to be done is in a sense, to repeat Adorno’s expression as so
many emphasize this, undertaken in order to ensure that “it” never happens again,
one has created a pseudo primal scene: one that can be neatly cordoned off, identified,
as if on an old map of ocean monsters: there is where evil lurks, but here is where we
 
Heidegger’s Authenticity and Günther Anders’ Neg-Anthropology 57

find ourselves. Do we talk about Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Fukushima? Do we talk about

‘climate change’ or do we mention, as few do apart to be sure from Peter Sloterdijk,
the ongoing and accelerating circumstance of both weather control and weather
multipliers effected by spraying accelerants on trees for years and years in the fire
disasters, in California, in Greece, in Australia?
Who today, which academic, which philosopher, here and now, that is since March
of 2020—and again apart from a sole exception, in this case: Giorgio Agamben79—
raises the question of what we have done and are doing to the old and the sick, in an era
of social media programmed and thus organized hysteria, pro mandatory masks, pro
mandatory testing, pro mandatory, that means forced, vaccinations, all in response to a
single pathogen somehow supposed singularly responsible for all death as such (this is
a stunning complicity in statistics) and for overwhelming medical facilities in potential,
unless all manner of fascist measures be taken on a global scale—including individual
self-incarceration, lockdown and quarantine, the prohibition of movement and social
interaction of the most everyday kind, in addition to the pursuit of one’s livelihood,
including art and theatre and face-to-face teaching.80
“Human,” as we are, are we, as we prefer to see ourselves, allied with the divine?
Image and likeness? As Nietzsche mused in recollecting his youthful theodistical
variations on good and evil, as Anders contemplated the fact not merely of Auschwitz
but also of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing instantiation of nuclear violence
via nuclear reactors in the then case of Chernobyl (which is still with us and today
we also have Fukushima, but the point is not to talk about it, as he maintained in his
Gewalt, Ja oder Nein?81), is there evil within us? The tradition that sets the devil as the
“prince of the world”—this is not by accident the title of Jacob Taubes’ edited collection
on Carl Schmitt82—seems frighteningly fitting, again consider only the burning of
Australia with wildfires abetted by months and years of chemtrail accelerants in the
trees followed by the wholesale persecution of its wildlife, nothing seems to hinder our
willingness, as Anders argues, to do the devil’s work for him.
 3

Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt

Love, Triangles, and the Political

Philosophical Triangles: Students, Scholars, Lovers

If love matches in philosophy are fairly rare—such that one can name the famous pairs
pretty much on the fingers of one hand—philosophy is named for love as the love of
wisdom. Indeed, some scholars note the physicality of love, beginning with Plato, quite
as what can draw one beyond the body, a redemptive erotic that suffuses, beautifully,
Plato’s Phaedrus. Indeed, and as already noted, a ‘concretized’ attunement to the erotic
as such inspires Anders in his reflections on Heidegger’s “pseudo-concreteness,”
indicting Heidegger’s Dasein as monkish, as sexless: ascetic. This conflicted point is
sufficiently nuanced that I will need to come back to it in a later chapter.
Love affairs, at the same time, are by their nature, personal matters, if they also
seem to make philosophy more human. Perhaps for this reason, despite the spareness
of such pairs, we overstate love matches in the history of philosophy like Socrates
and Diotima, as variations adumbrated by analytic readings are currently making the
rounds on the internet. Apart from Socrates’ famously self-ascribed friendship with his
Mantinean hetaira (how, one wonders, knowing as we do how things were arranged
with Thrasymachus, did he secure the wherewithal needed to recompense her time
and her teaching?), literary (and phantasmatic readings include Hölderlin’s Hyperion,
and a range of unrestrained associations),1 as well as the dramatic (and devastating),
like Abelard and Helöise,2 or, at the level of unrequited passions, Nietzsche and Lou,3
or else, as one dives deeper, Lou and Rainer Maria Rilke for more mutuality (if less
philosophy),4 to the sublime: Sartre and de Beauvoir.5 To the list, as Giorgio Agamben
takes care to remind us, may also be named Heidegger and Hannah Arendt,6 for a love
affair that spanned half a century, to which we may add, triangle-style, more muted
but as long lasting, by way of letters and the like, fifty years, so Anders tells us: Anders
and Arendt.7
I have been at pains to underline the considerable difficulties that cannot but
complicate writing a biography of Anders by contrast with Heidegger, who taught
a range of influential thinkers including both Anders and Arendt. It matters to note
that Heidegger was a famous opponent of the personal an sich, as a follower of the
Aristotelian dictates of doxa. For Heidegger, a thinker thinks only one thought. But
 
Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt 59

the complex thinking in Anders requires as much of the personal as one can get. In
der Mitte sitzt das Dasein [literally: in the middle sits the Dasein]—to riff a bit on
Lüdger Lütkehaus’ extraordinary title8—may capture the elementality in question,
as Lütkehaus reflects on Anders and Sloterdijk, triangulated, no love lost and quite
intending the pun of it, with Heidegger.
At the time, Günther Stern/Anders met Hannah Arendt in 1925 in Marburg in a
seminar taught by Martin Heidegger with whom Stern had already studied in Freiburg,
where he wrote his doctoral dissertation with Husserl. The coordination could not be
closer. At the time, Arendt herself was already absorbed by the claims of her then-
clandestine relationship with Heidegger. To this extent, the tension of the triangle
adumbrated the relationship between Arendt and Stern/Anders from the outset,
and, arguably, such triangulation remained between Arendt and her second husband
Heinrich Blücher, by then a double triangle quite to the extent that Heidegger remained
a love interest for Arendt. Hence, on her own account of it, rather than admiring
Anders as a possible love option—although it matters on the lived, phenomenological
level that Arendt would notice Anders’ physicality—he could do handstands!—Arendt
instead aspired to taking Anders’ place in easy and public conversation with Heidegger
as Arendt found herself jealous of his freedom to walk and to talk with Heidegger in
the open.
It is the freedom to enjoy conversation that will always matter when it comes to
affective desire, that is, the life of the heart and the mind as the erotic dimension
includes both. The poet and classics scholar Anne Carson works out the lines of visual,
perceptual, affective observation, and its pitfalls and its tricks, in a chapter entitled
“Ruse” in her book Eros, the Bittersweet. Carson’s book is dedicated to Sappho from
whose lines the title is taken, yet most of the chapters focus on poets like Archilochos
and Anacreon (and my students always notice Catullus). By contrast, this beautifully
complicated chapter reads Sappho’s Fragment 31: “He seems to me equal to the gods
that man who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking.”9
The comparison with Sappho, given Carson’s reading as she explains “the
geometrical figure formed by their perceptions of one another, and the gaps in that
perception,” matches quite to the level of the voice, first person, in the above account
of Arendt observing Heidegger and Anders. Thus, we note Carson’s analysis of
Sappho’s poem: “Thin lines of force coordinate the three of them. … The figure is a
triangle.”10 To this extent, the detail, self-recorded, self-reported, that Arendt herself
saw, and envied, the two, Heidegger and Anders, talking in public and seen from a
covert position, herself unseen, echoes the structural lines (although hardly the affect)
of what is, arguably, one of the earliest expressly philosophical triangles in history,
staged to be sure, as we are told from the outset that it is staged, as illustrated in
sculpture and woodcuts.
I refer to the classic image (Figure 3), unfortunately but instructively entitled
“Weibermacht,” as it gives us Aristotle captivated by Alexander’s beloved, and for this
reason submitting to her wish, originally instigated by Alexander, to play “horsey,” thus
pretending to ride on the old philosopher’s back as he crawled on his hands and knees
to Alexander’s covert observation—and hilarity—thus the triangle, not of jealousy but
derision.
60 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Figure 3 Hans Baldung Grien, “Weibermacht.” Woodcut of Phyllis seated on Aristotle on

all fours, with Alexander peering from the parapet. 1513. Wikicommons. Public domain.

The same triangular motif is so very influential that we are told that Nietzsche
would invoke it for the sake of arranging as he did, seemingly in an echo of Alexander’s
instigation, the troika photograph of himself and Paul Rée, the two of them hitched to a
cart in which a crouching Lou Salomé was posed with a whip entwined with flowers.11
It is this triangular context we would add to the further note that, as Kerstin Putz
remarks, their wedding in September of 1929 “surprised” both family and friends.12
With or without a reference to Sappho or Aristotle, triangulation as a structure
nonetheless followed Arendt and Anders as they continued to have other liaisons and
other marriages all without losing contact with one another. The rest is difficult to
assess with any certainty, for many reasons but not less because such matters, to use
Arendt’s own language, are affairs that transpire “unter vier Augen,”13 doubling the title
of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, marked by Alexander Nehamas’ formula as “two
pairs of eyes,” as Nehamas discusses attraction and desire — and beauty — in Only a
Promise of Happiness.14
If we read their correspondence and take care to note the dates, not unlike the date
stamping that increasingly marks our internet-inveigled lives, the intervals add and
subtract intensity, a sign of a dead letter, a sign of unvalued presence. And then there is
the matter of different styles between the two correspondents. Arendt, more successful
by far than Anders, was also promoted and protected by Anders. Thus, Anders worked
to get her out of Germany and then to arrange sponsorship, as she writes to him with
some baffled reproach, on June 4, 1941, as if he had “prepared [her] arrival as if ” she
 
Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt 61

were “who knows who.”15 Anders’ efforts on her behalf succeeded, which also meant
that she would come to have increasingly less time, a detail both she and Anders
emphasize in their correspondence.
In addition, but now we tread on the completely invisible to reconstructive
attempt, save liminally, there were telephone calls. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, in
a negative modality, the reductive efficacy of technology works to attenuate being by
magnification, in this case via the voice of the other on the telephone—Joan Baez also
has a song, Diamonds and Rust, about this immediacy and distance—that brings them
to us, in their presence, a bringing that is to be sure, and this is one of the dangers of
modern media programming via the internet, a summons: a call to recollection.16
We need Merleau-Ponty, who offers an ontology by contrast with an operational
account of language, as Merleau-Ponty’s account, concerned as it is with the mediation
of telephone and the voice, turns on exchange. This exchange is key to the letters
between Arendt and Anders, as intervals into which telephone calls and meetings must
also be counted but which, owing to the nature of a volume of correspondence, we can
read, and hence we are beguiled into thinking that phone calls of which there is, like
personal meetings, one to one, which is one of the reasons social distancing was so
very critical as psyop, no record, can for the same reasons of this lack of evidence, be
discounted, as if they never took place. And yet, like face-to-face encounters, the phone
maintains the life, the bodily presence of the other, by way of voice. And this was true
for Arendt and Anders and for any twentieth-century love affair. As Merleau-Ponty
writes, although he is not here foregrounding an affective context,

A friend’s speech over the telephone brings us the friend himself, as if he were wholly
present in that manner of calling and saying goodbye to us, of beginning and ending
his sentences, and of carrying on the conversation through things left unsaid.17

To this we add the reflections of the Italian philosopher, Giuseppina Moneta, as

she articulates this in an extraordinary, if lapidary, contribution to a Festschrift
for William J. Richardson, S.J. Moneta articulates the spacing inherent to and in
dialogues between philosophical friends, those attuned to one another. This emphasis
echoes the kind of attunedness key to Anders’ phenomenological reflection on music
as he underscores listening — the context is Heideggerian — for the sake of a specific
Mitdasein, Mitwelt, for the listener who is a specific listener, in Anders case, one
affectively, intellectually, creatively attuned to music. In this way, to parallel friends
who are also philosophers, we can recall the subtext of Anders’ Kirschenschlacht, as it
offers a description of “listening to another dimension of awareness.”18 For Moneta,
“the soundless distances between words and sentences,” calls forth and bridges the
distances of time, intervals punctuating communications between lifelong friends,
characterizing the correspondence between Arendt and Anders and so on, as
Moneta was a friend to Bill Richardson, a Jesuit priest and expert on Heidegger and
no less as she was also a friend of the Hannah Arendt expert, Jerry Kohn, and to
the current author, given Pina Moneta’s visits, almost a perambulation, annually,
between Rome and New York City. As Moneta noted, one notices, quite as Merleau-
Ponty also details in his own phenomenological account, the “voices of silence.”
62 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

These for Moneta offer a staccato “interval of muteness.” Here it is important that
such muteness adumbrates all exchange as such, no matter whether face to face, on
the phone, or correspondence via letter. One sends a postcard and the other saves
this forever; one says more than the other, yet, as Moneta writes, the other, keeping
silent, gives “tacit yet clear invitation to keep in check the urge of wanting to talk,”19
and the first one is thus constrained and served by this elective muteness to listen
for what is not said. In this way, Moneta cites Heidegger, who is for his part, himself
silently—stillschweigend—citing Nietzsche concerning the “habit of always hearing
only what we already understand.”20 For Moneta, offering a reflection that may follow
all our efforts with one another in and over time: “The spoken is dissolved as soon
as it is uttered and the air seems to have become a solvent to sense and meaning.”21
The acoustically sensitive, arch-Augustinian Anders—here it should be noted that
Moneta’s reference is an architectural one as Anders always noted the architectural as
musical—would have valued such observations. For my part, I think many of us might
share a related sensibility when it comes to intimate exchange. For Anders, in the case of
one phone call about which we do know, quite because he wrote about it, the immediacy
of the contact overwhelmed him. Thus we read a painful letter to Arendt written after
his marriage to his third wife, Charlotte Zelka, came to a factical close—they never did
divorce—but contact-wise, as Anders recounted under the guise of an apology for his
agonized crying on the telephone in a previous conversation,22 explaining that Zelka had
told him that she preferred, for reasons the music-minded Anders could never fathom,
to stay in California close to her sister and to content herself with teaching piano rather
than performing herself and rather than hearing others perform.23
Moneta is forbearingly generous in her reflection on the intervals of communication,
between friends, between different and elliptical intentionalities, differing mutualities,
reminding us that such intervals exceed gaps or absences. Such “emptiness,” as she
reminds us, “was not a blank but a stretching out of the spoken: the range and horizon
of its resonance.”24 This is the between, Heidegger’s zwischen, that remains or endures
between friends who stay in contact. It is the spacing of their contact: the absences
noted in correspondence, smaller intervals noted quite as much as the decades, to note
Arendt’s and Anders’ later correspondence.
Of their phone calls, as these calls punctuated their letters beginning already in the
1950s, we have no records, although we can suppose as a matter of cost and custom that
such early phone calls would perforce have been brief. It is not impossible to imagine
that the FBI, as an example of one intelligence agency, might have heard more than we
scholars will ever know, given suspicions concerning both Anders and Arendt. And we
have little sense of the conversations that took place in their rare later meetings face to
face, and what we know of these must be reconstructed, and not everything, as Goethe
famously reminds us, is written down.
But there was love. And from reading the letters, as it is a characteristic of romantic
and friendly love, we also know that this love affair was adumbrated by a clear sense
that one loved more than the other. This is always true if only to the extent that in every
love affair there is the one who is the lover and the one who is the beloved, and Anders
loved Arendt as beloved, and so “more” in this fashion. At the same time, affectively,
this was compatible with Anders taking other lovers for his own part, as Anders was
 
Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt 63

as old fashioned as was Heidegger and as was Hannah Arendt’s husband, Blücher, with
his extramarital affections, not that (as the #metoo movement might underline) all that
much has changed in the interval.25 And although Arendt was desired by many suitors,
it was Arendt who loved Heidegger more, as the constancy of her love, over intervals of
temporal distance, ensured that the love between Heidegger and Arendt could endure
half a century to Arendt’s death. But in just the same fashion, Anders would also remain
true to Arendt until her death. And in her turn, and in her fashion, Arendt remained in
contact, mediated by their once upon love, one flesh, as they had married, with Anders.
Heidegger has dropped out of our reflections on Arendt and Anders and yet he
remains part of what remained between them. This contested locus is one marked
by negation and critical emphasis and rebuke. In this way, Anders’ discussion of
Heidegger’s “Pseudo-Concreteness” emphasizes that Heidegger lacks any space for
affect, writing that Dasein is both bodiless and sexless (PC 349). Here I’ve sought
to underline some question of the differences between love for Arendt and love for
Anders to approach the complexity of Anders’ reproach (Arendt-Heidegger) as it is
not simply a theme that stands on its own. In addition, as I point out in The Hallelujah
Effect, one must also consider the “work” of desire, eros between men and women, in
terms of passion and beauty.
Several scholars have noted Hans Jonas’ contention that Arendt’s role was seemingly
subservient, intellectually, to Anders and of course by extension, though this is less
remarkable, to Heidegger.26 Here, too, there is a triangle, as Jonas too, so he tells us—so
we also learn from Arendt herself—was one of Arendt’s admirers, and jealousy (and
the diffidence that can be part of jealousy) may have played a role in Jonas’ assessment
of the relation between Anders and Arendt. At the same time, there is the fact that the
collective treatment of Arendt (the context of record was a meeting in the circle of the
early Frankfurt School) is often criticized (and rectified) by scholars, but the sexism
that dominates is unabated, and multifariously so.
To this extent, and this too is part of what the Hegel, and Adorno, scholar, Gillian
Rose called “love’s work,”27 Anders’ dedicated affection for Arendt, his clear admiration
of her along with his own gifts as a scholar and as a “philosopher”—importantly, a term
Arendt for her own part would always refuse—meant that Anders edited Arendt’s work
at the time they were together: and he assured its publication, efforts he undertook along
with the support and encouragement of Karl Jaspers. The simple circumstance, the fact
that Arendt regarded Anders as editor/corrector would then be part of their relationship
as scholars working together on related and joint topics, one more junior in this case
than the other: they were a pair, and both were scholars, but they were not equal. This
aid to Arendt on Anders’ part was vital, and thus Arendt’s doctoral dissertation on the
concept of—what else?—“love” in Saint Augustine came to light as a published book.

Triangulating the Triangle: Arendt–Heidegger–Anders

Any full reflection on the love affair—and not only the simple fact of the marriage—
between Arendt and Anders must await a biography of Anders attentive to his
differentiated concerns, hopefully one looking to highlight the affective dimensions
64 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

in Anders’ life, as such tracking is more complicated in Anders’ case than it usually is
(and it is always complicated as in matters of the heart we tend to lie to ourselves and
to others about love, motivations, achievements, disappointments), so much so (this is
Freud’s great insight as Lacan only complicates it) that we remain strangers to ourselves
when it comes to those we love, first loves, the love of a lifetime, a great love, and not
less when it comes to wives/companions in Anders’ case, given his lovers, and when he
was young he was a beautiful man, with three wives to his count. It makes biographical
reflections no less easy to underline Anders’ personality as he was apparently strikingly
difficult to be with, and that is on his own account. Anders was contrary enough,
paradoxical enough to continue to act on behalf of his wives, certainly in the case of
Arendt, after their divorce, and likewise for his other wives. Thus, Anders remained
close as well to Elisabeth Freundlich, his second wife. All the same, he would die in the
condition of loneliness he reflected upon throughout his theoretical life.
It is to be sure, as we know, but perhaps we are wrong about this originally, that it
is Arendt herself who gives herself the title of a “girl from a distant land,” “Mädchen
aus dem Fremde,” thereby, and this is the charm: claiming Schiller’s words as her own.28
Heidegger echoed the claim or did he originate it in conversations between the two of
them, which she then took up and he repeated, words between them to express a love
between them? Certainly Schiller’s lines infused their love, as Heidegger who was fond
of poetizing as Anders loved music, wrote a poem for her, as only Heidegger could but
also as only Arendt was able to “hear.” Thus, Daniel Maier-Katkin includes this as the
title and key to his Stranger from Abroad: “Stranger from abroad, du, / may you live in
the beginning.”29 Anders echoes some of this poetic thunder, underscoring his own
literary gifts, as he seeks to recount, all of this only posthumously and in retrospect
recounting Arendt’s surprise at the same, yet another dimension of triangulation, in
Anders’ Kirschenschlacht.
No different from the majority of studies that have examined the relationship
between Arendt and Heidegger, Maier-Katkin downplays Anders, whom Arendt
married in 1929 to divorce eight years later in 1937 (Arendt would marry Blücher
in 1940). The concern of the story, as it might be sold on the open market, is not the
story of a failed or derailed or otherwise misconceived first marriage (Arendt-Stern)
but the story of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, a love affair parsed as it should
be, it lasted a lifetime, as friendship: a friendship which, given the peculiar resistances
of Heidegger’s character, entails that Maier-Katkin has recourse to the language of
forgiveness. This dual emphasis makes Maier-Katkin’s book a contribution to the
debate on Arendt and Heidegger, while at the same time rendering the book difficult
reading for those interested in their love affair, perhaps given the frisson that such
a common fact of academic life can exert (think of Jacob Taubes’ abusive treatment
of his first wife, Susan Taubes, and his one-time lover Ingeborg Bachmann, and his
eventually estranged second wife, Margherita von Brentano),30 or else to wonder
at the durability of any love (and any friendship) that stayed the course of half a
century: until Arendt herself died in 1975, half a year before Heidegger himself
would die in 1976.
The longer lived of either Arendt or Heidegger, Anders published the second volume
of the essay reflections comprising his The Antiquatedness of Humanity, subtitled On the
 
Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt 65

Destruction of Life in the Age of the Third Industrial Revolution in 1980, four years after
Heidegger’s death. Similarly, Anders’ research concerns, like his formation, differed
from the preoccupations that would make Arendt herself a popularly contested figure,
politically as well as an indispensable name in political theory following her writings
on totalitarianism, on Eichmann, and what she called the “life of the mind.” Given
these keen theoretical differences, Anders—and note here that I am not speaking of
Stern—and Arendt intersected via a shared concern with the human condition. Thus,
Anders can underscore the extent to which Arendt had “stolen” from him and he
from her, both of them freely. Thus, Anders can advance a lover’s joke, between lovers,
highlighting mutual theft of one another’s ideas. And this too is part of love affairs.
The very fact that Anders and Arendt remained, arguably, quite as much as
Heidegger and Arendt remained, on a “friendly” basis, is clear,31 although it is no less
evident that Heidegger, quite like Blücher,32 maintained the upper hand in Arendt’s
affections. But friendship is a funny thing and can be strained between those who have
been lovers, especially perhaps those who were once married. If most biographical
studies of Arendt focus on her marriage to Blücher, noting only in passing or to date
the relevance of her life as “Mrs. Stern,”33 “Frau Stern” as she is reported in print among
and for the adherents of the Frankfurt School (a school which itself would not be
particularly friendly to Arendt, and vice versa), Arendt’s relationship to Anders tends
to go completely by the board: overlooked.
In addition, there is the conflicted dimension of friendship as such. Thus, despite
Aristotle’s emphasis on friendship as the crown of the virtues and a friend as ‘another
self,’ academics tend to worry (mostly to sexualize) friendships of even the most
innocuous kind, by which I mean the fictional sort, the mythic sort: Castor and Pollux.
So we wonder: Were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn really just and only friends? Was
there not an erotic subtext to Mark Twain’s fictive friends? So too we likewise wonder
about Schiller and Goethe or Nietzsche and Rohde and the ongoing enthusiasm for
asserting that Nietzsche was “gay.” Was he? Was he not? And how many know of these
two—what was it about Rohde—named the “Dioscuren” by their teacher, Friedrich
Ritschl, and much more commonly well known, the affection—what was that really?—
between Adorno and Benjamin (it surely helps to have one of the friends die relatively
“young”).
Even in the age of Facebook, where the one or two or four or six friends in the
course of a lifetime (and that only for some lucky souls) routinely morph into hundreds
(more for younger users), and especially in an era where friendship and contact are
officially proscribed (post-Covid), we question friendship, its basis, its truth. In this
measure we may wonder if Arendt and Heidegger were really friends? What kind of
love affair was it that they shared? Are there details? And again, and above all, how did
it manage to last?
Even more questionable then will be the nature of the love between Arendt and
Anders. A marriage that did not last, was it not undergirded by Arendt’s “truer” love
affair, as it seems patent that she was besmitten, with Heidegger? So, what affection
would she have had for Anders? Like friendship, love always needs to beg forgiveness,
even as it “keeps no record of wrongs. . . . It always protects, always trusts, always
hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13).
66 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

In philosophy, like Aristotle, we count as real or true only those friendships and
loves that endure, or outlast utility or survive the fading of sensual fancy (and of
this Elfriede Heidegger was never sure when it came to Heidegger’s love affairs,
even as Bazon Brock relays a certain factical diriment impediment on Heidegger’s
part).34 At the same time, it says something about Heidegger that in spite of his
character, transparent as he was to his friends, as Karl Jaspers tells Arendt (“here
we are, the two best friends he has, and we see right through him”),35 Heidegger
would have friends like Jaspers and like Arendt.
I have underscored that even dedicated discussions of Arendt that focus on love
and friendship say little of Anders, who, following his divorce from Arendt, married
Elisabeth Freundlich, quite as already noted, in the course of their shared exile in
the United States in 1945, returning with her to her native Vienna five years later in
1950 where they lived until their divorce in 1955. And, again, it matters that Anders
remained in contact with Freundlich until the end of his life (Freundlich herself would
die almost a decade after Anders in 2001).
But having married two intellectuals, the first a scholar of theological philosophy, as
Anders regarded Arendt, the other, Freundlich, a writer herself and scholar of theatre, a
dedication that ultimately collided to some degree with his own style and absorptions,
Anders turned, two years later, at the age of fifty-five, so goes the affective life, to a
marriage in 1957, with the much younger pianist, herself once a child prodigy, the
American, Charlotte Zelka. Arguably, this third and final marriage was the worst of the
three for Anders, although it would technically last until the end of Anders’ life, quite
because, as noted earlier, Zelka, herself unhappy, would leave him in 1972 to return to
California. Their contact remained desultory.
We can add to all this, as we know from several sources and as if to counterbalance
Anders’ own harsh critique, that Heidegger himself hardly held Anders in high esteem.
Maier-Katkin, one of the prime sources for this assessment, adds the comment that “in
the end neither did Hannah.”36 Given this, and as already noted, it is to his credit that
Maier-Katkin emphasizes Anders’ beauty, as can also be seen in the photos of the time,
quite in addition to the handstands.
Anders became a passionate theorist of the human condition as this term is
associated with Arendt, thinking this in the current technological age, between Husserl
and Heidegger and Arendt (although the last influence was surely mutual) arguing
that we were, as Anders argues, “born” as opposed to being a “thing” (AM I, 30), of
being, as it were, not a product, not fabricated to spec or code.37 There is a certain
justification for looking at Anders’ analysis of “Human Engineering” (in English in the
original, AM I, 35f) Here, if this chapter had been part of a study focusing on Arendt
and Anders, it would be crucial to call attention to Arendt’s focus on natality along
with her own critical interest in technology, as this last resonates with Anders’ and not
less with Heidegger’s philosophical interests in technology.
The challenge Arendt faced with respect to Anders, namely that of being taken
adequately seriously, affected her relationship with Heidegger, although Anders
read and corrected her work lending her his insights as a matter of joint research.
By contrast, Arendt knew that Heidegger would not read her work. Resigned to this
circumstance, she would write to Blücher:
 
Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt 67

I am, as you know, quite prepared to act with Heidegger as if I had never written a
line and was never going to write one. And that is the unuttered condition sine qua
non of the whole affair.38

The issue of Zionism is more than a little complicated, and it is easier to discuss with
respect to Arendt than Anders, even given the complex reception of Arendt’s own
problematic relationship with Zionism (distinguishing Theodor Herzl and Bernard
Lazare’s definitions of Zionism and gently clashing with Gershom Scholem) and
nationalism,39 especially given her “calls for the active pursuit of peaceful coexistence
with Palestinian Arabs”40 and her opposition, shared, as Maier-Katkin reminds us,
with both Sidney Hook and Albert Einstein, to “acts of terrorism by Jewish groups,” as
Arendt writes in a letter to Jaspers quoting Blücher: “If the Jews insist on becoming a
nation like every other nation, why for God’s sake do they insist on becoming like the
Germans?”41
It is claimed the comment is intended half-jokingly. Yet, there is a serious
dimensionality, to recall Jacob Taubes’ account, arguably in the last book he would
‘dictate’ of his own accord, and in person Taubes repeated, on several occasions,
the same story to the present author. Like Arendt, Taubes was a friend of Gershom
Scholem and collided, as he was fond of saying this, with Scholem’s disapproval of his
own failure with respect to Israel—Scholem would call him a traitor, Verräter. This
must be matched, as I believe, with the account Taubes also relates (and indeed and
again more than once) of the role played by the Nazi Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt’s
Constitutional Theory in Israel as Taubes, on his own account of it, went in search
for his own purposes (to give a lecture on Descartes) for which lecture he tells us he
required a copy of Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre, which dealt with the problem of nomos/
lex/Gesetz.
Taubes relates the story, combining the force of Augustine and Plato’s Republic, not
to mention Descartes—Strauss is not mentioned for nothing:

In 1949 I went to Jerusalem as a Research Fellow with the Warburg Prize; Gershom
Scholem, kabbalist and friend of Walter Benjamin, was my patron. Not only was
Jerusalem a divided city in the 1940s and 1950s, but the Hebrew University had
been exiled from Mount Scopus and was located in a monastery in the city centre.
The great library was locked up on Mount Scopus, where an Israeli guard changed
every fortnight under the supervision of the United Nations.42

The English translation skips over what the verbal German report underlines as the
specifically bureaucratic “enjoyment and sadism” of the librarian,43 as Taubes perceives
his response to his request, and in its place we are given a report of what seems an an
sich inoffensively “neutral” response to his query:

The chief librarian listened carefully, but explained that he was powerless to
speed the book ordering process. It could take two or three months before I got
hold of the book. This was little help, since in three months the semester would
be over.
68 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

As Taubes tells it, repeated on several occasions in person, the telling of which always
underscored the dramatic description of smuggling materials out of the library on
Mount Scopus44:

the minister of justice, Pinchas Rosen (formerly Rosenbluth), needed Schmitt’s

Verfassungslehre so that he could deal with some difficult problems in the drafting
of a constitution for the state of Israel. The book was therefore immediately
brought from Mount Scopus and had now arrived in the library on its return
journey, where my urgent request had been kept against an “opportune moment.”45

Taubes emphasizes his “bemusement” with “the idea that the constitution of the State
of Israel (a constitution which fortunately still does not exist) would be drafted using
Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre as a guide.”46
In this same context, it can be worth recalling, subject as it was to rebuke from her
friend, Gershom Scholem, following her Eichmann in Jerusalem for her lack of love
for the Jewish people, Arendt’s response in reply that she does not “love” peoples or
nations but only friends, “nur meine Freunde.”47 It is emphasized as noteworthy, and it
also important to qualify that Arendt does not always do this in her correspondence
with Scholem, that in this particular case she does begin her letter: “Lieber Gerhardt.”
The positions here between Arendt on Israel and Taubes on the constitution
of Israel are misalignments. Anders’ sister, Eva Stern Michaelis, would move to
Israel and, according to her son David Michaelis,48 would receive Arendt there but
precisely negatively vis-à-vis her Eichmann in Jerusalem—but apart from familial
accommodations, there is no mention,49 a deliberate silence, as if by mutual agreement,
on both sides with respect to either of their books on Eichmann (Arendt) and
Eichmann fils (Anders), such that to report these differences, Anders himself would
engage an utterly different set of concerns.
In addition to such complexities, and in addition to Arendt and Adorno, there is
a greater connection between Taubes and Arendt than may have been supposed, not
least via Scholem and also perhaps via Löwith and Jonas, and this is worth exploring
for its own sake. Here, however the concern is Anders, who remains more complex
just to the extent that his own research is broader, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
as well as nuclear energy projects. It is significant that Anders’ concerns go beyond
the received, standard and standardizing post-war focus as this involved Europe as
such and the Holocaust. We will return to these difficult themes, each of which would
properly deserve a study of its own.
 4

Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke

Love Songs to God

Kafka
It is common to write of Kafka—the very name is a commonplace, even acoustically
appropriate—when it comes to thinkers like Anders, and like Adorno and like Arendt
herself who writes on Kafka and about whose work on Kafka a fair amount has been
written. And there is a great deal (relatively speaking) already written on Anders and
Kafka, as there is to be sure on Kafka and Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt. Anders however
reminds us of the need to be particularly cautious when it comes to Kafka, using the term
“Kafkaesque,” itself an Inbegriff for his times, the times of ‘darkness,’ and for everyone
mentioned, this darkness would perforce have been their “situation.” In the same way, the
challenge would be less that of writing poetry “after Auschwitz” to use Adorno’s famous
coinage, but rather, as Kata Gellen cites Anders on the constellation and dangers of cliché:

one could think it must have actually been “difficult” for the likes of us not to write
about Kafka. However he who is forced to live a Kafkaesque life does not read Kafka
and does not write about Kafka. Even K. would not, under these circumstances,
have read Kafka. We had more urgent matters to attend to.1

Although a careful reader herself, Gellen immediately distances herself from Anders’
efforts to question the often-unquestioned conviction that literature or writing on
literature is a salvific or political or redemptive enterprise as such. For literary scholars,
such a question can be difficult to hear let alone to take seriously, thus, although Gellen
breaches the issue, she does not long consider it. This allows her to express a certain
scepticism rather than to inquire into Anders’ lifelong struggles with money, a point
that may be compared to Kojève’s explanation, although this is to be sure not Gellen’s
own comparison, given Kojève’s abundantly influential Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel lectures, an insult from which rank and file Hegelians have not recovered to
date,2 namely that as Gellen writes, and this would thus be the patent parallel between
Kojève and Anders:
the French academy sought a lecture on Kafka and that he [Anders] needed
money: Kafka was thus “useful” as a source of income. This, Anders suggests, and
not the plight of Josef K. or Gregor Samsa, is real existential angst.3
70 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

This summary of Anders’ perspective is incidental in the course of Gellen’s reading,

which pro forma reference yields what is surely an unintentional solecism, substituting
tombs for tomes:

When standing before the greatest ethical and political crisis of the modern age,
one did not waste time reading (much less writing) esoteric tombs on Kafka—or
at least one should not have.

“Tombs” are esoteric by their nature.

As Anders writes on the occasion of the death of his cousin, Walter Benjamin, in a
poem written in 1940, Das Vermächtnis, in memoriam—which should be matched with
a poem written two years later by Arendt herself (their style is worth comparing)—a
remarkable parenthesis: no one steps voluntarily through the gate: everyone—meaning
even those who take their own lives—is shoved over the threshold. “(Keiner / trat selbst
durchs Tor. Sie warden / über die Schwelle geschoben.)”4
The language Anders uses to introduce his reading of Kafka is complex, indebted
to Kant but not less to the physiognomic—only Virilio emphasizes the distortion that
intrudes into scientific experimentation on the vulnerable, the mad, but also of course
the prisoners in concentration camps in his Art & Fear.5 Indeed, in an anticipatory
parallel, Anders takes the reader into a discussion of love in his 1950 book on Kafka,
that is, the erotic in a literary, aesthetic context. Reminding us that it is in Wagner
(Friedrich Kittler will repeat the observation, if not with reference to Anders) that
“salvation and dissolution of self become identical,” emphasizing further, and here the
logic is Nietzschean, even if the reading is not, “it is in Wagner that the two feelings of
love and pity merge.”6 Anders’ summary lack of reverence for sacred cows is striking
in the continuation of the sentence—reading Adorno or Nietzsche one is not likely to
find a comparably cavalier account:

so complete is this merging that it is impossible to determine from the molten

sweetness of [Wagner’s] music whether his heart is consumed by compassion or
by sexual anguish.7

Kant appears on the first page with a reference that Kant himself offers early in his
own first critique, and Anders comes back to the metaphor, drawing its ultimate
consequences: “modern science, in order to probe the nature of reality, places the
object of its investigation in artificial, i.e., experimental conditions.”8
The Kantian reference to the “experiment,” quite as trial, recurs in Anders; it is
central to Heidegger and, as torture, in Anders, as has been noted in Schraube.9 But it
is also key to Anders’ reading of Kafka as it allows him to read The Trial, The Castle,
Metamorphosis, Before the Law and The Report for an Academy as he does:

For even as an experimental technique produces results, we shall not have penetrated
nature’s secrets unless we understand exactly what our technique is and does.10

When Anders reminds us that interpretation, and here we might wish to draw an
incidental, accidental parallel with Anders himself, the need to interpret, the facility
with the same, corresponds to a lack of power—elsewhere I show that Nietzsche tracks
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 71

what I analyze as an acteurly hermeneutic facility in the Jew as in women: a facility, as

Nietzsche describes it, in the art of deception, illusion, all compelled by necessity11—
thus, Anders explains as a hermeneutic corollary, paralleling an “unremitting search
for meaning” with “a mania for interpretation.”12 As Anders continues to argue with a
patent allusion to Marx:

This mania for interpretation is thus the stigma of the individual deprived of
power; of one who (to adopt an old saying) must forever interpret the world
because others rule and change it.13

If it can be argued that Anders offers a palimpsest in his 1950 Kafka book for what
becomes in the germ a certain reading of an all-too-real-world “process,” Eichmann in
Jerusalem,14 this is not my project here.
The focus of the current chapter is not Kafka but Rilke. Nevertheless, reading Kafka,
Anders not only reminds us that the two were contemporaries but points out that Rilke’s
“the beautiful is only the beginning of the terrible . . . for it serenely despises to destroy
us,”15 seems to serve as mirror and epitome: “these lines might have been written as a
motto for Kafka’s work.”16 Anders’ emphasis is inherently divided: one is caught in grip of
terror, and at the same time this terrifying “renunciation is” and can be “a gift of grace.”17

Rilke
At issue is hardly the question of “choosing,” as it were, Rilke over Kafka, or, as also
might have been done, given Heidegger’s own option for Hölderlin or a keenness
for Aeschylus or attunement to Goethe, the last emphases importantly underread
in Anders. Much rather it is hermeneutically decisive to note in reading Arendt and
Anders on Rilke, as Anders himself notes in his own retrospective reflection, that
Anders and Arendt wrote together a text in Anders’ hand—we will come back to this—
on Rilke. The urgency is assured by the themes of love and of voice and not less deity
in Rilke.
In the second strophe of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, a second sentence begins,
and we can imagine the young couple reading this together, as if addressed quite to the
two of them, together: Sterne [stars]. The poet calls to the reader’s memory, reminding
the reader in intimate, direct address, that even the springtime needed “you”, myriad
stars wait to be sensed, while from the depths of distant memory a wave rolls in, and
a violin, “as you passed by under an open window,” yielded itself to be heard. All of it,
the poet says, is assigned—Das alles war Auftrag.
Do we ever, we can read the poet as asking, find ourselves measured to, up to? this
assignment, this task? This is “the paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation”
that is the first line of their joint 1930 essay, “from which standpoint the Duino Elegies
may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the
knowledge of futility.”18
We hear paradox in the first formulaic frame as we also again hear the language of
“situation” as Anders would use this term more technically with reference to music—
72 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

he is not the only one, as we read the same language in F. Joseph Smith’s reflections on
and towards a musical phenomenology among others, including Carl Stumpf—and
with specific respect to poetry we hear “situation” as the word of the time, given the
political and economic circumstance of 1930, but also given the influence of Heidegger
and Heidegger’s later, Rilke-suffused reading of Hölderlin as a specifically “desperate”
poet, complex in a needful era, we hear needfulness, “desperation.”
The question echoes in the poem Das archaische Torso Apollons/The Archaic Torso
of Apollo, and it is the reason perhaps that the poem has proven to be as significant as it
has for Heidegger, Gadamer, and most recently Sloterdijk, to name the more famous of
the philosophical names of those who write on Rilke. That Gadamer himself will, thirty
years later, give his own answer in response to the urging of this archaic column in
human form, by speaking of trembling, of shaking, and thus of nothing so articulated,
as Heidegger will say of the work of art, “this painting spoke,” not then of symbol, nor
allegory despite Gadamer’s reference to both and as Pierre Hadot has also taught us to
hear the medieval resonance of the same, nor indeed in a more Platonic/Aristotelian
guise of reproduction, mimesis, play, terms Gadamer invokes in short order—and
seemingly invoking the beginning of Rilke’s Duino Elegies heard through Heidegger
recollecting Hegel—“Great art shakes us because we are always unprepared and
defenceless when exposed to the overpowering impact of a compelling work.”19 Thus,
Gadamer cites the Seventh Duino Elegy: “As Rilke says, ‘Such a thing stood among
men.’”20 Signally, Gadamer, who thus reads between Rilke and Hölderlin (his alignment
running contra Heidegger), cites the Archaic Torso, and it is this line in Rilke, this line
in Gadamer’s own essay, that stays with us: “There is no place which fails to see you. You
must change your life.”21 Gadamer’s closing reference is to Hölderlin, which may (or
may not) suggest his loyalty when it comes to the Heideggerian question of the work of
art as there are also traces more temporally proximate of Adorno,22 “That ‘something
can be held in our hesitant stay’—this is what art has always been and still is today.”23
For Anders and Arendt, writing in 1930 there is another echo as this directly
resounds in the poem. The acoustic claim speaks to Anders as is evident in his own
musical writing, in Rilke’s reference to the violin heard in passing, as this also seems
the clue to his 1930, and thus roughly simultaneously composed, two-page musical
essay, “Spuk und Radio.” But just as in the case noted earlier, for Gadamer, who is also
alluding, in the interim, to Benjamin’s later essay on the technological reproducibility
of the work of art, if Rilke is influential here for Arendt and for (Stern)Anders, as he
clearly is, and if we can show that the same poetic lineage may be traced in Adorno on
music, Rilke himself already draws in the word a lyrical, musical echo of the first verse
of Hölderlin’s Brot und Wein, originally titled: To the Night—An die Nacht. It was this
first verse that was, during the poet’s lifetime, the only version in print, dedicated as it
was to the author of the novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln/Ardinghell and
the Isles of the Blest by Wilhelm Heinse.
Hölderlin’s motifs in these few lines seem to outline questions of economy, “Und
Gewinn und Verlust wäget ein sinniges Haupt,” that is, matching Hölderlin’s Suabian
sensibility: weighing “profit and loss.” Thus a mindful, sensible “head” attuned toward the
“balance,” the satisfactions of the market, thinks back on the day. Hölderlin continues, as
the night goes on, before the watcher calls the hour, to trace distance, ambiguity, memory:
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 73

But the play of strings sounds distantly from the gardens: perhaps, that
There a lover plays or a solitary man
Thinking of faraway friends and days of youth . . .24

Hölderlin, whose word should also be heard and for the same reasons of the musicality
of the word in the first lines of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, in Nietzsche’s case:
concerning the conflicts between lovers, reminds us that with music we meet an art
that brings us distance, overcomes distance, in its most intimate claim. With Rilke,
we have to do with angelic hierarchies (cf. Figure 4): who might there be among all of
these, in all these heights, to hear us, were we suddenly to cry out?
We’ve noted Anders’ reflection that in effect, and the consequentiality here is key, the
religious world is “an acoustic world.”25 There is a clear ambiguity in relation to the divine
and thus the patent or seeming lack of answer that is part and parcel of “the situation,”
again we note the term, in which one seeks God. As Anders writes together with Arendt,
and the dialogue between them subtends the argument, in their joint reflection on Rilke’s
Duino Elegies as we have already cited this allusion to questioning in Rilke (and thereby
in Heidegger), as the kind of question that must be heard in the poet’s word, heard:

in the form of a question that no longer hopes for an answer. Still the question
does not perish from lack of an answer; rather it survives as disquietude suddenly
changing into despair at the very encounterability [Treffbarkeit] of God.26

Figure 4 Bethesda Fountain, Central Park, New York City. Photograph, Babette Babich,
December 12, 2018.
74 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

The resonance seems unmistakable in connection with the beginning reflections of

Anders’ introduction to the text he had meant for his habilitation, Concerning Musical
Situations. There we read the same dialectical tension, he names “Die Situation des
Zugleich,” the “situation of the at-once,” simultaneously, at the same moment, where
his specific concern is to reflect the simultaneous circumstance of being not sheerly
“in-the-world [in Welt], but ‘in Music’.”27
The tenor of the encounter, traced in Rilke’s faintingly uncanny perishing “from
his stronger existence” [von seinem stärkeren Dasein], is thus explained by Anders/
Arendt with reference to nothing other than Anders own notion of being in-the-world
as in-music, a specific ‘being-in-hearing.’ This is unpacked:

This “something” consists in an in-stance of hearing, being-in-hearing

[Inständigkeit des Hörens, Im-Hören-Sein]. Today there has to be a condition and
an occasion for being-in-hearing.28

The acoustic we have already seen but what is at stake is the difference between a world
with angels, a world with creatures created, and a world with and without God:

With the denial of the experience and existence of God, nothingness disappears
as a determination of human being: the human being finds a natural home in the
world. If the human being still understands himself as nothing, then it is not as
nothing before God, but as nothing as such: his life no longer lives in nothingness,
but in the meaninglessness of his being. When he admits this meaninglessness, he
lives in nihilism.29

What is at stake, as we read in the last line, is not “lament over what has been lost but,
rather, the expression of loss itself.”30

Angels
Explicitly Hebraic both in Benjamin and in Anders, the angelic locus is uncanny
and otherworldly, literally transcendent, these “messengers” bring in the sphere of
religion—the underworld for fallen heroes for the Greeks—and the salvific seemingly
by definition. Complete with an emblem, the angelic includes Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus
Novus (Figure 6), a painting famously acquired by Walter Benjamin.31 In this context,
the tonality of Rilke’s poem, as Anders emphasizes, carries the vulnerable and not less
audacious intimacy of the Rilke of the Stundenbuch, first published in 1905.
Love letters from the soul, as one may read these, are a play on the dimensionalities
between a brevier and an intimate diary, as Rilke writes to God:

You, neighbour, God, if I thou, from time to time,

in the long night disturb with loud knocks,
it’s only because: I seldom hear you breathe
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 75

and I know: you are alone in the hall.

And were you to need anything, there is no one
to reach to your groping, something to drink.
I hearken always. Give a small sign.
I am very near.32

The subtitle of this first book—there are three books in total—Vom mœnchischen Leben,
From Monkish Life, composed in 1899, captures much that would be of theological
interest to Anders, informing the focus of both Anders’ appreciation of the spirit and
the flesh, incarnate as living intimacy with deity: “Du, Nachbar Gott”—You, neighbour,
God.”
The tentative beauty of Rilke’s voice inspired Heidegger and many others: the
third of the books, the “work of an April week in 1903,”33 marks a year that would
be for Heidegger of great significance as it also sees the publication of Nietzsche’s
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and, of course, arguably changing the world
of letters in its entirety, uniting scientists and humanists, artists and poets alike,
Diels’ Die Vorsokratiker and in this same year Rilke publishes The Book of Poverty
and Death.
Rilke’s larger Stundenbuch appears in 1905, and the allusions to this work are
significant not only for Anders but arguably these may also be heard in Rilke’s own
later work. Thus, I quote the next lines concerning hearing, overhearing, and what is
“builded” or constructed from images and likenesses:

Only a slim wall is between us,

just by accident; for it could happen:
a call from your mouth or mine—
and it would break apart, not a whimper, not a sound.

Out of your images it is builded. [Aus deinen Bildern ist sie aufgebaut].34

Rilke published his Duino Elegies in 1923, just around the time Anders was writing
his dissertation. When, some seven years later, Anders came to write an essay on the
Duino Elegies together with Hannah Arendt, it seems plain to recuperate the points
already made above that reflection on hearing and assignment in addition to the theme
of religious intimation and renunciation might be involved.35
Here, there is a question of authorship, incidental or in passing. quite as Anders
assigns authority to Arendt when he publishes the text, ascribing in a courtly reflection,
the greater influence to Arendt. Questions are raised by Jerry Kohn, who points out
that “it is not clear how much of it Arendt actually wrote” in his introduction to
Arendt, Understanding 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism,36 noting in
the process that the original manuscript was written in Anders’ handwriting.
Indeed, as pointed out earlier, the relationship between Arendt and Anders was
never one of parity but that between younger and older scholar, in which the older
scholar worked to promote, and that also meant to vet and to correct, the work of the
younger scholar as we also read in their correspondence from this time.
76 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

In the case of the Rilke essay, however, such complexities of correspondence and
correction, have vanished. Thus, the current translation does not report authorship
as “Günther Stern with Hannah Arendt” but settles it as mutually coordinate: Hannah
Arendt and Günther Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” in Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb’s
edition of Arendt’s literary essays.37
One consequence of noting Anders’ relative obscurity is that it permits us to see
that questions of the weight, in either case, of a co-authored piece inevitably tend to
privilege the better-known author. To use a famous example not referring to Rilke but
the nineteenth-century so-called romantics, it can seem to be one consequence of a
long (and still unresolved except in the minds of some disputants) debate concerning
the authorship of the Oldest System Programme (written in Schelling’s hand, but
“anonymous”), which is attributed, very much depending on one’s enthusiasms,
variously to Hegel, Hölderlin, or Schelling; the most radical solution, someone other,
someone else,38 almost never comes up.
One can argue, fairly easily, that the Rilke essay follows, at least stylistically,
Anders’ concerns, but Anders’ own remonstrations emphasize that the text was
born of mutual involvement (both Anders and Arendt), such that we must forsake
the tendency to read the work as the name placement can induce us to do so, listing
Arendt first, and thus and thereby assuming it as following for the most part Arendt’s
initiative/formulation.

Elegies: Poetry and Hearing/Poetry and the Schma

Before continuing with Rilke, it is worth recollecting Arendt’s reflection on “Kafka,
Krauss, and Benjamin.”39 Arendt is talking truth (and Heidegger along with the
specifically Benjaminian “secret” of truth) but it is the acoustic that it is worth noting,
between accents and intonations (Arendt herself will invoke various German dialects
or Mundarten)40 as she proceeds to explain:

Once this truth had come into the human world at the appropriate moment in
history—be it as the Greek a-letheia, visually perceptible to the eyes of the mind
and comprehended by us as “un-concealment” (Unverborgenheit—Heidegger),
or as the acoustically perceptible word of God as we know it from the European
religions of revelation.41

With reference to Anders and Arendt on Rilke—reference to religion and to Judaism,

for Arendt the more important emphasis, is complicated beyond the immediate context
here and must await a full, and fully integrated, biography—what is key in Arendt’s
distinction between the “visually perceptible” and the “acoustically perceptible”
is Anders’ observation that “Rilke’s world is, like every religious world, an acoustic
world.”42 And it is in this same heard or acoustic sense that we should not fail to read,
or, better said, to hear the first lines as commentary on the prayer, “Hear, Israel,” Schma
Yisrael43:
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 77

The conscious renunciation of the demand to be heard, the despair at not being
able to be heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer—these are
the real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and tension of the style in which the
poetry indicates its own possibilities and its will to form.44

The kind of dialectic, the kind of ambiguity, is that in direct proximity, continuity
with the divine, and Heidegger’s specific kind of questioning may also be heard in the
reflection on the seeming lack of answer which attends the moment—Anders would
say: “the situation”—in which one prays, a petition given, as we cited it earlier, “in the
form of a question that no longer hopes for an answer.”45 If all of this, including the
very possibility of an encounter with deity, physical as this is, including breath, space,
creaturely encounter [Treffbarkeit], is at least fairly esoteric, this poem also would have
seemed almost obvious for the newly married Sterns.
Thus, we read a clear reflection on the audible, using Anders’ language of Zu-hören—
the text begins by emphasising the poem’s “musical key”—and one hears elements of
Benjamin’s angel of history:

Listening is so little bound to an object that, on the contrary, it receives “seine

ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet [the ceaseless message that
forms itself out of silence]” (1st Elegy) whenever the objects are lost and blown away:
it is not a listening to a particular, articulated message; rather, it is a listening to the
urgent beseeching of a heart (“Höre, mein Hertz [Listen, my heart]”), therefore a
mode of being (“so waren sie hörend [such was their listening],” (1st Elegy).46

For both readers, and here there is the full resonance of the theological and the acousmatic-
acousticological dimension that would bespeak the correspondence between the two, we
read: “Indeed, as a state of being, listening is already its own fulfilment, since it pays no
attention to whether its beseeching may be heard.”47 This is abandonment to deity and it
is also the abandonment intrinsic to the immanence of love. We may think we can hear
Anders alone as we read; it is certainly his formulation, the rescued “something” that the
poet is able to wrest from the then (and still we might say) current “religiously alienated
situation”; thus, we quote, again, but now more completely, the Sterns’ reflection on this:

“something” [that] consists in an in-stance of hearing, being-in-hearing

[Inständigkeit des Hörens, Im-Hören-sein]. Today, there has to be a condition and
an occasion for being-in-hearing. In place of complete objectlessness, for which
our heart is no longer adequate, the occasion for being-in-hearing becomes the
disappearance of the object, which we pursue with our ears.48

This is written by the two, together, but it is also in Anders’ voice: full intentionality, full
musicality, a voice in dialogue with the beloved.
If we read in this way, we see that what is at stake is not handed down from

“the Angels’ hierarchies,” which the “Elegies” vainly attempt to woo (“Engel, und
würb ich dich auch! Du kommst nicht [Angel, and even if I were to woo you, you
78 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

would not come],” 7th Elegy), nor does it come from other people; rather, it comes
from things.49

Just as Anders will later recall, he first “won” Hannah Arendt with a word, a sign of his
brilliance, his heart; thus, this lover’s discourse between both authors. The reference to
things is characteristic. For the poet, the things are of this world, and the reference to
these invokes the human estrangement from, alienation in, the world:

The fact that whatever remains of the relation to the world flees to what is relatively
most distant—in any case does not turn to the other, to what is closest, but rather
commits itself to this distant entity and claims closeness to it shows the extent to
which human existence has here been estranged from the world50

At stake then are echoes of Anders’ acoustic focus—as he will also emphasize his own
attention to tone as musically resonant in time/space and hence not as physically
delimited—along with Arendt’s theological concerns, and in both cases, love, here at
its inception, is seduction, wooing, solicitude, praise. Reading Rilke, reading Arendt
and Anders, Anders and Arendt, we can also hear the two together, whoever it is
who writes this text, as they, writing on the Seventh Elegy, continue to reflect on love,
particularly as inscribed in Augustinian echoes:

Praise only grows from the futility and despair of wooing. Only in praise is there a
being-heard [Gehörtwerden], namely the being-heard of what is told, even if it has
nothing to do with being-hearkened-to [Erhörtwerden]. The first impulse of the call
is thus a religious impulse, the failure of which gives rise to poetry, which contains
a double ambiguity for this very reason: measured in accordance with its religious
origin, poetry is already the falsification of that origin. As poetry, however, in other
words, as expression of the interior world, it fails to live up to its own premises.
“Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened”—this is the impulse that, as is shown
by what follows (“Nicht daß du Gottes erträgest die Stimme, bei weitem [Not that you
could endure God’s voice, far from it]”), already contains the failure of listening.51

The reading reflects between the complexity of Arendt’s own dedication to theology,
Christian theology, as Anders reflects with only a hint of teasing (speaking of the
subtleties of the theology “die Du perverserweise studiert hast” in the silence at the end
of her life and towards the end of his own [KS 38]), articulating thereby what inevitably
falls short, as both failure and redemption.
Anders begins his Kirschenschlacht reconstruction without the slightest hesitation
referring not to Rilke but to Goethe, not with respect to himself but to Arendt,
emphasizing that it was she, like Faust, who had studied theology, “viel Theologie . . .
ja christliche, and even dissertated brilliantly and profoundly concerning Augustine”
(KS, 23). Of course, to say it again, the theme was love: “Listen, my heart, as only saints
have listened.”52
Subsequently, we find a reflection on “situation,” as this is to be sure, after Nietzsche,
given the scientific sophistication of the age, also a concession to a-theism:
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 79

This poetry is thus directly grounded in futility: at the point of non-differentiation

in which religious intention and religious denial are sublated, a peace and balance,
hence a beauty arises that has nothing to do with religion in its origin.53

The text goes on to refer, seriatim here, to the hero, the child, the lover. For both
registers, that is, for the esoteric and for the erotic at its outset (this changes), we have
everything we need. Hierarchy of orders of angels, no less, music, impassioned hearts,
overpowering absorption, power, breath, and beauty and terror, and the promise of
devastation, rapture, destruction, all withheld:

WHO, were I to scream, would then hear me out of the angel

orders? And assuming one of them were to press me
suddenly to his heart: I’d perish from his
stronger existence [stärkeren Dasein]. For the beautiful is nothing
but the beginning of the terrifying, which we can scarcely bear,
and we admire it so as it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every such Angel is terrifying.54

And there it is with reference to angels and humans, the same wrestling once again, an
allusion to what it is to be a stranger, as Arendt speaks of this, as Taubes himself, in his
Die politische Theologie des Paulus, includes a section entitled “Fremdlinge in dieser
Welt,”55 [strangers in this world] alluding to Rilke’s “sly animals” and the night. Thus,
Arendt and Anders, cannot but write about the same lovers’ night:

O and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space
Consumes our faces—for whom won’t the night be there, the longed for,
gently disappointing, for which a single heart
painfully awaits. Is it for lovers easier?
Ah, they only cover their destiny with one another.56

Rilke, as said earlier, can seem to have written for them, for newly married lovers, Sterne
(Figure 5), and this poem, new to Anders and to the world itself when he was writing his
dissertation, culminates with a reference to a window, a passerby, a violin, everything
overdetermined, assignment/task, and the beauty of spring, for your eyes only:

Yes, the spring times needed you indeed. Some stars even suspected
Of you, that you could feel them. Swelling
A wave raised itself toward you from out of the past, or
As you passed by an open window,
a violin surrendered itself. All that was tasked.
But did you master it? Weren’t you always
so very distracted by expectation, as if everything announced
a beloved to you. (But where would you hide her)57

Their reading, speaking of the unreliability of the world, brings them once again to
abandonment and to love. Here perhaps it is irrelevant to know in whose hand this text
80 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Figure 5 Günther Stern and Hannah Arendt January 1, 1929. Photo credit: Courtesy of the
Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust/Art Resource, NY.

appears (we recall that Anders would write the text), lovers as they were, writing then,
here to repeat, together as lovers, cannot but be struck by love talk:

Love, for Rilke, becomes an exemplary situation, for love is principally love of the
abandoned. As a situation, love never cleaves to a single opportunity or a single
beloved; these are only occasions for it. Nor is love to be understood as one feeling
among others. Love overcomes and at the same time forgets the beloved, since it
intends more than the accidental individual, and its horizon is obscured by the
beloved’s closeness (“Ach, sie verdecken sich nur miteinander ihr Los [Alas, they use
each other to hide their own fate],” 1st Elegy). Love lies in this abandonment alone.58

Rilke’s words are key in every love affair, especially after Freud, after the elder Stern,
this must be heard; it is the oldest story of love: “they use each other to hide their own
fate.” The “unreliability” of the world as they then go on to say, as this is read back into
the poet’s language,

is therefore doubly determined: things abandon us, we who are “nicht sehr
verlaßlich zu Hause sind / in der gedeutete Welt [are not very reliably at home / in our
interpreted world]” (1st Elegy), and we abandon things, “denn Bleiben ist nirgends
[for there is no place where we can remain]” (1st Elegy). This double abandonment,
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 81

which Rilke tacitly makes into the positive quality of abandonability, acquires an
independent meaning as solitude.59

The reading that Anders and Arendt offer takes us through the poem, almost soft-
pedalling the references to love, to the night, to the girl who might be, is, was callously
abandoned. Thus Rilke reminds us of the transformation, phenomenological variation
of “the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string/to be more than itself. For
abiding is nowhere.” We need the German and we read: Wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht,
um gesammelt in Absprung—Rilke almost Heideggerian in tenor for all Heidegger’s
complicated resistance to Rilke, “Mehr zu sein als er selbst.”
And the word that Rilke will go on to repeat also speaks to love and the need for
a shelter, already evident to Anders, who had been in France already during the First
World War: Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.
We have already noted that Heidegger in his later reflections on poets in a needful
era, dürftiger Zeit, is careful to ask whether Rilke counts as such:

Is R. M. Rilke a poet in a needful time? How is his poetry related to the indigence
of the time? How far does it reach into the abyss? Where does the poet arrive,
granted that he goes where he can go?60

For Heidegger, and intriguingly his reflection only published in 1946, in Holzwege,
offers, one can only wonder if he means the reference to be heard by Arendt (and thus
by Anders) as his essay includes one of his few musical references quite in addition to
his own poetically, staccato-like allusions to Nietzsche and to Hölderlin:

Needful remains the time not only because God is dead but because even mortals
barely know or have the capability of their own mortality. Still have mortals not
taken possession of their own nature. Death withdraws into the mysterious. The
secret of pain remains covered. Love is not learned. But mortals are. They are
insofar as language is. Song yet dwells over their needy land. The word of the singer
still retains the trace of the holy.61

The poem Heidegger does cite is an indictment of technology as also venality and
finitude, mortality, telling us, in Rilke’s words: “The kings of the world are old.”62
Rilke’s poem fragment reflects on the pain of things—Anders will later in his
reconstructed dialogue with Arendt, as we turn to this below, Die Kirschenschlacht/
The Cherry Slaughter, emphasizes the bits, the pieces, Stücke—and here Rilke offers a
reflection on the faded sovereigns, who

...
will have no heirs.
Their sons already as boys,
and their pale daughters yield
to the power of the sickly crowns.
The mob slivers them small into money,
82 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

the current ruler of the world

extruded in fire into machines,
which, grumbling, serve his will
but happiness is not with them.
The ore is homesick. And abandoned,
it will be trained into a little life into coins and gears.
And out of the factories and the tills
It would fain return to the veins
Of ruptured mountains
That would again close around it.63

The reflection on the angel for Heidegger, restores a certain balance, after alluding to
Nietzsche by speaking of “calculating will”—as if this calculation had been Nietzsche’s
concern—and may, as it proceeds, help us to turn to The Cherry Slaughter below, as
Heidegger quotes Rilke’s “late period”:

…When from the salesman’s hand

the balance goes over
to that Angel who, in the heavens,
stills and gentles it with the trade of space . . .64

The Cherry Slaughter: Back to Love

Despite the attention to Anders’ life, quite as Gadamer would highlight the critical
importance of history for a text and as this matters in philosophical anthropology
and the Wirkungsgeschichte that begins at no less world historical juncture than with
Augustine’s own Confessions as “the” literary topos, what we have been observing here
is no biography. Nevertheless, biographical elements are involved and Anders who did
not write an autobiography nevertheless found it necessary to tell himself, to tell us,
the story of a life shared, The Cherry Slaughter, a posthumous telling that is at once a
testament to love and a claim.65
One can read the title of Anders’ text, Die Kirschenschlacht as the “Battle of the
Cherries”—the text exists in French as La bataille des cerises66—or “Cherry War” or
even, with a pop metonymic echo with the film/novel of divorce, The War of the Roses:
“The War of the Cherries.”
“Cherry Slaughter” can also convey the poetic sensibilities of Anders’ remembered
dialogue, reanimating the ghosts of memory, as Anders tended to remember the ghosts
of past wars, Vietnam, Korea, the Second World War, including the Hiroshima so often
left out, and the First World War. In addition, there is a great savaging of cherries:
devouring, destoning, dismantling them for the sake of cooking, the plan is to make
jam and jelly or, indeed, like as not, rote Grütze, a kind of jam soup served with cream,
a mystical dish by all accounts.
And there are other, darker tones when it comes to the language of cherries. Indeed,
Bürckhard Dücker traces the cultural history of the cherry in German letters—and the
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 83

chapter is astonishingly rich as Dücker reads through a range of poets, including the
Paul Celan poem that strikes Otto Pöggeler entitled “Here”: “Hier—das meint hier, wo
die Kirschblüte schwarzer sein will als Dort” [Here—that means here, where the cherry
blossoms wish to be darker than there].67
The reference to Hiroshima makes the connection inevitable and yet Anders excludes
such a resonance. How does anyone negotiate such memories at the end of a lifetime,
by way of what he named, in an awkward formula, “modish[er] Unsinn,”68 that is, as we
may say, “fashionable nonsense” just given the mores of the 1960s themselves.69 And
we do remain limited by such a reference by the ongoing need to favour one disastrous
name for an epoch above some other. Thus, Helga Raulff ’s reading of Rose Ausländer’s
unpublished manuscript, “After the World was Atombombed,” raises the question of the
sense in which certain terms seem imbued with one set of associations and not others,
whereby it can seem to be a transgression or almost so to use one symbolic schema—
“ashes and dust [Asche und Staub]”—for the work needed to make the more obscured
horror “legible.” The offence, as it continues to be an offence, is described by Anders,
cited in Raulff ’s discussion as he writes, flatly and boldly, that “in spite of the fact that
the world went to ground not through Auschwitz but through Hiroshima,” it continues
to be Auschwitz that strikes us “on an inequitably kipped moral level” as still more
horrific.70 Overweeningly so. As Raulff cautiously notes, the disproportion remains such
an enduring taboo in the words of Jan Philip Reemtsma that most of us find it “obscene”
even to mention the two names together—Auschwitz and Hiroshima—“in one breath.”71
Anders’ book would not appear in print, I noted above that it mattered that Anders
had his troubles getting his writing into print, which also entails that what we know
of his work we know via his editors and thus and only at their discretion. In this case
the book would not be published until a quarter of a century later, now a clean decade
ago, in 2011 as Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialogue mit Hannah Arendt, expanded with an
editorial notice and an interpretive essay by Christian Dries.72 The editorial notice is
needful to mention and had to be included to make the book a book—as opposed to
a pamphlet or opusculum, a term Heidegger’s publishers liked to use for his shorter
works, or indeed, the term favoured by Robert Hulot-Kentor with reference to Adorno,
“fascicule.”
Here it is important to recall the tension between members of the Frankfurt School,
especially Adorno, but no less especially their handlers: Who champions Anders? Who
champions Adorno or Horkheimer or Arendt and what difference does this make? It is
a rare testament in Anders’ sense of the same, and this for him was a matter of decency,
that Anders was distinguished, a late award, painfully given as late awards tend to be,
with the Adorno Prize in 1983. This late honor, the desultory quality of it, was the story
of Anders’ life.
The selection factor, a name prize, distinctions given, way too late for Anders in
the case of the Sigmund Freud prize, and rather as if the members of the jury had run
out of local names and had somehow noticed that Anders was ‘still’ alive in Vienna,
corresponds to the force (if not the substance) of Anders’ reflection on the “Irrelevance
of Humanity” in The Cherry Slaughter.73
For Anders, who here silently echoes Nietzsche’s cadences on the universe in the
third book of The Gay Science (“Heaven Forfend,” is the title of Nietzsche’s aphorism),
84 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

reflects that considered from the perspective of the universe, there is no cosmos, no
coordinate, well-attuned, harmonized schema. Thus the point of departure for his
reconstruction of his Drewitz dialogue with Arendt, Frau Stern, on their balcony,
facing one another, stoning cherries, eating cherries, wearing cherries—in Arendt’s
case, over her ear—and debating windowless monads.
The fabrication of a dialogue is fair game in philosophy—we need only think of Plato,
as we continue to take Plato, quite literally, at his word. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is another
fabrication that could be a close second. But Plato’s dialogues are the history of philosophy.
By contrast, other fabrications must be underscored as such. Thus, there is the fabrication
of Heidegger’s written (but it is not such) deposition (but it is not such) said to have been
composed and presented during Heidegger’s supposed de-Nazification proceedings, very
much as if we had in fact such a physical record (we don’t). Such a reconstruction was
published without flagging it and maybe thereby undermining its value as a reconstruction.
Rather, presented as a “translation” of Heidegger’s de-Nazification “deposition,” the
putative translators, the authors Valerie Allen and Ares D. Axiotis undertook to recount
a series of fictive Heideggerian etymologies: “Trivium, although a singular word, already
points to the multiplicity within—tri-viaum, three roads made into one.”74 Installed into
this, qua “reconstruction” as we may assume, this is not said, Heidegger is reported to
have instructed his questioners on the “art of teaching,” detailing grammar and dialectic,
including the risqué language the two authors set into Heidegger’s mouth, imagining him
as speaking of “putting the mare beneath the stallion.”75
Anders’ tone is different as his is a work of mourning and she was his first wife and
thus he had his reasons for the telling. The book is thus meant to be, whether it succeeds
at this is another question, I have already pointed to the conflict, an encomium in the
wake of loss, in the wake of Arendt’s death as Anders reconstitutes what he tells us is
an idealization, admitting that he privileges his own point of view (a good hermeneutic
point as both Heidegger and Gadamer would concur), where his guide is his memory.
Thus, in this case, even after “fifty years of totally separate life” (KS, 11), one is, in an
important sense, and still, one flesh, basar echad, words from the book of Genesis, the
same book, especially the first and second chapters of which, Anders tells us, would
always be “deep in Arendt’s bones” (KS, 26).
And so Anders tells us that Arendt, while warning us that he will be the hero of
the dialogue, the arguments he noted had to be, they could only be, his own, and so
despite the respect and regard Anders had for Arendt, inevitably he will only be telling
one side, his side of the dialogue in and through his reconstruction. What we see is
invaluable, and Arendt is not, as he tells us, someone attuned to pictures or poetry or
music, although she is not utterly clueless. Clearly, there is a difference of orientation,
and Arendt, more than Anders himself, could have been a child, as he puts it, of the
people of the book: “Kind des Volkes des Buches” (KS, 8). Note too that there is in this
account a reflection on what Anders teaches her of music and painting, through shared
concerts and conversation, museum visits and discussion, whereby the allusion is
strong to Heidegger—bringing paintings “to speak,” the turn of phrase, the language
of speaking is key to Heidegger on art—and where, as it turns out, Anders plays the
role of the translator, “dem Dolmetsch” (KS, 9), as indeed he seeks to do in retrieving,
reconstituting their dialogues.
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 85

Derrida and Benjamin and others in a long tradition write on the role of the translator.76
That is not quite Anders’ concern in his posthumous love letter to Arendt. He remained,
we know this from their letters as well as from this reconstruction, in close association
with Arendt if not always with a “con-crete” record of the same for us to follow, as some of
the bread crumbs have fallen to the winds, scattered here and there, lost but for memory.
Thus, even as their marriage came to end, they remained in contact as we say, even as
the love affair between Arendt and Heidegger ended, they too remained in important
contact, and so, in a sense, neither relationship ended. This was, so I argue, in Arendt’s
case a matter of her gift for friendship and not less her devotion to Heidegger, not in
spite of but perhaps, as the German phrase that plays between this opposition suggests,
because of his deficiencies, his failures. But in Anders’ case, Arendt was significantly not
as tolerant. Here I note that this same intolerance seems to have been taken in stride by
Anders, corresponding to the truth once again that in any love affair there is always one
who loves more, even if the one who loves more than the other may change over time.
If Anders’ eulogizing love letter to Arendt mixes praise along with qualifying
reservations, he is harsher on himself than he needs to be; refusing Leibniz as he does,
Anders is careful to remind her, to remind the reader, that he is no Leibniz scholar,
quite in contrast with Cassirer, note here that this could function as another way
to challenge Heidegger as par for the metaphysical course, in a reflection on world
systems and pre-established harmony, by pointing to the utter innocence of things,
ourselves included, carried by the whirl of the physical cosmos, a perspective we do
not share and which, even if we believe it, we still fail to feel, emotionally, physically.
Anders’ point echoes Nietzsche’s proclamation of the same nihilistic abandon, with
the same physical force, at the level of cosmological speed and depth—the height of
the universe, the course of the stars, the death of God, both in The Gay Science in the
mouth of a madman come to tell the tale, “too soon,” as he determines faced with the
incomprehension of his interlocutors, and again at the end of On the Genealogy of
Morals, where Nietzsche speaks, as Anders does, of “atheism.” As Nietzsche explains,
to cite Adrian del Caro’s new translation, speaking of the “ascetic ideal” typically
associated with belief:

Unconditional and honest atheism (—and its air alone we breathe, we more
spiritual men of this age!) accordingly does not stand in contrast to that ideal as
it seems to: rather it is only one of its latest phases of development, one of its final
forms and inner logical consistencies—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-
thousand-year training in truth, that in the end forbids itself the lie of believing in
God. (GM III: 27)

The Copernicus Anders invokes as counterpoint (it is important to echo this here as
it permits us to note Nietzsche’s influence) corresponds in Nietzsche’s own text as the
origin of what Anders calls “antiquatedness,” outdatedness, precisely as Anders regards
it as self-perceived, self-constructed, quite on the part of humanity.
“Does anyone really believe perhaps,” Nietzsche writes, still speaking of the ascetic
ideal as such, “that the defeat of theological astronomy meant a defeat of that ideal?”
(GM III: 25). Nietzsche continues:
86 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Have humans perhaps become less in need of an otherworldly solution to their

riddle of existence now that this existence looks even more arbitrary, loitering
and dispensable in the visible order of things? Has not the self-belittlement of
humankind, its will to self-belittlement been on an unstoppable progression since
Copernicus? (GM III: 25)

In Anders’ reconstructed dialogue with Arendt, the two philosophize together over
nothing less matched to the nature of love between lovers than the “problems of the
universe,” the world, writ large, literally. Their favourite occupation at the time would
be shared philosophizing, “symphilosopheīn” (KS, 13).
The problem with raising the question of the monads, the consciousness of
mere things, or of ourselves, in the context of Copernicus, is the derangement that
follows: one tends to lose thereby a “decent” (but what other kind is there?) “cosmos”
[einen anständigen Cosmos], including, as a proper cosmos would, “a connectedness
[Verbundensein] of all things with one another” (KS, 17). A world system in other
words. In this fashion, “the Copernican roundtrip,” as Anders says and as we have
learned ever since we were schoolchildren, following its course “around the sun,”
happens to carry us along with it as “blind passengers against our will”(KS, 29). In this
way, having set people and things, including poems and atoms, all along with the earth,
under compulsion “to travel along as utter and completely irrelevant passengers, no: as
baggage [Gepäckstücke]” (KS, 29), that is, bits on bits, mere pieces beside other pieces,
thus monads, lacking cosmos, without a pre-established harmony.
As Nietzsche writes at the dramatic outset of the third book of The Gay Science,
literary flourishes being even easier for Nietzsche than for Anders, starting with
the shadows of the dead, both Buddha and the deity, to emphasize in the following
section, with the suitably apotropaic title, Hüten wir uns!—again we quote: “Heaven
forfend!”—and going on to detail the following reflection on the astral order, we meet
his first articulation of the eternal return together with the blind will to power of the
universe as such, regarded as a Spielwerk, a musical allusion to Kepler and Kircher and
Copernicus, and the Milky Way:

Per contra, the total character [Gesammtcharacter] of the world is chaos to all
eternity, chaos, not in the sense of an absence of necessity but an absence of order,
arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom and whatever our aesthetic humanisations
[ästhetischen Menschlichkeiten] may be named. (FW, §109)

Anders, likewise invoking Copernicus, and the reference to Leibniz is meant to convey
this point, is all about the emotional, consciousness, or feeling of the very fact of it.
Thus, in spite of all our learning in this—and to dramatize the detail, Anders tracks the
effects of the sun’s motion throughout the dialogue, “mere child’s play,” as he describes
his own literary devices—quite apart from the Vatican, Anders says, we continue to
refuse to give up “our Ptolemaic world sentiment [Weltgefühl], refusing to coordinate
ourselves emotionally with our knowing” (KS, 29).
The relevance of Anders, for the planetary disaster we neutralize under the
portmanteau as if it had nothing to do with us or with our technology or our
 
Anders and Arendt Reading Rilke 87

industrialization effects or with our military activities and certainly not, heaven
forfend, with the decades-old practices of geoengineering, spraying chem trails hither
and yon, under the rubric of “Global Warming” or the “Climate Crisis,” has everything
to do with this insight.77
As for the rest, including obligatory references not only to Hegel and Nietzsche but
also explicitly to Heidegger as to Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, and not less those
girls who, like Hannah, with pronouncedly Jewish features, “even the pretty ones” (KS,
51), need its own complex set of reflections that are beyond the scope of the current
study.
Thus, Anders adds his own afterword to his own opusculum. And there the
monads remain, as does the reference to god, culminating in an academic reflection
or afterword where Anders, giving the final word to Leibniz, writes in French: “les
monades n’ont point de fenêtres” (KS, 60).
 5

Between the Lines

Benjamin’s Angels of History and Anders’ Apocalypse

Having Been

As a pre-eminent critic of technology and critic of the atomic bomb, Anders regarded
the bomb hermeneutically and phenomenologically in the visceral sense of being and
time, literally more being, more time, than Heidegger’s Being and Time. For Anders,
who thought through to the furthest consequences of the dropping of the atomic
bomb, first on August 6, in Hiroshima and then on August 9 in Nagasaki, respectively,
in the summer of 1945 following Germany’s May surrender, the sheer thatness of
the bomb’s having been used (where the Nietzschean dialectic of the “having been”
reflects the essence of modern technology) coupled with the bland politics of nuclear
proliferation, the “cold war,” extended the wake of the war after its end. For Anders,
the project of “deterrence” worked as so much programmatic aggression, advanced
in the name of “defence.” The tactic of sheerly technological, automatic, mechanical,
aggression is carried out in good conscience. The pre-emptive strike—and with Covid-
19 measures, masks and tests and vaccines, we are only living the logical extension of
this same ongoing putatively pre-emptive ideal—is, as Baudrillard observed, ever a
matter that may be blamed on one’s opponent. The pains the enemy suffers, the pains
we suffer with masks, tests, and vaccines, are simply the wages of (their) evil. Violence
in good conscience characterizes the post-war, Cold War era and the present day with
its mushrooming effects of neo-fascism under the titles of national security, anti-
terrorism, and Coronavirus.
Karl Krauss’ 1913 bon mot apostrophizing psychoanalysis as that same insanity
for which it declares itself as cure [Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren
Therapie sie sich halt] has never been more apt for political translation straight into
the heart of what Lacan called the Real, which has “always been” the political register.
Where Habermas and heirs have tended to disregard Anders (as they also sidestep
Heidegger and Nietzsche), just as most philosophers of technology (and philosophers
of science) ignored the political as well as the ethical in their eagerness to avoid any
suspicion of technophobia, we continue to lack both critical theory for our times
as well as a critical philosophy of technology, a conjunction incorporating Anders’
complicated dialectic less of “art” in Benjamin’s prescient but still innocent age of
 
Between the Lines 89

technological reproducibility, but and “concerning the devastation of life in the age
of the third industrial revolution.” Thus, rather than reading Anders’ critique of the
bomb as limited to a time we call the Atomic Age, Anders varied Samuel Beckett’s 1957
Endgame (Fin de partie) as Endzeit—“Endtime,” using the eschatological language of
Taubes fairly as Anders does.
What is at stake is less Anders’/Arendt’s Rilkean angels than Benjamin’s more morose,
more titanic angel of history, reflecting on war and its wreckage, detritus, a legacy after
the First World War, for Anders reflecting on the bomb with his technological critique
of the outdatedness of humanity as of a piece with our dedication to hurling ourselves
against our own mortality. The same concern with the violence of technology, this
hatred of the vulnerability of having been born and having been set on a path unto
death (the mortal path that is the path of life) inspires Anders’ engagement with the
sons of Eichmann (heirs of those who designed and executed the Nazi death camps
and extermination chambers of the Holocaust) and, banality on banality, the sons of
Claude Eatherly (the heirs of those who designed the bomb and of those who as pilots
and weathermen, deployed/guided the bombings that exploded the supposed stuff of
the sun itself contra the Empire of the Sun in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
We, embroiled as we are in wartime after wartime and now suppressing public
protest on a scale as never before, silencing free speech as we are, in country after
country across the globe, cannot dispense with Anders today.

Angels of History
Walter Benjamin, could trace the mystical art of his possession, acquired from Scholem
(who under tragic circumstances also got it back), Paul Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus
(Figure 6). Elsewhere I have epitomized the painting as postcard, iconic, and in my
own university, I have for decades passed it on a colleague’s office door, Professor Anne
Golomb Hoffman, a scholar of literature and a painter, and I am grateful every time I
pass it. The angel of history, recollecting the word painting of the open mouth, his “eyes
are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread,”1 whereby we conflate Klee and
Benjamin, one with the other. I cite Benjamin’s Theses on History:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. . . . His face is
turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has
been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.2

In an end time, at the end of time, the strobe light of horror showed the still figure, the
frozen figure of the angel of every apocalypse. And of course, as we recall Rilke’s Duino
Elegies, angels were on everyone’s lips: Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
90 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Figure 6 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem; Courtesy of
the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo credit: HIP/Art Resource, NY

Of course they are.

Of course, we should not fail to to ask just where one finds oneself, to ask what
has become of one’s life, one’s eyes, such that one can see angels? Anders explores the
mode of such modalities, können and nicht können, to be able to and not to be able to,
as opposed to Shakespeare’s rag in Jack Benny’s voice and the filmic icon of the same,
Nazi Germany, 1942 Hollywood style: To Be or Not To Be, being and non-being. Non-
being as a possibility, real in a different sense than it had ever been before for any time
since we humans had become, in Hölderlin’s words, a conversation with ourselves, for
ourselves. For Anders, in 1975, all of these are old-fashioned worries, and the problem
now as ever is to come to terms with what we have learned that we are able to do.
This is also the point of Anders’ invocation of Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
Note that more is involved than the simple historical detail that Hollywood had
translated this figure to the film centre of a cartoon musical opera, Fantasia.3 Thus,
it is worth citing once again, as Anders writes: “We are incapable of not being able to
do what has once been done. It is thus not can-do-ability [Können] that we lack, but
no-can-do-ability [Nichtkönnen]” (AM II, 395).
Obviously, Anders notes the Goethean source of his insight which he traces at
the same time, with Heideggerian precision, Nietzschean acuity—Nietzsche always
claimed that one had to have many eyes—towards a distant project to be attained:
the prospect of understanding the end time, just to the extent that our time is the
time of ending things: everything, the world, ourselves, and every other thing on it.
 
Between the Lines 91

Thus, for Anders, as for Nietzsche as I have argued in connection with Nietzsche’s
critical philosophy of science, and not less for Heidegger as one may also underline his
philosophy of modern technology, what will be important is to consider the ultimate
and further consequences.
To the extent that received scholarship reviews certain genocides but not others,
Anders by contrast outlines the lockstep of the ability to destroy together with the
inability to locate or place the blame on this people, this political constellation rather
than that. And that mucks up everything for the political theorists, the political
philosophers, the pundits, and the casual reader, who collectively find themselves
asking: How dare he say such things?
And thus, we bring in the experts to tell us (no shortage of these) that Anders was
a polemicist, a Ketzer, Hetzer: a pain in the neck. The bluntness coheres with the terms
Anders himself would use to characterize school or university scholarship. The higher
your position, the better ranked the school you find yourself at, the more you will fit
the mould. No one at the top of the academic ladder does anything to challenge the
hierarchy or the received view.
I earlier indicated that Anders refused appointments for his own reasons. Perhaps,
one might wish to say, he suspected there would be no way to change anything from
within. What is certain is that the only thing university appointments do is produce
university rank and file, a lockstep as true for the most cutting-edge grad student as it is
for the most distinguished professor. If few of us have bothered to read Anders, certain
scholars have had recourse to him in their work from Peter Sloterdijk to the theologian
Jürgen Moltmann, who cites Anders’ differentiation of the ordinary thinking of end
times, traditionally speaking, from the thinking of such times in a nuclear era which
he thus describes, quoting Anders, as “a naked apocalypse, that is to say an apocalypse
without a kingdom.”4 At the same time, what is all-decisive is the non-reading as this
occludes Anders from the scholarly world view. Hence, in a scholarly world where
Heidegger is read, even qua denigrated and discounted, or where Adorno can be read,
however typically misinterpreted, and where Benjamin is even revered, there is no
excuse for excluding Anders. And yet we do.
It is violence in perfect good conscience that characterizes war as it characterizes
the post-war, the Cold War era but also the present day, including mask mandates
and so on, with its mushrooming effects of neo-fascism under the titles of health and
national security and the terrorist, from surveillance to full-body (meaning naked
body) searches, matched on the health front with direct inoculation, literally in place
of the metaphor of surgical strikes and individually-tailored, targeted Armageddon in
the form of drones, all in the name of anti-terrorism. It is surely not for nothing that
Žižek was a student of the thinking of Lacan, whatever else, perforce he also did with
respect to Hegel, in Paris.
Where Habermas and his heirs disregard Anders (as they also manage to set aside
or minimally to sidestep Heidegger and Nietzsche etc.), just as most philosophers of
technology (and indeed philosophers of science) have ignored the political as well as the
ethical in their eagerness to avoid suspicion of technophobia—a reserve that characterizes
most political theory that considers technology. If the otherwise exceptional Bruno
Latour is no exception in the question of such reservation, that’s the academic deal;
92 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

hence, Latour says what mainstream thought insists upon, although sometimes, as in
the case of his The Pasteurization of France, with a certain subtle excellence.5 It will do to
reread this text again given the omnipresence of vaccination by mandate or law.
Say truth to power in the academy with any accuracy, and you are out just where
talking about saying truth to power is a safe bet. Anders, under his dark star, was
always already “out,” excluded from the academy.6 Thus, if, as emphasized from the
outset, numerous scholars have written, and continue to write, on Anders, it remains
the case that Anders’ work is not as yet “received.” at the university level.
But this relative non-reception requires a bit of context, as we recall it again at this
locus. Thus, it may help to recall that Nietzsche’s work tends not to be discussed in
philosophy departments unless tied to questions of freedom (the free spirit) and will, or
perfectionism or nihilism, but not in terms of his writings on science or antiquity. This
exclusion or narrow focus extends to Heidegger to be sure, whose Black Notebooks or
his anti-Semitism, can be discussed perhaps, but rather less his work as such—thus,
increasingly, Heidegger can be left out of discussions of the philosophy of technology.
And then to be sure, there is Anders’ work which is typically excluded in this case and
others because of the now utter dominion of analytic philosophy even in what is today
named (despite its often analytic style) “continental philosophy.”
As a result of this disciplinary (analytic) turn away from reading the texts themselves,
increasingly dominant, even in Germany and France, it will not be necessary to have
read Adorno to claim to have insights into his work. But and this is part of the previous
point concerning reception and the “mobbing” of outsider views in academia, much of
my effort here may be read as a bid to count him in. The reader will, I hope, forgive me,
if my style is also receptive to including other names along the way.

Time
We modern authors are used to positioning ourselves in time. And we long ago forgot
Augustine’s cautionary warning that we take ourselves to know what time is.7 Even
those who reflect on Nietzsche’s Zarathustran reflections on time tend to skip over the
literally contradictory contours of Augenblick, the intersecting courses, past and future,
colliding in the gateway, Moment. Despite the warning title Of the Vision and the Riddle,
Nietzsche scholars “solve” the problem, sure that there was never a problem in the first
place. We scholars, we scientists, we “knowers,” as Nietzsche says, pronounce on time:
we claim that it speeds up (when we are having fun, when we are busy, when we are late)
and complain that it slows down (when we are waiting for an anticipated event, when we
are bored, when we are boiling water), and we descry and map the lines of time.
Time always seems to have a spatial dimensionality; thus, Anders reflects on the
absurdity of defining, let alone distinguishing the two, and he reflects too on the
absurdity of the project, pointing out that and just to be sure, and as the average person
might answer that he has never once found himself in danger of “confusing the one
with the other” (AM II, 350).
By comparison with Jacob Taubes and Hans Jonas and others of the day, including
Löwith and Benjamin, all of whom wrote volumes or essays on eschatology and
 
Between the Lines 93

history, Anders offers us an anti-eschatology: reflections on the end, of the apocalypse,

on annihilation, mutually assured and what not, which is to say that he writes about
the “end time,” to say that “the future has already ended.” Where Anders differs from
others is that he brings his philosophical, even his theological, reflections as we shall
see, ‘down to earth,’ here to use Adorno’s phrase. Anders, who has as little patience as
Adorno with Heidegger but who, likewise not unlike Adorno, had no problem using
Heideggerian insights wherever needed, could rebuke Heidegger for describing the
human being as the “shepherd of being.” And if religious and poetic associations serve
the image of the shepherd well, the philosophical image of the shepherd has been
problematic since Thrasymachus handily, floored Socrates: pointing out that there is no
difference between shepherd and tyrant: from the view point of the ones “shepherded,”
that would be the sheep as it is they that are preserved for values or purposes not their
own and not less because they are always brutally killed in the end.
But even if, through every bucolic register, one hears the language poetically, even
if one hears the language through the tonalities of the New Testament, Heidegger’s
language still misses the point for Anders,

“The Shepherd of Being,” that which Heidegger still yet very biblically, that is to
say anthropocentrically, suggests—whereby he vastly overrates “the position of
the human being in the cosmos” (which couldn’t give a damn about whether we
continue to exist or have already disappeared), no, we are certainly not “shepherds
of being.” Far rather we might consider ourselves the “shepherds of our product-
and gadget-world” as a world that needs us, more strikingly than we do ourselves,
as servants (e.g., as consumers or possessors). (AM II, 281)

The language of shepherd also appears contra Heidegger in the Kirschenschlacht. In

general, this is the language of antiquatedness, outdatedness: the human being at an
end, past its sell- or use-by date, as it were such that all time henceforth, is and can only
be at an end, the end of days, the end time. Where traditional eschatologies take a leap
into the mystical, the gnostic, the beyond, Anders stays squarely in the here and now.
Because for Anders that is where the end transpires: not later, not in a world to come,
but always already here.
These reflections on time are compelling for Anders above all, not for religio-
theological reasons, like either Taubes or Jonas, and not even for the traditionally
epistemological reasonings of a Kant, but just on moral grounds. If Anders thus begins
his second volume on The Antiquatedness of Humanity, reflecting on the inversion of
the Lords’ Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread” as this has morphed into a new
mantra: “give us this day our daily eaters,” (AMII, 15) what is required is the same
culinary desperation Adorno also discovered at the heart of the culture industry: the
world needs consumers, social followers, more than it needs products because, as Anders
already noted, this is Heideggerian challenging forth replete with Machenschaft, as we
may read this in the the Beiträge in addition to the lectures on technology and danger
to the Club of Bremen, Anders is much punchier: we make products to make products
to make products. To this extent, marketing and the production of market is our only
occupation and preoccupation. The language of “climate change” covers the need for
94 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

a new world order to put an end to this on the level of the everyday consumer. To this
end all advertising, social media, psyop efforts in the same direction just to the extent
that today’s digital marketing is nothing but advertising? The same mediatic imperative
holds, strangely and painfully in the era of Zoom instruction which is likewise a matter
of such advertising.8 Anders’ point is that the only imperatives we know are imperatives
consequent upon what can be done: if it can be done, it should be done. Heidegger says
this too, of course, and to this day our sole concern is not with what one should do, what
a quaintly Kantian question, but how we might do and how we might forever continue to
do (this is the meaning of what we call “sustainability”) what we can do: Das Gekonnte is
das Gesollte. As a result, Anders has even less patience, if that is possible, with the idea that
technology might be some neutral means (he has a field day with the language of ends
and means when it comes to the atomic bomb and the point of its production) or that it
might somehow be in our control or even within our purview. The epigraph Anders sets
to the second volume is significant: “It is not enough to change the world. …” Writing
in 1980, one is well beyond any imperative that would call for changing the world, in a
good Marxian voice, just because, as Anders writes, we always do that anyway [Das tun
wir ohnehin]. What is lacking is an interpretation of what we have done, especially in our
times where, as he argues, our ability to act far exceeds our comprehension. Later in the
book, although the text itself was written two years earlier than his introduction, dated
1979), his chapter on “The Antiquatedness of History” will make the same point with a
trio of dated epigraphs—and, in a way, only the dates should strike us in this trifecta. I list
them here and will expand later:

Politics is our destiny (1815)

The economy is our destiny (1845)
Technology is our destiny (1945)

Heidegger and Time: New Rules

The old commandments had failed; certainly, they were never observed. Anders
thus took it upon himself to compose a set of “new” commandments for the new,
nuclear age, not commandments issued by a creator, made for those in his image
and likeness, but commandments for destroyers, made for an age when we human
beings had learned to annihilate ourselves, along with other beings in the world,
plant and animal, even the soil and the oceans, seemingly including the world as
such. The “commandments” were originally published in 1957. Anders managed to
secure English language circulation by sharing them with Major Claude Eatherly, the
weather reconnaissance pilot who gave the go-ahead, or all clear, for the bombing
of Hiroshima. Two points first: dropping an atomic bomb is differ from ordinary
bombing missions. If, for the safety of combatants in modern warfare, using
poison gas, as Sloterdijk argues in his Terror from the Air,9 the bombers themselves,
weathermen always played a crucial role, in this case one needed to know still more
about wind and weather than ordinarily so, for precision bombing, given the nature
of the bomb, had different implications. Secondly, the trajectory of flight path,
 
Between the Lines 95

immediately evasive, flying up and away after dropping the bomb, also testifies to
this difference. Bombers are inevitably at a distance from the work of their actions;
those who dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were and had to be
clear about the devastation they would bring because the backwash in this case could
touch them in the sky. Eatherly was infamous not for having flown the mission,
but for having had second thoughts about it; he was of course, like every successful
bomber, a war hero.
In the “commandments” Anders sent to Eatherly, we can read, as if it were the
highest moral imperative, and this is indeed how Anders meant it: “widen your sense
of time.”10 Anders has his reasons for this as he introduces this broadened sense of time
by calling for an equally broadened breadth of “moral fantasy”11: you must broaden
your ethical sensibility “until imagination and feeling become able to comprehend and
to realize the enormity of your doings.”12
Concerned with the phenomenological effects of the end time [Endzeit], Anders was
also concerned about what he calls the “guiltless guilty” as this ontological characteristic
is now the destiny of the human, following the objective, physical, thingly circumstances
of the modern technological era. Anders used the word “technicity,” to the irritation
of newspaper commentators: the same irritation has meant that scholars and popular
authors could successfully ignore Anders just as they have ignored Jacques Ellul, and
to a lesser degree Heidegger on the same topics. By instructive contrast, Marshall
McLuhan has been inhaled by most media theorists, digital and otherwise, to this day,
and this is part of the silent proscription of technological critique. We think (never mind
Heidegger): technology can’t be the problem: the medium is, the message is.
In his correspondence with Eatherly, which if my thesis here is correct ought to be
read as Anders’ way of communicating with American, Anglophone commentators
(whereby his “sons of Eichmann” would thus be an address to German counterparts by
the same token and logic), Anders did not make it difficult for those same commentators
to dismiss him. Indeed, Anders put his key point, which was also his most difficult
point, on the very first page, almost summing up the heart of the masterwork that
has yet to be fully translated into English. Thus, Anders writes to Eatherly—this is
a letter addressed to a former American airman, incarcerated for petty crimes in a
psychological hospital or institution (where, for the most part, Eatherly would remain)
and hence written out of the blue, as it were—by speaking of nothing more esoteric
than “technification,” speaking in a Heideggerian sense but no less in a Kantian sense
of what Anders there describes as the

“technification” of our being: the fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly
and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of
which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we
imagine them, we could not approve—this fact has changed the very foundations
of our moral existence. Thus, we can become “guiltlessly guilty,” a condition which
had not existed in the technically less advanced times of our fathers.13

By thus speaking of our “technification,” the same technology on every social level
that Ellul would for his part claim as the wager [Enjeu] of the century in a series of his
96 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

own books,14 or of what Heidegger far less popularly called the “essence” of modern
technology, Anders could emphasize that it would be this same essence into which we
ourselves would be absorbed. Thus, Ander’s first letter to Eatherly patiently articulates
the points Anders had developed in his The Antiquatedness of Humanity, points
continued and especially articulated in the second volume, parts of which were written
in the 1960s.
We are our tools, and we are our gadgets, our devices, our things, our objects. In
this sense, Anders is far from today’s object-oriented ontologists (I say this admitting
the wide variability of these writers, and I say this noting that in some cases Anders is
even cited—and the sighting of any citation, in the wild as it were, is rare enough). But
Anders differs. He does not think that we can simply think the thing, the object, the
gadget, and his reason for this reticence is the very hermeneutic and phenomenological
reason that this objective is not accessible to us simply because we are already the
object of technology as the subject of history, and hence we are ordered to (in this sense
as we saw above we are the ‘shepherds’ of), we are claimed by things, by objects. The
fact that we have made them is quite irrelevant, and this irrelevance is the scope, the
range, the breadth, the sheer size (this is Jünger’s titanism or giganticism), of modern
technology. As we shall see, this same signal irrelevance of the connection between
what we know and what we have made or done, pace Kant or Vico, likewise echoes in
Anders’ reflections on Goethe’s Zauberlehrling/“Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
Anders’ main concern was the non-neutrality that Heidegger for his own part also
emphasized at the start of The Question Concerning Technology. Good or bad, neutral
or non-neutral, either point is committed to the same. Anders’ argument is that once
we have an object, we have it. Because it is the object that has us, we can—as a result—
claim neither detachment nor sovereignty. Other authors reflecting on technology have
made similar points in similarly uncompromising fashion, especially Heidegger and
Ellul, but what bears further reflection is that Anders’ point would not be directed
to the ontological circumstance of doing and not doing. Thus, Anders was more
concerned for very phenomenological purposes with “having.” And this also meant
that Anders’ concern was with the inescapably moral fraughtness: of being “guitlessly
guilty,” and this is what it means for all of us, to accept the designation of banal evil as
a descriptor for all of us, every one of us a son of Eichmann: Hiroshima everywhere.
The condemnation for Anders is the damnation of being and not being in the
context of the things of our age. There is no way to be, simply to be, in the world in the
wake of the atom bomb. Thus, Anders reflects in 1966, contra Lukács and others, that
given the literally “negative religion” that was the atomic fact—and by no means only
the mere threat of nuclear annihilation—everything the past century had previously
considered under the rubric of nihilism, by comparison with that same “possibility of
‘annihilation’ turned out to be sheer culture-hall nonsense.” For Anders, “Nietzsche,
even the beastly serious Heidegger, come across as laughable before the madness [Folie]
of this possibility” (AM II, 404). The “possibility” is that of a literal annihilation, the
“creation,” the relative production of nothingness, eliminating all humanity and culture
and all history with it. The question of nuclear annihilation thus explicitly extends
beyond the Heideggerian possibility of impossibility. This is of course the heart of what
Anders, a good Heideggerian, had to mean by The Antiquatedness of Humanity, which
 
Between the Lines 97

is of course nothing but the “Antiquatedness of Dasein” and precisely qua Dasein or as
such. What is at stake for us as mortal beings is no longer anything so classical as our
mere mortality, that we, as beings who can die, are bound to die and bound to the loss
of our ownmost possibilities for being but and much rather that today we are no longer
“mortal” but have been converted into simply “‘killable’ entities” (AM II, 405).
Anders concludes the section by denouncing the situatedness of dying one’s own
death, just as Rilke had spoken of this and of course and to be sure as Heidegger had
earlier made his own claim to the same. Here using a Heideggerian argument against
Heidegger, Anders goes on to argue that what is singularizing about dying is that the
individual’s loss of his own singularity in dying is and can hardly be one’s “own” (AM
II, 407).
For Anders, we human beings are no longer in a position to simply regard our
lifetime, even as Mallarmé might have done, as simply random, as chance tossed into
the realm of possible being, or as Nietzsche wrote: “a hiatus between two nothings”
(KSA 12, 473).
Anders’ Commandments in the Atomic Age are mortal reflections as he writes to
Eatherly, and as is immediately clear upon reading them, offer an array of spiritual
exercises. Much rather than a refurbished vision of the ten Commandments, these are
to be read as rules for the soul’s direction, meditations of a Stoic kind, beginning, just
as Marcus Aurelius begins his Meditations, written to himself, Book Five: let this and
not that, be your first thought upon arising.
The point here is that there has been a reversal, a turn, a change, and things are now
and forever more no longer as they were. If that sounds extreme, it is only because
Anders remembers, as Benjamin does, what makes history history and that prerequisite
is always a recording hand. With an angel, we are covered even after the apocalypse.
Take away the angel and you have as Nietzsche also reflects, as he writes in the parable
of the mad man who comes to seek and then to announce the death of god in his The
Gay Science, that having murdered god—“We have killed him—you and I. All of us
are his murderers” (FW §125)—we have at the same time managed “to wipe away the
entire horizon.” Nietzsche continues to elaborate the very last words of the Christ as
he hung on the cross, asking for forgiveness on our behalf, because we, his murderers,
guiltlessly guilty, had and could have had no idea what we were doing. As Nietzsche
continues to quote his madman:

“…What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it
moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up
or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the
breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing
in on us?” (FW §125)

The scene of the Commandments as Anders’ translator put his Meditations in the Atomic
Age is as bleak. In the wake, not of the death of God, but the explosion of the power
of stars, we are, in Anders’ terms, “killable”: as humankind, and not only henceforth
but in every other sense as well. Thus, humanity as such is not only limited to “today’s
98 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

mankind” or “spread over the provinces of our globe; but also mankind spread over
the provinces of time.”15 The expanse is literally unimaginable—which does not mean
that Anders has any trouble explaining it, and he gives Eatherly a little lesson in history
as he does:

For if the mankind of today is killed, then that which has been, dies with it; and
the mankind to come too. The mankind which has been because, where there is no
one who remembers, there will be nothing left to remember; and the mankind to
come, because where there is no to-day, no to-morrow can become a to-day. The
door in front of us bears the inscription “Nothing will have been” and from within:
“Time was an episode.” Not however as our ancestors had hoped, between two
eternities; but one between two nothingnesses; between the nothingness of that
which, remembered by no one, will have been as though it had never been, and the
nothingness of that which will never be.16

Anders’ own expression is shot through with the Nietzschean language of the door
or the “gateway,” the formula of the “two nothingnesses,” likewise Nietzschean, but
the tenor and the tone is Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology: a meditation on
being and having been, on being and not being. This is also the Sophoclean μὴ φῦναι,17
as Nietzsche reflects on what it would be never to have been at all, where just this is, as
Nietzsche also reflects, utterly impossible for humanity, which leaves us the curiously
second-best option of dying soon, as Yeats translates Sophocles into the last lines of his
A Man Young and Old:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.18

Anders, who brings to his reflections literary considerations amid philosophical

and theological considerations, makes his argument in the high spirit of the original
Frankfurt School (neither Habermas nor Honneth need apply, nor, to be sure, would
they wish to). Thus, Anders compares “consumer terrorism,” that is compulsory
consumption, to the even more significant compulsion to use. This is the compulsion
of the applied. Applied terrorism is the terrorism of what happens to be on hand, what
is available for use, and this applicable and therefore deployable terrorism is for Anders
quite literally the reason atom bombs were detonated as they were and in the first
place. One can make a similar argument concerning new pharmaceutical means now
ordered for use, globally: the idea is to vaccinate the world.
In context at the time, as Anders here points this out, President Truman happened
to have had two bombs available; therefore, there would have to be two targets. The
only question was where they would be. That is the space question. The time question
concerned only how soon they could be used. And given diplomacy and the ontic
details of concluding the Second World War, Germany was out of the question, so the
space in question, the where of the bomb, followed the question of time, the when of
when the two bombs one had on hand, could be used.
 
Between the Lines 99

But beyond consumer-terrorism and applied-terrorism, beyond having become

less mortal than mere “killable” beings, Anders reflects that we are killed when we
are killed by an atom bomb not by human hands, and by nothing so old-fashionedly
humane as human intention or human passion. We do not die at human hands because
hands as such do not, for Anders, enter into it at all. That’s the point of obsolescence:
one takes the human component out of the equation. Like Major Claude, who gives
the all-clear from his plane, The Straight Flush,19 and thus like the command to execute
the mission, like the bombers of the Enola Gay, who dropped the ridiculously aptly
named hydrogen bomb: Little Boy; such a death when it comes, would come, either
shades of Eichmann (but with drone warfare the shadow falls more clearly), from
agents somewhere, even thousands of kilometres distant from their target, following
orders in accord with duty, or indeed through brainless and sightless machines, which
have long since been emancipated from the hands and the intentions of their creators
and users (cf., AM II, 406).
Far from any symbolism, the “apocalypse” for Anders could henceforth have
nothing to do with any kind of second coming, any sort of new Reich, any last
judgement, or anything at all that one might need to “interpret.” What we no longer
have is hermeneutic esotericism: there is no “meaning” in need of subtle divination.
Thus for Anders, today’s end-time is of a “massive” sort, on a scale of the Lacanian
Real, and beyond both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. For this possibility (and that
means if it is a matter of technology: the inevitability) there are historical examples: the
facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and today’s related facts concerning the secret from-
no-one calculation regarding the “overkill” capacity of today’s stockpiled weapons. In
our “situation,” the fact that the end has yet to enter in quite as we might have expected
it is no refutation of the reality of the danger, no counterdemonstration of the fact that
our time is a, indeed the end time.
The “Now” of this fact of the facticity for all and for each one of us of what has been,
of what has been done by human beings, lies (or better said: should lie) as a weight upon
all human beings. This is for Anders the Promethean guilt of action, of original sin, and
it has been a problem since the time of the change of the gods. For the ancient Greeks,
this was the change from the age of the Titan to the Olympian gods, for Jews and for
Christians, this goes back not only to Adam and Eve but above all to the time of Cain.
In another way of telling the story, this guilt or acquired shame has been with us since
Enkidu stopped to sleep with the woman of the city paid as she was to seduce and betray
him, and who as a result lost the patience, the grace, the time that allowed him to run in
innocence alongside the gazelle, the lion, and so on. Thereafter, Enkidu, the wild man,
would not free the animals from the traps that city hunters set for them, himself caught in
and by another kind of city hunter’s trap, he would be lost to his forest companions, with
little to do except follow the whore who had come to lure him to the city.
Sin, for Anders, Promethean shame, needs no specific confession: it is neither
Jewish nor Christian nor pagan—think of the contrast Nietzsche makes between
Prometheus’ and his Titanic and Semitic notions of sin, as this suffuses the Judeo-
Christian tradition in Genesis. It is the human condition that we be ashamed of
having been born, as Anders writes of this, as we are conscious of our inadequacies,
our frailty. By the same token, we are hell bent on becoming, at any price, more than
100 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

that, more than we are. Our tools, our objects, our tanks, our planes, our bombs, our
bioweapons, our vaccines—these days such things also include our digital prowess in
social media psychological manipulation—seem to be just the ticket. And it all starts
with a fig leaf, the flag of shame, the particular piece of technology that serves to hide
our nakedness. And as Giorgio Agamben reminds us in his reflections on fashion, the
fig leaf is a convention that covers over a more shameful “theological signature,” which
Agamben manages to connect with the kairos of fashion as such whereby he corrects
the conventional expression of a fig leaf parenthetically:

(To be precise, the clothes that we wear derive, not from this vegetal loincloth,
but from the tunicae pelliceae, the clothes made from animals’ skin that God,
according to Genesis 3:21, gave to our progenitors as a tangible symbol of sin and
death in the moment he expelled them from Paradise.)20

In What is an Apparatus, Agamben usefully explicates Anders’ term: Ge-rät, clarifying

Foucault’s dispositio, we can overlook the constellation with technology that traces
Heidegger’s Ge-Stell as Agamben reads it, explaining that in The Question Concerning
Technology, Heidegger

writes that Ge-stell means in ordinary usage an apparatus (Gerät), but that he
intends by this term “the gathering together of the (in)stallation [Stellen] that (in)
stalls man, this is to say, challenges him to expose the real in the mode of ordering
[Bestellen],” the proximity of this term to the theological disposition, as well as to
Foucault’s apparatuses, is evident.21

Readers have remained at the end of the array traced here, namely with the dispositive,
but reading Anders we may want to read Agamben’s text here from the start, beginning
with the skin of an animal to flag the violence of the Fall. Thus Agamben uses the same
temporal frame with respect to the Augustinian question of time as Anders also frames
it but as Agamben writes “of an ungraspable threshold between a ‘not yet,’ and a ‘no
more.’”22
With the atomic apparatus, humanity succeeded in crystallizing the terror of laying
siege to a city, wasting it, compressing it down in time and spatial act to the pressing of
a button, mere minutes from start to finish. Over and out.
At least in theory—and as Anders, already writing to Eatherly took care to note (and
in the interim his point has only been made all the stronger, in ways unimaginable to
most of us—not that we think about it): the bomb, although hardly ever thought about
(this non-thinking would be different for Major Eatherly, who knew such things far
better than most) was no static achievement. Indeed, since the bomb was developed,
progress consisted in further perfecting it, meaning as this was hardly lost on Anders,
that that same project to develop a better bomb was all and only about increasing its
deadliness, gain of function research is part of this, magnifying the destructiveness of
a negative genie-in-a-bottle.
The problem with the project from the outset, following Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
was only that the genie had already been out for a detonating excursion, twice over. As
Anders put it:
 
Between the Lines 101

For the goal that we have to reach cannot be not to have the thing; but never to use
the thing, although we cannot help having it; never to use it, although there will be
no day on which we couldn’t use it.23

It was Anders’ technically attuned thinking, student as he was of Edmund Husserl—if

first he wrote on logical categorization, Anders’ later book on “Having” concerned
epistemological ontology24—and of Heidegger; it was thus his techno-epistemological
sensibility that led Anders to reflect on the consequences that follow simply from what
we do as modern, technical human beings, living at a tempo like none before: our
time is “the completely new, the apocalyptic kind of temporality, our temporality.”25
This temporality is the end time: all time henceforth must be counted from here and
accordingly, and because we are at the end, we affect the future, any possible future, like
no other epoch in the history of humanity.
Anders offers one of the first articulations of a point we now so take for granted that
we simply refer to the concept by a number, counting generations—we count, biblically
of course, seven generations, and then because it is now a cliché, we stop thinking
about it. As Anders explains:

the people of the Western world, since they, although not planning it, are already
affecting the remotest future. Thus deciding about the health or degeneration,
perhaps the “to be or not to be” of their sons and grandsons. Whether they, or
rather we, do this intentionally or not is of no significance, for what morally counts
is only the fact.26

For his own part, already in the Gelassenheit lecture and afterwards, Heidegger
too calls attention to the manufacture, as it were, the technical production of, the
human.
The point here is that the only thing that matters is our objects, that is, what we
have, what we possess, and what we have done. Therefore, there is no question of
intention, there is no question of rightly or wrongly deploying such objects. Atom
bombs, napalm, or, quite to make it real in the current day, drone strikes, fracking,
nuclear power plants, GMO crops, but not less immediate or real: chemtrails and 5G
and HAARP and medical incursions contra personal freedom, including intrusions
on the body itself (Foucault’s biopower cannot compare) and thus the elimination of
personal privacy, intruding indeed on even the possibility of love, überveillance, the
new viral vector/GMO style ‘vaccines’ and so on. These things, these measures, cannot
be used well.

Time/Space
Time, as we have seen that Anders also reflects upon it, is always found to have a
kind of topology, a spatial dimensionality, complete with the topographic features
of a particular landscape—think of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory or think of The
Twilight Zone’s milder television metaphors: we are time-travellers of an antique
102 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

adept’s variety, less the high future of a Star Trek cruising the edge of a singularity
in space–time or even Doctor Who than the late nineteenth-century future of a
Jules Verne. Invoking Schlegel’s description of the historian as a backwards-turned
prophet, an image doubtless precisely relevant for Benjamin’s description of the
facing orientation (Figure 6) of Klee’s “Angel of history,” Anders suggests that we
need to demand the same of today’s prognosticator or futurologist.27 We “hitchhike”
in our fantasies equipped with an imaginary scientific vision, a mere hundred years
old, of time-travel via rocket ships and jet-powered speed, to take us, thank you
Albert Einstein, back in time without noticing it. Thus, suitably steampunk, we
prefer nineteenth-century cabinets, and our Dr. Who needs no spacesuit, and Bill
and Ted make do, American Style, with an aluminum, midwestern phonebooth. Nor
is it an accident that the latest language to describe the (imaginary) transforms of
the digital are borrowed—hat tip to Evgeny Morozov and Jussi Parikka—from Harry
Potter’s creator, J.K. Rowling: the horcrux is the perfectly articulated image for our
multitasking minds.
Rowling, creatrix, as it were, of the “horcrux,” had her own borrowed rabbit (or
lion) up her sleeve or tucked into her hat, even if she did not name the master
of Wonderland and its topographical transforms, morphological shifts of size and
form, down the rabbit hole and all. The mathematician author, Lewis Carroll is thus
the poster boy, the ideal author of the digital era because even with no acquaintance
with Alice, and no acquaintance with any of her adventures (who was the rabbit?
who was the walrus? who needs any of them?) we have Angelina Jolie forever—in
her gaming avatar avant la lettre in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, we have the very idea.
Mentioning, the mere mention of the wondrous is all we get and all we need: we
know everything we need to know about the mathematico-logical transform of our
new projected selves.
We are, aren’t we, by now? Transhuman, posthuman, humanity 2.0? Surely we’re
due for an upgrade to humanity 3.0 or even 4.0.
And then, just for the locus of the boggart in the wardrobe as such, Rowling also
had her C.S. Lewis. I have mentioned boggarts and wardrobes (it is a wonder that I do
not invoke Alan Rickman in the same breath), cabinets and time-travel, because when
we shift levels (and note that we are still talking topologies), one should be struck by
the persistence of our representation of time as time in history, always a picture, an
image, iconic. As if we might be surprised that anything with two dimensions might
be other than a picture.
Adorno would give Anders’ competition on the question of time and technology,
as he too was also struck by iconic, canonic time, as Berthold Hoeckner rightly
notes.28 And this is always a claim with particular insistence in Adorno where music
is, of course, the art of time. With music we are also always, and even if Hoeckner is,
like most musicologists, most philosophers, most academics, inattentive to Anders
(Stern), speaking about Anders, who also (as Stern) offered his own reflections
on time, musical time,29 as phenomenologically, as hermeneutically as Hoeckner
himself.30 Hoeckner, like Anders, like Adorno (if also, although Hoeckner does
not note this, like Nietzsche), attends to the time of the now—Jetzt-Zeit—in his
discussion of the “star” in Beethoven, echoes of constellations important for Adorno
 
Between the Lines 103

as for Benjamin, Anders, and, indeed, Schoenberg.31 Quoting Adorno’s “aesthetics

of appearance” (under the important presumption of an allergy to Heidegger that
spares any engagement with the notion as it also appears early in Heidegger’s Being
and Time), Hoeckner characterizes Adorno’s “aesthetics of Augenblick as an aesthetics
of apparition: ‘the artwork as appearance approaches most clearly the apparition,
the celestial vision.’”32 Just these lines of thinking are also to be found, traced,
and elaborated in this context in Anders. For Hoeckner—and here one misses a
discussion of both Heidegger and Nietzsche—what will be needed is a “hermeneutics
of the moment.”33 With this desideratum, the author must disentangle himself from
Adorno, who exemplified perhaps more than any other author the lived anxieties
of influence (not only Heidegger and Gadamer and also Anders and the same
Habermas Adorno had intellectually discounted but also, and certainly, whether we
like it or not—and we do not like it—Hannah Arendt as well). In addition, there are
other authors who also write on dialectics and time in conjunction with Benjamin,
making very close arguments for Hoeckner regarding Adorno’s supposed lacks, as
Günter Figal has analysed these. Focusing, as Hoeckner does, on Adorno’s attention
to the standstill, Hoeckner disagrees with Figal. There are less lacunae in Adorno
than an abundance of eyes, as it were—the image of the Argus-eyed is significant
as it should be for Hoeckner’s reading—than a veritable constellation of insights
into that same dialectic. Thus, we read that “what intrigued Adorno was Benjamin’s
objectification of the historical process in the image.”34 The key passage everyone
cites from Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk is thus worth citing here:

What has been coalesces in lightning like fashion with the Now. In other words,
the image is the dialectic at a standstill. For while the relationship of the present to
the past is a purely temporal one, the relationship of what has been to the Now is
dialectical, of a pictorial rather than a temporal character.35

The point made here overlooks a key point in Nietzsche (and it is instructive that
authors, for all their enthusiasm, are at pains to keep Nietzsche’s points at a distance
from their own). In addition, there is the eschatological as such, in this case the very
picture of it, which is the picture book Dante, in the images inextricably associated
with him since the 1850s, not only for us today but for Anders, and Adorno, and
Benjamin ever since Paul Gustave Doré’s illustrations came to stand in Dante’s name
and place, an achievement arguably to match that of any other illustration in any
other book.
Doré’s pen drawing of the Empyrean in Dante’s Paradiso, Canto 31, published mid-
nineteenth century (Figure 7), combines as rebus both the ideal of heaven after death
and the power of the sun. The same figure, the same combination can seem to have
been articulated by J. Robert Oppenheimer using the language of the Vedic tradition,
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”36 As Peter Sloterdijk takes up this
same association, as we may compare this with the iconic image of the Trinity explosion
on July 16, 1945 (Figure 8), the “Bomb is really the only Buddha that Western reason
could understand. Its calm and its irony are infinite. . . . As with Buddha, everything
that could be said is said through its existence.”37
104 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Figure 7 Paul Gustave Doré, Dante, Paradiso, Canto 31. The Saintly Throng in the Form of
a Rose. Wikicommons. Public domain.

Figure 8 Trinity atomic bomb explosion, Rapatronic image. July 16, 1945, 05:29:45,
Mountain Wartime. Alamogordo Test Range, Jornada del Muerto Desert. Courtesy of US
government Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Wikicommons.
 
Between the Lines 105

Anders’ Endzeit und Zeitenende38 requires reference to Nietzsche’s eternity as this is

the moment, the now. Again, and as already intimated at the start of this chapter, this is
mapped out in space, a space of infinite dimension, fore and aft, as Nietzsche depicts it
and without which dimensionality it is impossible to think the Augenblick, the winking,
the blinking of an eye, as Nietzsche also names the moment. Time stands still and in what
Nietzsche could describe as two roads, mapping infinities past and future, the crossover,
the junction is the moment, again: Augenblick, the same word Adorno uses.
And why not the moment, the blink of an eye, an image which already closes off
the seen, relegating it to a lost glimpse? Why not in Anders’ time, in Adorno’s time,
Benjamin’s time: a time when the apocalypse seemed sure just because as Anders
emphasized with respect to Hiroshima, and although we scarcely like to talk of this at
all, in Vietnam, or in Iraq as Baudrillard did not fail to try to tell us, or closer to home
for the German Anders, already in Dresden, as Winfried Sebald has reminded us, it
had already taken place? For Anders, starting with his own experience of it, the First
World War had already done that and the Second World War, as that came and ended,
not once, but twice, with two bombs, could not but repeat the same message, once more
with feeling, and a reprise, da capo. The encore at the end of the Second World War,
and the constellation, the order of events would matter for Anders, changed everything
beyond rectification, beyond redemption or correction. Anders thus reflects on shame
or denial: on what has been and what we have done.
This is, for Anders, in his retrospective reflections on the “Antiquatedness of Space
and Time” part of the problem, emphasizing, as Gadamer would also always do in
his lectures when I was a student, the importance of consummation, satisfaction,
fulfilment, what Anders simply called “having.” It is instructive that Anders begins
his 1959 reflections with the illustration of “Schlaraffenland” (AM II, 335) but it is
even more significant that we can barely translate this term into English, although we
Americans have perfected its realization on earth arguably more than other people, at
least in the Disney version. Schlaraffenland is a world where sausages leap perfectly
broiled, perfectly willingly, into our always-hungry mouths, no effort at all, guiltlessly,
automatically, and in this child’s fantasy (not really for children because there is beer
that has the same eager proclivities to satisfy any thirst we might have); the only name
we have is Candyland, or the media obsession with the heaven of a certain confessional
persuasion: complete with a given number of promised virgins springing, not unlike
the sausages, unbidden, uncoaxed, compliant into the martyr’s arms.
Our age crosses space and time, obliterating, as Anders also emphasizes all distances,
spatial and temporal. We are effectively, as he argues, rendered by technological means
into spaceless, timeless beings, not in the sense of transcendence but imperviousness,
blindness. This is apocalyptic blindness, and thus we no longer have any sense of history
or memory. But the problem of the modern time-less (lacking time as we do), space-
less (lacking a sense of the world around as we do) way of being is precisely that it
transcends nothing at all. We are, as Anders goes on to argue, mediated in all of this by
our technology, which is always to be found just where we put it: precisely, exactly “in
the ‘middle’ of the fulfilment of needs or ‘facilitating’ [‘Vermitteln’] the manufacture of
products” (AM II, 336).
106 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Whose Holocaust? Which Genocide(s)?

Who shall count? As Anders asks with respect to everything from music to political
sensibilities, who gets to be counted?
If some have followed the apotheosis, as it were, of the cattle car as this was
borrowed, along with the entire factory slaughterhouse project, technique, assembly
line-layout, and so on, from Chicago’s stockyards and thence to Auschwitz, Dachau,
Buchenwald,39 we can also trace the lines, the tracks of the trains that ran throughout
a war of destroyed transports. These tracks that could have been bombed were never
destroyed, and Hitler not only got the trains to run on time, but the trains that fed the
final solution ran without fail. A transport always arrives at its destination, to vary
Jacques Lacan while keeping the same spirit. In the same spirit, these are the ashes of
which Derrida also speaks, Anders talked about things not even a Klee could illustrate.
No paintings are possible; one is immediately moved to cite the film Hiroshima, Mon
Amour, and even that shudders. Meshes of non-representation. Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
and we have no idea what we are talking about. And then students of Adorno prattle
about a Bilderverbot. God forbid that we care to speak of this, of these people, foreign
to us, in foreign places, alien beings; who are they?
We continue to require both critical theory and a critical philosophy of technology,
a conjunction incorporating Anders’ complicated dialectic less of art in Benjamin’s
prescient but still innocent age of technological reproduction but and much rather
Anders’ reflections “on the devastation of life in the age of the third industrial revolution”
(AM II, subtitle). Thus, Anders would talk not about enemy fascism (which was an easy
sell as many authors know to their advantage) but and much rather the American, the
good-guys, the non-fascist, non-(supposedly)-totalitarian, but very democratic (despite
its complete secrecy) contraversion of just-war ideology, transforming it into just and
only a war after the war had ended. For all by themselves, in the midst of the Japanese
effort to surrender—surrenders are diplomatic things, that take diplomatic intervals
of time, negotiation, the business of sovereignty and legitimacy—the bomber’s planes
would fly as for weeks, indeed for all the years of the Manhattan Project, it had been
planned to fly just those planes, to send them somewhere appropriate just in order (that
would be the end in question) to drop the winged death, the apocalypse itself. The end
fruit of that same project was two bombs completed just prior to the end of a war (but
when does anything end?) that was finished just a touch too soon before the planes (these
would be the means) were nonetheless launched to destroy cities full of people.40
If scholars dispute whether one can claim that ordinary Germans knew or did not
know about the Holocaust, Holger Nehring reminds us that in this case there is nothing
to dispute. For more than sixty years, German authors have been at pains to argue, like
Nehring, that no one can make that statement about Hiroshima, about Nagasaki.41
And yet even this point can miss the point. We are, we remain still in the dark about
the atomic attacks on Japan. Thus, if the aforementioned description of the timing or
the necessity for the bombs dropped on Japan sounds like an overstatement, that is
because, as Americans, we continue to be in denial; we, as Anders offered Eatherly a
diagnosis for his mental distress at a distance, are traumatized. And this trauma today
is the result of, as trauma always perpetuates itself as trauma, by means of suppression.
 
Between the Lines 107

The development of the atom bomb was a secret during the Second World War (not
only the project as such was a secret but three different locations were created, likewise
in secret, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (uranium), Hanford, Washington (plutonium), and
today the best known of these: Los Alamos, New Mexico). As one cultural scholar, David
S. Bertolotti, has observed, the development of the bomb, which involved building the
aforenamed cities from scratch, was arguably the best-kept secret of the war. I have
cited Bertolotti’s analysis because he does not adumbrate a theory to reconstruct in
retrospect, one way or the other. Bertolotti argues by citation and object illustration,
via actual newspaper publications from the day, the very old-fashioned kind of media
archaeology, by way, with object documentation, of a study of print media as the means
of both suppression and controlled dissemination (translation: that is propaganda,
translation, to borrow the language of the masthead of the New York Times, that is “all
the news fit to print”) during the Second World War.42
The closest we have ever come to this was Dresden, also an aerial destruction,
angels again, firebombed by the British bomber Harris, who, it is said, knew what he
was doing. Winfried Sebald, in the English version of his book The Natural History of
Destruction,43 used the nihilistic language of Lord Solly Zuckerman, the architect of
the Dresden firebombing, to title his book, and it is an uncanny title. Sebald quotes the
Swedish journalist Stig Degerman’s 1946 report of nothing so much as a landscape of
destruction, a landscape at which no one of the inhabitants turned their heads to look:

writing from Hamburg, that on a train going at normal speed it took him a quarter
of an hour to travel the lunar landscape between Hasselbrook and Landwehr, and
in all that vast wilderness, perhaps the most horrifying expanse of ruins in the
whole of Europe, he did not see a single living soul44

The whole point, the whole purpose, the sole, the one and only end, of waging war is
terror. The reference is to Löwith, to Jaspers, and, indeed, to Herman Kahn.45
The point can and must continue to be made, and thus I will return later in the text
to Alan Rickman, not with the popular reference to one Severus, named as Marcus
Aurelius thanks his own tutor for teaching him the principles of Stoic Republicanism,
but for his last film deployment in Eye in the Sky, serving propaganda quite as the
culture industry always does.46

Once More, With Feeling

A student of Husserl (again it remains important to say this first when it comes to
the prospect of articulating a phenomenological socio-anthropology), Anders was
also a student of Heidegger, although that requires a separate study, and a student of
Max Scheler (again, another study is essential, as Anders owes some part of his own
ethics to Scheler’s influence in addition to his own spiritual and practical sensibility).
Here, Heidegger is central to the reading I have offered. If Anders’ scholars tend to
eschew Heidegger (and if Heidegger scholars return the favour by ignoring Anders),
Heidegger’s reflections on technology remain decisive for Anders. I have argued that
one needs to keep Heidegger’s criticisms in mind to read Anders as these are crucial
108 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

for Ander’s critiques of Heidegger. To do this, it is necessary to go beyond the limits of

Heidegger scholarship as even Heidegger scholars show little patience for the sustained
and thoroughgoing character of Heidegger’s interest in technology as indeed in modern
science, both of which Heidegger thought in terms closer to Anders’ preoccupation
with the same. Heidegger scholars can be the least valuable resource owing to their
concern to excavate their personal favourite theme, which means they tend to cut
references to Nietzsche, to either overfocus on or else to exclude Hölderlin (because
who understands him?) mixing and matching Rilke (why ever not?), to nail that same
personal interest to the wall as the whole of Heidegger: be it being, be it meaning, be it
objects, be it god or God, or anti-Semitism or what have you.47
A full elaboration of the relationship between Heidegger and Anders surely
remains to be articulated but elements of such a reading are offered here, and other
aspects glimmer in Sloterdijk’s recent work. This is the sheer thatness of its having
been (where, once again, the Nietzschean dialectic of the “having been” reflects the
essence of modern technology) as deployed, as put to use, as this also functions as
programmatic aggression advanced in the name of defence and deterrence. Thus the
tactic of automatic aggression is carried out in good conscience. The very notion of
the “pre-emptive strike,” as Baudrillard observed again and again towards the end of
his life, absolves the perpetrator (the English would not be blamed for Dresden, and
the oddity of Eatherly’s conscience was not that it, in Anders’ expression, burned but
its contrast with most Americans who have or feel they no blood on their hands for
Hiroshima). The blame, again, is assigned to the opponent: such are the wages of evil.
The claim of innocence did not sit well with Eatherly,48 and similar discounting
claims, as if nothing had happened, were hard on soldiers who had fought in Vietnam,
especially after their return to everyday life in the United States, and the same
dissonance of oblivion continues—today we name it post-traumatic stress, classified as
a “disorder”—for today’s fighters in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on.
Sloterdijk analyses this “shock” at the end of his book, The Critique of Cynical Reason,
even going so far, and the present author is grateful for this, as to invoke Anders. But
Anglophone readers looking for the next new thing have never read Anders (who was
never the next new thing, perforce not, having never been translated into English)
or Sloterdijk (who was), and those looking for today’s next new thing (and it is only
today’s new thing that matters) cannot go back and read what they did not read in the
first place. Thus, we trust young scholars who, as Nietzsche once expressed it, “have
thoroughly unlearned the art of reading.” And by the time anyone notices a lack, those
same scholars will have moved on to where they wished to be, in time, as already noted
above, to be replaced by the next set in turn.
As Žižek has observed, as Sloterdijk observes both of them following Virilio on
the same theme, the war on terrorism is infinitely fightable and wildly adaptable,
transformable. Indeed, our enemies are beautifully invisible: a powerfully convenient
antagonist, and the invisible and therefore omnipresent enemy serves as today’s
transformation, the perfection of the sheer automatism of war. Today of course in the
era of Coronavirus the logic of the same war on terror is turned against ourselves and
our neighbors. We are all of us the target, assuming that everything is the same for
everyone, an easy assumption if you believe what you see on the internet.
 
Between the Lines 109

The invisible enemy all around us is the equivalent of the acephalic and therefore
perfect soldier of past war fantasies as Sloterdijk invokes these to conclude his Critique
of Cynical Reason.49 Of course there is more, as the NSA has undone the old joke—we
have met the enemy and he is us—by making it come true, literally so. Add to that the
new laws hastily instituted everywhere, criminalizing protest and “outing” anonymity.
Only today’s virus pandemic outdoes as it also fulfils the “war” on terror. In any case,
the war on terrorism, like the Coronavirus “war,” is one like most wars fought in good
conscience. The perfect war for the “guiltlessly guilty” who fight infinitely, without
remorse.
But the full, as we cinematically say, technological metal jacket entails that we today
use other means, geological, meteorological means for waging war, and we pretend
that we have no choice, we pretend that we need energy (although Anders pointed
out that our perpetuation of our supposed “need” for energy was a calculated choice
of a particular and particularly non-convivial way to live, to use Ivan Illich’s language
as he makes a similar argument, a result of a politico-economic option to ignore the
abundance of energy for the economic sake and advantage of the industry strictures,
the restrictions of monetizable specific, limited resources that would then justify the
utter destruction of the earth, water, air, everything). Obviously, I am speaking of
fracking but also deep-sea drilling to go with the heedless destruction of the seas by
industrializing fishing to reach proportions of the same apocalyptic force that is the
theme of the current chapter and to which, with a different emphasis, I will return in
the concluding chapter.
“What is decisive,” as Adorno wrote, “is the absorption of biological destruction by
conscious social will. Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its
members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.”50
And I would extend this, as Adorno would, to animals as I would also extend this, as
Nietzsche would, to the earth itself. Our trouble, and hence our continued interest
exactly in Eichmann—and not as Anders would say in “Eichmann’s sons,” for we are,
although commentators dispute just this, all of us his children—where Eichmann is
only pars pro toto, a signifier for the story we tell ourselves that all our troubles in
war, past and present, are always and only about the enemy: the Nazi, the Russian,
the phantom Al Qaeda operative—like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, an invisible,
omnipresent opponent so convenient that we could hardly resist inventing him—and
so we did.
If civilian death and the destruction of human, individual habitations and the
conditions of maintaining a life was always both deliberate and regretted and thus a
problem in war and so a necessary evil in the case of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
such deaths need no longer be regretted because they are no longer collateral. We send
drones to kill civilians, we attack supposed “terrorist” sites and cells and incidentally,
having to search them out at night, kill and rape women, children, and so on. We listen
to Žižek because we no longer have Baudrillard to make these points, not that scholars
ever listened to Baudrillard in his lifetime. And as we have seen, and for the same
reasons, university scholars paid no attention to Anders in his living years.
 6

Anders and Adorno

Genocide

On What We Have Done

It is significant that publishers gave Anders as much grief as they did. Thus, as already
noted, his Munich publisher, C.H. Beck, refused until the very year of his death to
bring out his novel, Die molussische Katakombe. I have already suggested that rhythmic
forms matter for this but here we note a proverb from that long-standing project as he
sets it into the closing lines of the antepenultimate paragraph of his 1980 volume of The
Antiquatedness of Humanity:

In Molussia there was a proverb, which in German went as follows: “Die Dinge
foltern, bis sie ihr Geständnis ablegen.” [Torture things, until they confess.] (AM
II, 429)1

The present chapter raises questions that are awful in every sense with regard to what
has been done to human beings—done by human beings to one another, to animals,
to plants, that is trees and grasses, and every flowering thing, to the world around
them. Here it matters to note following the previous chapter, that typically, despite
the dedicated rapacity often involved in such doings, these are for the most part acts
undertaken in/with a good conscience.
At issue is a question of who we are as human beings and what we, as human beings,
have done. Here, Anders insists upon the difference, as did Gabriel Marcel who, as has
been noted, himself takes over the notion from Anders. Now Marcel is explicit about
this borrowing, and he cites “Dr. Stern” advanced as a free option, to suit own thesis,2
between being and having. The tolle lege moment, as Marcel describes it, refers to the
focus on corporeality that also struck other French philosophers of the day, here however
not a matter of the flesh as such, or the facticity of apricot cocktails as de Beauvoir quotes
these for her part, but as Marcel quotes Anders as reflecting on what it is reflexively,
subject and object at once, to be bodily as such, not as being but precisely qua having:

We have a body. We have. . . . In ordinary talk we are perfectly clear about what we
mean by this. And yet nobody has thought of turning his attention upon what, in
 
Anders and Adorno 111

common parlance, is intended by the word “have”; no one has attended to it as a

complex of relations, and asked himself in what having consists, simply as having.3

Before Marcel proceeds to emphasize that what follows is deeply steeped in Husserlian
phenomenology and that “the language of German phenomenologists is so often
untranslatable,”4 a reflection which authorizes Anders’ insight for Marcel’s purposes,
Marcel observes that what is at stake for Anders involves a crucial reflection on a
certain relationality beyond intentionality, beyond immanence:

when I say, “I have a body,” I do not only mean “I am conscious of my body”: but
neither do I mean “something exists which can be called my body.”5

More than Husserl to be sure, Anders’ point with respect to bodily having is closely
aligned with Heidegger in the wake of Heidegger’s emphasis on Being (and the
circumstantial horizon of having as what belongs to embodied being-in-the-world),
in the phenomenological and hermeneutic context that was Being and Time. If Anders
does not always pick up on the Heideggerian hermeneutic, it will be because Anders
holds the question as having to do with the (perfected) facticity of having done what
has been done.
Here once again: we have a reference to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (the parallel
Anders makes), or indeed as we may extend the reference to Goethe’s theodistically
confounded Mephisto (although this last will not be Anders’ concern as he focuses, as
we shall see later, on the apprenticeship to evil, witting or not, and maintains his own
reference to the devil himself): “Teil von jener Kraft Die stets das Böse will und stets
das Gute schafft”/“Part of that Power which would/The Evil ever do, and ever does the
Good”].6
Given what has been done, how are we to face the fact of the same? This is what
Nietzsche called the es war [it was] of the past, as this also inspires Freud. This is the
force of asking, as Adorno famously asks, whether poetry could ever be possible again?
Whether poetry or art or music or philosophy or even ratiocination itself makes any
sense at all, in Adorno’s words, “after Auschwitz?” Or else, as Anders would remind us,
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Adorno, who began in philosophy by concerning himself, quite as Heidegger had
concerned himself, with the theory of knowledge,7 articulated what would become
the ground plan of critical theory itself—even if adherents of the Frankfurt School
after Habermas and Honneth, have not been critical for years— or at least not in
Anders’ or Adorno’s sense of the word. To this end, who maintains this question as a
question: How do we know what we suppose ourselves to know? In other words, and
as Nietzsche also reflected: How are we as sure as we are that what we take to be true
is true? In truth? How so?
There have been many answers offered in response to such epistemological
reflections—the bulk of which fall into the flat thoughtlessness of an uncritical realism
that (unintentionally and in this measure or to this extent:) ironically calls itself “critical
thinking” in Anglo-American philosophical parlance (for the sake of what is surely
“barefoot” expediency, having the benefit as it does of easing the burden of thinking
112 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

“positivity” or “positivism,” to use Adorno’s generic terminology as it was also Arendt’s

and Anders’ and Heidegger’s word for what can be just as generically designated
“analytic” philosophy: the same style of thinking that continues to pre-empt other
modes and styles of thought with such efficacy that it dominates the philosophical
mainstream to this day—even so-called “continental” philosophy, including critical
theory, just to the extent that today’s critical theory is itself articulated in terms of this
restricted schema). The bits that remain are vapours gathered under the weasel name
of metaphysics.
Adding the question of genocide to Adorno’s critical epistemology, including the
“crisis of causality,” Adorno’s enigmatic: “the answer is false” raises the question of
genocide as a question. But it will do to excavate certain genealogies of the concept, the
word, the practice, the act of genocide. Yet if it is right to raise the question, as it is, it is
just as certain that the answer cannot but be as Adorno fairly affirms: “false.” And quite
in addition to promulgating a false answer, false from as many perspectives as there are
eyes, there are also many feet to be stepped on and there will also be the indignation
of egos seeking to have their own and only their own distinctions heard above the fray.
“Genocide studies” bristles with canons, various ones to be sure, complete with
canonic disputes, duly settled on the terms of its practitioners. Thus, in The Meaning
of Genocide, Mark Levene offers a definition, set off in an epigraph to his eponymous
central chapter:

Genocide occurs when a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened
by an aggregate population—defined by the state as an organic collectivity, or
series of collectivities—seeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse
physical elimination of that aggregate, in toto, or until it is no longer perceived to
represent a threat.8

This definition could be named with the word Auschwitz; or what would, for Levene,
be better termed “the” Holocaust as if it had been or could be or better said, should
be, the only one. By contrast, the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of Genocide defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to
destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”9 For Levene,
this definition’s breadth is too limiting. And this limitation remains, no matter how
much we might add to its breadth by including Syria in 2015 or—and this remains
the limit case, especially since July 2014 and ongoing—Israel contra Palestinian Gaza
(and Jerusalem and elsewhere May 2021). And now let us have what can only be an
incomplete listing: after Cambodia and Rwanda, after Chechnya and Bosnia, after
Iraq, Darfur, Afghanistan, Libya, and now, Semite on Semite, one must once again
add Gaza’s catastrophic loss of life, which includes—as almost all these instances
include—a majority of civilians, as Gazans and Syrians spill over their borders and
create a refugee flight that cannot be restricted to a single locus. Now that what is
visually and mediatically disseminated (though this was never not the case) includes
children, a people and a world—from nations and cities to neighbourhoods and
hospitals, schools, universities, museums, and so on—we might speak of being subject
to what—despite all this dissemination—remains strikingly nondisseminated—just to
 
Anders and Adorno 113

speak in journalistic terms, given all the news we do not think fit to print—a disaster
du jour. And part of the problem, as Adorno would have asked that we note, is that
these (invisible or denied) events themselves correspond to instances of numerically
and thematically explicit genocidal conflicts.
Anders uses the term “conspicuously” with reference to US military deployment in
Vietnam when he publishes the second volume of The Antiquatedness of Humanity to
exemplify the thesis of his 1968 book, Visit Beautiful Vietnam10:

However, even after having expressed what I believed could be said about the
nuclear threat, my immediate “return home” to philosophy was still blocked.
For the second time I “was distracted” (if it can be said that the call of duty is a
distraction), as in the sixties I met another emergency, one, which also had to do
with the main concerns of The Antiquatedness of Humanity, namely, the demand
to participate in the struggle contra genocide [Genozid] in Vietnam, which, indeed
being implemented by means of machines, was a grievous exemplification of my
machine-philosophical theses. (AM II, 12)

The focus for Anders ties the observation of genocide together with his overtly critical
philosophy of technology, and his consciousness of overstepping the bounds of what
intellectuals prefer to focus on, is also in evidence:

To be sure, likewise, here one can draw no exact line of demarcation between
theory and praxis; on the basis of this activity a book also emerged, a partial
representation of a “Critique of Technology”: concerning the language developed
by the homicidal technocracy of the United States and deployed in part to
disguise and in part to justify its acts of devastation and genocide [Völkermord].
(AL II, 13)

Wide ranging as the scholarly absorption with Holocaust studies attuned to Adorno’s
own question of Auschwitz is, it must also follow contemporary reflections on
colonialism (including the Atlantic slave trade, which some scholars still cannot tolerate
being named a genocide, just as in the United States we aver that all the autochthonous
peoples we call Indians, who once lived where Americans now live and where ranchers
mean to ranch their free range cattle and miners mean to mine, and frackers mean to
frack, and so on and so forth—and not merely somewhere in some so-named “public
land” or “reservation” but everywhere and anywhere we now happen to live in the
United States and Canada—just to keep to North America, in every locus, from sea,
that is, to shining sea, and up and down the continent—simply moved on, just as we
claim with respect to animals, such that by this shrinking away the “West” was “won,”
that “they” altered what we suppose to have been their “range” as we plot it, or else we
are told that they simply died of smallpox, say, or of other diseases, rather than as the
result of a deliberate and sustained genocide).11
I will have a bit more to say on the Atlantic slave trade later in the text, yet for
all that, what I say articulates what is, in Adorno’s sense, “false,” for all the vanished
peoples—and I include here as well the vanished animals of the land in which I myself
114 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

was born, on the island of Manhattan, the borough of Brooklyn, on their ashes, their
bones, their unmarked graves.
Although Adorno declared impossible any ultimate comprehension of
Auschwitz, this, Rolf Tiedemann writes, does not licence the surrender of attempts
“at understanding, if not the fait social of Auschwitz itself, then at least how it could
have come about. Adorno set as one of the tasks of philosophy after Auschwitz ‘to
comprehend the incomprehensible, the march of humanity to inhumanity’ it is a
task that, since the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, in Iraq and Darfur, since
the uncountable victims of terrorism in Israel and Chechnya, since the attacks on
September 11, 2001, and in the face of the hundreds of murdered in Madrid’s and
London’s subways, is farther from a solution than during the middle of the 1960s of
the, in the meantime, past century, when Adorno first formulated it.”12

Singulare Tantum: Whose Genocide? Which Genocide?

The thing about genocides is that they can be denumerated. Perhaps this is part of the
appeal of legislating that only one can or should matter. The Second World War itself
was punctuated, woven through, with an unthinkable number of genocidal ventures,
against Jews but indeed also against Slavs (of course), against Gypsies (of course again),
and against Catholics (of course). The last matter-of-fact, parenthetical “of course” is
owing to the fact that the locus of such genocides was Germany: land of the one true and
enlightened Protestant faith that had its beginning and its success in the suppression
not only of the church, figuratively speaking, but of Catholics—Adorno could take his
mother’s name, but it was his father’s confession and not his mother’s that, after the
war and for the rest of his life, exacted upon him that guilt through which he came to
see himself as a ghost-thinker, competing not only with Anders but so many others,
posthumous for two more decades; and therein resides the complex of the superior said
to be inferior, the chosen, the elect: the Jew in Adorno will always outrank the Catholic
in intellectual, moral esteem.
It is still only one genocide that matters in this or any other discussion. This
singularity may even be the sole reason we discuss it philosophically. Emmanuel
Levinas, when asked by some visiting students if, perhaps, the Palestinians might count
as the “other,” demurred: “No,” it’s said, he replied. And it is this reply, this “No,” that
remains to be thought.
Derrida would not, I think, differ. Nevertheless, when it comes to the massive scale of
animals slaughtered on every level, for every reason, consistently, repeatedly, on and on,
Derrida did reflect precisely on the issue and question of industrial agriculture what is at
stake, not merely slaughter but life, including an excess of overproduction, bred for death
(note that this can also include canned safaris or ‘snuff ’ or ‘petting’ zoos):

No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that human beings do all
they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order
to organize on a worldwide scale the forgetting or non-recognition of this violence,
which some would compare to the worse cases of genocide (there are also animal
 
Anders and Adorno 115

genocides: the number of species endangered because of humanity takes one’s

breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly
consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain
species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and
exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions
that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed
norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their own
continued existence or even their overpopulation. . . . Everybody knows what the
production, breeding, transport, and slaughter of these animals has become.13

Thinking the Holocaust

“The” Holocaust should occupy this specific and singular place within our conception
of genocide. Rightly so. Otherwise, the numbers to be counted, the incessant siege
against peoples, would shock our sensibilities. We human beings who have been at it
since we began to be human, communicating with each other (again, in Hölderlin’s
words, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind) at the same time as we kill one another, might do
well to recall one of the first biblical justifications for the razing of a town: for killing
every last man, for raping and then either killing the women or enslaving them so as
to continue the process over the generations, through genocidal rape.14 But in this case
the variety specified proved too great to encompass down to the last detail.
I refer to the biblical account of record, Samuel 15. The letter of the law required
killing everything, down to the children and babies, including—just as the civilized
world always ends up including—all the animals. Thus, the Lord, speaking through
Samuel, commands Saul to take utter retribution, to exact total annihilation as just
vengeance15:

Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people
Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty
says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid
them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally
destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women,
children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”’ (i-3 Sam. 15)16

Saul does not follow this command to the letter but does take the Amelek king, a
common form of tribute in war, as well as another plunder of war: the living animals, set
aside and reserved for his own people. This departure from the letter of the command
will prove to be Saul’s ultimate error (and thinking about this logic may yield insights
into the current and ongoing state of hostilities in Israel today):

He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed
with the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep
and cattle, the fat calves and lambs everything that was good. These they were
116 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they
totally destroyed. (7-9 Sam. 15)

Even after Saul defends keeping the cattle and sheep, claiming he intended to kill them
ultimately, reserved for sacrifice on another day, even after the subsequent execution
of the captive king, it is still too late for strictures of the law. Thus Samuel 16 sees the
change of kingship to the house of David, he who was brought into Saul’s house as a
musical antidote to the “evil spirit” of God.
Something similar can be read in the limpid clarity of Homer, the epic of epics, the
ultimate end that is the story of Troy, the end that is the story of the beginning of Rome,
a tale of origins that launched what may very well remain our sole image of empire and
remains, arguably, our founding narrative to this day.
For Anders, for us today, genocide is part of the logic of techno-efficiency. Thus
we mean a global reset, thus we mean to combat ‘climate change.’ To this same extent,
in his 1978 chapter from his second volume on The Antiquatedness of Humanity, on
“The Antiquatedness of History,” and beginning with a timeline of dated epigraphs, as
already cited above—“Politics is Our Destiny (1815)/Economy is Our Destiny (1845)/
Technology is Our Destiny (1945)” (AM II, 271), dates which can be aligned with
Napoleon, as with Marx, and with Hiroshima/Nagasaki—and where his reflections
range thetically from “Truman to Kissinger to Carter” (AM II, 280), he argues in a
section dedicated to the “un-modernity” of the neutron bomb, given the tactical, so
it is politically argued, unusability of new bomb products, that these engender a new
array of product needs and product consumers:

Thus, the annihilation of people is thus certainly not the main objective of
contemporary production—naturally, something that I do not assert in order
to make excuses for the latter, inasmuch as genocides, like those in Vietnam or
Cambodia, are unhesitatingly accepted as collateral damage. (AM II, 282)

In the midst of this argument, beginning from a reflection on technocrats as leaders

of nations and not less as leaders of industry, Anders’ term is the “Shepherds of
Products,” which terms inevitably includes reference to the Heidegger, who had died
just a few years earlier, and his “Shepherd of Being,” as Anders reflects that we fall
exactly short of this. Where Heidegger installed his conception of the “shepherd of
Being,” as Anders observed, “in good biblical fashion, namely anthropologically,” and
in the process exaggerating—this is a Nietzschean echo as we may recall the beginning
of Nietzsche’s essay on Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, the significance, from a
cosmic perspective, of the “place of the human in the cosmos” (AM II, 281), we are the
shepherds not of being but of our things, dedicated to tending technological product
lines, where it is significant that we refer to modern technology not only generically,
cell phones, computers, airplanes, than by the names of their makers: Samsung, Apple,
Lenovo, but also Boeing and Raytheon, and so on.
Here, we can see the sense of Anders’ subtitle: On the Destruction of Life in the Age
of the Third Industrial Revolution. Anders adverts to an inherent contradiction in the
political sphere, where the policy of mutually assured destruction as was the rhetoric
 
Anders and Adorno 117

of atomic escalation, linked, as war has been throughout the twentieth century with
“safety” and “survival.” Dissonant, as Anders argues, given that the neutron bomb was
designed to destroy people while preserving structures:

The most irrefutable proof of this triumph is the manufacture of the neutron
bomb (already [as of 1978–BB] invented about fifteen years ago), which treats
our technological facilities as taboo but us, to the contrary, as “expendable” [in
English in the original]; formulated theologically: it treats our manufactured
products [Gemachtes], the opera creata, as survival-worthy, as ontologically more
important than we makers, the creatores. In the same way, via this invention and
the unqualified express readiness to put it to use, the word “inhuman” has taken
on a meaning it did not possess even during the classical years of annihilation,
between 1941 and 1945. If a crowning witness to “the antiquatedness of humanity”
were needed, here it is. (AM II, 282)

Anders’ footnote here is shocking (only Virilio’s reflections on the contemporary

manufacture of swine–human chimeras for the sake of “harvesting” for
xenotransplantation, in direct historical alignment with Auschwitz, is comparable):

Auschwitz, where one classified hundreds of thousands as mere containers of

hair and gold teeth, containers which were annihilated in order to obtain those
materials, can be regarded as a testing ground for this “pure human annihilation”
(the neutron bomb, in fact, is recommended as the “cleanest weapon” [“saubere
Waffe”]). (AM II, 452)

For Anders, the issue of scale and distance, the conviction that we are dissociated,
at least in principle as consumers, as citizens, from the effects of consumption, the
actions of our governments, as of international corporations—as in the case of the
explorations for oil and gas as well as the destruction of the rain forest for the sake of
palm oil and beef and lumber—implicates us still more powerfully in the logic of the
gadget coupled with the homeworker and the intimate labour of the same taken to
its more complete extension, as he writes in 1972, towards the end of a long chapter
concerning the antiquatedness of “meaning,” in a section entitled “The Iteration,” and
emphasizing his repeated recourse to this same illustration:

Again take my previous example: the meaning of my work on the mechanical

part of a machine, whose meaning consists in manufacturing another part of a
machine and, moreover, for a machine necessary for a weapon of annihilation,
whose meaning in turn consists in the liquidation of millions of human beings—I
say, the ultimate meaning of a job so seemingly innocuous to the extent that its
product is a miniscule component, consists in the final effect of the final product,
despite the fact that the latter is temporally and spatially distant from me, and
despite the fact that during my work I concentrated exclusively on the flawless
production of that first element. The ultimate meaning of a modest manual gesture
[Handgriffes] can be called “genocide.” (AM II, 389–90)
118 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Colonialism and the Exploitation of the Globe

The discovery of America as this was named to claim the continent as a found new land, like
a new Jerusalem, by discounting the original inhabitants already there for whom the lands
were not ‘discovered’ but lived, inhabited, was also the discovery of myriad opportunities
for different varieties of genocide—rampant, multifarious: so many different peoples, so
many languages and names, so many trees and plants, so many animals, including birds,
fishes, and variously furred beasts,17 enough to create a profession for those who lived
by excavating the flesh of wild beings, all the professions attendant on all those hunters,
trappers, fishermen, whalers, and sealers. Thus the technology for the circumnavigation
of the globe would wipe out entirely different vistas, distant parts of theretofore new
worlds and hemispheres, landscapes and populations; and on into the modern era, for
the benefit of that industrial revolution, which, of course, as we read in our history books,
depended on slaves and was indeed founded upon slavery (this foundation continues in
wage slavery and in the unnoted, uncounted, thankless, utterly invisible work, or let us
just, as Arendt does and as de Beauvoir documents, call it the “labour” of women), where
to be “dependent on slaves” is to depend upon enslavement—this, then, is the benefit, the
profit of genocidal practice.
The history of humanity is the history of extermination, of extinction, yet we blanch
before naming it genocide; historically, however, merely historically speaking, there are
and cannot but be parallels. For this reason it is worth invoking again the animals to
whom we tend to refuse this parallel most violently (because the term holocaust derives
from ancient Greek animal sacrifice, which involves the burning, in its entirety, of the
whole animal (ὁλόκαυστος), and because the contrast is so abysmal). While Adorno
drew this parallel on several different levels, the historian George Patterson has
expertly traced the technique of the Holocaust itself back to the Chicago stockyard’s
development of industrial agricultural efficiency—its mass transports, sorting lots, and
techniques for efficient killing en masse, detailed in Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment
of Animals and the Holocaust.18 To be sure, there is certainly a relation of continuity:
in the one, the unrestricted killing or hunting of animals to the point of their utter
destruction—it is the entirety of the destruction that makes the difference, the fact
that none survive, that none remain on this earth (and increasingly we have reached
this point in terms of “extinction,” a term we use to mask the fact of extermination,
persecution, hunting, poisoning, which we call “control”); in the other, the devastating
crossover to human beings.
This is one part of the historical argument advanced by Briton Cooper Busch’s
The War Against the Seals.19 If it is common to suppose that the problem concerning
the assault on the seals was born of the sensibilities of those who founded Earth Day
in 1970 or those who still publish images of baby seals brutally clubbed to death—a
systematic slaughter funded entirely by the Government of Canada for the sake of a
fishing industry stressed by its own overwhelming successes (this is what overfishing
means, and its result is the depletion of herring stocks that have yet to rebound)—then
the question is more a problem for ecology, for the “management” of animal “resources”
and for environmental studies than it is a concern related to the question of genocide,
no matter how numerous are the variety of kinds that die—or shall we insist as many
 
Anders and Adorno 119

do, that they simply perish, and are in any case no more. We see no animal as suited
for any other purpose than to serve our needs and an animal that competes with us for
what we regard as ours (insects and other ‘pests’), we destroy with no further thought,
poison, traps, etc. fully meaning to eliminate the threat of any competition, the merest
presence at all. Fishers fish fish, seals fish fish, and so there should be no seals. And
philosophers, of course, make distinctions to keep their own minds (and consciences,
one supposes) clear. But historians and social scientists muddy things.
Or if they do not, as is alas often the case, they should.
For my own part, I cannot but think that if all members of a kind are killed, then
it is only human hubris that speaks of this extinction as though something other
than a holocaust, a genocide, were involved in that slaughter. Like whales and wolves,
pigeons and bison, Busch’s seal wars thereby constitute a kind of genocide. Genocide is
a matter of totalities, and these totalities are estimated by numbers and achieved by a
determined and consummate execution: it is an irrationality quite rationally calculated
to consummation, as Anders reminds us and as Adorno says.
For his part, Busch estimates—though no count can be correct since too many
factors make every estimate at once too low and too high (all the while noting, as
everyone does, that some species, whole kinds, including, as we can be sure, kinds
never known, were driven to extinction, and for them there is no measure)—and
counts up 5.2 million seals. But surely, we say, these do not count. Even if all of them
(all of their kind) died, we do not count them. Indeed, in the recent and unprecedented
2019 bushfires in Australia, ecologists doubled the millions who perished from
500 million to more than a billion in the space of a week by an estimate noted as
conservative.
In a recent study following Busch, Greg Grandin draws out the political context
and consequences of this devastation, which Grandin reads for its parallels with the
contemporary American political context. Quoting Busch, Grandin highlights his own
point:

“On island after island, coast after coast . . . the seals had been destroyed to the
last available pup, on the supposition that if sealer Tom did not kill every seal in
sight, sealer Dick or sealer Harry would not be so squeamish.” By 1804, on the very
island where Amasa [Delano] estimated that there had been millions of seals, there
were more sailors than prey. Two years later, there were no seals at all.20

To turn from history and its seals to the literary mirror of that era, Melville’s Benito
Cereno, is to turn to the circumstances of a related “genocide,” namely that of the
transport, abuse, and devastation of whole peoples that was the slave trade.21 American
Indians ran away from enslavement when they could and because they could (which
did not mean that they survived as a people), while African slaves were imported to
meet the needs of a growing nation. If we do not care to count the seals (and it is hard
to find those who do—or can), then perhaps we might, perhaps we should, count the
slave trade. At least. But to say this is hardly to settle things since, as we began by
noting, Levene, like other scholars, is aware that some hold the Atlantic slave trade to
be an act of genocide—but he rejects such claims.
120 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

If some (not all) are disinclined to name the Atlantic slave trade genocide and if
at the other extreme it seems certain, despite koala deaths along with other wildlife
perishing, that the bushfires in Australia will not be so accounted, it is difficult to claim
as genocide the obliteration of other kinds of human beings in different historical
contexts, different loci, never mind—as my reference to the loss of Australian wildlife
indicates that we do not mind, no more than we minded in the United States and
Canada—species different from our own.
For Anders, the slaver’s logic, like the sealer’s and, as he extends it, quite contra
Melville, the whaler’s logic, has an impeccable philosophical pedigree or justification,
even if it is one Anders refuses, writing with respect to Kant’s moral prohibition against
using anyone, meaning any person, as “a means only,”22 that is,

It is true that we could never subscribe to Kant’s claim that, as he says elsewhere,
“[with irrational animals] one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion”[“Lectures
on Anthropology”, 7:11] (a claim that could be invoked by the exterminators of
whales and seals). (AM II, 432)23

A contribution to studies of territory and geography: the slaver’s trade and thus the
whole enterprise of slavery, as well as all those nations that grew fat—that would be
an entire nation, a continent, the West as such we might say, beginning, as Robert
Bernasconi has argued with Locke’s own justifications,24 nor is Locke’s the only name—
on the obliteration of humanity and the rights of so many, beginning with Egypt and
Assyria (if we do not count other continents and peoples or indeed those in the same
locus of Western antiquity), like those of ancient Greece and Rome, and like every
feudal society up to and including the tremendous powers of our own world—the
sealer’s trade only came to an end once sealing had utterly demolished (and that
means, again, to the very last seal) the possibility of its own practice. Fishing boats
and whaling boats faced similar problems of redundancy and were redeployed for
other purposes. Thus, it was neither enlightenment qualms nor any new fashion, new
tastes, or new sensibilities that brought an end to whaling certain whales as whaling
continues to date. In fact, at the time, and much rather, the target, the so-named right
whales, were hunted to their death. We are, more broadly, as there remain some other
whales, not yet done with that consummate destruction, nor are we finished with deep-
ocean fishing in general as we continue to dredge and drag and sonic blast the seas, at
this point at such a volume and so extensively that whales and dolphins are dying at
unheard of and certainly untold numbers.
For Anders, we are insulated by our valuation of the practical and the useful. To this
extent we are well advanced; think of our new vaccines for a hint of our progress with
DNA and mRNA. To this deployment of viral genetic modification must be matched,
the technique in question depends on it, the related project of creating human–animal
chimeras for the sake of “harvesting” their organs; the more human, the more useful
it is. The scenario is not merely akin to one taken from a horror show, and Virilio
writes about just this connection quite specifically in connection with concentration
camps in his Art & Fear, reminding us, and we can remember that Walter Benjamin
makes a similar reference, if only to the Italian Futurists, in his essay on art in the age
 
Anders and Adorno 121

of “technological reproducibility,”25 paralleling Anders’ emphasis on the “cleanliness”

of the neutron bomb:

The slogan of the First Futurist Manifesto of 1909 “War is the World’s only
Hygiene”—led directly, though thirty years later this time to the shower-block of
Auschwitz-Birkenau.26

For Virilio, as we will need to return to this point later in the text, experimentation on
animal chimeras is part of the Nazi project and has continued since then to be part of
modernity.27
Anders, using the complement homo creator, homo materia, follows the logic
he identifies—instructively using without remark Heidegger’s own language of
the “manufacture of corpses” along with his distinction from “killing” as such—as
following from the modern, industrial repurposing of humanity:

The transformation of the human being into raw material (if we overlook the age
of cannibals), began in Auschwitz. That from the corpses of the inmates of the
concentration camps (which themselves were already products, because human
beings were not killed, but corpses manufactured [Leichname hergestellt]),
certainly hair and gold teeth were definitely removed and extracted, probably also
the fat rendered to be used as a raw material. (AM II, 22)

Anders, if anything, offends our conventions and expectations with his next sentence
as he informs us that “everyone knows” what everyone in the United States, even those
engaged in Holocaust studies do not “know,” as quoted already at the start of this book,
reminding us of

the American soldiers who returned from the Pacific with the gold teeth of Japanese
soldiers: with my own eyes I have seen bags full of teeth, the GIs showed them to
me, as unbelievable as this sounds, blamelessly. Blamelessly, because to them it
was obvious to view the world as raw material and they also took it for granted
that their Japanese counterparts (who, of course, had previously been demoted
to “monkeys” via a systematic campaign of defamation) should be regarded to be
part of that same world. (AM II, 22)

Sealers and slaves, dolphins and whales, Auschwitz and human–animal chimeras—
who makes distinctions?—and yet race studies does not focus on the colours
of humanity, black or brown, red or yellow or pink (or beige or pasty mauve), but
“white.” And as the now-effectively exterminated American Indian once observed—
attending with good cause to white practices, and thus exceeding the insights of any
ethnographer then as now (as Latour says, “The investigatee always knows a great
deal more than the investigator”—an observation that has not endeared him to his
fellow anthropologists)28: the whites, we whites, and note that this includes any and all
nations with industrial fishing vessels of any size, only leave off killing when and only
when they have, in the words of the poet who, qua mathematician, was also good at
counting, “eaten every one.”29
122 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

While we—noting the conjunction in the title of Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Walrus
and the Carpenter”—pretend that there is convergence and competition. Like the seal
(prey, like Carroll’s oysters, to our harvest), the walrus is supposed (by us) to vie with
us for prey we regard as “ours” by some deranged right. We thereby pretend that animal
predators are our competitors. And we will not stop (and, again, in this, whatever our
ethnicity, we are all white) until every last one is gone.
 7

From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin

to Virilio’s Chimeras

One conjunction that remains problematic is that between the aesthetic and the
political as a category. This is a theme for Anders as for Benjamin and Adorno and
not less a theme that to a certain extent may be read in and through Heidegger’s own
(albeit oblique) reflections on the “origin” of the artwork qua “overcoming” of the
aesthetic, and thus it is connected quite as Gilles Deleuze argues to Kant on the one
hand and Nietzsche on the other. In addition to Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’
Antigone, there is also the question of the body as this is differently understood in
different traditions, some of which entail others (physiology, physiognomy, social
psychology, and the economics of affect and eros, the once vital and now oddly faded
tradition of Lebensphilosophie as this mattered for Anders especially with reference
to Scheler and others). Here, too, though this cannot here be completely explored
given that it proceeds in very different directions (although one of the reasons for the
complex array of footnotes is to offer some small indication of this), connections may
be forged, from another perspective, with Jean Baudrillard, who also writes on sex (in
a masculinist rather than feminist voice), and, as we have already seen, Paul Virilio,
as well as, and we have touched on this earlier, the question of love via Heidegger (in
connection with Arendt) and Agamben (who writes on both Heidegger and Arendt).

Economy, Power and Possibility, Impotence and Sexuation

I have underlined the importance of noting the influence of Heidegger’s thinking
on Anders’ thought, and I would argue that Heidegger’s claim that much of Anders’
thinking can be read as derivative is not groundless. Perhaps for the same reason,
Anders, who was early on a very enthusiastic follower of Heidegger, could not but
encounter a lack of reciprocity on Heidegger’s part. All of this plays into Anders’
sustained and uncompromising critique of Heidegger’s thinking overall. In this
chapter, it is worth noting that in addition to his strikingly severe criticisms regarding
sex and love, Anders foregrounded the limits of Heidegger’s philosophic reflections on
human cares and woes, noting Heidegger’s inattention to the worldly, the economic
order quite where, occasioning a certain conceptual dissonance, Heidegger invoked
explicitly economic language [Sorge] in Being and Time. This complex thematic is
124 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

also part of the problem of Anders’ never-published novelistic work, that the text
includes an allusion to Anders’ own “Molussians,” which he describes with respect to
his analysis of “consumption” (AM II, 432). Quite where Adorno, for his part, speaks
of the “culinary” with respect to mediatic culture, Anders foregrounds the economic
dimensionality of ontology:

As a matter of fact, Heidegger’s trick consists in re-coining every possibilitas into

potestas, every Möglichkeit into Macht. . . . It is very characteristic, indeed, that the
words “Eigentum” (property) and “Eigentlichsein” (being proper, authentic being)
stem from the same root. The “Dasein” that, according to Heidegger, first finds
itself as stranded good (“cast into the world”) becomes authentic by making itself
its own proprietor. (PC 352)

One can use the language of the “sexuate” (here I cautiously borrow Luce Irigaray’s
word, although Irigaray herself does not invoke Anders) as Anders’ foregrounds the
bodily lived dimension contra Heidegger and to the extend the quote we have already
cited: “All want is wanting; thus sex, too” (PC,” 346). Accordingly, so Anders argues,
Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world manages to give us an utterly disembodied Dasein,
bereft of any account of body, let alone of the body as lived by beings who actually
have bodies, once again as beings subject to both “concupiscientia” and “toothaches.”
Anders refers to sexuality to refer to everything enfleshed, “One is tempted to vary
the famous French word ‘ni homme ni femme, c’est un capucin’ into: ‘ni homme, ni
capucin, c’est un Dasein.’”1 Anders repeats the point in a note to his introduction to
the second volume of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, where Anders characterizes
“Being and Time as lacking reference to the economy as to hunger and sexuality”
(AM II, 432).
There is here a certain insinuation of sexuate ablation, and it is patently relevant
that Anders had good reasons for his sustained conflicts with Heidegger, given the
triangle between himself and his former teacher with Arendt. Intriguingly, Anders’
own metaphor reads Dasein as quasi-Augustinian “angel”—that is, non-sexuate, which
is exactly, and by definition, sexless:

Nowhere is it mentioned that Dasein has (or is) a body; nowhere, that it has, as
it was called in more than two thousand years of philosophy, a twofold nature,
rather than being as the human being had been for more than two thousand years
of thinking. (PC, 348–9)

In addition to abolishing, quite in addition to the ontological difference, the difference

between body and spirit, Anders counts off the roster of Heideggerian omission: of
“caritas, or friendliness, or duties, or the state” (PC, 349).
Anders began his reading of Heidegger varying Husserlian intentionality using the
example of hunger and its object, thus he wrote on the erotic and its complexities, not
unlike Georges Bataille. But writing on love, closer now to Arendt but also intriguingly
to both Nietzsche and Derrida (and Agamben), Anders reminds us that the word of
God, to which Israel and the entire Judeao-Christian world have been listening for
 
From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 125

millennia is not speech but a telephone voice. And as he muses, desire itself is difficult
to maintain—a point Jacques Lacan notoriously underlined in his seminars in Paris as
an imperative. For Anders this difficulty yielded the strangely necessary prayer: “Give
us this day our daily hunger” (AM II, 15). Today’s economy is a consumer’s economy of
end products “which are no longer means of production, but means of consumption,
that is: means as such that are consumed by being used up, like breadstuffs or grenades”
(AM II, 15). Beyond the routine contradictions of capital as might be noted by
Marxists of the day (then and now), what was evident especially in the United States as
in post-war Western Europe, also an insight animating Marcuse’s notion of “repressive
desublimation,” whereby a concerted “effort to maintain production via consumption,
at least in capitalism is today’s ‘concern’ [‘Sorge’],” is attributed to Heidegger “as an
existential melancholy” (AM II, 432).

From Consumption to Biotech

The anti-Heideggerian note is needed to sharpen the political point and the turn to
the social focus of the Frankfurt School regarding industrial technology as a machine
dedicated to the reproduction of itself by all means possible, consummate in every way,
and that is to say, consumed at every level, inevitably involves us as “eaters,” in Anders’
terms, that is, as consumers/fabricators of ourselves (and today—and this does make it
sound vastly better—we say curators as if a museum display or a schedule of exhibition
were somehow involved), a self-curation which, given the current conditions of social
media, also extends to our consumption/fabrication/curation of one another, in virtual
and thus effectively literal terms.
Note that the complex constellation is also one that Adorno notes at the start of his
own posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, where Adorno begins by reminding the
reader, just as he would remind his students in his lectures on expressly philosophical
aesthetics, of the relevance of Kant’s legacy and the notion of “disinterested delight or
pleasure” that is the beautiful:

If according to its own concept art has become what it is, this is no less the case
with its classification as a source of pleasure; indeed, as components of ritual praxis
the magical and animistic predecessors of art were not autonomous; yet precisely
because they were sacred they were not objects of enjoyment. The spiritualization
of art incited the rancor of the excluded and spawned consumer art as a genre,
while conversely antipathy toward consumer art compelled artists to ever more
reckless spiritualization. No naked Greek sculpture was a pin-up.2

Anders writes post Adorno as we read him, and the implications for media aesthetics
together with political reflection and ethics overall are significant. Anders sets his
analysis in the context of a society oriented to mass destruction on every level,
ecological but also explicitly military-industrial, unflinchingly describing the logic
of what journalists can write about without blinking an eye: “mutual destruction”
as political détente. For Anders, this is not an accident of a particular party in
126 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

power nor is it limited to a given nation or a specific regime: it is built into the
logic of technology. Like Heidegger, Anders is unimpressed by the West’s sense of
a keen difference between the United States, say, and Russia or China, say, as all
regimes today believe in the same salvific powers of technology. This is the logic he
thematizes from the start of the second volume of The Antiquatedness of Humanity
in 1980, echoing concerns from the first volume and his writings in the 1960s and
1970s as well. What’s doable is what should be done [Das Gekonnte is das Gesollte]
(AM II, 17) The can-do- (to catch the Americanism of Anders’ era) is what gotta be,
oughtta be.
We tend to omit the logic of this claim in our own thinking on technology, even as
we debate the virtues of displacing ourselves to another planet (should the technology
to do so become available) or clone ourselves (ditto) or upgrade our brains (ditto)
all as if there were a consideration of ethics somehow to be brought to bear on the
question; thus, for example, with reference to cell phone technology, is the coming
shift (already in place) to 5G safe? As it seems, it has been deployed, as all cell phone–
related technologies have been, without any such review, no more than the effects of
widespread herbicide in addition to other industrial poisons and pollution on the world
at large, or the less and less relevant question of cloning and the rather more relevant
question of xenotransplantation (human-pig to human) for the sake of medical-grade
organ technology?3
That “the possible is generally accepted as the compulsory and what can be done as
what ought to be done” (AM II, 17) has its most obvious extension in biotechnology.
But biotech concerns are messy while at the same time confirming the language of
“obsolescence,” as many scholars prefer this term to render Anders’ analysis of our
sense of ourselves as outdated, antiquated, as Anders uses this to underscore our desire
to be “corrected,” transhumanized. Here it is essential to remember that Anders uses
the term “obsolete” to characterize the vaporization, as he explicitly names them,
of “religious and philosophical ethics” “exploded with Hiroshima and gassed with
Auschwitz.”4 To this same extent, a focus on nuclear armaments may offer a clearer
understanding of the dynamic of technology as perpetual motion machine. Again:

in order to satisfy the needs of technology, that is, to fabricate what can be
manufactured [das Machbare], weapons are produced that make it possible to
annihilate humanity many times over—that is, a situation after which there will
not only be no demand, but in which all demand can no longer exist, or, more
accurately, a situation excluding any survival of industry (and not only that).
And yet not only must everything be produced that can be feasibly be made, but
everything that has been fabricated ought in fact be used for the purpose for which it
was designed; not only is it the case that no weapon has been invented that has not
also been effectively produced but every weapon that has been produced has also
been effectively utilized. (AM II, 17)

Commentators prefer to demur, thus securing a cautious stance for themselves, if only
to avoid being branded “negative.” Surely the threat of atomic war remains an empty
one? However, today it can seem, to the contrary, that Anders retains his relevance
 
From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 127

as the current political dynamic plays itself out between the United States and same
players as ever before, North Korea and including discussions with Russia and China.
Tests and nuclear proliferation from nation to nation, arms races, are exactly
nothing if they are not all about deployment and manufacture. There are clear parallels
with today’s mRNA and viral vector vaccines, but for Anders,

demand for such products is often produced post productionem; and this is done
owing to the desire for profits on the part of the producers, who deceptively present
their own interests as a national necessity. Thus, the lobby for heavy industry in the
United States created—and not just during the Cold War (which was also one of
its products)—a need for security and protection in the “free world” by way of the
production of false statistics regarding Soviet arms production and thus the most
savage production of the most monstrous weapons and their acquisition by the
Armed Forces was justified and set in motion.5

The ongoing war on terror, which remains under various transformations, with or
without being named as such, increasingly without media notice of such, as of 2019
(although all such worries seemed to vanish with Covid-19), nota bene: pre- and post-
9/11 as Jean Baudrillard (among not too many others) has analysed this,6 offers us
yet another version of just this eternally recycled demand for the eternal production
of the products of mass destruction. The logic is the one Anders takes to its furthest
expression in his own writing on Auschwitz, Hiroshima, but also the ongoing or the
third world war, as he called it, which Anders regarded as underway throughout the
1950s, 1960s, 1970s with the Cold War and Korea/Vietnam, and so on—and, today,
with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria/Gaza, we can say, without Žižekian irony, “and so on,
and so on.”
Where positive readings of technology highlight human intervention and power,
Anders emphasizes technological determinism in an even graver fashion than
Heidegger’s “questioning” or Ellul’s systematicity, where Anders offers his own version
of his reflection on the likely possibilities or “futures” of Gelassenheit. Again:

Not only is it the case that whatever can be done ought be done, but what should be
done is also inevitable. And this is not just a rule, but a postulate, that says: Leave
nothing unused that can be used! (AM II, 17)

For his own part, Heidegger emphasized that in addition to our disposition to the earth
which we regard “as a gigantic gasoline station,” which may be a generic metaphor
for our treatment of the earth as repository of “natural resources,” to be exploited
or conserved (meaning, to be saved for later use) at our politico-economic pleasure
(AM II, 32), the greatest danger may be our tendency to see ourselves and even more
generally to see other beings (or bits of them), as ‘resource,’ better said: spare parts.
Today and for a long time, this has included, as Paul Virilio likewise underscores
in addition to Anders, what Heidegger pointed to as the human being as biological
resource, not in terms of some ontological idea but factically, ontically, fetal cells
and serum (no Jesuit ever made a finer distinction), and such like extractions essential
128 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

to vaccines and assisted fertility and so on: none of these interventions is without the
need for a great deal in the way of animal and human, cloned and otherwise harvested
“resources.” This economic and ethico-political perspective takes us back to the trans-
human-swine chimeras bred for human medical exploitation or the human fetal tissue
or stem cells to be similarly deployed: to quote Anders, who varies this point, it is a
seeming techno-imperative, or commandment: “You must not refrain from utilizing
that which can be utilized!” (AM II, 32).
To this day, a version of this imperative rules the so-called “war on terror” and its
logic (an infinite undertaking, waged as it is against an invisible and thus omnipresent
enemy—exceeding even George Orwell’s imagination), key to the ecological
anxieties concerning climate change, anxieties which for the most part steer clear of
any suggestion that governmental geoengineering might not be well in place, with
devastation done to habitat and wildlife and human populations long established, is
the notion that everything remains a threat: meaning avoidable, if (and only if) one
undertakes to put this or that counter-mechanism in place, purchases or sets funds
aside for this or that presumptively salvific strategy. The technology, so it is assumed/
claimed, is there (or can/could/might be developed) to save us, and the disaster thus
is one that can be avoided. It is the illogic of this thinking that Anders challenges. His
negativity consists in daring to think the thought of a time after or following an end
time, and his phenomenological perspicuity consists in laying out the consequences of
apocalyptic time backwards and forwards. He writes:

The door in front of us bears the inscription “Nothing will have been” and from
within: “Time was an episode.” Not however as our ancestors had hoped, between
two eternities; but one between two nothingnesses; between the nothingness of
that which, remembered by no one, will have been as though it had never been,
and the nothingness of that which will never be.7

The allusion to an eternity between “two nothingnesses” is an Augustinian echo of

Nietzsche’s coiled reflection on lifetime in his Dionysus Dithyrambs, the penultimate
closing verse of the poem, “Between Birds of Prey” in his last published work:

Jetzt —
zwischen zwei Nichtse
eingekrümmt,
ein Fragezeichen,
ein müdes Rätsel—. [Now—/between two nothingnesses,/crumpled,/a
questionmark, a tired puzzle—.]8

Already cited above, Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes gives us an interval, an emptiness

between nothingnesses [ein Hiatus zwischen zwei Nichtsen].9 Anders’ reflections on
the “third” industrial revolution highlights some of the more patent contradictions of
the same: the need to produce weapons of mass destruction and the need to constitute
opportunities to deploy said weapons (including the absurdity of “needing” to replace
said items on a regular schedule with yet better weapons of yet more comprehensive
 
From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 129

mass destruction [AM II, 20]), pointing then to an even greater challenge to the social
task of creating the consumer in the image and likeness of the machine.
At issue, as Anders had noted in his first volume, is the transformation of the
human being, now switching out the position of maker and made and so defining the
human as Homo faber: “the essence that fabricates its fabrications” (AM II, 25). Anders
reprises this insight in his second volume as the “immense fact that the human being
has been transformed into a ‘homo creator’; and in the fact, no less unheard of, that he
has transformed himself into raw material, that is, into homo materia . . .”(AM II, 21)
In spite of his criticisms of Heidegger, Anders follows Heidegger’s lead as we ourselves
become raw material for our own consumption. This is biotech, novel vaccines and
nanotech, GMO and cloning, stem cells and the ultimate hybridization of humanity on
the level of and beyond the machine.

Manufacture and Art: Homo Materia

In the previous chapter and in passing earlier, I noted parallels between Anders and
the late French sociologist and philosopher, Paul Virilio, with respect to the theme of
human fabrication,10 upgrading the antiquated human being, emphasizing; this is the
point of speaking of “antiquated” by contrast with the Francophone tendency to speak
as the French translation of Anders’ Antiquiertheit speaks of “obsolescence.” Thus, the
technology needed to engender humanity as “transhuman” is not a recent invention
or possibility or new dream consequent to the Human Genome project but begins as
Virilio argues (and documents) even prior to Auschwitz. In the section, A Pitiless Art,
Virilio means to emphasize the silencing of compassion, and a parallel seems patent
just where Virilio askes:

Hasn’t the universality of the extermination of bodies as well as of the environment,

from AUSCHWITZ to CHERNOBYL, succeeded in dehumanizing us from
without by shattering our ethic and aesthetic bearings, our very perception of our
surroundings?11

The aesthetic reference takes us back to the beginning of the last century, as Virilio
underscores Marinetti, who writes as Benjamin cites him: “War is beautiful because it
establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks.”12
Not unlike Anders, insisting here on points we would rather not see, points even
theorists are inclined to discount,13 Virilio reminds us that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a
leading research laboratory for both pain and genetics.14 Like Anders’ largely ignored
reflections on the nuclear violence inherent in the “peaceful” uses of atomic power in
Gewalt, Ja oder Nein?, Virilio underlines the calculated construction of

the balance of terror along with the opening of the laboratories of a science that
was gearing up to programme the end of the world notably with the invention, in
1951, of thermonuclear weapons.15
130 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

The point needs repetition inasmuch as we can overlook “Nazi science,” which is thus
less about what would have been called French science or, as Pierre Duhem emphasized
per contra: “German science,”16 or what the Nazis later named Jewish science, but a still
ongoing enterprise dedicated to developing the raw materials to be had in the human
being, qua homo materia, to use Anders’ language. Virilio stresses the use of chimeras,
mosaics, hybrids, and what is done to create systematically monstrous combinations of
life that only our insensitivity to animals allows us to ignore.
Like the historian, William Patterson, who reminds us in his Eternal Treblinka,
of the direct commonality—mechanism and industrial technique—between the
Chicago Stockyards and the death chambers—17 Virilio’s analysis of the aesthetic
ideal of silencing in art seems to echo our disinterest into the conditions of scientific
research, reminding us that as we ignore what we do to the animals manufactured as
so many corpses for consumption, our very dispassion—silence—as spectators of art
confirms Kant’s definition of the judgement of the beautiful as disinterested interest
better than Kant’s own argument. As aesthetic spectators, we watch as artists harm
themselves. Without thinking, without a word of protest, we bracket the thousands
upon thousands of animals used for artistic work (Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, and
unnamed others in uncountable ways), not including the inks and paints and brushes
themselves, the gessoed canvases, the glues and lacquers, and so on. In addition to a
performance video-artist’s self-castration (and accidental death on camera) and other
instances of self-harm, Virilio recounts a museum exhibit that consisted, that was the
whole of it, in the artist’s chaining of a stray dog to a museum wall until it perished of
hunger, without anyone, curator, visitors, janitors, lifting a finger to protest or to help
the dog: disinterested indeed. It’s art, is it not?
There are all kinds of reasons we would prefer not to talk of such things when
it comes to writing philosophically on technology. When it comes to science, the
prohibition is, if anything, even more pronounced. It’s science, after all. Scientific
research to be scientific research must “use” animals and, to follow Anders’ argument
as outlined in the last chapter, and by the same token, humans as well. Thus, the human
being after two world wars had already long become for itself—this is the ultimate
significance of our “antiquatedness”—a repository of so many replacement parts, that
is, potentially as source material, potentially in need/hope of the same. Anders would
thus update his earlier mid-1950s reference to our Promethean “shame” at lacking
such replacement bits, by the time he begins the second volume of his Antiquatedness
of Humanity, highlighting our ambition to exceed anything merely human—all too
human—with reference to the logic of a productive economy and thereby a productivity
dedicated to its own perpetuation. Thus, we consume and create the need we then
fulfil and consume, to the production of ourselves, which already now entails the mass
production, already in progress, of spare body parts. The point is that it is nothing new.
Already underway for some time, as Virilio writing in 2000 points out, silenced as
this has been, the spare part industry is not some future possibility of science to come
but extant biotech. And recent years have seen advances in the mass production of an
animal–human “chimbrid,” raised for industrial slaughter, pigs, once again, 80 percent
or more human, to provide medical organs (hence the need for/value of such a high
human to pig component).18
 
From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 131

I’ve said this before, relegated there to the context of a footnote, that the one-
time Sirius executive and now biotech industry leader, Martine Rothblatt can, on
the one hand, smoothly inform both shareholders and journalists alike of a minor
obstacle she calls the “yuck factor” in order to reassure us that once consumers see the
potential ideal use (real results in real practice or real life, as always, will vary), users/
consumers will not be bothered by such visceral details.19 Here we recognize Anders’
observation, “what can be done has already been done,” now transformed in keeping
with Anders’ matching industrial imperative, “what is doable ought be done.” If Anders
kept the point on the level of theory and economic and practical feasibility and moral
righteousness, what can and should and ought to be done, that might have been quite
enough. But Anders provokes, there’s that negativity again: reminding those of us in
the United States, to cite this once again, of “American soldiers who returned from the
Pacific with Japanese gold teeth [japanischen Goldzähnen].” Here, we’re not speaking
of artefacts on display in a Holocaust Museum; these are not Nazi acquisitions but
war booty, “harvested”—this is the force of Anders’ point here—by American GIs who
collected them from the jaws of Japanese soldiers. The “yuck factor,” so to speak, could
not be more in view, and we ourselves are implicated as Anders reminds us that the
logic of war and despoiling is not limited to others but something we have done/are
doing/will do.
Virilio updates this parallel, writing about art as he segues in the process of
reflecting on the artist’s self-exploitation in the service of his art, to the war’s legacy
via Nazi science for human xenotransplants. Human stem cells that promise, among
other things, the next biotech revolution, exemplify recycling products of abortion and
other organ harvesting—but generally speaking, where do cells come from in cytology
research, and how are they obtained, preserved, secured; the answer involves fetal tissue
serum or fetal broth, which involve the slaughter of animals, in increasingly hideous
ways, as we ought to reflect as we consider the prospect of “meatless” meat, extracted
from the calf still in the body of the pregnant mother20—can serve to instantiate yet
another industrial, biotech revolution were this not, according to Anders, only the
third such industrial revolution, well underway, already in research production for
decades, with pig-human chimeras only another sort of manufacture of corpses of an
“animal” kind.21
Anders goes on to remind us, not that we speak of this to this day in the United
States, exactly not in the United States, where looting on another level has accompanied
every intervention in the name of the war on terror since the escalation of the standard
Gulf War, which, as Baudrillard told us, again: not that we listened, “did not take place,”
now transformed into the new stakes of the new Gulf Wars, from Iraq to Syria and
now to Gaza and so on. In his reflections on his GIs’ display of their looted gold teeth,
Anders emphasized their lack of guile, naiveté, they showed their souvenirs to Anders,
who promptly proceeded to write about it.
Thus, it is worth noting, given the dates of Anders’ writing, that supposedly “new”
transhuman experiments to create improved human beings, were already underway
in his day and not merely on the drawing board, already less about the creation of the
superhuman transhuman than the creation of medical products for sale and routine
surgical deployment: part of today’s industry of biotechnology, vaccines and all.
132 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

As Anders writes in his 1980 book of this imperative: what can be done ought to be
done:

I am speaking of so-called “cloning,” of genetic manipulation; that is, to the possibility

of producing new, “unprecedented” and unforeseen genera or species, or even
duplicates of extant individuals. Whether human beings have already been cloned
is not known to me. But inasmuch as we know that today’s imperative recites “What
one can do, one ought to do”, or, “What is doable is compulsory”, what was until now
merely possible now looms as a breathless Omen over the present-day. (AM II, 24)

The point made here has to do with an inherent politics inbuilt into technology
and an inherent trajectory. To have a tool, to have a technology, means that certain
possibilities latent or inherent in the technology become realities. We imagine that
human cloning is a sheer idea, empty, and yet reports of cloning humans crest from
time to time on our news horizons, and already in Anders’ day it was not unheard of;
indeed, Heidegger points to nothing but this in his own Gelassenheit address on the
ten-year anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, the end of the Second World
War. Thus, Anders can observe, in the full sense of Kant’s actuality entailing possibility
and the very Heideggerian imperative that is what calls for thinking through that same
possibility as possibility, in this case: “the possibility of producing new, ‘unprecedented’
and unforeseen genera or species, or even duplicates of extant individuals” (AM II, 24).
Anders’ parallel here reflects some of the experiments undertaken by Nazi medical
science for the sake of fully developing or exploiting the so-called Lebensraum, new
researches perforce explorations of terra incognita and yet, as he emphasizes, not for
the sake of traditional colonization but towards the end of the new schema of mass
destruction and as a new means of mass annihilation. Thus, Anders highlights the
contrast:

Whereas nuclear war means the annihilation of living creatures, including humanity,
cloning signifies the annihilation of species qua species, and conditionally, the
annihilation of the species of the human by way of the production of new types.
(AM II, 24)

And to the same extent, all previous concerns, be it the Sartrean anti-essentialist spirit
of humanist existentialism, or contra the Schelerianism of Anders’ own day, would
henceforth be transformed as the radically phenomeno-hermeneutic formula, “The
human essence consists in not having an essence,” vaporized “on the day that the
human is used as a raw material ad libitum” (AM II, 25). These past debates now appear
as harmlessly naïve phantasms, that is, “that the theory of evolution be opposed to the
biblical idea of man in the image and likeness of God!” whereas Anders compares the
proto-humanism of Darwinism to the

genetic manipulation which might produce the inhuman and indeed by

manufacturing beings that would be “images and likenesses” or copies of types to
be desired on political, economic, or technical grounds! (AM II, 25)
 
From Anders’ Sexless Capuchin to Virilio’s Chimeras 133

Anders opposes the transhuman imperative because the aspiration to the superhuman—
nota bene, Goethe and Milton had already trod this same ground—is as opposed to the
human as it is to the degradation to the subhuman.
Allergic to the sin of thinking negatively regarding technology—thank you Don
Ihde—we remain aversive to critical thought, avoiding the idea that we might well
challenge the “yuckier” dimensions of biotechnology, quite as Virilio underlines the
parallel between the art of cloning (and Auschwitz) and animal–human hybridization
for medical purposes, whereby reference to health, as the Coronavirus crisis has
dramatized beyond all doubt, should any have remained, is a trump card for effectively
everything, from lockdown to easing our qualms regarding mass surveillance/übervei
llance22 as well as mass vaccination, compulsory to be sure, in the case of ‘health,’ and
much as the museum ambiance can induce ethical somnolence in the case of art.
Anders transgresses on all sides and has not been heard. It is as if philosophers,
especially philosophers of technology but also critical theorists and political
philosophers, have simply opted to look away.
This option is convenient. Nothing is easier than to ignore a scholar: just overlook
their work and it is as if they never drew breath. But as Anders points out, foreshadowing
an imaginable, if contrafactual, debate with theorists like Steve Fuller but also (and
likewise potentially) in accord with Nick Bostrom and others who reflect on the
desirability of this or that singularization of a new anthropic ideal, a new androidism,
a new “digital” humanism, remembering that all that is needed for this is a cell phone
with an internet connection:

And even then, if the products that might result from such attempts did not turn
out to be subhuman beings but “superhumans” [“übermenschliche”] (what the
technicians suppose to be “superhuman”, as Superman-like [superman-haft]), if
one thus for example, were to synthesize “creative beings” [“creative beings”] (the
putative ideal in the land of the conventionalised), music- or math geniuses—the
sacrilege against humanity would still not be any less than were they to attempt to
create the ideal of a semi-simian machine operator. (AM II, 25)

To this same extent, it makes no difference whether the post- or transhumanization

promised by a cloned replacement biotech body or a hybrid fusion of human and
machine is a Frankenstein-style disaster or the seamless promise assumed by most
discussions of the human-robotic mind-meld. There is an ambiguity inherent in the
notion of such “improvement,” better for whom, one might ask, as the recent Covid-19
health crisis can raise the question of the sense of better: do we mean better to track or
trace the human being,23 or functionally better from the viewpoint of the health of the
subject? What about gain of function research, what about side-effects?
Anders’ third revolution ought to be the last revolution inasmuch as it changes the
way we see the world, which was previously designated in terms of Heidegger’s ready
to hand [Vorhandenem]: “If one poses the question today [concerning the essence of
the world], the answer can only be ‘raw material [Rohstoff]’” (AM II, 32). As a result,
the world becomes not a world in-itself [an sich] but, increasingly so, simply a world
for-us. Thus, we focus on “development” as we also focus on climate change. Anders’
134 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

supposition, as we shall see, may itself be too optimistic, and we may be caught in the
gyre of supposed revolution after supposed revolution.
The trouble is the one Anders took over from Heidegger, as he might also have
borrowed it from the other members of the Frankfurt School, including the human,
now very literally as we see in the new focus on transhuman mice and swine, as just one
more “resource” among other resources:

Over the course of the history of the mechanistic natural sciences what has
transpired is that the human, too, is regarded as a machine (“homme machine”), as
the exception that would have contradicted the principle; and this is repeated today
on another level: given that the world is principally regarded as raw material, so,
too, must that piece of the world, “humanity,” in order not to injure this principle,
likewise be treated as raw material. (AM II, 26)
 Part Two

Anders, Media, Music

136
 8

Radio Ghosts

Ghosts

Ghosts are spectral affairs, if we believe in them, if we do not believe in them. And
there are instances of radio ghosts, “real” radio ghosts as we might say: qua phenomena
manifestly accompanying radio broadcasts as such “ghosts” are perceivable and
replicable as phenomena. Thus, Anders might have known of the Norwegian physicist
Carl Størmer’s account of shortwave radio echoes which the aptly named Størmer
analysed in connection with his first-time measurement of the atmospheric height of
the aurora borealis.1
Conversations and memories, past ghosts, are named as they return to us. Thus,
Nietzsche speaks of a leaf floating down to us writing on history and life in his Untimely
Meditations. With the mystical allusion to a full moon, to cite this one more time, Joan
Baez sings, “Here comes your ghost again,” in a song about Bob Dylan and memories
of casual male insensitivity in Diamonds and Rust. And to talk of the Psychology of
Everyday Life, Freud uses the same language Anders uses to speak of his radio ghosts,
citing Goethe’s Faust II: “Nun ist die Luft von solchem Spuk so voll, Daß niemand weiß,
wie er ihn meiden soll.”2 In Politics Without Vision, Tracy Strong cites Sigmund Freud
citing Goethe, using the English translation: “Now is the air so filled with spooks/That
no one knows how he might keep clear of them.”3
The tradition of radio “echoes,” still unexplained to this day, evokes theremin-
like spookiness, but the language of “radio ghost” points to an echo protracted over
space and in time, the same time, as it were, key for an acoustic phenomenology:
both Husserlian retention and protention. Indeed, the sensibility conveys a material
notionality, related to the epoché, and this is likely why Kittler also speaks of the same
ghostly echoes, specifically auditory, specifically with reference to radio, in the first
chapter of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, reminding us that the ‘spooky’ phenomenon,
in all its ghostly resonance, can be summoned to this day at will: “If you replay a tape
that has been recorded off the radio, you will hear all kinds of ghost voices that do
not originate from any known radio station, but that, like all official newscasters,
indulge in radio self-advertisement.”4 In The Hallelujah Effect, I have sought to explore
related issues with respect to Adorno specifically regarding the radio ‘voice’; here I am
concerned with the essay on radio ghosts written by Anders as this also, as we shall see,
influenced Adorno.
138 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Radio Transforms: Politics and Music

Anders’ (Stern’s) brief essay “Spuk und Radio”5 appeared in February of 1930 in a
monthly journal dedicated to what was then the cutting-edge of new or modern music,
Anbruch. The essay appeared as the closing essay in an issue dedicated to the “so-called
opera crisis.” The same journal featured an essay by Theodor Adorno (on Wagner), and
there is an important parallel given Adorno’s focal attention in his own writing on music
as he would proceed to develop a political, sociocultural “phenomenology of radio.”
Note that both Adorno and Anders use the language of phenomenology.6 Elsewhere
I take up this very question of a musical and perforce hermeneutic phenomenology
in Adorno focusing on his Current of Music, which he composed while living in the
United States from 1938 to 1941 under the auspices of the Princeton Radio Project.7
Anders’ title is a short one, and if the two loci of the title include variant parsings
“im” and “und” (on and and), the challenge is to translate “Spuk” in Anders’ case
just where ‘spook’ seems perfectly apt in the case of Freud citing Goethe. Here
“ghost” seems more accurate to the extent that what Anders conveys in his expressly
phenomenological reflections on broadcast radio sound is less the effect of theremin-
like spookiness than an acoustic double, quite in the sense in which he will later indict
our all-too-human “second inferiority” (AM I, 50), or “industrial Platonism,” a word
for what Benjamin named the age of technological reproducibility, qua “immortality”
and “‘industrial reincarnation,’ the serial existence of products” (AM I, 51). At issue
in Anders’ 1930 essay is an echoing trace, more rather than less material, haunting,
a “ghost.” And Kittler in a related reflection writes about the phenomenon of “radio
spectres” in repurposed military equipment and “state security.”8
Here, in addition to the radio “voice,” it is worth recalling the radio “face” as
Adorno emphasizes what he calls “radio physiognomy,” as one may also highlight
the concentric dimensionalities of the phenomenology of a Merleau-Ponty or the
hermeneutics of a Ricoeur.9 Like Heidegger,10 Anders and Adorno follow Husserl
and thus, only negatively, Heidegger. On the level of “reception,” socially, politically
culturally, Adorno explores the cultural and theoretic dimension of what Anders
invokes under the double terms of listening-to (including a specific or dedicated
phenomenological analysis published in 1927, by no means an accidental year)
as well as what Anders formulated as the compound being-in-music in his own
philosophical reflections on music and its “situation” as well as via the human
sciences of psychology and anthropology in his more specifically outlined reflections
on “Musical Sociology.”11
It matters that the bulk of Adorno’s reflections on radio, Current of Music, would
be published in English from the start.12 Anders himself likewise published several
texts in English, and questions of translation make up no small part of the history of
post-war critical theory. To this extent, the difficulties Anders repeatedly encountered,
blocking his efforts to get his texts into print in both German and Anglophone
publishing contexts—and one may argue that this is related to his post-war efforts
through to the end of his life to secure support for/acknowledgement of his becalmed
Habilitationschrift quite specifically concerning the “Musical Situation”13—are hard to
overstate: dominating his correspondence with Arendt as he also sought, unsuccessfully,
 
Radio Ghosts 139

compensation from the German government retroactively, quite as others could (and
did) lay claim to official programmatic efforts at “Wiedergutmachen.”
Anders’ brief essay on radio describes a phenomenology of radio in the lifeworld
including elements of active and passive variation in addition to a Heideggerian
hermeneutic of “listening to” the radio qua musically attentive listener, articulated
and conceived with reference to a then-new technology (the first commercial radio
broadcast began with a single sender in Berlin in 1923). Using the psychological
framework of acoustic perception together with a musically reflective hermeneutic
phenomenology, Anders relates the change(s) in musical space–time experience,
that is, the lifeworld transformation of listening adumbrated by modern technology.
On its own terms, radio technology would revolutionize everything on nearly every
level: from communications and wartime tactics/techniques to propaganda and the
political. In addition, as Anders underscored this, it was also to transform the human
relationship—both phenomenologically and sociologically—to music.14
It is perhaps a sign of that same accomplished transformation of life and especially
of musical experience that we today may find it difficult to imagine the difference radio
broadcast would have to make for the experience of listening. Yet many who lived
through this—Anders, Adorno, Rudolf Arnheim, as well as Bertolt Brecht, and not
excluding Heidegger himself— seem to have written about radio.15 In addition to what
would soon be used to transmit sociopolitical, that is, Nazi, and other propaganda,
the very fact of radio transmission permitted the same musical performance to be
broadcast to a range of tuned radio receivers in a given community, at a given time.
Thus the ghosting, echoic effect.
Anders analysed the “spooky” play of experiencing the same music playing on the
same station as one might move from place to place in the world. This is the acoustic
ghost effect Anders describes moving in his own apartment, listening to the radio from
room to room, and in its phenomenological, retentional/protentional, extension as he,
after leaving his apartment, still hearing the fainter sound of his own radio playing in
the distance, encountering, as he passed his neighbours, the stronger sound of other
radios playing the very same music in other apartments.
To compound this phenomenological analysis of what might be assessed as an
otherwise insignificant artefact of acoustic experience, it is important to underline
that loudspeakers were specifically engineered and developed for mass placement at
party rallies in the political sphere.16 Writing his infamous Black Notebooks a few years
later, Heidegger will decry Nazi party gatherings for what he describes as a “gigantic
‘prostitution’ into noise,”17 gatherings he had earlier characterized in terms of their
“organized screaming,”18 a phrase echoing, as it does, some of Theodor Lessing’s
language on the social role and efficacy of noise,19 which might also be applied to
today’s riled-up crowds, the far-right raging to boiling, the collectivity of the “they.”
That loudspeakers are the dedicated means to collimate this screaming is the point
Albert Speer argues, characterizing Hitler’s dictatorship as the

first dictatorship in the present period of technical development, a dictatorship

which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own
country. Through technical means like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty
140 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to

subject them to the will of one man.20

Loudspeakers, large and multiply positioned or located in the case of party

gatherings, more minimal in the case of the single radio in Anders’ living room,
entail an acoustically transformed world. As Anders observes (and Adorno and, later,
Kittler will only continue this), they also change, precisely beneath our notice of the
fact, the way one hears. We listen not merely with our ears or even with our minds,
but also—and this is something Heidegger highlights in Being and Time—with our
bodies, to and with the world around us and as we live in and find ourselves bodily
in this world.
In the political sphere, as this also becomes an intimate correspondent of and to
the private sphere in the twentieth century, loudspeakers allow us, or, better perhaps,
compel us, to hear more resonantly than heretofore, with sonic sub- and super-
liminality. As Anders emphasizes in his essay, as Adorno will later write about this:
space–time, world–space, and world–time are altered by sound. The way we hear
loudspeakers, the replication of and placement of loudspeakers and, ceteris paribus,
earphones, shifts everything.
The space and the time of the everyday world, Husserl’s lifeworld, is charged by
sound as sound specifically mediates (and is mediated by) both space and time, and
both space and time are transformed by technology. To this same extent, the crowds
gathered in Nuremburg would not have (because they could not have) listened to
these speeches in the same way, in the space, at the same distance, and in the same
lived temporal relation as one would have heard the speeches of Pericles in Athens or
Lincoln in Gettysburg. Thus, in antiquity, the reference to Pericles being more than
rhetorical, and it is also for this reason that I continually note my earlier study of media
and influence, The Hallelujah Effect, the Greeks themselves were aware of and designed
magnifying sonic effects as these could be induced via stone itself and the resonance
of certain enclosed spaces—think tholos tombs—and, hence, the design of the theatres
themselves, open spaces, and also focused via theatre masks.21 Radio broadcast
speeches make the point still more clearly, if the specific sound analysis is yet more
complicated quite as Anders writes and as Adorno writes in the same modality, using
in his case his own terminology not of a situationally attuned listener but highlighting
“radio physiognomy” instead.22
Seemingly anticipating aspects of today’s debates on “Post-Truth,” although perhaps
missing the force of Trump’s America and Boris Johnson’s Brexit, Anders writes:

no one will deny that to produce the kind of mass man that is desired today, the
formation of actual mass gatherings is no longer required. Le Bon’s observations
on the psychology of crowds have become obsolete, for each person’s individuality
can be erased and his rationality levelled down in his own home. The stage-
managing of masses [Massenregie] in the Hitler style has become superfluous: to
transform a man into a nobody (and one who is proud of being a nobody) it is no
longer necessary to drown him in the mass or to enlist him as an actual member of
a mass organization. (AM I, 104)
 
Radio Ghosts 141

As Anders goes on to say, all you need is radio. In the case of listening to music, what
had been a phenomenological analysis of a lived-world experience of (a live) broadcast
radio performance, untethered to its actual locus and thus able to haunt or follow
Anders as he walked down the hallway in his apartment building, as a trailing echo
(this was the “spooky” experience of the radio broadcast), became quite another thing,
ubiquitous (as both Anders and Adorno argue) as a means for the crystallization of
political opinion, before and after the Second World War, and not less for advertising.
Thus, with a reference to Viktor Frankl, Anders reflects in 1979:

Inasmuch as in the age of electronic media there is no longer any place where
one cannot be informed/dis-informed [informiert bzw. desinformiert], or, more
accurately, where one may escape the obligation to be informed/dis-informed,
therefore no provinces—there are also no places where one’s ears are not filled
with idle chatter concerning the “loss of meaning” by vulgar philosophers,
psychoanalysts, and radio preachers. (AM II, 30)

Phenomenology’s Ghosts: Anders’

Phenomenology of Radio Listening
If Anders goes on to offer a critical take on the ubiquity of information/disinformation
(what we call “fake news”) of electronic or digital media, Anders’ original 1930 essay
on radio is remarkable as a performative phenomenology of radio listening. In this
way, Anders is a witness to the acoustic transformation of the lifeworld effected by
radio broadcasting for experiencing sound as perceived in the lived world. This
acoustic lifeworld is the technological condition, existentially and politically, for
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
Patently, with the ubiquity of media all around us today, broadcast as it is, “streamed”
as it is, directly into our ears, we take all of this for granted. From phenomenology’s
ghosts to Anders’ “schizo-topia,” Anders undertakes his discussion of radio ghosts
via the phenomenological modalities he learned as a student of both Husserl 23 and
Heidegger. Thus, Anders offers not only a picture book phenomenology of music and
spatiality, positionally differentiated in space, but takes care to highlight the curious
circumstance whereby it is specifically technology that “accidentally brings ghosts along
with it.”24 Radio ghosts, like the more familiar projection artefact of television ghosts,
are part and parcel of broadcast phenomenology—a point Kittler also foregrounds.25
It is the phenomenological “variation” that adumbrates Anders’ reflection on
radio. Phenomenologically, Anders observes, music can be acoustically located in
space, from the perspective of the subject, the listener, who can thus characterize
what is heard directionally and in terms of distance, just as one might, sitting in a
street café, hear a busker play on the sidewalk or, for Anders’ example, the sound
of a street organ moving past. Anders thus illustrates the method of Husserlian
free variation, but Anders notes that listening to radio broadcast made possible an
acoustic experience that had never been heretofore experienced, and was thus a
definitive artefact of modern technology. Beyond listening to a street organ rumbling
142 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

by, or else, as in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, hearing a violin as one passes under an open
window, one can also vary one’s own disposition or position in the world by walking
into and out of range of broadcast radio music, now complete with—and thus the
difference between hearing a single source, Husserl’s postillion horn or Rilke’s violin
or street organ in the distance—the novel opportunity to encounter a musical twin
or triplet [Doppelgänger oder dreifachgänger],26 undergirded with the distant echoes
of the self-same sound.27
Where the visual object is specifically to be seen here and not there, or not seen
at all, as in the case of Plato's cave (as Østergaard emphasizes) or as in the case of the
picture behind the viewer, Heidegger refers to this in Being and Time, and thus is fixed
or localizable, music tends rather to permeate space, producing in accord with the
design of the composer (and the dimensions/materiality of the room in question) a
more or less “voluminous” space, “massive” or widely dispersed or more or less narrow,
but largely spatially encompassing, and thus neutral in the sense of being not as such
here or there but which “real presence” is annihilated by radio. Note, again, that this is
a doubling in ghostly fashion which may, shades of quantum theory already in the air,
may be here and there, adding overlay patters as Anders emphasizes these. Anders, as
already described, offers the reader an account of the then remarkable experience of
hearing the radio still playing behind him as he leaves his apartment. With the door
closed, the sound is muffled but able to be heard as Anders walks down the hallway.
Note, to be sure, this is the relevance of distance and directionality, that the sound
he hears—think of the experimental psychologist’s (his father, William Stern’s) tone
variator—as he steps out of his apartment is the (now) distant sound of the radio heard
in his living room. This Anders names the “schizoid-topic” moment, the trail of sound
in the distance that accompanies his hearing, repeated as moves to hear once again,
still with overtones of his own radio, as he meets and passes the same radio music
playing in the next apartment.
Husserl uses parallel examples in his 1905 and 1911 reflections on internal time
consciousness. In Being and Time, Heidegger adverts to the direct apprehension via
hearing of a “creaking wagon or a motorcycle” or “the column on the march” (SZ 163).
Heidegger emphasizes that we never hear “tones” as such, but always lifeworld indices,
the voice of the lark, a certain airplane overhead; later he will refer to the sound made
by a specific make of automobile. Thus, via Heidegger, Anders argues for an acoustic
phenomenology yielding radio ghosts and “virtualities.”
It is sound, as both Husserl and Heidegger attend to this, but with Anders’ attention
to being-in-music, noting the spatiality of tuning along with the active listener’s
attunement ensures the kind of sensibility, for better or for ill, that allows or permits the
kind of claims that Adorno makes, because the jazz he analyses is very specifically not
a “live” performance but broadcast on a television or radio programme. In his “schizo-
topia,” offering an echo of his analysis of simultaneity—Zugleich—Anders reflects on
the acoustic and affective phenomenon heard on the radio, in whatever event (say a
sports broadcast) or musical experience or an exceptional moment, qua transmitted.
Later, writing on the “antiquatedness” of the idea of the masses as radio has
transformed the “masses” by 1961, describing the changed ingredients needed to make
a world-class event: listening-together, en masse:
 
Radio Ghosts 143

Even while vacuuming her rug, the housewife is not only at home between her
own four walls but is simultaneously under the vast cupola of St. Peter’s, since the
organ music accompanying the Coronation of the Pope is playing in her house.
(AM II, 85)

Via the music, one is both where one is and at the same time one is elsewhere.
To this extent, listening to the music one first heard as a young person can, in a
locational transposition, take one back, as we say. The language is spatial, further
specified: in time—again the term is “schizo-topia,” as Anders explains, and a
great deal about modern social media’s experiential phenomenology is thereby
illuminated:

Because the radio can be installed anywhere, at home, in the car, or in any
public place, in a way it represents a common denominator device which is
capable of neutralizing the differences between these places where we spend
our time. And since with their help we are always somewhere else, that is, we
are never home, we are also always and everywhere at home by virtue of their
help. (AM II, 86)

Observing, “If the radio is the embodiment of his de-privatization, the car is the
embodiment of his always being-at-home” (AM II, 86), Anders invokes the complete
coordination of these two instruments, radio and car, just so radio and airplane, as this
describes our current digitally adumbrated, mediated human condition. Heidegger
too, will also indict the prevalence of radio sets seemingly everywhere, in all the rooms
of the house, as an indication of “planetary idiotism.”28
One cannot, as psychologists who study the phenomenon of multitasking tell
us, do two things at once, not really. This applies to listening to music and the
phenomenon of ASMR, if studied phenomenologically, might illuminate this
but even more saliently, Anders’ schizo-topic phenomenon may account for at
least some of the uncanny effects of ASMR. Anders’ “Prometheus effect” both
domesticates and disenchants the world, to use language Adorno and Horkheimer
and Marcuse use to explicate related phenomena. Baudrillard explored this
condition as endemic to modern digital media with a seemingly paradoxical
description as foreclosing responsibility. The paradox is only apparent given that
we seem (to ourselves) to be more directly engaged with media than ever before
in our socially mediatized lives, is its one-way directionality, which Baudrillard
names, I discuss this elsewhere and it matters immensely for an understanding of
media, “speech without response.”29
Baudrillard writes:

The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-
communication—this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define
communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response,
and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a
personal, mutual correlation in exchange).30
144 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Media archaeology for Baudrillard “always,” by design, “prevents response.”31 The

media thus make

all processes of exchange impossible (except in the various forms of response

simulation, themselves integrated in the transmission process, thus leaving the
unilateral nature of the communication intact). This is the real abstraction of the
media. And the system of social control and power is rooted in it.32

We are inclined to overlook the one-way glass that is the mediatic screen—which is
surely part of the way it works—whenever we tweet or post on Facebook, if we can
hardly limit this scopic directionality to television (cable or network), YouTube, and
streaming music feeds, not to mention other social media, where we post and wait,
usually bootlessly, for a response to our responses which social mediatic forms33
may thus bootless be counted as so many varieties of Baudrillardian “speech without
response.”
The transformation is hard to see because it has succeeded—as Nietzsche says of the
ascetic ideal in his On the Genealogy of Morals. And for Anders, in consequence, we are
everywhere and nowhere at home:

Partly, today, we are nomadic, because, even when we are home, we are, at every
moment, residing somewhere else; and partly sedentary, because, even then when
we are actually driving through a foreign country, we can consume the comforts of
being at home; and this means, paradoxically, that we also have the possibility of
finding ourselves in another, that is, transmitted place. (AM II, 87)

In the same way, Anders analyses “background music,” that is, the ineliminable music
of the elevator variety we have no choice but to “enjoy.” In this measure, and so far
from offering us an antipode to Adorno, Anders allows us to understand what Adorno
names the “culinary” with respect to the culture industry and to music in particular.34
In just this measure, explicating both the culture industry and the culinary, Anders
invokes Adorno’s reference to breath (and suffocation):

We have been plunged into an industrial oral phase, in which the cultural pap
[Kulturbrei] slides smoothly down our throats. In this phase, what is supplied does
not even have to be perceived, but merely absorbed. (AM II, 254)

No sooner do we note that association than we also may observe that Anders here
similarly echoes Adorno’s charged reflections in Minima Moralia, as so many variations
on “air”:

The supplied commodity is, for the listener, “air”; and indeed in a twofold fashion:
1) it is something taken for granted; but 2) one cannot breathe without it. This
kind of destruction, the annihilation of the object, via dissolution, liquidification,
is not some kind of special feature of radio and television, but is characteristic of
all production today. (AM II, 254)
 
Radio Ghosts 145

Anders’ analysis includes multitasking and displacement. If the later Anders reprises
Adorno, he had earlier drawn on Heideggerian motifs for his 1959 reflection on the
“antiquatedness” of space and time, nevertheless combined with a Frankfurt School-
style critique of the culture industry as this industry commandeers the space of our
lives and our minds, as we know, post-pandemic:

Everyone knows that life today often proceeds down two roads simultaneously.
Thus, e.g. while we travel along the track of our main occupation, we listen to
music on the parallel track. And do not believe that we only love this double road
of existence merely because we want to cover over the necessity of work with the
sweetness of energeia (music enjoyment). (AM II, 346)

This is like the schizotopic moment analysed earlier, but this doubling can also be
applied to the self as we seek to distract ourselves from ourselves.
In addition to the increasingly consummate deployment of the human being as
the creator of himself/herself as “consumer,” curating himself/herself for others, that
is, “broadcast” for similar consumption (this is the point of social media) and as
himself/herself reproducing himself/herself as a homeworker on himself/herself as
consumer (in the scheme of industrial consolidation), we distract ourselves from our
surroundings as from one another.
The world ignored becomes a spectre, estranged and distant as Anders observes
in “The World as Phantom and Matrix,” a phantom quality that is also a direct
consequence of technological determinism. Thus, Anders argues—and note the claim
as he means it literally and as it illuminates Adorno’s related arguments on the same
point concerning music as practice and as lived culture, in everyday life, at home—
“the phonograph and radio have robbed us of live music performed in our homes”
(AM I, 18).
It is not Anders’ claim that we lament the loss of this kind of “live music”—what’s
to miss? Even Anders himself in his 1949 essay on the “acoustic stereoscope” argues
that there is effectively, given the right kind of stereophony, no difference at all. We
have never had more “music” in our lives as we can arrange via a variety of streaming
services to have music with us anywhere we like, screwed into our ears, synchronizing
our thoughts on nearly any occasion, all on demand, better said: on auto play.
For Anders, “wired” for sound in the open world, we have changed our relation to
ourselves and to one another and to our listening, specifically to our musically attuned,
oriented, or “active” capacity for listening-to-music. To this extent we hardly need the
loudspeakers of Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 (inverting the year of
its publication in 1948) for the sake of social conformity.
Anders’ concern is with what thereby becomes obsolete or outdated: autonomy,
Mündigkeit, as Kant speaks of it: human self-determination. The eclipse of self-
determination could not be more radical. As Kittler reflects:

The literally unheard-of is the site where information technology and brain
physiology coincide. To make no sound, to pick your feet up off the ground, and
to listen to the sound of voice when night is falling—we all do it when we put on a
146 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

record that commands such magic. . . . As if the music were originating in the brain
itself, rather than emanating from stereo speakers or headphones.35

Kittler emphasizes the role of wartime innovation in such technologies, reflecting on

the precise triangulation of wartime bombing missions, sound and the pilot’s brain, all
one synaesthetic event, and it is important to cite this at length because “the hypnotic
command” of which Kittler speaks was as automatic as a pressing a button:

Long before the headphone adventures of rock’n’roll or original radio plays, Heinkel
and Messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of sound space. . . . Radio beams
emitted from the coast facing Britain, for example from Amsterdam and Cherbourg,
formed the sides of an ethereal triangle the apex of which was located precisely
above the targeted city. The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse
dashes into the pilot’s right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally
continuous series of Morse dots—always exactly in between the dashes—into the left
headphone. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most
beautiful ping-pong stereophony (of the type that appeared on the first pop records
but has since been discarded). And once the Heinkels were exactly above London
or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either
side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into one
continuous note, which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the
very centre of the brain. A hypnotic command that had the pilot—or rather, the
centre of his brain—dispose of his payload.36

As Kittler remarks, “Ever since EMI introduced stereo records in 1957, people caught
between speakers or headphones have been as controllable as bomber pilots.”37
For Kittler and for other philosophical analysts of music and war, “The world-war
audiotape inaugurated the musical-acoustic present. Beyond storage and transmission,
gramophone and radio, it created empires of simulation.”38 Like Anders, Kittler means
this literally:

Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, Magnetophones, submarine location

technologies, air war radio beams, etc. have released an abuse of army equipment
that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War I. Radio, the first abuse, lead
from World War I to II, rock music, the next one, from II to III. Following a
very practical piece of advice from Burroughs’s Electronic Revolution, Laurie
Anderson’s voice, distorted as usual on Big Science by a vocoder, simulates the
voice of a 747 pilot who uses the plane’s speaker system to suddenly interrupt the
ongoing entertainment program and inform passengers of an imminent crash
landing or some other calamity.39

Kittler’s methods of counting historical intervals match Anders’ own reflections,40

especially where Anders insists that we explicitly, albeit unwittingly, “program” ourselves:

The pairs of lovers sauntering along the shores of the Hudson, the Thames or
the Danube with a portable radio do not talk to each other but listen to a third
 
Radio Ghosts 147

person—the public, usually anonymous, voice of the program which they walk
like a dog, or, more accurately, which walks them like a pair of dogs. Since they are
an audience in miniature which follows the voice of the broadcast, they take their
walk in company of a third person, not alone. (AM I, 18)

To do the work of this programmed constant accompaniment, Anders invokes the

quintessentially innocuous transistor radio, no Brave New World-style loudspeakers
needed. Today, we programme via subscription or playlist, whatever curated soundtrack
we prefer, of our own design: more homework, as Anders describes the undertaking
involved to do this, from music to meditation apps. Thus, we use the fetishized
distraction of our devices to undo the distraction of our devices, and today, ensuring
that we are never alone, and thus that we never fail the task of being an “audience in
miniature”—this is FOMO, what we call fear of missing out—today’s wandering lovers,
if they are allowed out during lockdown, might tune in to a GPS system so that they
do not lose their way along the Hudson/Thames/Danube. For Anders, the point of
this constant attending, audience being, guarantees that “[i]ntimate conversation is
eliminated in advance” (AM I, 18).41 In general, when people today drive, often to
destinations they happen to know, they tend to choose to listen to GPS guidance, as
opposed to speaking with one another. For Anders, the radio voice/GPS lady voice,
is an invited third, as we transform ourselves of ourselves into passive—as opposed
to active—listeners. This is being-online, being-connected, getting-a-signal. And as
Anders helps us understand with being-an-audience, that is, being connected, this is
an intentional status to be worked at.
Broadcast radio changes in its effects, in its dynamic working, by drawing on,
transforming what Anders described as “being-in,” the matrix that is absorbedness in
music. Listening to music on television, or as Anders’ example detailed the vacuuming
housewife as listening to a mass (the papal coronation) or listening to the news effects
a similarly transformed experience of being in the world. Here the first few stages of
what Anders—who was more than perhaps ordinarily fond of lists—counts off as a
collective move to a virtual or phantom existence are worth noting. Beginning from a
crucially Heideggerian In-Sein, Anders explains:

1. When the world comes to us, instead of our going to it, we are no longer “in the
world” but only listless, passive consumers of the world.

To this extent, the world becomes a phantom as he writes in his title, that is, a ghost,
an illusion. As in-being, qua being-in, the modality or tone of our own existence is
transformed.

2. Since the world comes to us only as an image, it is half-present and half-absent,

in other words, phantom-like; and we too are like phantoms.

Anders, drawing upon the early years of loudspeaker and radio technology, continues:

3. When the world speaks to us, without our being able to speak to it, we are
deprived of speech, and hence condemned to be unfree. (AM II, 20)
148 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

The result Nietzsche had already diagnosed as the reaction condition of modern
impotence, and for Anders this impotence changes our way of relating to the world:

4. When the world is perceivable, but no more than that, i.e. not subject to our
action, we are transformed into eavesdroppers and Peeping Toms. (AM II, 20)

Again: we are such “Peeping Toms,” as we find ourselves, often without intent,
“eavesdropping” constantly. We do this supposing our own invisibility/silence whenever
we watch whatever video catches our attention when we “check” Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, what have you. What Anders writes about the radio and television receiver
applies to our cell phones and tablets, any internet connection. Anders argues and
Baudrillard echoes the point that just in the measure that we are “connected,” such
connections “gradually deprive us of the power of speech” (PM, 17). This passivity, making
us voyeurs of the world (qua phantom), is what it is to be an “audience in miniature”
minus the community building efficacy that it would be to be present one to another,
listening together, as Heidegger describes this, as does Anders and as Adorno similarly
writes of the communal power that is listening, specifically to music, together with one
another. This cannot be done virtually or at a distance (literally, or else it is not a way to
build a community, to use Paul Becker’s language when he speaks of the symphony’s
“gemeinschaftsbildende Kraft,” just as Adorno cites this in his Current of Music).42
Elsewhere I highlight that the trivial thing needed to convert the user into a
voyeur—Illich will use the same macabre language in his Medical Nemesis, speaking of
a patient dying in hospital—is the slightest chime or signal, “notification,” that permits
us to suppose ourselves engaged.43 All these means of Baudrillardian “speech-without-
response” replicate a scopic transformation. As audiences, we continue to relate to
the world in the same incorrigibly unfree fashion Anders analyses, “spectacle” as Guy
Debord contended in the 1960s, or via what Illich in the 1970s and 1980s named the
“Age of the Show.”44 And like Adorno, Anders emphasized the transformed experience
and the space–time of the same for the lifeworld of the human being.
In this way, in a section entitled The Return of the Soloists, developing his 1956 essay
into a 1961 reflection on the general outdatedness that it is to invoke the “masses,”
Anders offers a phenomenological sociological analysis whereby what is abolished
is the external world, namely the Heideggerian Mitwelt: the public world. If Arendt
herself focuses on the political public sphere in this exchange, Anders helps us see,
as Nietzsche in his own century responding to a differently totalized experience of
entertainment and culture, that in the wake of the loss of the public sphere we are
increasingly given over to what can seem an utterly self-focused absorption, in which
one also loses the private sphere and thereby the private self as well.

Media-Induced, Collective, “Autism”

Anders refers in the 1960s to American jukebox culture, the diner culture continuing
throughout the 1970s, only to end with the 1979 development of the Walkman, “The
 
Radio Ghosts 149

customers behave in public as at home” (AM II, 84). The focus is a shift from what
can be regarded as the private and the public sphere whereby self-absorption—and
the exclusion of social focus on others—acquires a technological articulation and
as technologically induced, a normalized justification. In an interesting way, the
2020/2021 lockdowns, sporadically ongoing in 2021, worked as seamlessly as they did
because the phenomenon of lockdown had, in effect, already been a quasi-virtual rule,
think only of the title of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, although, and to be sure, this
is also the point of many of Ellul’s as of Illich’s reflections, along with Baudrillard and
Kittler as indeed of Adorno’s Current of Music. Anders’ reflections contribute to this
same tradition in the philosophy of technology. By using earphones, the consumer
focuses on himself or herself, alone, or together with his or her companions. To
this extent, the “privacy or isolation of the receiver disguises the mass character of
the commodity and the mass character of its transmission” (AM II, 80). We permit
ourselves the same isolated self-absorption when we focus on our cell phones/iPads
at home, with our families, as in office meetings, on public transportation, and so on.
The games we play, the music we listen to, the social media we “follow,” permit us to
participate, even before Lockdown: in our own homes, in this very same mass character:

each of us is supplied personally not only with our de-individualization and our
form of mass existence, but also, at the same time, with the illusion of privacy
(insofar as it is generally a question of a dual conditioning). (AM II, 81–2)

Horkheimer and Adorno were concerned with the same questions of inductive
conditioning in their analysis of the culture industry and its industrial product, namely
music, entertainment of all kinds, newspapers, and so on. Anders argued, as we have
seen, that we create/invent/form ourselves in the image of the culture industry, which
today extends in our digital era beyond what had been a certainly burgherly limit to
hours of the day and the night, such that today we think nothing of interrupting sleep
in the fourth—or n-th—industrial revolution:

One experiences pleasure at home when one consumes in the family circle (which
has actually been transformed into a mere juxtaposition of individuals) the
program that millions of other consumers are consuming at the same time, in an
equally “private” way. (AM II, 82)

This is how the culture industry works. At the same time, intellectuals and scholars
and savvy individuals overall tend to regard this working as by and large benign or
else to suppose themselves somehow unaffected by the effects of this industry. It is the
theme of Anders’ as of Adorno’s/Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry that
this effected a de-individualization matched from the start with the illusion of choice
and above all, as Anders emphasizes this, the illusion of privacy. The point is easily
extended to Facebook/Snapchat/Instagram/Twitter, and Anders reflects on its efficacy
precisely as something we do to ourselves and as ourselves, on our own dime—Anders
liked to emphasize that we pay for this—and, this is a psychoanalytic truism, with the
result that what we subscribe/submit to, is completely volitional:
150 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

For this conditioning is disguised as “fun”; the victim is not told that he is asked
to sacrifice a thing; and since the procedure leaves him with the delusion of his
privacy or at least of his private home, it remains perfectly discreet. (PM, 16)

Thus, Anders’ “solo performers,” referring to the consumer as he/she creates himself or
herself as such, surfing the net, “designs” his own advertising experience. “Modern mass
consumption is a sum of solo performances, each consumer an unpaid homeworker
employed in the production of the mass man” PM, 14).
Thus, as Anders describes a mid-twentieth-century living room interior arranged
around a television—note how constant that feature remains, even as it has migrated
to our cellphones and tablets as well45—his description matches current mediatic self-
inversion. The scene is familiar to the philosopher—it is Plato’s cave:

The seats in front of the screen are so arranged that the members of the family
no longer face each other; they can see or look at each other only at the price of
missing something on the screen; they converse (if they still can or want to talk
with each other) only by accident. They are no longer together, they are merely
placed one beside the other, as mere spectators. (PM, 17)

Speaking of radio, we noted earlier with reference to Kittler that gramophones and
phonographs went together with the loudspeaker technology developed along
with mass-programmed Baudrillardian speech-without-response, that is, radio
broadcasting. In this way, Anders can observe, just to quote this once again:

The stage-managing of masses in the Hitler style has become superfluous to

transform a man into a nobody . . . it is no longer necessary to drown him in
the mass or to enlist him as an actual member of a mass organization. Today’s
Hitler would need no access to radio and not even mass-party demonstrations.
(PM, 16)

If, today, Donald Trump and every other influencer seem to have a Twitter account
(now handily suppressed, to popular applause, in the case of Trump), it may also be
argued that,46 quite in the spirit of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised,47 any revolution to come will require attention to the limitations that follow
from our confinement to our screens, assuming we can attend to such limitations,
including the same Twitter that remains sufficient to effect control as well as the
illusion of participation.
Anders’ concern, as we have seen, is with the “unilaterality” of social media. This
is curated self-creation, tweaking our own feeds, all the better for data miners as we
today may well observe. Thus, Anders emphasizes: “Soft totalitarianism likes nothing
better than allowing its victims to have the illusion of autonomy or even to engender
this illusion” (AM II, 238). But what is expropriated from the average American is what
had previously been most properly, most intimately, his own. To this same extent, what
is taken is never property: relations of capital are not to be put in question (banks are
always to be “bailed out”). Instead:
 
Radio Ghosts 151

The “sole” thing that must be taken from him is his “particularity” [Eigentümlichkeit],
his personality, his individuality, and his privacy: solely himself. In contrast with
routine socialization, which involves what the person has, we are here concerned
“only” with a socialization of that which the human being is. (AM II, 239)

In his own anticipation of Baudrillard’s 1988 reflection on America, itself a twist on

de Tocqueville, Anders reflects that “America uses psychoanalysis for the sake of the
establishment of conformism” (AM II, 237). Today’s neuropsychology follows along,
as we, absorbed in our eternally new, eternally data-mined, “surveilled,” and curated
bubbles of attention, create and re-create ourselves in the current remix—again, n-th
industrial revolution—in the age of digital reproduction.48 For Anders, the fact that
you appropriate something not yours as yours, does not make it yours. The point (and
this is why one must take Anders’ distancing of himself from Heidegger with more
than just a grain of salt) is a matter of Eigentlichkeit.
 9

Being-in-Music

Music Critique and Musical “Situation”

It is famously impossible to “please” critics. Beyond Georg Kreisler’s satirically close-
minded music critic in his song of the same name, Der Musikkritiker, the description
seems to fit critical theorists, both Anders and the yet more obstreperous Adorno,
including his criticisms of jazz (and swing). The “material” basis for Anders’ thinking
on music goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, part of which time Anders worked as an
international music correspondent, writing reports quite on the contemporary musical
scene from Paris.1 The concern was not as such an incidental one. Thus, I have already
emphasized that it matters that Anders sought to habilitate with a 1930–1 thesis:
Philosophical Investigations Concerning Musical Situations, a project Anders continues
to pursue throughout the following decade and the decade after that, all without
success, including an application, failed, for a Guggenheim, letters to Arendt and so on.2
A full account of what Anders’ called the “musical situation” and his later research
on music sociology compels attention to Frankfurt school critical theory, traditional
philosophical aesthetics, and the enduring challenge of writing between philosophy
and music. All of this I can only outline in the current context.
Thus, in Adorno’s 1944 lecture presented at Columbia University and addressed,
nota bene, not to the philosophers but the sociologists, he underlines what he calls
the “decultivation of the German middle classes demonstrated in the field of music
but noticeable in every aspect of German life.”3 The disciplinary distinction between
sociology and philosophy is essential to underline as Adorno recalls a class he himself
had given more than a decade earlier,

In the winter term of 1932-33, immediately before Hitler took over, I had to
conduct at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick’s treatise On the Musically
Beautiful—which is essentially a defence of musical formalism against the doctrine
of Wagner and the programmatic school. Although the seminar was focussed on
philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In
the first meeting I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most
famous of all Wagnerian leitmotifs, on the blackboard. Nobody was.4

The vignette could not be more classic “Adorno,” and it speaks to the very distinctions
Anders makes as these retain a contemporary edge: concerning the “sociality” of the
 
Being-in-Music 153

“complex” that is music. To repeat Anders’ critical array of questions already cited at
the outset: “Who musicizes, who may, who may not? Who composes?” Anders thus
proceeds to ask: “Is there authorhood in a sharp sense?” (MS, 178), raising a question
that in a very different sense is explored (in an analytic mode) in Lydia Goehr’s
The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, and although Anders is hardly Goehr’s
reference,5 the theme is a convergent one. Further, it bears on my own question of the
musical cover and the range of issues involved whenever technology is involved with
music along with what Anders emphasizes as performance practice as its own kind
of musical situation qua performative or “execution situation” [Mitvollzugssituation].
Anders develops in his reflections on music sociology as well as his phenomenology
of listening a more than Heideggerian catena of questioning. Thus, Anders
maintains his earlier insight into the question just as Heidegger had drawn the
question as such into focus in terms of the situation of both questioning and
questionability. At stake for Anders, as he writes in his “Philosophical Investigations
Concerning Musical Situations,” is to follow the Heideggerian imperative to put the
issue itself in question, not as a simple object of theoretical investigation but the
predisposition always already entailed, qua pre-decision already made for this or
that Heideggerian preunderstanding of what, in advance, counts as music (MS, 21),
difficult for Anders, who sought to explore music as it is its own world and at the
same time as it is in the world, differently accessed according to cultivation but not
less class and privilege.
What is clear, perhaps is that be it a musical cultural history of “situation,” or a music
sociology, or indeed a phenomenology of hearing music, listening-to, a philosophical
aesthetics of music, even enriched with the resources of hermeneutic phenomenology
will require a path between music theory, music history, which for non-musicians,
and even enthusiasts, can be closer to “music appreciation”—quite where Adorno
dedicates two chapters to the last6—which may sometimes presuppose familiarity with
the referent but often not even that. Thus, the demand, beyond the suggestion that one
hum a few bars, set to a class of university-level musicologists that at least one of their
number be able to write out the Siegfried motif can be overwhelming. Perhaps, so one
is told, Adorno smiled when he related their lack of competence.7
This tension is compounded by academic philosophy’s explicit habitus when it
comes to aesthetics and its respective ingroups. Inasmuch as the philosophy of music
reproduces grosso modo the prime division of professional or university philosophy—
that is, the same discipline that did not make room for Anders—namely, into “analytic”
(the great majority must be accounted as such, including Jerrold Levinson and the
already-mentioned Goehr) and continental, the last being a very small set, inhabited,
in addition to thinkers like Adorno and Anders, by Pierre Bourdieu as well as more
esoteric others,8 names philosophers of music either ignore or else, as in the case of
the late Sir Roger Scruton, actively refuse—thus Scruton, with contempt, pronounced
Adorno a “dead duck” at a 2012 London conference.9 If there are exceptions, I have
noted the musician-philosopher Max Paddison on Adorno,10 it remains difficult
in philosophy of music to invoke critical theorists like Adorno or like Anders quite
because of the institutional dominion of analytic-style philosophy as this continues,
formation and appointment, to characterize most university academics to date. To just
154 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

this extent, critical theory can be subject to exclusion (just leaving out names can be
enough for this), philosophical reservations of sundry kinds along with objecting to
Adorno on jazz. There will be similar objections in the case of Anders, who remains
even less discussed.
In the same way, Anders himself may fall between two stools. The late Ludger
Lütkehaus, brilliant as ever—and he was exceptionally sharp—argues that Anders fails
to overcome Adorno,11 an observation attesting to the level of the bar to be met. Anders
himself will note, as Lütkehaus underlines, that he does fail short in comparison with
Adorno, but, and this is to the point of the current study, without yielding his own
concerns in favour of Adorno’s.

Situational Phenomenology: Underway

to a Hermeneutics of Music
In the book that would have counted, a counterfactual book as it were, the kind of
book that can haunt a scholar’s lifetime had things been other than they were, as the
young Günther Stern’s Habilitationschrift, had he gone on to a position as professor
of philosophy and/or cultural sociology of music as his thesis patently provides
ample basis for the same, Stern/Anders notes the conundrum built into the word
“Musikphilosophie.” For Anders—and here again the influence of Heidegger’s explicit
phenomenology of questioning is evident—from the start, one must reflect on the
subject matter of a given investigation, in this case into the musical situation, while also
raising the question why. The “why-question” (MS, 15) is key; it is to be understood
in connection typically with the what question and, for Anders especially, with the
that question, crucial to any post-Rilkean aesthetic question, quite as Gadamer also
for his own part will emphasize, and as is also differently underlined by Adorno. But,
hermeneutico-phenomenologically, preliminary questions have to be posed from the
start; this is an always-already presupposition of reflection necessary before one can
raise a “why” question in the philosophy of music, to which, class-conscious as he is,
from a sociological vantage point, Anders adds the when- and the where-questions as
these bear both on society and history (MS, 51). Intriguingly, Anders begins with a
reflection on Augustine’s Confessions, referring thereby not only to the locus classicus
of phenomenology (intentionality for Husserl) but also sensual desire—voluptas, a
range of various and all-too-human tentationes and, in a lovely poise, an articulation
of delectation: “that is to say, the current incarnation and the express physical-sensual
realization of music, in contrast to the textual content intended in music-making, the
‘res,’ visible” (MS, 51), thence, to read this a little further as “becoming-song.”
Anders’ theme is “musical situation”:

this situation consists in the necessary being-simultaneous [Zugleich-sein] of

being-in-the-world and of Being-in-music [In-Musik-seins] in an existence, as an
existence; consists in that one lives in the world, on the one hand, in the medium
of one’s own historical life, that one understands world and life comparatively (or
tends effectively thematically towards this understanding—i.e., philosophizing);
 
Being-in-Music 155

that one is not in the world, on the other hand, but rather “in music,” whereby the
word music does not indicate a piece of the world that can be found in the world,
in short: that one lives in determinations that shatter the average ontological
fundamental character of human existence, even overcome it, and in turn indicate
your kind of existence. (MS, 16)

As Anders explicitly distinguishes the question, “the musical situation, the in each
case being in-music, turns out from its inception to be a negative insular situation
within the historical life of the human being” (MS, 23). The terminology recalls
Anders’ 1924 doctoral dissertation, Die Rolle der Situationskategorie bei den
logische Satzen, written under Husserl and which Anders begins with a reference to
Heidegger’s conception of “world,” on the very first page. Speaking thus generally of
circumstance and historical standpoint, where Anders/Stern uses the term to refer
to the concrete question-worthy situation [die konkrete Fraglichkeits-Situation],12 not
unrelated to Karl Jasper’s language of limit-situation [Grenzsituation] and arguably
also, especially given the complex guilt-shame for Anders, related to Carl Schmitt’s
terminology of “definition” as Schmitt expresses this in his own doctoral dissertation
on guilt, and thence to, noting typical kinds and common instances, the very
idea of “situation.”13 Lütkehaus, for his part, explains the same constellation with
Adorno (and Eisler) circa 1931, but the language of “situation” in this era is patently
overdetermined.14 Thus, for Anders, the musical “situation” is, qua situation, question
worthy as such but not less intrinsically an affair that is inherently exceptional, as he
states specifically, not only as a typical discounting or criticism (“Sunday music”) but
of what it is to be in-music. The constellation includes a transformative, transfiguring
effect which can therefore be counted as having a certain druglike efficacy (here
Anders invokes Nietzsche) not only because Anders distinguishes between the
musical performer/composer/expert listener and amateur or indeed extern, just
as Maurice Halbwachs does,15 distinguishing accidental from casual listening as
determinative of the situation (and Anders, as noted at the start, is quite specific
about the social circumstances inherent to music in every case but which he also
connects, and this is the hermeneutic-phenomenological and not less existential
element, with, for the most part, and to speak with Heidegger, the most proximate
or intimate character of the human being who does not live historically, an oblique
circumstance that makes the musical situation and its exceptionality in its capacity
to engender such, even to the height of the numinous, thus for deity as Anders writes
citing Augustine) and not less crucially: “Human being in the musical situation is
neither life within the continuity of one’s own life nor life in the world” (MS, 23).
The “neither-nor” (MS, 20) brings Anders to a generally Kantian reflection on music
aesthetics, not merely, as he says, the alternation subject-object, but action and
work, and thus he has recourse to the “Aristotelian concept of ἐνέργεια,” not on the
basis of subjective attunement but the musical situation and thus as “including the
ἔργον in itself ” (MS, 20). Here, the focus on performance/execution has to do with
play: engagement, otherwise directedness. Fundamentally, the “musical situation
is a cognitive situation,” which, expressed as a kind of “Schellingesque ‘organon of
art’,” does not differ from “love,” Anders writes, noting the triumvirate: Augustine,
156 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Pascal, Scheler (MS, 24, Cf. 33 ff.). From this juncture to an explicit via negativa,
Anders clarifies music as coordinating the unhistoricality—note that one may also
speak of this in temporal terms, being as it were outside of, transported out of the
specific place and time—of human existence. This yields a reading of Dilthey’s brief
discussion of musical understanding and the “tonal world.” For Dilthey, and this
must be understood in terms not only of his analysis of experience and alongside
his famous lived world, this is the world of music, a world apart, “with its endless
possibilities of tonal beauties and their meanings.”16 Dilthey is emphatic on this
apartness qua submersion: “there is no duality of lived experience and music, no
double world, no carry-over from the one into the other.”17 Citing sections from
Dilthey’s next line: “Genius is simply living in this tonal sphere, as though this alone
existed; all fate and suffering is forgotten in this tonal world, but nevertheless in
such a manner that all this remains within it” (39),18 Anders glosses what is key to
the sublimating retention/overcoming of this same “foregone life,” such that this is
ultimately no “lost destiny [das Verlorene Schicksal].” The key for Anders is Dilthey’s
recognition that “the object [Gegenstand] of music” is “life itself ” (39). For Dilthey,
“every relation to a musical work is interpretive.” The emphasis as important for
Adorno as it is for Gadamer: “Its concern is with something objective.”19 For Dilthey,
hermeneutically minded as he was, muses on nothing less Kantian (Copernican),
than Kepler’s method of inductive inference leading to the discovery of the “elliptical
path of the planet Mars,”20 and thereby on the question of determinate-indeterminate
reciprocities in terms of sentence and syntax—and here there is a crucial resonance
with the Hilbert school and thus with Husserl and with Heidegger that would not
have been, could not have been, lost on Anders, who wrote a doctoral dissertation
on sentences:

The sequence of words is given. Each of these words is determinate-indeterminate

[bestimmt-unbestimmt]. It contains in itself a variability of meaning. The means
of syntactically relating each word to the others are also ambiguous within
fixed limits; thus the sense arises, since the indeterminate is determined by the
construction.21

Dilthey adds an Appendix on “Musical Understanding,” articulated on the basis of the

unifying Kantian reflection that “Understanding rests on the retention in memory of that
which is immediately past, and its participation in the intuition of that which follows.”22
Dilthey emphasizes the tonal world that is the world of music:

absorbed by the musician from his childhood on and which is always there for him.
Everything he meets is transformed into it and comes forward out of the depths
of the soul in order to express what was there; and for the artist fate, suffering and
blessedness are above all present in his melodies. Here, memory again asserts its
role in producing meaning.23

In the previous chapter on radio echoes/ghosts, we saw the importance of memory and
apperception. But here Anders, glossing Dilthey, writes:
 
Being-in-Music 157

Human being in the musical situation is neither life within the continuity of his
life, nor life in the world. And so far as human existence not only occasionally lives
in this insular situation but fundamentally, his existence as a whole is as unhistoric
[unhistorisch] as the kinds of musical movements. (MS, 23)

In the case of musical situation, there is an essential reference to the social—thus, one
sees not only the importance of history and hermeneutics but also what will become
the project of a musical sociology as well as dynamics or energeia and along with this
an ecstasy, almost religious in this text not only as Anders draws on Augustine but, at
the same time, an anticipation of what Eugen Fink will characterize as an “oasis” of
play,24 more communally/sociologically expressed in Anders as “Enclave” (MS, 44f).
Given the reference to Dilthey and Heidegger, Anders’ reflections on the “situation”
of music can also be illuminated via Gadamer’s history of effects. Indeed, in his
reflections on The Relevance of the Beautiful, Gadamer presupposes the same anthropo-
phenomenological context of the musical situation, in every sense of the word, literally
programme music, in a very different sense from that in which Dilthey claims that
“program music is the death of true instrumental music” and the challenge that remains,
in some cases even to the current day, for the inclusion of contemporary works of the
kind Anders and Adorno and Gadamer would have named the “new” music.25
For Anders, the “musical situation” emerges (and this too is related to Gadamer’s
Rilkean emphasis: “that such a thing” stood among human beings),26 in that the “that
sentence [Dass-Sätze]” or proposition, the same “that” that is at work in the music
as energeia, expresses an “incompatibility, better: a non-unity between ordinary life
‘in-the-world’ and life in-music” (MS, 21). Later, Anders goes on to apostrophize
Mahler’s astonishment that in spite of the events of music, the ordinary banality of the
everyday continues. For Anders,

As long as the musical situation lasts, the human being is in spite of all immanent
referentiality of beforehand and afterwards in the music him or herself always in
the now; but at once not in the now as the present within historical time, but an
expressly unhistorical now. To this it makes no difference whether the now already
frequently and earlier was, the now of a music, if the now is an unicum and in the
realm of life unsituatable occurrence. (MS, 38)

And, already in an emphasis on what Adorno will also observe with respect to the
“being” of the work of art, the question of meaning is constitutively irrelevant. For
Anders, this constellated being is what is effected in (being-in) music, the sheer “that”
[Dass] of the original linguistic form and note here that this can relate to musical
composition for the composer:

that (in the music) one falls out of the «world» that one is still somewhere; that one
is always torn out of the continuum of one’s life; that in each case, one still remains
in this hiatus quite in the medium of time; that one’s own (personal-historical) life
becomes imaginary in the face of the other reality; that there will only be a gap
between the situations of being-in-music; that one no longer remains “one self ”;
158 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

that one is transformed; that one must return to oneself; that music says something
in every note and nevertheless—in the sentential sense—articulates nothing;
appears, seemingly to go somewhere, whilst concealing what is opened up, what
opens up; that one understands something—and yet ἄνευ λόγου. (MS, 17–18)

Taken by Heidegger’s reflection on the question as such, just as Gadamer would

likewise be taken, Anders reflects, “A question is thus already the dissolution of
wonder quite as the answer dissolves the question” (MS, 18). The observation clarifies
a methodical petrification of the situation modelled in the case on the question
situation which can settle into a “rigid and disposable problem” (MS, 18). To this
extent, in addition to Adorno, Anders’ “situational” reflections on the relevance
of sociology to music highlights his philosophical conception of and attention to
“Being-in-music,” underscoring the formative dimensionality of Anders’ relation to
Heidegger, despite his lifelong reservations contra Heidegger. For Anders intended
his own focus specifically to highlight the active musical listener in-music; this is not
quite any listening and thus Heidegger’s language of world and being-in can be useful,
typically heard in general terms of being-in-the-world but which, for Heidegger, also
conveyed a reference to disposition and affect but also a particular intentionality.
The world is not the same for everyone; the lifeworld we all share is also differently
given to us depending on our preconceptions, cultural and theoretical, the projects
in which we participate and which are specific to us, and the focus we have on the
world around us, dependent in turn on the aims or purposes we hope to attain. For
Anders, what mattered derived from Husserl, and to that extent it was a matter of
musical consciousness, not mere perception but resonance. Key for Anders is the
notion of music for an attuned listener.
The theme, broadly conceived, has found expression in a number of studies of
listening to music, such as F. Joseph Smith’s Listening to Music, and in The Hallelujah
Effect I try to connect this very practically to H. Stith Bennett’s phenomenological
sociology of specifically performative music.27 What is typically missing is express
reference to Anders, and it can only be hoped that a now-growing trend to attend to
Anders will change this state of affairs.28 For his part and very differently—note that
Anders refers more conventionally to Schopenhauer, which is also an exceptional
focus—Nietzsche raises the question of music in his own thinking, philologically
minded as that was in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.
Nietzsche begins by making an active distinction, setting the creator’s or performer’s
aesthetic, that is: “the artist’s aesthetic” in opposition to the “spectator’s aesthetic.”
The gendered contrast Nietzsche drew from Hölderlin’s poetic dynamic of the
contest between the sexes, as Nietzsche described it as everlasting in the first line
of The Birth of Tragedy, punctuated with the reconciliations that Hölderlin could
transfigure into beauty. Nietzsche’s own imagery was crucial given the focus on the
audience in Nietzsche’s era (not less in our own), which artist’s creative aesthetic
Nietzsche named a “masculine” as opposed to the latter audience-oriented, reactive
or “feminine” aesthetic.29
The resonance can seem unmistakable. There we read the same dialectical tension:
“Die Situation des Zugleich,” the situation of the at-the-same-time, simultaneous,
 
Being-in-Music 159

at once. Anders’ specific concern is to reflect the circumstance of being not sheerly
“in-world [in Welt], but ‘in Music’” (MS, 16). Here, to be specific, and this is for Anders
a reference to Busoni as much as to Schopenhauer, the “word music does not signify
any worldly thing encounterable in the world” (MS, 16). In the context of literature, the
same claim to voice, and what is thereby spoken in an immediate address, testifies to
a direct encounter, spiritual and bodily, traced in Rilke’s faintingly uncanny perishing
“from his stronger existence” [von seinem stärkeren Dasein], explained by Anders/
Arendt (if here we might have reason to take the emphasis to derive more from Anders
than Anders himself will later concede):

This “something” consists in an in-stance of hearing, being-in-hearing

[Inständigkeit des Hörens, Im-Hören-Sein]. Today there has to be a condition and
an occasion for being-in-hearing. In place of complete objectlessness, for which
our heart is no longer adequate, the condition for being-in-hearing becomes the
disappearance of the object, which we pursue with our ears.30

The phenomenological attunement of hearing is key; this is attending, hearkening

where one is inclined, the vanishing object “pursued with our ears.” The theological
element subtends the entire point: hear! as the prayer commands. At the same time,
Anders’ explication of both the culture industry and the culinary includes an Adornian
reference to breath (and suffocation). Anders writes:

What the background music demands of us (ninety-nine percent of the music

played on the radio and television is, or is in the process of becoming, background
music, for c’est la situation qui fait la musique) is no longer that we should listen to
it, but only that it should be there, because without it there would be an unbearable
vacuum. (Ibid.)

We have noted that Anders’ reflections must be read not only in an Augustinian mode
but also in correspondence with Adorno, and Husserl as well as, despite or because
of his criticism, Heidegger. At the same time, the most important influence for the
question of music and sociology will be the concerns of the Frankfurt School, and if this
is true of his reflections in the 1930s, this only continues throughout his critical work
as the world itself comes to embody the worst elements anticipated by critical music
sociology. Here, to cite this once again, Anders echoes Adorno’s charged reflections in
his Minima Moralia:

The supplied commodity is, for the listener, “air”; and this in a double sense: 1) it
is something he takes for granted; but 2) without it he cannot breathe. This kind
of destruction, the self-liquidation of the object, is not a special feature limited to
radio and television but is characteristic of all current production as such. (AM
II, 254)

Anders thus analyses the way we find ourselves today, complete with our current
commitments to distraction via multitasking and displacement.31 If the later Anders
160 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

seems to draw on Adorno, he offers a more Heideggerian perspective in a 1959 reflection

on the “antiquatedness” of space and time, combined with a Frankfurt School–style
critique of the culture industry as this industry commandeers the space of our lives
and our minds. Once again, we recall Anders’ reference to the ‘schizotopic’ project of
listening to music on the ‘parallel track’ as it were. Thus, to cite again:

we often look for something to do while listening to music to offset the unbearable
character of the enjoyment which is good for nothing apart from its own existence.
“I just can’t enjoy Beethoven without doing my knitting” [in English, in original],
is not the expression of an eccentric woman, but the epoch’s confession of faith.
(AM II, 346)

In addition to the increasingly consummate deployment of the human being on

automatic as creator of himself/herself as “consumer,” curating himself/herself for
others, that is to say, for transmission or “broadcast” for similar consumption (this
is the point of social media) and as himself/herself reproducer of himself/herself
as a homeworker on himself/herself as consumer (in the scheme of industrial
consolidation), there is the particular relation to where we find ourselves. This is
our relation to the earth, including what Anders speaks of, here not unlike Hannah
Arendt (and thereby echoing the parodic spirit not merely of nineteenth-century
cosmology advancing to the claims of mid-twentieth-century cosmonauts, but
dating back already to Lucian’s second-century cosmology), as “the view from the
moon,” in particular including the potential exploitation or “development” of the
same.32

Positive Attunement: Sociological Reflections

on the Musical “Situation”
The colloquial focus of the musical situation has been with us for some time, ever
since Plato, as what Anders highlights as the Greek conventionality that is relation of
ethos and music, which we learn already by way of Plato’s Republic and his discussion
not only of a certain sense of decadence or decline but by way of a catalogue of
modes and ethical-political sometimes assumed to be pathic effects. This Anders
refers to in his own discussion of tonality (and rhythm and melos) which is indeed
the means that for Plato literally and not metaphorically changes or transforms the
human soul.33
This is esoteric, the so-called acroamatic, as this also recurs in Kayser’s Akroasis.
But quite by definition, the acroamatic is not typically understood. Exoterically
typically, what is assumed is that some ancient and suitably cantankerous character
denounces the music of the young, complaining that the good old days of yore
are no more: this then can be assumed to be the “musical situation,” as Adorno
writes in 1932.34 The same sort of languishing nostalgia can serve double duty for
any other sort of golden age complaint. There are many problems with this (quite
apart from the eso-exoteric distinction noted) at the start of Adorno’s “On the Fetish
 
Being-in-Music 161

Character of Music.”35 Characterized as “musical sermonizing,” Adorno observes,

in a phenomenologically relevant note typically unnoted even by the most exigent
Straussian, that it remains unclear “to this day why the philosopher ascribes these
[weakening or ‘soft’ making] characteristics to the mixolodian, Lydian, hypolydian
and Ionian modes.”36 Including most of Western music, as Adorno points out, both
the “flute and the ‘panharmonic’ stringed instruments also fall under the ban.”37 For
Adorno, there is patent irony in Plato, but there is also a serious and political edge,
given the circumstances of the Athenian human condition in its socio-historical
moment, far from an ideal utopia an urgent disciplinary effort: an “Attic purge in
Spartan style.”38
It can go overlooked even in discussions of Adorno and music, especially with
respect to claims concerning his assessments of popular movements in music and, to be
sure, jazz, that Adorno himself was a composer, a student of Alban Berg, and, similarly
key here, that that same, now fairly long in the tooth, ‘new’ music has been subject to
a range of negative stricture on the side of popular reception, a tendency that has yet
to abate. Here it is important to note that Julian Johnson, and here not unlike many
commentators, both invokes and avoids this constellation, with the best of intentions,
beginning no less by citing Schlegel’s apt observation that “What is called philosophy
of art usually lacks one of two things: the philosophy or the art.”39 Johnson, like many
scholars already knows better, even as he cites Adorno’s claim that a crisis in music
analysis is a crisis in music composition, we already know better and have already
written ourselves into the locus, contested as Anders will tell us, of those empowered
to have views on music and those entitled to be heard as such.
Anders’ attention to music, in terms of both listening to and performing music,
as well as the circumstance in which music is made, composed and rehearsed and
performed, was affected by Anders’ phenomenological formation as well as his
instrumental training and perhaps most intriguingly his attention to what was requisite
for hearing music, listening as an attentive participant. To this extent, Anders refused
any simple division between musician and audience.40
Key to Anders’ understanding here was also the embodied, situation, circumstantial,
disposition, attunement of the audience member who could be merely present or who
could, a frequent theme, fail to listen or be otherwise preoccupied. For Anders, the key,
and here there are some elements in common with Leo Treitler, the only thing at issue
would be the constitution, as such, of musical listening as such.
Here to speak of such a constitution in Anders’ writing, it is necessary to refer to
Heidegger’s discussion of listening as this is always already in a world for us, and thus
able to be heard for us: we do not hear, we cannot hearken to, we cannot listen to tones
as tones, Heidegger maintains, as he thematizes this phenomenologically. For Anders,
this hearing differs for the one for whom music is his or her life, the player/performer/
conductor, the composer, the music enthusiast, and another listener.
Because we are primarily under the sway of analytic philosophy, that is, including
the legacy of the Vienna Circle as of Carnap and to the extent that we are as Anders was
fascinated by this legacy, including Heidegger’s analysis of express articulation [Aussage]
which he articulates in Being and Time in technical terms of indications and predications
and—crucial for media philosophers, more incidental or casual, here we think not only
162 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

of Anders but also of Kittler, who was (as he himself maintained) Heidegger’s student as
well, and I have sought to bring in Baudrillard—“communication,” as such, “speaking
forth,” as well as affirmative or positive (the very meaning of the word “positive” in logical
positivism refers to this affirmative character) validity. Heidegger here refers to Lotze, and
the questions concerning logical validity exceed the present theme but would have been
understood by Anders, such that it is at least essential to point to it. But most significantly
for our attention might be to also take note of Heidegger’s nigh-onto Nietzschean
expression of these “logical” terms as so many “Word idols [Wortgötzen]” (SZ, 156) as
he names them, a good way to characterize the terminology of logical validity as such.
The reference that now follows offers its own reprise of Heidegger’s hammer
example, and the context of hammering as a referential context of meaning and
expression offers an explicit allusion to logical positivism as such along with a variety
of ways of speaking of a physical object in its different referential insertions, as a table,
as a door, as a bridge, and so on. The point (Heidegger is speaking of hammers, and
their properties, and in this case heaviness), concerns categorial assumption but more
significantly, as Heidegger underlines, the presumptions that go along with this. Thus,
where one can refer to a range of language games, Heidegger reminds us of the world
already at stake. In this case, “Unadverted [Unbesehen] is the ‘meaning’ of the sentence
already assumed in advance as: the hammer thing has the property of heaviness [das
Hammerding hat die Eigenschaft der Schwere]” (SZ, 157).
For Heidegger, this inadvertence has everything to do with the kind of Umsicht that
is engagement with the hammer as such, in use.41 Thus, Heidegger goes on to explain
the comparative, also in Wittgenstein’s examples, too heavy, or the other hammer.
Here with reference to Aristotle, to the logos, to judgement as such, indicated by “the
phenomenon of the copula,” turns out to have a determinative “interpretive function.”
All of this is background, and I am concerned here with Heidegger’s reflections on
“Da-sein and Speech. Language.” Here speaking and hearing and above all heeding (the
German is hörchen) is crucial, and this is already to be seen in Anders and Arendt’s
articulation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.
Heidegger exemplifies the fundamental use of the negative (silence, but also as he
emphasizes, misspeaking), negative listening, unattending, overhearing, mishearing all
of this is for Heidegger, despite its negativity, revelatory and foundational: “Listening to
. . . is Dasein’s existential way of Being-open as Being-with for others” (SZ 163). In each
case, Heidegger contends that we speak as we hear: already in a world with pregiven
concerns, attunements, significations—because creatures of the word as we are, we are
also born into, thrown into language as well.
Thus, as I referred earlier (because in Heidegger this has a negative expression)
to the distinction Heidegger makes between his own analysis of sound and that of
cognitive psychology as such, contrasting psychological research into perception
studies into “the sensation of tones and the perception of sounds [Empfinden von
Tönen und das Vernehmen von Lauten]” which is for Heidegger thus a derivative
phenomenon,42 quite as listening and hearing and hearkening presuppose language
and communicative attention. This Heideggerian distinction would be key for Anders
and not less for Arendt, as we read already in their focus on the hearing addressed in
a religious context in their reading of Rilke. In addition to such “observance,” there is
 
Being-in-Music 163

also a Hölderlinian reference to “following” as such: “hearing constitutes the primary

and authentic [eigentliche] way in which Dasein is open for/to its ownmost potentiality
for being [Seinkönnen]” (SZ, 163).43
Thus, we recall that Heidegger emphasizes:

“Proximally” [Zunächst] we never, ever [nie und nimmer] hear noises or complexes
of sounds, but rather the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. One hears the column
on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. (SZ,
163)44

Indeed, and this Anders could not but have noted for his part, Heidegger emphasizes
that a specific kind of practised, scientific, theoretical attention is required in order to
make the scientific world of the cognitive psychologist possible in the first place: “It
requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind in order to ‘hear’ a ‘pure sound’”
(SZ, 164). By contrast, Heidegger tells us, we hear, we do not deduce or infer that we
“hear,” motorcycles and cars—and today we can certainly add the little notification
tone or chirp that can tell us that we have—and now we can think again of Anders in
his diner, as this information is also communicated to the someone, the anyone next to
us, be it at the dinner table or as a stranger on the street—just received a text (or tweet
or what have you), which “notification” we perceive exactly directly, as this capacity for
immediate, instantaneous perception is part of the way we are in the world: “Dasein is
as essentially understanding proximally alongside what is understood” (SZ, 164). As
Heidegger explains, when we listen to a foreign language we do not listen to random
“tone-data” but “unintelligible words.” We take this for granted; this will be the basis for
a good deal of French existentialism and not less Daseinsanalyse, when we seek out a
companion for a specific conversation (as opposed to other possible interlocutors) but
in each case, and the example of linguistic comprehension is crucial when it comes to
music, such that this is key to what Anders seeks to theorize in terms of the listener
who is in-music as opposed to others. “Only one,” Heidegger writes, and Gadamer
will repeat this as the cornerstone of his hermeneutics, “who already understands, can
listen [Nur wer schon versteht, kann zuhören]” (SZ, 164, emphasis added). When it
comes to music, hermeneutically, phenomenologically speaking, Adorno and Anders
will agree with Heidegger, whatever other differences they may have.

Transformation and Transfiguration

Schopenhauer makes a range of claims for music, philosophically, metaphysically
regarded that Anders finds both appealing and, on an object level, untenable,
despite the advantage of distinguishing music from the other (representative) arts by
describing it as a “direct objectivation of the world will.” The hierarchical trouble enters
in for Anders with Schopenhauer’s own fourfold objectivization of the will, “Mineral,
Plant, Animal, Human,” which is, if only owing to a certain overzealous coordination
with Schopenhauer’s own schematism, subject to a certain “artificiality” (MS, 73).
Bracketing the musical scale via the evolutionary hierarchy of being in this way, for
164 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

musical reasons as Schopenhauer’s schema, is inadequate to explain all musical kinds

(as Schopenhauer contends that it does) retains a certain appeal. For Schopenhauer’s
cosmological notion of the world will as a constellation of the “musical situation
of humanity” (MS, 73) together with his notion of “Being-in-music,” taken in
Schopenhauer’s sense, yields a participation in nothing less than that same world will,
including a being together with beings exceeding human provenance. The result is
almost as cosmic a level for philosophy as Pythagoreanism, and this, for Anders, would
be alluring were it not for its already-noted musical inadequacy. But what is above
all, for Anders, problematic—Anders is no Pythagorean and also no Platonist—music
as such is, quite like language, quite like the tool, quite like truth for Heidegger (and
Nietzsche), an inherently, even essentially human affair. “Music is music of human
beings. Without the modulation of this facticity, no music philosophy can function”
(MS, 74). Here is the nucleus of Anders’ Goethean reflection on enchantment,
transformation, transfiguration:

The fact that music, like every magic that makes the human inhuman, is made by
humans, that the transformation that cuts to the human quick, also derives from
him, is on systematic grounds forgotten and not counted into his explication of
music [Musikdeutung]. (MS, 74)

For Anders, the transfigurative capacity of music testifies to an extraordinarily human

capacity: “the possibility of enchantment, and of the situation in which he conjures
himself into the music, lies within himself ” (MS, 74–5). This coincidence entails that
any effort to understand this musical transformative situation [Verwandlungssituation]
remains an anthropology of music. A good deal of the attention to world music that
goes along with, in many ways also being the heart of so-called postmodern musicology,
attests to Anders’ insight, offered to be sure, avant la lettre.
That Anders goes into a reflection on Schopenhauer’s and musical tonalities,
especially the bass, suggesting that “that also belongs, to the world subjected to the
force of gravity,” (MS, 74) thus loses what can seem its metaphysical risks, as a human
capacity that is not only human in this same sense. It is here that Anders can bring
in what he calls dimension, illuminated with reference to the music of Tristan but
also, as one of his frequently invoked examples, the kind of incarnate song called for
by Augustine. Here, the phenomenological force of Anders’ musical anthropological
vision entails an utter reciprocity, the situational transforms of mutuality whereby one
is with respect to another, always also at the same time, an other posed with regard to
yet another and so on.

here he lives as son, there as citizen, thus these distinctions of “as” are however
always yet modii of being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-seins]. But the human being
is not only in the world, he is for example as functioning body, for example as
vegative eventuality itself world. (MS, 75)

One can read this via Aristotle, from whence the Linnean schema stems, or via
Goethe or Rousseau or Rudolf Steiner but today’s reflections on the second gut or
 
Being-in-Music 165

the microbiome that makes a difference, physiologically, hormonally, neurologically,

and so on, may make this point a bit clearer for us. Anders’ point is precisely this
as subliminal, as transpiring beneath the level of cognitive apperception, “apart from
all human freedom and supervision, “am Menschen,” in the human as it were, as
hormones and nutrition and growth and disease and death are in the human. “Life
lives in itself as vegetative passage” (MS, 75), not in one but alongside, passing beyond,
out of oneself. This image at once beautiful and uncanny, takes Anders to a reflection
on the ontologico-ontic multidimensionality of the human being, including one of his
rare but quite on point references to Nietzsche with respect to Nietzsche’s imperative
call for “the necessity of a ‘physiology of music’” (MS, 76).

Critical Sociology of Music

Anders’ phenomenological sociology of music is specifically and at the same time a
critical theoretic sociology of music owing to the nature of music as such, and not
less owing to a certain correspondence, if one may so speak, and Anders does, of the
relation between the one who calls [Rufendem] and the one who hears; this includes,
as he emphasizes, a specific spatial dimensional extension [Raumweit] for the caller
and a specific listening tendency for the one attuned, that is to say, inclined to hearken
[Hörgeneigtheit des Lauschenden]. It is no accident that the example here is prayer, and
this same spatial dimensionality is also in play in Nietzsche’s discussion of rhythm and
prayer, and so on and not less, and the coincidence with the early Nietzsche is also to
be observed—although Anders himself connects Weber to be sure—“with a social or
religious event” (MS, 181).
Anders proceeds in accord with attention to media and mediation to reflect on a
parallel, as this cuts two ways, with film, never forgetting its particular genesis out of
(and reciprocal constitution of) the culture industry as such, in this case out of the
very political and market-driven film industry, which makes of the filmgoing public
a filmgoing public: attuned to “the stars,” reading magazines devoted to the stars or
watching television programmes on the same theme and following the same figures on
social media as if these were members of their immediate family as they are to be sure
key to their affective lives, which fact takes nothing away from the decisive detail that
everything is fiction.
If Anders attends to space as he does, the reach of the voice, the attentive response
of the listener, the material basis for the loudspeaker, the radio receiver, all elements
of Adorno’s better-known radio theory,45 it is significant that at the same time Anders
is also concerned with time, understood musically and understood in terms of history
as such as this fact is always part of music history and appreciation and a complex
component to understanding what we mean by music. Just as Heidegger can reflect
that a historical object, an artefact found in a museum, say, is as such, qua present, an
object that has survived the passage of time and is thus at once an object of its time
and an object of today. If Benjamin’s aura makes all the difference here, it can obscure
the historical point of coincidence that Anders draws out with respect to music—this
is also why we can speak of efforts to recreate historical performances, or at least our
166 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

enthusiasm for musical period instruments/practices: “Music,” Anders emphasizes,

“is ever indeed [zwar stets] the music of its time, but not every time is the time of its
music” (MS, 184).There is the world of music, and this in itself, and thus the appeal
of Schopenhauer, is also the sense of “another world,” and the challenge for Anders to
explain this as however much there is a social dimension of music as such, music “in
its facticity” can never be explicated on the basis of the social character of humanity.

Being-In
In a summary assessment of the whole of Heidegger’s project, Anders remarks that
“Heidegger’s intensity, called ‘existence [Dasein],’ lacks all Dionysiac connotations”
(PC, 364). But what is Dasein (for Anders? for Heidegger) and what is the Dionysiac
(for Nietzsche? for Anders, for Heidegger)?.46
In general, accessing Anders here is elusive, and part of the reason is not Heidegger
but Husserl and, to a greater extent, the concern that animated overall Anders’
reflections on music as this also animates Adorno for his own part with his own
concern with music and space—and time.
For Anders, what matters is volume and voluminosities, density, porosity. Indeed,
in his 1958 essay, “The Acoustic Stereoscope,” Anders articulates a phenomenology
of stereo that could be useful for understanding the (internet and sometimes cult)
phenomenon of ASMR47:

We distinguish the voluminosities of sound-complexes; their different “massivities”;

the “density” or “porosity” of musical texture; we call one tone higher than the
other; voices of an orchestral piece seem to be “in front” while others are supposed
to operate as “background”; there is a “continuum” between tones, even different
types of continua—the chromatic scale and the legato; there are “jumps’ from one
tone to the other which do not “touch” the in-between-tones, (f.i. the “sext”) and
so on.48

For Anders, there are only “spatial acoustic objects or ‘events’ which, in themselves,
have space-properties or -structures.”49 Here, Anders seeks to distinguish a certain
kind of being-in, and absorbedness in music, cosmically, almost as if he were
anticipating a certain new-age movement, sometimes allied to the postmodern, a kind
of Hearts of Space effect, already in effect, thus Anders invokes the most romantic
musical “cliché’s”:

E.T. Hoffmann’s panegyric words about Beethoven, Heine’s description of Berlioz,

Wagner’s self-interpretations—these all seem to agree on this point: the limitless
space of music which they describe in pseudo-cosmological or -religious terms.50

The “limitless space” in question is meant to be absolute or all-encompassing: “Whoever

listens to this kind of music, is not supposed to hear the musical pieces as being at this
 
Being-in-Music 167

or that distinct point, but rather to feel ‘surrounded’ by them, to be ‘in music,’ to be
drowned by them.”51
In 1958, Anders wants to describe a particular stereophonic phenomenon, at that
time innovative enough, as he demonstrates a performative way to create the same,
and thus one may match this account, which can otherwise seem merely occasional,
with his earlier and later experimental and phenomenological analysis of radio. The
key is inbuilt into the nature of listening as opposed to the visual, phenomenologically
speaking. As Anders distinguishes the point towards his conclusion here, he reflects:

It is the fact that in the visible world we have the freedom of movement, while in
the acoustic world we are unfree: we are always led by the strings of the musical
object itself, for the object is a “process.” Facing a painting, we have the freedom
of looking first to the right, then to the left corner; faced with a musical com-
position, we are carried by the stream inherent in the music itself; we do not move
ourselves within the musical “object,” but we are being moved, led along by it.

Phenomenologically speaking, the acoustic stereoscope takes away no kind of

aesthetic freedom from the listener, as Anders remarks, quite by contrast, with the
“sensomotoric” deprivations inherent in using the child’s toy example of the optical
stereoscope (like a View-Master),52 with reference to which same Anders begins his
original essay, arguing that where the former is a toy and limited to amusement value,
in the case of the acoustic stereoscope different access is offered to the music for the
listening ear, and unlike the constraints on the eye imposed by the rightly named View-
Master, in the latter instance, when it comes to listening, we are not “deprived of such a
freedom by an acoustical gadget, since we lack this freedom anyhow.”53
To this extent, Anders is invaluable, quite as Ellensohn emphasizes in his own study
but also, and in this case as van Dijk had earlier suggested with respect to dynamic
efficacy or working effects—this is what I call the “Hallelujah Effect”—of the culture
industry in practice, both in the sense of critical theory and in its analysis of industrial
and commercial or corporate culture, but also for what Anders called the musical
situation, for the musicians, the composers, the listeners who are amateurs or who are
themselves musicians.
There is much more to say, but the conversation remains to be had, and for that
there must be interlocutors.
 10

Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance”:

From Anders’ “Radio Leash” to Tracing

“Ground Control to Major Tom”

The monolithic power of radio and television media—war of the worlds style, Voice of
America style—is seemingly long gone. But, were we aware of just how trackable and
how tracked we are,1 we would, perhaps, have cause to worry. We are as oblivious as we
are owing to what Adorno called standardized ubiquity: thus we are constantly, always
and already, connected via our phones and tablets, and today rather than listening
in Anders’ antiquated sense to the radio, automobile trips—when we can make them
in an era where Lockdowns come and go—are monitored and supervised not via an
Orwellian Big Brother but just the GPS lady (it is rarely a male voice). Once again, note
that the driver as well as the passengers in the car can make every effort to ensure she
speaks without interruption, even if/when she says the same thing over again: we don’t
want to miss a thing and so risk losing our virtual tether.
Not wanting to miss anything begins as Nietzsche already reflected in the
newspaper age of the nineteenth century, read, as Nietzsche observes, “watch in
hand.” Thus, Adorno referring to the doubling phenomenon, Anders noted in his
essay on radio via acoustic signals. Thus accommodated, Adorno writes in a chapter
he entitles “Musical Situation,” “No one will experience the phenomenon of the
continuation of one piece from different houses as a sort of ghost like apparition
any longer.”2 Now, it turns out that Anders’ text is more influential than may be
assumed if one only attends to Adorno’s focus on Heideggerian Dasein rather than,
as Anders writes, about broadcast musical phenomena. To be sure, part of the reason
may be that Adorno adopts some of Anders’ insights as his own. Thus, Adorno cites/
criticizes Anders at length while emphasizing that “it would be superficial to dismiss
[Anders’] assertions about the haunting character of radio.”3 Characteristic of Anders’
philosophy of technology is that technology is more than a mere extension of our
senses but of our desires. Importantly this conceals an appropriating pride and a
“shame,” as we have seen that Anders speaks of it. We know what the technology, the
tool, the gadget can do for us, and to get it in our power and at our service, whatever
the tech in question might be—information, “notifications,” digital inscriptions, we
pay, as Anders unlined this, for digital connectivity in our homes, and we dutifully
charge our similarly self-financed cell phones, and so on. Thus, our psychological
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 169

involvement with, and complicity with, our machines is part of the ongoing
millenarianism of our techno-cargo cult era.

Political Philosophies of Technologies

i. Left and Right Philosophers of Technology and 9/11

With Adorno and Anders, but also Herbert Marcuse and Lewis Mumford, along with
other less well-known names in the philosophy of technology, including technology
and political theory in the case of the Canadian Gilbert Germain and the US political
theorist Langdon Winner and John Street in the United Kingdom, and even van Dijk’s
undervalued study of Anders in his Anthropology in the Age of Technology, in addition
to Baudrillard and Virilio, Ellul, and Illich, many theorists of technology could be
located towards the so-called “left” rather in the sense in which Alasdair MacIntyre
could call Tracy Strong a “left Nietzschean,” if not always quite as “left,” say, as Marxist
theorists or, indeed, critical theorists of technology.4 By contrast, those who write on
Jünger and technology tend to be imagined on the right,5 and it is significant that
Heidegger would be what Karl Jaspers named a “limit” case between right and left.
Still for many scholars, the political turn in the philosophy of technology can
appear to be ambiguous. The turn to the political can indicate what is sometimes
described as public policy philosophy, one that would emphasize practical viability,
making common cause with corporate interests and government interests, including
the military.6
In the interim, a great deal has changed with respect to privacy as Anders is already
concerned with this in 1958 in terms of wiretapping and the like, pointing out that
surveillance devices as such “are totalitarian” (AM II, 216ff.). As Baudrillard analysed:
one sees only what is afforded via the eponymous window of one’s browser, and one
should assume that one is thereby already tracked and otherwise monitored, with
or without one’s consent, as internet privacy laws turn out to be ways of assigning
authority over one’s activities to government supervision and not otherwise. The “see
something, say something ethos” patent in the war on terror and expanded in the era
of Coronavirus implies treating oneself and one’s neighbour as a suspect, guilty until
proven otherwise. Thus the idea that one has a virus one might transmit to others
even if one is oneself not ill, means that one may treat the healthy as ill, and as a
precautionary means, maintain social distancing, mandate vaccines and the wearing
of masks, and lockdown or quarantine, etc.
The idea is to err on the safe side; false accusations and untoward medical side-effects
(including death) or psychological damage may be written off, ignored, as part of the
price for increased security. There are moral concerns, though these tend to be brushed
aside. If McCarthyism was vulnerable to the dramatic challenge, “At long last, have you
left no sense of decency?” it is not at all clear that the question could have any purchase
in today’s era of governmental overreach: lockdown, masks, and plans for compulsory
vaccination and bodily tracking/tracers.7 The threat of terrorism covered all bases, and
the threat of a fatal virus seems still more efficacious. Nor is one meant, and this would
170 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

have been the most challenging constraint for Anders, to ask provocative questions
of the kind raised in the wake not of Hiroshima or Chernobyl but 9/11, questions
concerning the technical details of vaporizing New York City skyscrapers.8 Like the
two towers themselves, the third building, the so-called “building 7,” collapsed into
itself, just as the twin towers did, in seconds: imploding into choking dust, the kind
of dust that persisted for weeks and months afterwards, along with the fires burning,
likewise for months, at the site of the former World Trade Center in lower Manhattan,
an ongoing contamination of air quality inspiring the business community on Wall
Street to commission independent science surveys of air safety as the government
immediately declared the air perfectly safe. The experience of those who lived in the
area contravened this on the empirical level, and people delighted to own downtown
lofts gave up this advantage often citing, if not perhaps to their buyers, air quality as
the reason why.

ii. Technology and War: On Maintaining the State of Exception

Rosa Brooks’ popular account, written from a lawyer’s (as opposed to a hacker’s)
perspective, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales
from the Pentagon,9 relates a very old story which somehow always needs retelling.
Technology development and proliferation, beginning with the popular computer and
thence to what becomes the internet, is related to military innovation from planes to
bombs to drones. If the scheme for a global library goes back to a Belgian librarian,
Paul Otlet,10 himself developing or elaborating interior architectural schemes for the
world on a Corbusier scale, namely as modelled, virtualized rotating manuscript
wheels dating from the Italian renaissance—as these would ultimately play into what
became the World Wide Web and the ideal of a “databank,”11 including the so-called
Memex, support for deployment on a national and international scale goes back to
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “As We May Think.”12
Media archaeological analysis is essential. Yet such an archaeology has to do more
than today’s conventionalities do, not only where Friedrich Kittler reminds us of the
complexity of the development of portable typewriters and the gender transformation
of clerks from male to female personnel in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,13 but
psychology in all its forms, as Kittler emphasizes citing Don Gordon’s Electronic
Warfare: Element of Strategy and Multiplier of Combat Power.14 As Kittler writes,
alluding to Clausewitz to do so:

War on the Mind is the title of an account of the psychological strategies hatched
by the Pentagon. It reports that the staffs planning the electronic war which
merely continues the Battle of the Atlantic, have already compiled a list of the
propitious and unpropitious days in other cultures. This enables the U.S. Airforce
“to time [its] bombing campaigns to coincide with unpropitious days, thus
‘confirming’ the forecasts of local gods.” As well, the voices of these gods have
been recorded on tape to be broadcast from helicopters “to keep tribes in their
villages.”15
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 171

The point is more material than one may suppose from the language of psychological
strategies. Hence, in The Hallelujah Effect, I cite Goodman’s Sonic Warfare16 just to
the extent to which, like Kittler, Goodman underscores this long-standing habit of
American military inventiveness. Mind control in this literal or material sense is more
straightforward than one may think. It goes back to Edward Bernays’ 1923 Crystallizing
Opinion.17 From the beginning (what Horkheimer and Adorno call the “culture
industry”), the calculated military deployment of this crystallization technique was
deployed by corporate culture.
Here the hermeneutico-historical suggestion is to consider not only the day before
yesterday but the day before that. Thus, I recommend Paul Forman’s discussion of
the complex cultural context of quantum mechanics in a historical and necessarily
hermeneutic (this would not be Forman’s word choice but it is indispensable for a
discussion for which perhaps only the late Patrick Aidan Heelan would have been an
ideal interlocutor: “Kausalität, Anschaulichkeit, and Individualität, or How Cultural
Values Prescribed the Character and the Lessons Ascribed to Quantum Mechanics”18
but maybe more obviously “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis
for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960”).19

iii. Hacking Hackers: Philosophy of Technology in the Wake of the

Political Turn
In 1992, John Street published Politics and Technology, this last not a book that
mentions either Anders or, indeed, Heidegger, but which does do what very few
studies of political theory do, namely to raise the question of technology and to ask
how “technical and political change might be linked.”20 How, today, may one link
technological change as we live it, largely via social media as much as anything, and
the political, given current events on a global level? If post-Brexit is one thing, post-
Covid-19 seems overstated: are we there yet? And how, if so, might we be sure? Such
a “pandemic” orchestrated at the level of the 2020/2021 pandemic seems inherently
repeatable, like a seasonal virus or a cold, and not something one might get through
or past. To this are to be added the questions of misogyny, of agism and disablism
and overall intolerance, all in the midst of unrest around the long-standing themes
associated with Black Lives Matter. How, especially given the current changes to police
and municipal and civic tensions, is this related to the question concerning “security”?
Does it matter that this is likely to be connected to a “medical” imperative insisting that
everyone in the world be “vaxxed,” new technology of the kind Virilio warned about, of
the kind Anders warned about, indeed even Heidegger warned about: turning human
beings into a kind of capital resource of themselves quite by way of the new vaccination
technology, including new biochemical ventures. Here the question is not a matter of
distrusting a certain technology but assuming that a health protocol that dates back
centuries, namely vaccination, in this case of an utterly new variety, itself with only
discrete efficacy, should be imposed on every man, woman, and child on the earth,
except for those who have the privilege that affords them the option, be it hidden or
overt, of opting out.
172 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Thus, some argue, naively as it can seem, that what is at stake is a matter of
getting funding and support for the philosophy of technology, whereby philosophers
of technology might somehow get a voice in policy.21 The field of the sociology
of knowledge may (or may not) offer help with this question. This is related to
larger problems in philosophy of science (but that would be another book), and
at the same time the philosophy of technology exemplifies the complexities that
haunt the political. It could be, as already suggested, all to be laid to Don Ihde’s
account—and perhaps there is more here than meets the eye, so to speak. As Patrick
Heelan pointed out with some wry humour, Ihde seemed to be especially gifted in
taking up thoughts from others, be it Husserl or Heidegger or Heelan, and express
them accessibly and in the process, as part of the process, obscuring the original
constellation.22 Instantiating this point, one of the more creative ventures of Ihde’s
career was Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound,23 and Ihde had not yet
talked himself into what would be the key to his own success as a name figure in his
philosophical niche, eked out of the closing of continental philosophy on behalf of
mainstream analytic philosophy.24
It is relevant in a context of Gadamerian Wirkungsgeschichte that certain texts
constitute a common reference point, and thus that it makes a difference that a
translation of Anders’ 1956 book on the antiquatedness/outdatedness of human beings
would be “vetoed” as Don Ihde would confirm. Preventing an English version of
Anders was unfortunate but it is the resultant gap, the lack of Wirkungsgeschichte, that
is ultimately decisive and cannot be corrected. Silenced as book of its era, Anders’ 1956
study of the “antiquatedness” of the human being was addressed to its times, even more
radical than Marcuse’s later One-Dimensional Man,25 just as Anders’ second volume
published in 1980 addressed the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the fact that Anders was not
read in English (quite as opposed to the French and German traditions) is a historical
detail that also renders Anders’ voice more of a hermeneutic challenge than it should
be. It is true, quite in accord with Ihde’s assessment, that Anders is “negative.”
But the negativity is no personal predilection of Anders, no more than it was in
the case of Jacques Ellul, similarly dismissed by many of his contemporary readers
in philosophy of technology as too negative.26 In this case, the caution goes back to
Greco-Syrian Antiquity. Thus, in the second, 1980 volume of his The Antiquatedness
of Humanity, thematizing the “destruction of life in the age of the third industrial
revolution,” Anders reclaims Lucian’s all-too-human insight concerning the
temptations of techno-sorcery. Now Lucian, important for Nietzsche, patent perhaps
in his epithet, as the celebrated “lover of lies,”27 and no less for David Hume and
Erasmus and Jonathan Swift, also served as the original source for Goethe’s 1779, Der
Zauberlehrling, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”(Figure 9)28
Old as the cautionary tale may be, no amount of repetition of this same ancient point
would seem to permit insight much less “political change,” to quote Street’s formula.
And what Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice did with his water and mops, we are currently
doing with geoengineering the sun, flooding the atmosphere with particulate matter
of all kinds, acknowledged and unacknowledged for the sake of weather and climate
control, along with depth charges in the ocean, killing species, especially cetacean life,
at rates that have already led and will continue to lead to mass extinctions. The lesson
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 173

Figure 9 Ferdinand Barth (1842–92), Der Zauberlehrling (1797). Goethe’s Werke, 1882, Ink
drawing. Wikicommons. Public domain.

from Apuleius and Lucian to Goethe and Anders is that we human beings will not stop
until, having set incorrigible disaster in motion, we cannot continue.
Note here what should be a massive brake on the historical and current
technopolitical situation, namely that we human beings consistently fail to anticipate
the negative. Thus Robert K. Merton sought to give a sociological reflection on the
matter, and he does this subtly via an inversion (Jacques Lacan would tell us why this
seems self-occluding) of Goethe’s formula: “Die Kraft, die stets das Güte will und stets
das Böse schafft” [That power that constantly wills the good and ever fashions evil].29
In philosophy, Peter Singer can give utilitarian reasons why this is so, supposing that
Lucian and Goethe and Anders are not your conceptual cup of tea, such that evil seems
to be wreaked, even when the negatives of the practice are tragedy-of-the-commons-
simplistically obvious. Oblivious to danger, we frack, we burn forests in Indonesia,
Africa, and South America for the sake of agro-commerce, spray poison pesticides,
devise 5G systems with measurably deadly effects at the cellular level, and run pipelines,
with 100 percent failure guaranteed somewhere along the line, at repeated loci (we just
underreport the effects, as Anders writes in Gewalt, Ja oder Nein?,30 a point to which
we return later in the current text), as if what none of us see, cannot hurt us; thus, we
diffused rather than plugged the Deepwater Horizon gulf oil leak, now repeated July
2021 in a ocean fire geyser, counting on, as polluters always count on, the sheer size
of the ocean and the general absence of witnesses at the bottom of the sea, to let the
news of the disaster fade. By contrast, the advantage of programming constant media
174 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

access shapes consumer belief. For this reason, beyond “postphenomenology,” more
dangerously “colonial” power threats are to be countenanced.31

Postphenomenology, Post Critique: From Surveillance to

Überveillance
Already in 1958, surveillance was, for Anders, well advanced. In the title of the same
chapter included in his 1980 collection, Anders, who was gifted at collimating his
titles like so many aphorisms, ponders The Antiquatedness of Privacy. The decades
that have since transpired seem not to have made a decisive difference, as Google and
Amazon, Twitter and Facebook make more than patent: “Not only is it the case that
‘the world is delivered to your home,’ but also” (AM II, 210)—and we can think of the
concerns raised and immediately forgotten concerning “smart” appliances but which
of course dominate the current day along with the surveillance capacities built into
smartphones, tablets, television monitors, quite in addition to Siri and Alexa, such that
Anders’ parallel today lacks any kind of shock value—“Your home is delivered over
to the world” (AM II, 210). Anders refers to his earlier essay on the world, complete
with his appropriation and extension of Heidegger’s terminology of being-in-the-
world, herewith simultaneously taking over Husserl’s notion of world for his own
purposes, writing of “phenomenon” and “matrix” but Anders also explicitly alludes
to Arendt’s totalitarianism. The already-widespread phenomenon of devices used
for surveillance [Abhör-Apparate] are for Anders from inception, as noted earlier,
explicitly “totalitarian” (AM II, 216). At issue is not only a matter of the determination
and restriction of cultural and social possibilities but control. Thus, with respect to
the vaunted neutrality of technology, “inventions are never merely technical inventions”
(AM II, 216). That is to say: “every device is already its application” (AM II, 217).32
At issue is nothing less than world control, “planetary” in the language of the day,
global standardization and manipulation. Anders touches issues that we have in a
sense neutralized by speaking of issues of “privacy.” Anders thus emphasizes:

“Integral presumption” and “integral shamelessness” is the corrective means

requisite for the state aspiring to be totalitarian to realize its ideal of perfected
integrity. (AM II, 220)

This is to be understood with reference to totalitarianism properly conceived,

“Whenever totalitarianism is at stake,” Anders writes, “the individual is the first
‘occupied territory’” (AM II, 220). To this extent, as apt for the current moment as at
the time of Anders’ writing (just to consider as he surely considered the then-wars
in Indochina), “Expansionism begins at home” (AM II, 220). But the means to this
end is already at hand, consummately so, via surveillance technologies. There is, for
Anders, no technology that one could possibly imagine that would produce both the
brazen obtrusiveness of the totalitarian state and the shamelessness of the individual
under surveillance—and here Anders goes beyond Foucault’s reflections on the
panopticon, with a clarity that only Virilio might have shared—than surveillance
technology as such. As Anders observes, as if he had a direct connection with the
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 175

current day, “Where surveillance devices are used as a matter of course, the main
prerequisite for totalitarianism is created; and thereby totalitarianism itself ” (AM
II, 221).
As “example,” Anders reports on the installation, for legal purposes, of such
surveillance devices in the United States itself of no less than 1,000 cases in buildings
limited to Los Angeles between 1957 and 1958 (AM II, 221), noting to be sure that
such details are more public in the case of the United States “than in other countries.”
Adding as his second example, from 1952, taken from the notes of the Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas that no less than “58,000” persons were then under
surveillance (AM II, 221). At issue at the time were debates concerning tapping or
bugging telephones, debates including, as Anders writes, issues of privacy and, as
always, John Locke seems to be the prophet here, issues of personal ownership of
personal articulation, in this case the words spoken on the telephone as property of
the one who “owns” the telephone (AM II, 221). One may, if one cares to do so in
the context of material or object or media archaeology, reflect on the tendency of
telephone and cable and internet providers to “rent” the instruments for a monthly fee
and a certain or patent legal advantage, but perhaps the issue we now call content may
be more relevant. Facebook owns all one’s posts and photos, for legal purposes, so to
speak, likewise other social media platforms, and if we do not object, it is because we
are, by now, well used to it.

Überveillance Überall
One of the points made in the 2013 edited collection, Uberveillance and the Social
Implications of Microchip Implants is that surveillance, in order to work as such, must
be obvious to those surveilled.33 This is the morphological excellence of Bentham’s
Panopticon. The effect is pure Foucault, discipline and punish: and we do submit—no
tickee, no laundry—No Scan/No Vax/No Fly.
In an essay from 1966, On the Antiquatedness of Evil, Anders reflects that “technology
obeys too well” (AM II, 396f). Thus, for the sake of air travel, a hectic affair as it is,
unless we are privileged enough to walk through a mere metal detector, we expose
ourselves to either backscatter technology airport scanning devices or millimetre-wave
technology units.34 To be sure, this pales in the face of both the reduction of personal
air travel owing to government restrictions, PCR testing requirements, masking and
vaccine mandates, and the current deployment of 5G/6G, etc.
What motivated Anders with respect to post-1945 radiation in Japan and the
failures associated with nuclear reactors like Chernobyl is invisibility over time, the
same reflections set into the centre of first book in his Beckett chapter, “Being Without
Time.” In addition to this, the chronic effects of radiation as indeed of vaccines,
especially the current ‘experimental’ variety, as these are called, do not make an
appearance (this is part of the point of Anders’ reflection) until quite far down the
road. Compounding matters, health effects vary from person to person, that is, one
person’s skin differs in absorption, and one’s person’s blood plasma likewise differs in
penetration and response, meaning that for some people it is much worse.
176 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

The Skies Down to Earth: Being Without Time

Anders’ pop concern with Honolulu crooners regaling one in the wilderness, the
scoping involved in airport security not to mention GPS and Facebook and Twitter
tracking etc., may be variously compared with Adorno’s reflections as the “stars down
to earth” (again to refer to his Minima Moralia) on technological determinism. At
stake is a reflection on the consequences of having the things and capacities we have
(and know that we have, which is one of the key reasons that despite its charms, the
idea of a technological sabbath does not work as we also know exactly how long it
will be until we can be online again), and note the claim, as Anders’ point here may
help to illuminate some aspects of Adorno’s related arguments, again, for Anders: “the
phonograph and radio have robbed us of live music performed in our homes” (PM, 18).
And, ignoring the factive accuracy of Anders’ remark, as for the most part: we
do not have “live music performed in our homes,” it’s easy to raise the idealizing
objection: Well, we could. If Adorno can argue that one can scarcely grasp the point
of talking about “ghosts” as Anders does, the reference is “outdated,” “antiquated” in a
conventional sense. But this is not quite correct, and in Anders’ centre chapter, “Being
Without Time” (AM I, 213f), he makes it clear using Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,”
tacking through Heidegger to do so, as he says, all animosity temporarily reserved, at
issue there in a complicated inversion of negative theology where once “was merely the
absence of attributes that was being used to define God, here,” and there is an uncanny
parallel with the dogma of asymptomatic transmission in the era of Coronavirus:

God’s absence itself is made into a proof of his being. That this is true of Rilke
and Kafka is undeniable; likewise that Heidegger’s dictum which he borrows from
Hölderlin—“where danger is growing, rescue is growing, too”—belongs to the
same type of “proof ex absentia.”35

Anders’ reflections on Beckett’s Godot (on waiting) have acquired a greater plausibility
in 2020 than they could ever have had in 1956. Extended under Lockdown, it has
become plain that we understand all too well what Anders means by “Being without
Time,” as he explains that “time appears to be standing still and becomes in analogy
to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity’) a ‘bad eternity.’”36 The ghosting language is a matter of a
pairing, an echoing, a double-effect, and if one might wish to argue that Kittler heard
this doubling, Adorno, despite his musical and theatrical and literary sophistication in
reading Anders’ “radio ghosts,” did not.
For Anders, we ourselves, we modern, antiquated, outmoded, “leftover” human
beings represent, or mirror the pair on Beckett’s stage. Thus, we are all of us not only
‘sons of Eichmann,’ but Estragon/Vladimir. I need to quote here at length, Anders
reading Beckett in a chapter on privacy and security concerns, on the internet, on life
lived on the terms of, including lockdown orders taken via, social media and so on:

The pitiful struggle they are waging to keep up the semblance of action is probably
so impressive only because it mirrors our own fate, that of modern mass man.
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 177

Since, through the mechanization of labour, the worker is deprived of the chance
to recognize what he is doing, and of seeing the objectives of his work, his working
too has become something like a sham activity. Real work and the most absurd
pseudo work differ in no way, neither structurally nor psychologically. On the
other hand, by this kind of work, man has become so thoroughly unbalanced
that he now feels the urge to restore his equilibrium during his leisure time by
engaging in substitute activities and hobbies, and by inventing pseudo-objectives
with which he can identify himself and which he actually wishes to reach: thus it
is precisely during his leisure time and while playing that he seems to be doing real
work—for instance by resuming obsolete forms of production such as cultivating
his balcony garden or do-it-yourself carpentering, etc.37

This is Anders on Beckett and today this is life on social media, checking Facebook,
Twitter, email, and doing this repeatedly, again and again, partly for its own sake, partly
idly or to pass the time. Thus, Anders can seem to be anticipating today’s social media
and “being-on-line,” when he writes that the mass human being [mass-man], has today
“been deprived so completely of his initiative and of his ability to shape his leisure time
himself that he now depends upon the ceaselessly running conveyor belt of radio and
television to make time pass.”38
It is in this sense that we must understand the resonance of Anders’ “ghosts” as he
speaks of these in 1930 to discuss a certain phenomenology of musical experience,
hearing a broadcast from discrete space to discrete space, recharged, by different
radios playing in different loci (like a cover, avant la lettre, of an imaginary Nono
performance), as the encounter with such spectres does not “haunt” the current world
as much as it is the ongoing and presupposed backdrop of the supposedly “connected”
lives we live today.

The inverted meaning of the scene in which Estragon plays “shoe off, shoe on”
reads: “Our playing of games is a shoe off, shoe on, too, a ghostly activity meant
only to produce the false appearance of activity.” And, in the last analysis: “Our
real shoe on, shoe off—that is: our everyday existence—is nothing but a playing of
games, downlike without real consequences, springing solely from the vain hope
that it will make time pass.” And: “We are their brothers—only that the two clowns
know that they are playing, while we do not.” Thus it is not they but we who are the
actors in the farce. And this is the triumph of Beckett’s inversion.39

Anders’ point in his reading of Beckett depends upon standardization, the same
standardization Adorno will invoke, standardizing what we count as play and leisure
time. His point then is that the bathos of Vladimir/Estragon, two “metaphysical
clowns” as he characterizes them, metaphysically incapable as they are of distinguishing
“between being and non-being,”40 is quite that

they do not possess yet, as we do, recognized and stereotyped forms of leisure
pastimes, neither sport nor Mozart Sonatas, and are, therefore, forced to improvise
and invent their games on the spot, to take activities from the vast store of everyday
178 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

actions and transform them into play in order to pass the time. In those situations
in which we, the more fortunate ones, play football and, once we have finished, can
start all over again, Estragon plays the da capo game “shoe off, shoe on”; and not in
order to exhibit himself as a fool, but to exhibit us as fools.41

Time is at issue for both Anders and Adorno, both of whom reflect on the musical
“situation,” both of whom write about “listening to” music, both of whom write about
radio, quite in the context of what Adorno names “Space Ubiquity.”42 For both Adorno
and Anders, there is a difference between “live” music and radio music, and Adorno
critically insists, with himself as clear referent—this is the same Adorno, let us not
forget, who could ask his music sociology students on the first day of class to write the
Siegfried motif on the blackboard—that

A man with musically trained ears, who is walking along outside a restaurant and
hearing music inside, will almost always be able to determine whether this music is
really being played in the restaurant or if it is being transmitted by radio.43

At once Adorno observes, in no small part because just these elements are the concern
of his radio theory, that “Of course, this partly depends on the specific modifications of
sound which any music undergoes by radio.”44
Taking over Anders’ “ghostly” language, Adorno adds that “radio music always
seems to be an echo of music coming from a distant place.”45 The language is repeated
to be sure in Kittler’s more uncanny discussions, which Kittler, rather in the spirit of
Anders, also reads in connection with Goethe.46 The contrast between the radio “voice”
and indeed recorded sound as such, as Adorno continues to analyse in his own writing,
and the performative possibility, the lived world possibility of lived live music, as it
were, is, on Anders’ phenomenological and sociological reflection, displaced from the
home by radio and recorded forms: this today is YouTube, and so on.
Note that as already suggested earlier, the issue is not that “we” mourn the absence of
“live music” in the home, as if most of us might simply organize a string quartet in our
spare time, although we may fancy that we could, with only homes of high conspicuous
consumption (or prestige-signalling) feature pianos much less cellos and so on (this is
not the same as digital keyboards or guitars).47 Thus, music history and music sociology
detail how the place of the piano in the home is given over to the phonograph, and,
eventually, this is a matter of living room staging, to the television set.48
Anders explains the interior architectural evolution of the living room as an
evolution, sociologically speaking, which would appear to depend upon the elimination
of the formerly “massive table in the center of the living room” (PM, 17). Anders’ point
echoes the earlier-noted negativity:

the television set, a piece of furniture whose social symbolism and persuasive
power can measure against those of the former table. This does not mean, however,
that the television set has become the family center; on the contrary, what the set
embodies is rather the decentralization of the family, its ex-centricity: it is, so to
speak, the negative family table. (PM, 17)
 
Transistor Radios and Media “Überveillance” 179

Today, we can wonder what Anders is talking about—this is already Adorno’s tactic as
we have seen. These days, we arrange via a variety of streaming services to have music
with us anywhere we like, screwed into our ears, synchronizing our thoughts on nearly
any occasion, all on demand, on auto play.
Anders’ point here is the point George Orwell articulates in his dystopian novel:
“Intimate conversation is eliminated in advance” (PM, 17). Thus, earlier we noted that
people driving to destinations they know can elect to listen to GPS guidance, even
when someone else is in the car with them, quite as opposed to speaking with one
another. Thus, we transform ourselves of ourselves into passive, rather than active,
listeners.
Anders offers another description of the same phenomenon in connection with
the über- or super-veillence of surveillance so very ubiquitous today, especially post-
Covid, that most were unmoved by the report that one’s “smart” televisions are smart
by virtue of the capacity to listen in to conversation, the ubiquitous phenomenon of
tapping or recording phone conversations,49 now “unleashed” from or “untethered” to
the phone, to use a term Anders was fond of employing. In the interim, Facebook and
other apps can opt to hear one’s conversations as they like—and Siri does like—and so
we are prompted to purchase this or that, with an ad for whatever we might have been
talking about.50
As audiences, “online” as we live our lives, we are caught in the ghostly phantom of
what Anders called “sham reality.”51 Thus, we relate to the world as “spectacle” as Guy
Debord contended in the 1960s, or via what Illich in the 1970s and 1980s named the
“Age of the Show.” And like Adorno, Anders emphasized the transformed experience
and the space–time of the same for the lifeworld of the human being.
Hence, in a section entitled “The return of the soloists,” reflecting in 1961 on the
general “Obsolescence” or outdatedness or antique convention that is to speak of the
“masses,” Anders offers a phenomenological sociological analysis whereby what is
abolished is the external world, namely the community: the public world. At the same
time, as in the case of Nietzsche’s twilight reflection How the True World at Last Became
a Fable, what is lost is the private world.
In place of “presence,” there is self-absorption and some part of the surround sound,
and the headphone-driven music experience is part of this. Thus, these days we can
be hard-pressed to imagine Anders’ American drugstore diner jukebox experience.
Indeed, the proximity of cultural programming, given iPhones and headphones or
earphones along with the culture of surveillance capitalism, has already intensified,
and the current and ongoing “pandemic” crisis is driven by nothing less. The issue
concerning music in public spaces, as this is dramatized by the Orwellian feature of the
loudspeaker, is that the agent ambulating in public can still retain a sense of freedom
and choice, programming his or her own soundtrack. But this also means as Anders
analysed this issue that the music one chooses to play publicly tends to be the music
one plays privately: “The customers behave in publico as they do at home” (AM II, 84).
Today, social disattention to the sensibilities of those around one is common. But
at the time, as Anders wrote this in the 1960s, the American habit of playing the music
of one’s choice at one’s table at a drugstore fountain shocked Anders because by simply
sitting at the next booth, he was a victim of his neighbour’s taste. To this extent, the
180 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

“privacy or isolation of the receiver disguises the mass character of the commodity and
the mass character of its transmission” (AM II, 80).
We similarly tune others out when we attend to our cell phones in family gatherings,
office meetings, and so on. This habitus made the recent lockdown less of a shock for
many who simply continued this focus in private, without practising it in the open
world, on public transportation, in public places, and so on. And in almost each
case, individuals report a self-sufficiency they take, for some reason, to be unique to
themselves. The games we play, the music we listen to, permit us to participate, on our
own terms, in this ‘mass character’ as Anders uses the terms.
Frighteningly, given the omnipresence of Zoom instruction, the same constraints
apply as the very possibility of online learning requires that one have access to zoom
and other platforms, accessed at a distance:

each of us is supplied personally not only with our de-individualization and our form
of mass existence, but also, at the same time, with the illusion of privacy (insofar as
it is generally a question of a dual conditioning). (AM II, 81)

Thus, something so neutral, benign, as the experience of hearing the music one
likes, quite when one likes, becomes, as both Anders and Adorno argued, a means of
de-individualization. Given the ubiquity of surveillance, part of the illusion of privacy,
Anders is uncompromising about the consequences for what is increasingly outdated
or antiquated in our human condition. And who would want to be out of place, beyond
the timeliness of the current mode of human being, that is, Heideggerian Dasein as
Anders understood this more concretely as he claimed than Heidegger himself, that
is, in-the-world? Perhaps it is Anders who can best help us negotiate modern social
media and what it does to our social being in the world as one uniquely placed to think
about technology in its most intimate expression and not less in terms of its capacity
to change the world and both directly and indirectly, as Anders underscores as well, to
destroy the world.
 11

Pop Music (and Jazz), and Covers (and Copies)

Transitioning: From Anders’ Radio

“Leash” to Cohen’s Hallelujah

Some accounts describe Anders as an essayist or “journalist,” writing as he did on the

Paris music scene as on Vietnam and Hiroshima as on American pop music in the 1950s
and 1960s. The description is misleading, and Anders always assumed the authority of
the professional academic, reflecting not less a performative perspective on musical
sociology (this is the theme of what would have been his Habilitation thesis, becalmed
as it was, among other things, by its timing, coincident with the Nazi regime).
Anders’ terminology (as we have seen that this is drawn from Heidegger, and also
appears in Adorno) of Zuhören corresponds in Anders’ usage to a specific musical
attunement, listening to. Anders is thus not describing careful attention: listening
very hard or very carefully. Instead, at stake for Anders is a phenomenology and thus
epistemic. And, as Gadamer observes, “To understand something, I must be able to
identify it.”1 Adorno makes a similar claim, compounded with reference to music and
to what is specified in context, and thereby to what may count as musical surprise and
as variable:

You have to know exactly if something sounds and only to a certain extent how it
sounds. This leaves room for surprises, those that are desired as well as those that
require correction: what made its precocious appearance as imprévue in Berlioz
is a surprise not only for the listener but objectively as well, and yet the ear can
anticipate it.2

For Anders, the informed musician hears or “is in-the-music” differently quite by
comparison with someone lacking a musical formation. At issue is a matter of being-in.
To illustrate the phenomenology of such “listening-to,” Anders uses a classical
phenomenological tactic, that of free variation, listening, as he says, to “anything
at all” from Debussy, “be it the few tacts of the ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’-Overture,
one of the ‘Études’ or some third thing” (MS 14). At issue is a separate question
regarding musical experience in a social context. The point, at least on the surface,
simply owing to its ubiquity, may be compared with Cohen’s Hallelujah—which
was at the end of Cohen’s life so very everywhere that even Cohen jokingly called
182 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

for a “moratorium.” The ubiquity of pop music permits us to understand Anders’

denunciation of a certain song maintaining, as Anders writes in 1958, that “love is
only in Honolulu.”3 For Anders:

The thing here is that this music was inescapable for hours. Why this agitated me,
remained incomprehensible to my companions. For them, this circumstance was
not only not unpleasant but explicitly delightful. (AM II, 241)

Anders, expert as he was on the phenomenology of “listening to,” has no trouble

understanding the reasons why, and he extends the point to the contemporary
American scene, hiking Mount Washington in the company of a transistor radio:

Patently, they enjoyed a certain feeling of security, as long as they could still hear
the music transmission and find themselves “in” it: the feeling of still being “there”
[“da”], down below. Like pilots, who like maintaining reliable contact with their
base. They had not yet gone out of range. The acoustic leash, which connected
them to the valley, had not yet been broken. (AM II, 241)

Like Adorno, Anders has little patience with the words of the song, which he, like
Adorno, also cannot help hearing (like an Anglophone listening to the words Je vais,
je vais et je viens, written in 1967 by Serge Gainsborough for Brigitte Bardot and
illustrating the substance of the song, recorded in 1969 with Jane Birkin, Je t’aime… moi
non plus, or Herbert Grönemeyer’s 1984 pop song, Männer) the assertion “that love is
only in Honolulu” (AM II, 241). The problem as suggested in the previous chapter
was what Adorno calls ubiquity. Thus, for Anders, master of mobile phenomenological
variation in space and over time,4 the music in question “was inescapable for hours.”
Elsewhere, I offer a discussion of the experience of playing radio in the car and the
perception, the hearing of proximity and range as we enter and leave the range of
certain radio stations: to this extent, very phenomenologically speaking, as Anders
describes the attention of acoustic intentionality, we listen-to not merely the what of
what we are hearing on the radio but the thatness of radio contact, weak or strong.
We don’t need the car example; anyone who finds themselves in an area with weak
mobile smartphone reception will know exactly what is meant as will someone seeking
a WiFi/WLAN connection.
If Anders’ Honolulu song has been (perhaps rightly) forgotten, Honolulu or
Hawaii more generally, were popular references in the 1950s5—this was and this is no
coincidence, and we will come back to this a bit later, in the setting and the subject of
Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii, and his cover of Le Plaisir d’Amour [Fools Rush In].
Anders’ focus is on the loss of privacy (note again a reference to Arendt), and we
today associate this with the omnipresence of social media, as Anders seems already
to be pointing to this, as indeed and explicitly he was. Thus, and just as Anders begins
his 1930–1 “Philosophical Investigations Concerning Musical Situations,” with Saint
Augustine’s reflections on “music as tentatio” in his Confessions, (MS, 14), he reprises
the seductive claim on the working power of technological reproducibility in the case
of the work of art and social culture:
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 183

As everyone knows, Saint Augustine portrayed the “memoria” that reproduces

the past, recollection, as the vehicle for the discovery of sins, of conscience
and repentance. Today, this reproduction is unnecessary; in its place a device
of reproduction has been installed that transforms the past into something
reproducible and present at every moment, into something that properly does
not belong to the past. The peccavi of the conscience, has become the pecco of the
magnetophone tape play back. (AM II, 232m, boldface in the original)

We are familiar with this in its different adumbrations through Benjamin and of course
Adorno.
In my own earlier hermeneutic and phenomenological reflections on Cohen’s
Hallelujah, the point, as I sought to underline this, was attuned to what Anders
describes as “something reproducible and present at every moment,” that is, what
Adorno named ubiquity in the case of music, and which today may be arraigned under
the rubric of what we call the “cover” and therewith, the culture of remix, replay. As
Anders writes, “Human sociality is drilled into unilaterality” (AM II, 253).

Death and Taxes

For whatever complex actuarial or statistical or cosmological reasons, 2016 marked
a death boom, especially of the famous, of actors, artists, musicians. The harvest of
the dead included Alan Rickman6 and Leonard Cohen7 and the deaths also included
David Bowie, Prince, and so on. In the entertainment industry, as the Frankfurt School
has already observed, the death of the actor provides Hollywood with yet another
opportunity to use star capital for the sake of the same industry. And we do the same
when we tweet songs thereby including ourselves in the process, as Anders reflects,
“as producers also always already the ‘products of our own products’” (AM II, 249).
At issue is dominion even in matters of taste. The focus of the culture industry, fitting
for an industry, is the control of taste and thereby of culture itself. What is crucial is
that by the same token we are “robbed of experience and the capacity to take a position”
(AM, 251)8 or to have an opinion of our own. Here Anders remains quite close to
Heidegger’s denunciation of the “they” that set up and determined what one believes,
feels, or holds as true. Everyone is not only a consumer but a producer/advertiser/
promoter of themselves, but, even more importantly, there is no place where this new
world does not extend, where the individual can, as it were, opt out. One “has to be” a
cheerful participant (AM II, 427).9
To confirm Adorno’s culinary complaint, not dissimilar as we have seen to the
eating/consuming language Anders employs, regarding the commodification of
music, the “Hallelujah Effect” turns out not to be a result of singing Hallelujah, no
matter how stunningly sung. The effect, phenomenologically speaking, is one that
works retrospectively, this backwards working dimensionality is the imaginary
causality (and for Nietzsche, as for David Hume, all perceived causality is imaginary)
that Nietzsche in Götzen-Dammerung, in two sections of Die vier grossen Irrthümer
(looking at the subject’s capacity to will his own thoughts, the very transcendental
184 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

unity of apperception, but not less the same subject’s apprehension of the causality
of external events) attributed to a certain Nachträglichkeit, whereby and via such
backwards working of our awareness of causality is revealed as a seemingly reverse
temporalization.
What we do in dream time we do, for Nietzsche, in our waking hours. Modern
marketing psychologists call it branding or priming, a phenomenon Freud’s nephew,
Edward Bernays, deployed to great effect, and it is still with us in commercials and not
less in politics on the world stage, where, to be sure, it always was: Adorno named it
“programming,” which is what we still call it. Thus, the Hallelujah Effect, the “Honolulu
effect,” is a matter of what we today call triggers. These triggers are both acoustic
and visual: one needs the music video, and one needs repetition. The contemporary
example of ASMR recordings is a recent exemplification of this phenomenon. The
effect is self-induced somnolence, self-manufactured, subscribers become ‘patrons’
of producers, directly and this is very different from YouTube influencers (though of
course these can sometimes overlap or coincide).

Pop as Contemporary Music: Fortunes and Futures

Even the pop of yesteryear, even pop music before one’s own time, including, for
example, Anders’ extended reference to his “fresh-air mountain advertisement for
Honolulu” (AM II, 245), our parent’s pop music, or, worse, our grandparent’s pop
music, the musicologist’s version of Tin Pan Alley included, can be heard, and this
is part of the point Anders seeks to make concerning listening-to, as the music of a
then-contemporary, a then-when. If you are German, you can listen to the Comedian
Harmonists for this; if you are anyone else, you can listen to Kurt Weill; and if you are
American, perhaps, you can listen to Liza Minelli, via Bob Fosse’s 1972 film, Cabaret.
Thus, one could speak of Elvis, the king “forever” as some still say, and this is true of
Bob Dylan as well as of Frankie Laine,10 of Lesley Gore, she of various teen ressentiment-
angst pop songs, It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To, She’s a Fool, Judy’s Turn to Cry
(all related themes, all from 1963), and You Don’t Own Me (1964, covered by Bette
Midler, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn in the 1996 film First Wives Club), and so on.
Note that the Elvis Presley reference dates from the mid-1950s, and Lesley Gore
the early 1960s: Ought one not mention Beyoncé or Adele or, indeed, someone much
newer? This is a limitation of any instantiation or example. But pop music, like bubble
gum, illustrates “speculation,” fancying and favouring, disinterested interest, with or
without the promise of a return, another name for interest, across a range of context
and contexts, experience and recognition, the uses and disadvantages, the very real
Nachtheile, of history for life.
What is at issue for Anders, as he writes about radio, portable and otherwise, and
about television, and juke boxes, but also canned music playing in the background
in restaurants but also projected into the sidewalk to lure customers, is transmission.
This includes streaming, engineering, digital mediatization, and this is the essence
of modern technology that is, as Heidegger says, nothing technological.11 Anders, as
we have seen, has a conspicuously different take on this, and thus he foregrounds
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 185

the nothing in Heidegger’s formulaic word on technology. For Anders, and contra
Heidegger’s own claim for the distinction of his philosophy from life philosophies,
be they Bergson’s from whom Anders points out, Heidegger is at pains to distinguish
himself or Jaspers or, especially, Sartre, Heidegger offers a life philosophy inimical to
life. The definition is steeped in Nietzsche’s own terminology, and Anders concludes
by quoting Nietzsche directly indirectly, with just a closing riff on Ernst Lubitsch/Jack
Benny:

rather the result of the “Self ’s” will to power, of its omnivorous urge to appropriate
everything. Nietzsche’s words: “If there were a God, how could I bear not to be
God?” seem to be transformed into “If there is History, how could I bear not to be
History?” The desperate motto of all active desperados, “all or nothing,” changed
under the hands of the existential one into an “all and nothing,” which makes it
well understandable that the book that continues his work is not entitled To be or
not to be, but Etre et Néant.12

Here it may also be worth raising the question of the non-aesthetics that Nietzsche
claims as his own, beginning with his first book, first sentence no less, name that tune,
where Nietzsche talks about die aesthetische Wissenschaft, “the science of aesthetics,”
and where he begins to analyse the art of the artist, a concern he will maintain for the
rest of his life.
But by framing the question of the artist (as opposed to aesthetics, as opposed to
the spectator), one stumbles into Nietzsche’s gender issue: it is not for him a question.
For Nietzsche distinguishes aesthetics as such as an art for spectators not only as an
art before witnesses, calculatedly dedicated to performance, the art of the Hallelujah
Effect where the subjectivity of the aesthetic subject, qua spectator, plays with and as
the effect in effect: all taste, good or bad, because all judgement, qua judgement, this is
another spin on ressentiment, is feminine, receptive, reactive. By contrast, for Nietzsche,
“an art for artists only” is not merely monological, as he says, that is, unconcerned with
either spectators or effects, but expressly, explicitly masculine.
In The Hallelujah Effect, I look at male and female desire, pointing out that the one
remaining prohibition even after de Beauvoir and Irigaray, a permanently aesthetic
Bilderverbot remains. This, and debate on race and gender, only underscores this is a
ban on representations of the male as object (of desire) for a female subject (of desire).
Thus, and this is why in Judy Collin’s 2015 cover of Cohen’s Hallelujah, featured on
her album Strangers Again, Collins did not opt to sing the line, Her beauty and the
moonlight overthrew ya, but gave the verse to the male singer, Bhi Bhiman; she tied you
to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair, and from your lips she
drew the Hallelujah.
One may not, qua female subject, desire or objectify which is to be sure worse,
just to the extent that judgement is involved, the male object. It is for this reason that
Cohen can sing, not only because this is the song of a king, a priest, singing to his
god, It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah. Every word
is a word of prayer but, and this is not a little problematic, only for the male. The
female, the woman, both Anders and Adorno will speak of the “girl”—using English—
186 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

so addressed and so objectified in this context is already and always excluded: But you
don’t really care for music do ya?13 Anything that might begin to look like female desire
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch, is dismissed out of hand: our love is not a victory
march, It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.
Key to the Hallelujah Effect is that in his own first book on tragedy, Nietzsche in
fact focuses less on Wagner than we are ‘primed’ to suppose (Wagner thought so, the
original review by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, self-published, said so, and
in translation Walter Kaufmann repeated the claim to which ever since Anglophone
scholars march in lockstep) but indeed the relative absence of Wagner. Thus although
Nietzsche’s first book is dedicated with a preface to Wagner, naming him an advance
warrior (Vorkämpfer)—this is the kind of praise that is intended to dismiss a predecessor
as a “pioneer”—Nietzsche’s first section reads in, some detail, Beethoven’s Schiller
chorus, a reading subsequently further thematized in the book’s succeeding sections,
so much so that Nietzsche concludes with an elaboration of this spirit of reconciliation
in Beethoven’s ninth, invoking the transfigured time space of

a region in whose joyous chords dissonance as well as the terrible image of the
world fade away charmingly; both play with the sting of displeasure [Stachel des
Unlusts]. (GT §25)

Nietzsche takes the reference further if this confounds most who rarely attend to this
focus as he suggests that we then best understand tragedy, imagining “dissonance
become human” (GT §25). To this same extent, Nietzsche’s first book is not about
Wagner, father-figure friend or not. It makes matters worse, but I am inclined to think
that Nietzsche had the temerity to frame his first book to appeal to Wagner, who also
had his own focus on Beethoven, to invite him to make common cause with Nietzsche
for the sake of nothing less Wagnerian than Nietzsche’s own vision of a future culture
and a future musical work of art.
Indeed, and this should not surprise us, less than Wagner, and apart from his explicit
references to Beethoven, The Birth of Tragedy was focused less on either musician than
it was dedicated to an articulation of Nietzsche’s own literally programmatic theme Out
of the Spirit of Music, an exposition of Nietzsche’s philological, quantitifying rhythmic
discovery.14
Nietzsche, whose discovery “decodes,” and we might say it is the basis for, our
current pronunciation of ancient Greek, tells us that the tonal ictus of the ancient
Greeks excluded our manner of emphasis or the stress ictus characteristic of Latin
and all modern European languages. Instead, the Greek tone ictus (some think it more
helpful to say pitch ictus, but tone is Nietzsche’s term and hard to exclude inasmuch as
Nietzsche specifically cites: O Freunde, nicht dieser Töne) was on Nietzsche’s theoretical
account of it to be understood in terms of quantity and time: that is, musically.15
In this sense, the culture of the cover has its philosophical expression, but such
covers are self-covers, reissues, rearticulations, new envisionings; thus, we may think
of Kant’s Prolegomenon (to his first critique) Nietzsche’s Gay Science, Ecce Homo (with
respect to The Birth of Tragedy) as philosophical quasi-covers. Nietzsche wrote his own
‘prolegomenon’ to his first work, appending it as a new preface to a second edition,
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 187

retitled as one might repackage an album, with a new disjunctive subtitle, or Hellenism
and Pessimism, which new preface was entitled Attempt at a Self- or Auto-Critique, an
attempt routinely misread by scholars as if Nietzsche there intended to withdraw or
deny his first book (odd assumption given that he uses it to preface a republication),
but where Nietzsche seems to castigate the book’s voice for its errors, as if to match his
junior colleague’s critique of his first book, von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff ’s Zukunfts-
Philologie (Future-Philology),16 where this would be no kind of praise in the field of
Altphilologie, arguably inspiring Nietzsche’s reflections on then-contemporary styles
of doing Altphilologie (his meditations on the then-popular attention to the historical
Jesus)17 and to history18 in his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations).
Misreading Nietzsche’s new preface as retractio to his newly reissued The Birth of
Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism is easy to understand (misreadings tend to be
more, not less, obvious), and scholars suppose Nietzsche to say that his text might have
done better had he, and it is assumed to have been a metaphor, “sung and not spoken.”
Reading this way, we have forgotten Nietzsche’s reflections on “Music and Word” to
quote the lecture Carl Dahlhaus includes in his Music and Romanticism along with the
challenging claims Nietzsche makes in his first Basel lecture reminding us, and this
too is a word, contra Wagner, uttered before any falling out between them, that ancient
Greek tragedy had exactly nothing in common with the way we moderns encounter
tragedy, beginning with the way we actually encounter it: on stage, in a darkened
theatre.
But repeating his texts did not do for Nietzsche what he had hoped (I don’t think
repetition ever does this for anyone but there is nothing for it) and reflecting in Ecce
Homo on the futures (here we need the plural s) of his “Dionysian music,” he refers to
Wagner directly, pointing out that if anyone profited from his ventures, it would be not
Nietzsche, but Wagner:

In order that one may be fair to the Birth of Tragedy (1872) it is necessary to consign a
few things to oblivion. It created a sensation, even fascination because of its defects—
its application to Wagnerism as if the last were an index of a beginning. Solely on that
account this treatise would be an event [Ereignis] in Wagner’s life: from this point
onwards great hopes would surround the name of Wagner. (EH, §GT 1)

Cover Culture
The “cover,” the recognizable hit we know, exemplifies Ernest McClain’s point concerning
the mechanical calculations of Summertime and not less Adorno’s culinary metaphor,
made still worse with Anders’ emphasis on the status of radio and television listeners
in the United States as so many “noodled” geese, force-fed. In part, this productive
(repetitive/receptive) status illuminates the irritation Anders expressed as noted earlier
concerning the specific or uniquely amorous virtues of the song Honolulu, which is
less important for its specific qualities than for the almost endless melody that is an
earworm. To this extent, perhaps, Anna Kendrick’s somewhat more recent Cup Song
(which is not her song any more than it is the title of the song, but makes the point
188 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

about covers, plastic cup pencil holder ad hoc convention of staged improvisation).
Metonymy rules, displacing the title of the song, “originally” a Carter family song,
When I am Gone, “originally” something else and to be sure because with this song one
sees what a difference the age of what Walter Benjamin called technological (usually
translated “mechanical”) reproduction. Everything depends, as Adorno emphasized, in
the reproducibility, the recorded factor of the music and not less its radio transmission—
this is what Adorno means by the “radio face,” a “physiological” reference which has less
to do with the look of the radio, although as Anders says, the radio like everything does
happen to have a face, than with the fact that sound from one surface, produced in one
space, recorded as such whether in the radio studio or else in a very similar recording
studio per se, might be reproduced in another dimensionality and space, localized in a
speaker, however virtualized in two, as Anders analysed the audio stereoscope.
In the case of the Carter family hit, When I am Gone, the song qua song is an artifact
of the recording process, possibility, and institution, very much in the sense of what
Benjamin analysed in his reflections on the work of art and precisely technological
reproducibility, a concern repeated with different degrees of esoteric accessibility in
Adorno’s Current of Music, and to be sure throughout Anders’ own reflections on
music performance, practice, and sociological situation is by virtue of having been
recorded as such, an original as such.19 Prior to that, who knows, and indeed the song
in question was not invented or “written” by the Carters (which ever one likes) as it
was a hobo song, as it was a gospel song. Like the Hallelujah, I’m a bum, Hallelujah,
bum again with the same rhythm and repetition of the rails (we know this rhythm a
bit better perhaps with Arlo Guthrie’s cover of the late Steve Goodman’s protest song:
City of New Orleans).
The repetition of love and Honolulu goes together with the acoustic “leash”
tethering Anders and his pop music aficionados hiking out of radio range. The element
of distance and the function of filling time, thus the association of radio and car travel,
is key. This has not changed in the modern era. Where Anders’ companions had a
battery-powered transistor radio, today’s travellers listen to music not individually
sourced to accompany their urban commute with such world-altering affects that a
Coronavirus pandemic could (and did) piggyback on the same all-purpose media
delivery system.20
It is the rail rhythm that is repeated, reprised, channelled by and with, we could say,
the cups in the Cup Song. Perhaps some element of hobo affect is lost or sanitized—
think of the Kendrick music video—but also lost is a sense of mortality, all Huck
Finn mourning sensibility. The (originally interrogative) title of what we take to be
the original (inasmuch as it was thus originally recorded and so set as the original
via a recording session as a record and thus as something that could henceforth
be played again and again and which on the basis of the same could be reprised or
imitated or “covered”) itself became, like the Hallelujah itself the title of a book on the
Carter Family: Will You Miss me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family & their Legacy in
American Music.21
To be sure, as songs respond to songs in the recording industry, think of Don
Mclean’s 1972, American Pie, there is a song about the specific challenges of
recognizability. Rickie Martin’s Garden Party (this is the Rickie of Ozzie and Harriet
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 189

Nelson American television fame), a rock song about covers and the need for even
the originator of a particular song as covered by others to stick, as it were, to the
programme he first set. So when Rickie, who had become a kind of prototypical teen
idol at seventeen in 1957, dared at the age of thirty-one to veer from his signature
“look” at a Madison Avenue Rock revival concert in 1971, by saying this I mean only
that he looked rather like every other soft rock music star of the time, people were
horrified enough to boo him off the stage. As music audiences will do. When there
were music audiences.
In the same way, Cohen’s Hallelujah sings the song of a song that has, so to speak,
“been around” beginning with its biblical origins (the Hallel psalm) and a staple of
hymns and spirituals, in masses and oratorios and continuing in popular music on
every level. In my book, I offer a certain account of the historical horizon of influence
of Cohen’s Hallelujah, but I suspect a complete outline may well be impossible in all
the details or registers of what Anders calls the musical “situation”: Cohen’s song took
off only following the paradigmatic interpretation on John Cale’s 1991 album, which he
enthusiastically dedicated to Cohen, I’m Your Fan.

You Don’t Really Care for Music, Do Ya?

Anders’ objection to the exclusive association of love and Honolulu, rejecting his
hiking companion’s taste, attests to a culture clash. Speaking a second language,
literally minded as we noted earlier—recall Nietzsche’s reflection that at the end of the
day, when it comes to Beethoven, the listener no longer hears Schiller’s poem at all—
Anders found the lyrics illogical (was it true that love was limited to Honolulu? Why
nowhere else?), German expat clashing with LA music tastes.
Anders’ objections exceed the content of the song he found unendurable—as music
is Kant’s example of sense imposition as it is difficult to shut or close one’s ears to
it. At the same time, linguistically hermeneutically speaking, it may be argued that
one never listens to “the words” of a song more than when listening to music in a
“second language.” To this must be added, and this would apply to both Anders and
his hiking companions, the tendency to insist on a constant programming (self- or
other-imposed) of one’s own life following the dissemination of radio ubiquity echoed
or expanded by television ubiquity all the way to MTV and today to YouTube and
TikTok too. Seeking such programming reinforcement, his companions opted to bring
their transistor radio along with them; it was not issued to them as part of a permit for
climbing that day.
Here the question is the question of musical taste and the musical subjects?
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy raises the question of the subject as subject by
questioning what we think we know about the lyric. We all know that lyric poems
tell what it is to say I, but Nietzsche raises the question of the subject, telling us in his
first book that “The subjectivity of the lyricist is a deception.” It gets complicated here,
and it helps to go back to Cohen’s Hallelujah because it is a singer’s lyric song about a
singer’s lyric song. “I heard there was a secret chord.”
The listener seeks the music, Anders suggest, but even more so, the secret of the
secret, the best of the best. And bettering the best, to take an old song, as the Beetles
190 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

wrote, a sad song and make it better, that would be what a cover is all about. Thus,
and this is already eclipsed, think of Katy Perry’s Hey, Jude, or Paul McCartney’s
performances of the same.
Here the point is that the putative “best” version cannot be heard. This is not
because of some dispute regarding “taste,” the same point Kant makes in his
Critique to observe that where other nations speak of taste, the Germans speak of
the “Aesthetic,” and when it comes to covers, there is no limit. Thus, the ultimate
version or, indeed, the question whether there will be any candidates for such,
cannot be stipulated. Covers emerge and fade into oblivion, even where, think of the
Cup Song—now already fading from pop consciousness—some pop group finds and
resuscitates them.
What I call “cover culture” is what H. Stith Bennett, himself a phenomenological
sociologist, calls “recording consciousness.” It is this consciousness that Anders
analyses, that Adorno analyses, in terms of the exemplification of the phenomenon
of programming standards, self-creating oneself as a consumer, recognition being the
most decisive factor, thus the need for repetition in determining just what we “like.”
Thus, Adorno will tell us, irking his reader in the process, aesthetic philosophers, and
musicologists alike, well in advance of cognitive science, that our “liking” reduces
to a matter of recognition: we like what we know; we like things we recognize. This
seems to clash with the aforementioned reflection on covers (being all about a new
variant or what have you) but meshes with the industry’s efforts to get exposure for a
performance.
For a phenomenological exemplification of this in practice, for performers,
musico-sociologically speaking, I refer the reader to Bennett’s recently reprinted 1980,
Becoming a Rock Musician.22
In Bennett’s study of the rock music phenomenon of what he describes as “getting”
“the music,” everything depends quite as Anders argues, although Bennett does not
cite Anders, on the radio. Updated for our time, this is all about listening to a tape
or a CD or YouTube video repeatedly, over and over again—as I recall David Darling
complaining to me after a master class at the Juilliard School, hosted by the late Hugh
Downes, that auditions were hopelessly tilted as students sought to replicate the CD.
Today one might say the mp3. But what is absent is the musical culture that mattered
for Adorno as it mattered for Anders and of course, as I argue elsewhere, as it mattered
so much for Nietzsche, who also played piano and wrote music. The culture is the
grammar of composition, the tradition that, quite technically as Adorno argues, makes
“the new music” possible, the same tradition that induced Adorno to challenge the
ubiquity standards of jazz and pop music as such, radio music, recorded music, and
which also allowed him to manage to alienate readers high and low. It is certain that
had Anders had other readers, as he did not have, in music sociology that he, like
Adorno, might have done the same.
If both Adorno and Anders point to the sound difference this makes, the point
at issue in Adorno’s “hear stripe”23 is that it is sociologically musicologically,
phenomenologically, affectively oriented to and for the listener attuned to “the”
music. Thus, it is as a phenomenological sociologist of music not unlike Anders in
this convergent sense that Bennett can point out that the same medium, the radio,
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 191

the loudspeaker, small and focused sound, enables a new phenomenon in the
performative ambit of technologically mediated reproduction whereby the performer
can learn by ear, even if he or she cannot read (or write) music. As Bennett points
out without focusing on Anders: “the” music is not what it is as Anders describes
such “being-in” music. Much rather what contemporary aspiring musicians seek to
acquire as what Bennet calls “the music” is the sound as it is produced on the radio,
via the CD, via the mp3, as we speak of it today, qua reproduced. The point here
presupposes Benjamin on the work of musical art in the age of its technological
reproducibility as much as we need Adorno, who wrote on the familiarity factor, the
ubiquity key to the same.
Anders emphasizes the sociological elements key to any social access to music
especially as performed. But in an age of technological reproducibility, what the
aspiring performer, especially in the case of Bennett’s rock musician, seeks to “learn”
to “get,” as Bennett says, the music in question is a specific recording. This can be very
specific to the level of a given cut on a given album, but it is also a generic constant of
what Bennett calls on the side of the listener, think here once again of Elvis Presley’s
Only Fools Rush In. Bennett’s “recording consciousness”—it is this that David Darling
was grousing about—which is the modulated equivalent for today’s performers of
Anders “being-in” music—entails that when one hears (or simply remembers) Elvis’
first words, Wise men say, only fools rush in, the intonation, Elvis’ musical voice is part
of what one hears/remembers, which continues with Elvis: Like a river flows surely to
the sea, darling, so it goes, somethings are meant to be.
Bennett’s point seems patent: to “become” a rock musician is not the same as
“becoming” a concert pianist. Given recordings, the distinction is less clear. Alfred
Brendel is an artist precisely owing to our consumer’s recording consciousness, and
arguably, so too, Glenn Gould and so too, because esotericism does not get one out
of this recording dependency, a sometimes-overlooked composer and performer, the
Basel-born musicologist, composer and pianist Ernst Levy (1895–1981)—friend of the
musicologists Siegmund Levarie and Ernest McClain. One can vary the argument for
cellists (Casals, Ma) and quartets (Guarneri) and ensembles (Hilliard), as well as opera
singers (Caruso and Callas) and so on.
Indeed, and this is to Anders’ point concerning “being-in” music, Nietzsche,
although a gifted improvisor on piano, was assessed by Hans von Bülow as a tyro
composer. As von Bülow wrote to Nietzsche in reply to Nietzsche’s request for an
assessment of his work, on July 20, 1872:
your Manfred-Meditation is the most extreme case of fantastic extravagance, the
most unedifying and anti-musical instance of notes placed on music paper that
I have come across in a long time. . . . Did you consciously flout all the rules of
musical language, from the higher syntax to simple matters of correct notation? . .
. .If you really have a passionate urge to express yourself in musical language, it is
indispensable that you acquire the rudiments of this language24

For his part, von Bülow took barely a day to reply to Nietzsche’s request mid-summer.
For his reply, Nietzsche would take until mid-Autumn and would need to draft two
versions of his letter to boot (circa October 29, 1872).
192 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Today’s readers read Nietzsche as prototypical genius, hardly in need of von Bülow’s
critique (commentators are unsparing: how could von Bülow, the discarded husband of
Cosima Wagner, dare to be so unfeeling in response to Nietzsche’s overtures in sending
him his youthful scores, how cruel!). Indeed, as Giorgio Agamben has reminded us,
philosophical and musical genius would seem to be “beyond” grammar, and Nietzsche
himself urges us to overcome our fealty to grammar teachers (the first grammar books
were written by the Alexandrians); our entire philological tradition is, Heidegger is
right about this (if he is conspicuously wrong when he assimilates Nietzsche to the
same), more Roman than Greek.
Nietzsche, who lived as much as possible, quite in Anders’ sense “in-the-music,” did
not protest but replied, all good acolyte style, underlining that he was not unfamiliar
with the rules of composition which he had studied since childhood, including a study
of Albrechtsberger (and among the works Nietzsche would have known, as everyone
did, including what he would have taken to be Beethoven’s aka Albrechtsberger’s
theory of composition, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried and Henry Hugh Pierson’s Ludwig
van Beethoven’s Studien im Generalbass und in der Compositionslehre).25
If this exchange makes sense in its era and context, we can wonder if the same
would hold for contemporary composers and contemporary music? To this same
extent Anders’ reflections on musical sociology, offering a phenomenological and
sociological explanation, predate the more practical sociological reflections of Mike
Roberts’ Tell Tchaikovsky the News,26 the last a reflection on the social lives of trade
musicians, including economic details, the sheer numbers of those who work—who
can work—and thus who live—and can live from music of all kinds, pop and rock and
jazz but also new and modern and contemporary as all of this has been completely
transformed with the invention of recording.
Not a matter of labour contracts (although Anders underlines the privilege that
it is to be a performer and to be an educated listener), Anders was concerned with
technological means for, that is, the digital mediation of, music in addition to the
culinary factor, as Adorno would say, that is, the consumer’s taste, at issue is also the
artist’s aesthetic disposition. One can compose with respect to—one can argue that
one cannot but, inasmuch as the culture industry industriously continues apace,
in obeisance to capital and such like (and this is no minor detail but perhaps more
central than ever, thus I speak of the effect of the Hallelujah Effect). Alternately, one
can compose with respect to the tradition and beyond, hence the pre-eminence of the
name John Cage (1912–92) for Adorno and others, including Arthur Danto, although
other composers also brought in silences and ambient and odd sounds and not less, or
more promissory, than conceptual (and post conceptual) art.
Anders speaks of Romanticism and Impressionism. And although I have been talking
about pop music, with the occasional reference to Nono, Anders discusses Busoni and
Schoenberg. Here the focus remains a matter of the technological reproducibility, as
Benjamin spoke of this, of the work of art in our techno-mechanical-digital era. Thus,
for another example, Cage’s “4'33″” is not only performed, starting with its original
performance art performance of a piece originally titled “Four Pieces,” it became three
movements, by David Tudor in 1952,27 broadcast by the BBC in 2004—informatively,
so relevant is the challenge of this performance to what radio engineers call dead air, in
 
Pop Music (and Jazz), Covers (and Copies) 193

the case of the BBC radio transmission, including the requirement to switch “off their
emergency back-up system—designed to cut in when there is an unexpected silence
on air.”28 It has even, albeit in gallery spaces and museums, gone on tour, as it were,
including a CD featuring 4'33″.29

Darker Stars: Death and Silence

We are approaching the end of this study, and the aforementioned reflections have
included death, with some severity, and, despite his brave words contra Heidegger
on matters “concrete,” Anders’s own physical death would not be among the most
graceful. As Illich has underlined, there is no factor of exception here, although
and to be sure the wealthy pursue this with the support of endocrinology and
surgery where this fails. Most death, as Illich underscores, is a “foul” affair, even
if we have—this is what Illich names “expropriation”—sought in recent years to
medicalize and thus and by various means as the current Coronavirus crisis only
dramatizes, to conceal the fact, dressing numbers, spinning truth. And between hype
and hope, some people have different access to different treatments. Illich, however,
argued uncompromisingly that on a common level, for the common human being,
medicalization has never saved the individual from the foulness that has historically
always adhered to death but, and this has never been more true in history, not even
when Illich first wrote this line, it “isolates” the one dying from view. Today this
is not a metaphor, it is protocol, it is law, it is forbidden.30 In Anders’ case there
would be considerable hardship, financial and otherwise, including physical pain and
above all loneliness. There is a cost to being not merely misunderstood as Heidegger
would complain that he was not understood but critically, crucially unreceived. All
the things that Anders missed in his life were exacerbated, as things tend to be, at the
end of his life.
Here I refer to one of Leonard Cohen’s last recordings, given the earlier reference
to Nietzsche’s book on the death of tragedy, and silence, with Cage’s 4'33″. Thus, to
change the tone, to talk about the music, I will do what I have been doing all along,
emphasizing the words.
Cohen’s Hallelujah is a lyric, an “I” poem, like Bird on a Wire, pluralizable,
replaceable, interchangeable, almost as Anders presciently argued in is “The
Antiquatedness of Privacy.” As punctuated with the “who” of Who by Fire, Cohen’s
pronoun changes to what will always have to matter, as Ivan Illich writes: a matter
of grace, Umsonstigkeit, that is what happens for, with, to the individual the I, when
it is mediated by or via a distinctive other, a you.31 Thus, even in the divine You
Want It Darker, the poet speaks in the first-person plural, you and me, all of us: we
kill the flame. Then we hear not Greek and not Saint Augustine’s Latin, ad sum, but
Hebrew—hineni, hineni [here I am, here I stand] I’m ready, my Lord. Cohen is a
master of the pop song, he has the music industry in his pocket, and he repeats and
plays an infinite melody, this time with the echoes of a cantor: If thine is the glory,
mine must be the same: You want it darker.32
194 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

If, as Anders says, citing Max Weber, what is most important is always to be found
in the notes, between the lines, “Das Wichtigste steht natürlich in den Anmerkungen”
(AM II, 14), the most important things are the questions. These Anders invokes both
to situate his own situational reflections on at once [Zugleich] the phenomenology
of music with reference to Heidegger and to differentiate his own perspective from
the same with reference to a very posed and dynamic dass, which, as Anders writes,
“stands between situation and question” (MS, 16).
Here we can also recall Nietzsche’s wonderful reflection on the “moment,” the
Augenblick, poised in and against history, useful for the same of understanding
Anders “dass” reflection as this is positioned between the more Heideggerian and
phenomenological poles of So-Sein and Das-Sein. For Nietzsche, who emphasizes “the
value of feeling unhistorically through and through”—and precisely for the sake of life,
which is also for Nietzsche always also to say for the sake of art and thence to science:

Whoever cannot set down upon the threshold of moment, all pasts forgotten,
whoever is incapable of standing on a point like a goddess of victory without
dizziness and fear, such a one can never know what happiness is and still worse: he
will never do anything that makes others happy.33

This Nietzsche writes on history and life in his Untimely Meditations. The task for the
scholar, in his case: for the classical historian, is always “untimely” [unzeitgemäß] and
thereby his title, to work “against the times and thereby on the times and hopefully for
the sake of a coming era.”34 It is forgetting timeliness, one’s timebound condition, that
“makes happiness happiness”; in other words, as Nietzsche goes on to explain, the ideal
is utterly unhistorical. As a result, all our joy is oblivion: the forgetting of the memory
of past feeling gives us delight, one more time.
Intriguingly, just this untimely insight corresponds to the delight of recognition
that is for Adorno, as we may recall in his own work on effective “work” of the culture
industry, such recognition is all we need to like anything, especially in broadcast music,
traditional or new, as in film, photographs, any work of art.
We may thus track Nietzsche’s insight behind Anders’ mordant words contra the
miserably perfect ascesis of authentic Heideggerian being-in-the-world:

When “Dasein” sleeps, it wakes itself up, if it wants to read the paper it tears this
“tool of mediocrity and average-life” from its own hands. It excludes itself from
leisure, friendship, friendliness, in short, from culture. Its exercitia fill the twenty-
four hours of the day, its drudgery to march toward death lasts the whole life. (PC
362)
 Part Three

Schizotopic Thought: Planetarism

and Apocalypse Blindness
196
 12

Political Media Theory, Hiroshima,

and Nuclear Power Plants

From the Holocaust to Hiroshima: “Chernobyl is Everywhere”

I have argued that to Anders’ reflections on genocide and Auschwitz must be added
his pacificism along with the question of one’s ownership of action, of “having been,”
of “having been done,” regarding the atom bomb as this was twice deployed in Japan
in August 1945. To this, nearly impossible to coordinate on the same level of analysis,
must be set Anders’ efforts at cultivating a future for kindness or humanism as we
may read in his correspondence with the Hiroshima airman, Claude Eatherly, but also
very literally his letter to Eichmann’s son. For us at this juncture, given Anders’ title:
Hiroshima ist überall: “Hiroshima is everywhere,”1 there would seem to be a continuity
with “Chernobyl is everywhere.”2 Indeed, as Anders goes on to say, counting out Ten
Theses to underscore his point as is his wont, “the real danger consists in the invisibility
of the danger.”3
The “everywhere,” an obligatory “überall,” is ubiquitous but precisely as such
“invisible.” Better said, opaque: precisely where radioactive contamination of one kind
or another remains, however “real” it happens to be, however much it affects us as
we are exposed at almost every turn to radiation, microwave, cell phone, broadcast
radiation of all kinds, and not merely, as noted in the course of the last chapter, every
time we go through federal buildings or airline security, an “out of sight, out of mind”
affair.4

Other Than, One More Time

Earlier I called attention to the conventionality of Anders’ name change, casually
taking the nomination “other than,” “something else,” as we hear the apocryphal
story, at the behest of an editor who complained that there were too many “Sterns” on
the newspaper masthead. Thus, it was also noted that Anders, who apparently took
this designation to heart, turns out to be less well known than he should be,5 despite
belonging to a group of famous names, by marriage, blood, and other affinities.
In Gewalt, Ja oder Nein?, Anders argued that the ideology of non-violent resistance
meshed rather too conveniently with the Nicht-können that happens also to be the rule
198 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

of law: a bourgeois, all-too-bourgeois, excuse for inaction out of respect for law. This,
our cowardice, is exacerbated as it is an automatic consequence of our dependence
on technology. Earlier, we also had cause to note that Anders’ critique of technology
is not to be separated from his phenomenological analysis of music broadcast- and
reception studies, which themselves have a technical psychological component, as
do radio and television programming.6 The internet can seem to break that parallel
until we consider bubbles and the particular constraints of our experience of social
media, as noted earlier with reference in particular to Baudrillard’s early analyses of
this phenomenon of what he called “speech without response.” Thus, our interactions
are framed or limited in advance: we are fed certain posts, in response to which we
can register a like (thumbs up on Facebook) or a love (a little red heart on Twitter).
We are primed to respond to posts with such likes; it’s a seemingly easy enough thing
to do, and we seek such responses, reading these numbers, as much as we might read
comments on our posts. Some users turn off comments all together, thus limiting
themselves to the numeric satisfaction of likes. As noted at the start of this study,
Seymour’s recent book The Twittering Machine, focusing on social media and the
very possibility of political and of active citizen engagement, explores some of these
limitations with an array of dark consequences.
Anders, who used the language of the “homeworker” (the mass human as the
self-made)—with some aid or inspiration from the argument Heidegger also makes
with respect to the radio and in the ambit of Benjamin and Adorno as well—argued
in a fashion more sustained than any of these, that the consumer himself or herself
literally fabricates himself or herself in the image of mass media into a participant in
mass-media by means of consumption. Thus, in his 1980 Antiquatedness of Humanity,
where Anders meditates on the antiquatedness of this and of that, including the very
notion of the mass human being, Anders writes on our new need, here again to cite this
epigraph that still requires comprehensive attention despite the ubiquity of consumer
attention, content for “consumption”: “Give us this day our daily hunger.” (AC II, 15)
Only Illich and Baudrillard and more recently Sloterdijk come close to repeating the
singularizing, isolating, point that Anders identifies.
For Anders, our preoccupation with (and by) technology is a preternaturally
religious one, filling the void or wake of what Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit
had already announced, well before Nietzsche, as the “Death of God.” In this way,
different from Nietzsche’s mad man who breaks into churches to play his Aeternam
Deo, calling the churches so many sepulchres for the deity, Anders’ homeworker
is a trans-modern “hermit,” working tirelessly—like a monk in his cell. Anders
repeatedly emphasizes the quality of being alone, even in company with others,
conspicuously so—correspondent to the vocation of creating oneself, all as unpaid
home labour, in as many hours of the conscious day that one has to oneself in order
to produce the mass human being, capable of appreciating on command, on demand,
mass media and to pay for the privilege, as Anders adds in the kind of stylistic
dissonance and insight that was his watchword. Spoon-fed by the media, watching
TV as one does all alone (even in the presence of others), TV is a quintessentially
autistic medium. So too of course the internet (and Facetime and Zoom, etc., are
not likely to change that).
 
Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 199

So too, similarly, YouTube, on computer or on our cell phones and tablets, as I write
in The Halleluiah Effect.7 There, I already invoked Anders along with Adorno’s more
well-known involvement in the Princeton Radio Project,8 to make the case that we
might well understand Facebook, and other forms of surfing today’s internet, Twitter
and Instagram among other newer apps, as exemplifying this quasi-autistic effect just
where this same isolation and self-reference may turn out to be its most subversive
quality, and correspondingly, its lasting appeal.9
Already in the mid-1950s, Anders argued that there could be no possibility of
democracy in a world with television (which would make the case that much worse, so
we can now extrapolate, with the internet). Thus, as we saw earlier, contrary to popular
belief, it turns out not to be the case that connectivity and cell phones enable revolutions,
if it does turn out to be true that the internet and aforementioned cell phones make
it possible to coordinate meetings with family and friends and not less encounters,
erotic and otherwise, with friends but also with strangers.10 Today’s computer and cell
phone connectivity (and internet bubbles and “filters” and algorithms) makes that
same democracy less possible than ever.
Here, given that Anders wrote of Chernobyl—and since then, with Fukushima, we
have now had a number of such disasters, disarmed of specifically “nuclear” associations
as these are more generically designated as environmental catastrophes11—and that he
also wrote of television and radio, we may ask what radio, even “spooky” radio, could
possibly have to do with violence? Apart from the bomb, it seems that Chernobyl,
Three Mile Island, Fukushima are incidents, accidents, things that happened to
transpire with effects that are happening quite without the responsibility and certainly
apart from the deliberate intention of anyone.
Even citing, as I above cited Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare, to explain some of
the points Anders makes with respect to music on the radio, or music as a television
broadcast, like music on YouTube or Spotify, and so on, music as such seems, qua
entertainment with the on-demand appellation that covers over the necessity of
exposing oneself in the undertaking not merely to sound but all kinds of other ambient
radiation, the antithesis of violence. Goodman himself, echoing Kittler, prefaces his
book with a dissonant quote from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, referring to
Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, which Goodman, a Scots philosopher and performance
artist (producer of bass weighted electronic dance music under the name “kode9”),
attributes to one “General Kilgore,” actually: Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore: “We’ll
come in low out of the rising sun and about a mile out, we’ll put on the music.”12
That was Vietnam, Hollywood style. The reality today, as Goodman, himself a
dubstep, electronic music sonic artist, demonstrates, is more pernicious: ongoing,
ubiquitous (Adorno’s favourite word when it came to the culture industry has never
been more apt). For Anders, who writes on radio in 1930, the “spooky,” uncanny, for
our brains, as we are compelled to process this, would be the point that derives from his
experience of his father’s tone generator, hearing the same music from every window,
continuing seamlessly as he remembered walking down an apartment building
corridor.13 For us today, there is no surprise, accommodated as we are to streaming,
earbuds in our ears, there is no there there. We hear and overhear without remark and
it can be hard to grasp what Anders was on about.
200 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Adorno arguably borrows the image, if without attribution, in his Current of

Music.14 One year after Anders’ “Spuk und Radio,” the role of loudspeakers in Huxley’s
1931 Brave New World recurs, playing, as noted earlier, the same part in Orwell’s
1949 novel, 1984.15 Once again, loudspeakers were involved in—and were specifically
developed for—party rallies.16 This entrains and captivates us in our commercial jingles,
priming or triggering our thinking (that is our brains at work again) in response to
our attention to radio programmes, television programmes, all the way to YouTube
playlists and streaming media, all programmed: on demand.
The social manipulation of Facebook in the recent US presidential election (and
of course this “social engineering,” as it is called, has been deployed for some time
and must be, though it rarely is, considered along with direct and overt hacking,
not necessarily via supposed Chinese or supposed Russian interference but routine
party politics, as this is something that has been going on for some time now)17 is the
latest manifestation of what Anders called “force-feeding.” You do not have a choice.
As consumers, homeworking on ourselves as such, we do this ourselves to ourselves
when we watch television or, as today there is no difference, when “go online” or use
our cell phones, for texting, or via GPS when we navigate the city: Google earth is,
of course, anything but neutral.18 For Anders, if “democracy supposedly consists in
that one disposes over the right to express an opinion of one’s own, then democracy
is through mass media rendered impossible.”19
Anders is not here making a case about what one takes to be one’s opinion one
way or the other. Anders’ point concerns whether one is free, to begin with, to form
such an opinion in the first place. On Anders’ account of it, judgements framed in
accord with mass media are not because they cannot be your own, that is, no matter
whether you were for Donald Trump, or Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, as it transpires,
because, so the claim went, anything would be better than Trump, and the DNC
itself had already manipulated or hacked Bernie Sanders out of the running so
that the only candidate to set against Trump would be Clinton (who duly lost) or,
more recently, Biden (who duly won). Like the unconscious, publicity works in one
direction as public opinion research since the early 1920s has underscored. Thus,
repetition, so Adorno argued on behalf of the Office of Wartime Information in the
Second World War, beginning with his work on the Princeton Radio Project in 1937,
entails that the radio does not play works that happen to be popular (this would be
a democratic hit parade) but makes them popular.20 Thus, being played on the radio,
as any professional musician will tell you, makes a hit a hit. The title of Adorno’s
“current” of music reflects this same point: radio makes popular hits popular simply
by broadcasting them.
Here to be opposed to something is the same (in end effect) as to be for it. In
either case, one is preoccupied by it. If the ancient Stoic thinker Epictetus took care
to remind us that quite as one would be horrified to be physically handed over to
the power of another, one ought to recoil from allowing one’s mind to be affected by
another’s insulting word (or seduction or flattery) because just at that moment one
has surrendered one’s mind to that other.21 Nietzsche reflected in On the Genealogy
of Morals on the power of words when he explained that the slavely moraline ascendance
 
Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 201

of reactive thinking effects a revaluation of values simply by changing what things

are called.
At issue here is not a matter of slavely moraline character or predisposition,
good or evil. Much rather, it is the architecture of modern ‘social’ media that, as
Baudrillard argues, “always prevents response.”22 These media forms, television,
Facebook, Twitter, and so on constitute, for Baudrillard, an address we give
ourselves over to without the possibility of actual or real response and so we post
on our Facebook walls and tweet into the void, while being exposed to the assaults
of the same, augmented by television, cable and network, radio, and internet feeds,
as so much received “Speech Without Response.”23 And as Anders writes in the
‘Antiquatedness of the Individual,’ concerning the illusion of exchange in a section
entitled “The Collective Monologue”:

[w]ith respect to most of our conversations, namely ‘small talk’ [Engl.] it is patent
that the words and expressions that we exchange with our partner resemble
tennis balls flying here and there between tennis players; i.e., that the ‘balls’
we ‘serve up’ by speaking are identical to those we have received by listening
and that those we receive are identical to those we have been given. In brief,
receiving and giving have become interchangeable. (AM II, 153)

Programmed to ‘receive’ speech to which one cannot respond, beginning with radio
and television sets in the living room, but now on every media platform, 24/7, it is
plausible to suggest that we are “primed” to look for this at every waking moment, as
internet psychologists have studied and today, perhaps, perfected the phenomenon.
For Anders, who already anticipated this, we are at work at every moment in the
creation of ourselves in the image of mass media, now named social media.
If we surely suppose ourselves free to respond to someone on Facebook (or on
Twitter), all we really “do,” all we can do, is hit the like button, letting the sender (and
Facebook) know that we have seen and received the message.24 Better yet we can
augment the same event of “speech without response” by reposting or retweeting,
and if one writes a “reply,” perhaps alongside “replies” already written, one generates,
creating any range of possibilities for miscommunication, only what Baudrillard
presciently named a ‘simulacrum’ of a conversation. The result never yields speech
plus response, not for theorists of semiotics like Umberto Eco as Baudrillard cites
him. For, speech with response always presupposes communicative exchange (not
action as Habermas one-sidedly insists), including everything that constitutes what
Gadamer calls conversation. Conversation, as Gadamer emphasized, and which in
a surprising coincidence Illich also argued, is an emergent property of the spirit
resistant to formalization and every kind of institutionalization, as Illich plainly
emphasized this resistance in a passage that cannot but confound even his admirers.25
But how compare Anders and Illich, except to note that both are marginal names?
After all, what commonality can there be between Anders, a Jew, with a classically
German formation, and Illich, a mixed blood, Jewish-Catholic/German-Slav? The
commonality would have been their dedication to humanity and to the sound of the
sign, the musical note for Anders, for Illich, the “vineyard” of the text.
202 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

“Seit ein Gespräch wir sind”26

Hölderlin, in his poem Friedensfeier, names beings such as ourselves, Anders’
antiquated human beings, a “conversation.” By this the poet obviously is not talking
about the capacity to “like” or to “reply” on Facebook or retweet a tweet or even the
ordinary kinds of exchange. Hölderlin emphasizes “hören von einander,” key to the
phrase that concludes the verse: “bald sind wir aber Gesang.”27 And here, and this point
too connects with Heidegger, Anders foregrounds the echoing capacity on our part to
be attuned to one another, to argue that what is at stake is precisely what Kant called
Mündigkeit, that is, the ability to speak in our own mouths, with our own voices, for
our own part. The media today entail however, as Anders has it, that “Der Mensch ist
kein ‘mündiges’ Wesen mehr.” Thus, to quote Anders, here writing in English:

The human being is no longer an entity capable of speech, such that he might
express his own opinion with his own mouth.28

Anders is concerned precisely with, and this is a technological dictate, the

“unilaterality” of broadcast and social media. Driven by media, collimating our senses,
we are “eye people,” we are “ear people,” and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (On Redemption)
already predicts a human being who had become only a giant ear. Anders uses the
(rather appalling) phrase “Genudelte Gänse,” as I referred to this earlier, force-fed geese,
emphasizing that in all the years he lived in the United States he himself had not been
free, just as he never met anyone who was free for and on their own part to express his
or her own opinion. Anders insisted on this, and elements of this insight dominate
both volumes of The Antiquatedness of the Human Being.
We are thereby constrained by the social media we use (notice that saying social media
makes the claim easier than saying radio or television) to create ourselves in the image and
likeness of the media. But there is no extern’s tyranny in this constraint. This is curated self-
creation of the self in the exact image that social media would have us make of ourselves,
which, as Anders emphasizes, we do willingly. “Soft totalitarianism likes nothing better
than permitting its victims the illusion of autonomy or even to engender this illusion in
them” (AM II, 238). As Anders explains, what is expropriated from the average American
as he writes is what had previously been, in the sense in which Rousseau speaks of this
and, more recently, Derrida, and of course Heidegger, most properly his own: him or
herself. Social media as we speak of it is in this sense, for Anders, quite specific. Nothing
of what we ontically ‘own’ is taken from us, no part of the relations of capital are put in
question (the banks must always be “bailed out”). Much rather:

The “only” thing to be sacrificed is his “own specificity” [Eigentümlichkeit], his

personality, his individuality, and his privacy: solely himself. By contrast with the
ordinary kind of socialization, involving what the person has, what is at stake here
is “only” a socialization of what the person is. (AM II, 239)

What is characteristic of the modern age is that it is of our own free will that we appropriate
the task of creating ourselves as “the masses,” as Anders writes, and in and as our online
 
Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 203

personas. And these are various, depending on the social media we access but big data
(and Google) tend to cross such fine distinctions. What is crucial for Anders’ analysis
bears repeating as it has become even more accurate given the role of social psychology
and programming in the current Coronavirus crisis, “America uses psychoanalysis
for the purpose of establishing conformism” (AM II, 237). But this does not mean that
we create ourselves as everyone, we think of ourselves as unique, as individuals, and
certainly not as workers or as the proletariat. Thus, Anders’ point is more Benjaminian,
that is, we create ourselves as human beings technologically, as we do in the current age
of technical reproduction, thus consuming mass products en masse: the same products
immoderately, without measure.29 In age of digital media, the mass products we consume
are digitally conveyed, and thus we are attached to our phones and we do not tend to
think about the effects of omnipresent WiFi/WLAN or indeed cell phone radiation, on
the eve as we are of the acceleration of the same to 5G/6G.30
Baudrillard makes the point that “power belongs to the one who can give and cannot
be repaid.”31 Thus, Baudrillard argues, “the revolution everywhere: the revolution
tout court—lies in restoring this possibility of response.”32 To do this however would
presuppose a complete transformation of the architecture of the media as such.
For Baudrillard,

All vague impulses to democratize content, subvert it, restore the “transparency
of the code,” control the information process, contrive a reversibility of circuits,
or take power over media are hopeless—unless the monopoly of speech is broken;
and one cannot break the monopoly of speech if one’s goal is simply to distribute
it equally to everyone.33

We need what Gadamer names conversation—this is what Habermas never managed

to understand, because for this we need phenomenology and hermeneutics, we need
the face to face (unmasked), that is to be able to speak with and not less to be able
to hear from one another, and to do that, as Baudrillard emphasizes, so-called social
media excludes us, as what is needed for conversation are all the elements that escape
transmission even as there are new emergent communicative possibilities that grow
out of our new modes of expression of storing, “liking”—such a minimal affect to
minimal effect—sharing, retweeting. All of this is part of communication and media,
but for conversation with one another we need the ironies and the hints that escape
mediatized exchange.
Baudrillard thus highlights what may be named Hölderlinian, Gadamerian
conversation when he writes in his “Requiem for Media” that “Speech must be able to
exchange, give, and repay itself as is occasionally the case with looks and smiles.” We
need more than the possibility of registering a like or a love. We need the body, we need
the look, we need the smile, faint or feigned, absent, or irrepressible. In other words, for
Baudrillard, response, to be response cannot be “data,” mined or otherwise; it “cannot
simply be interrupted, congealed, stockpiled, and redistributed in some corner of the
social process.”34
Anders is even less optimistic as we may be sure, and less compromising, naming
us “cosmic parvenus, usurpers of the apocalypse,” contending, this is the dark side of
204 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

his language in his open letter to Klaus Eichmann, We Sons of Eichmann, that we have
our excuse at the ready, in our non-action by the impermissibility, the illegality of any
counteraction. It’s against the law. Thus, Occupy Wall Street was put down in New York
City, way back in 2012, in good fascist fashion by “locking up” (it will do to remember
the language Trump used to trump Clinton) as “terrorists,” as the Occupy Wall Street
protesters were designated.
To this day, violence can only be deployed by those in power. That is the violence
of violence. Once set in motion, once deployed, violence constrains all acts that follow.
Someone rebukes you, again to recall Epictetus on responding to insults, only let
it trouble you and you place yourself in the thrall of your abuser. At issue is not an
imperative to turn the other cheek, this is not Epictetus’ claim but instead to underline
that if your mind or unconscious mind is troubled, it is conquered forever. At best, as
Nietzsche says, one can look away, but how close one’s ears?
Like the gas chambers in Auschwitz, like the bomb deployed in Hiroshima, Anders
argued that nuclear power plants present an ongoing and invisible circumstance of
constant danger to the earth and everything on it. Thus, Anders spoke of “globicide
[Globozid]” (AM II, 410). And in the face of such an extreme, global danger, he argued
especially towards the end of his life that the stakes constituted an emergency, calling
for defensive action. Notstand und Notwehr.
Yet he was already aware of this trajectory in his first writings on the bomb, which
already forms what is in effect the second half of his first book, including the section:
“Über die Bombe und die Wurzeln unserer Apokalypse Blindheit” (AM I, 233f.). In an
excerpt published at the same time, Anders began by adverting to our displacement of
ourselves into the position—this was an argument that begins in Nietzsche and can be
tracked with some dexterity in Heidegger but very plainly in Sartre—of the divine. The
argument Anders makes is the Promethean argument, and the reference is Aeschylean;
we can create nothingness, absolute destruction, as he writes in The Antiquatedness of
Evil, in a section entitled the “Theology of the Atomic Situation”:

Indeed “like unto God” [“Gottgleich”] only in the negative sense, as creatio ex
nihilo, cannot come into question, instead we are now capable of a total reductio
ad nihil as the mark of omnipotence as destroyers. As omnipotence we may really
characterize this, that we (or more correctly, our broomsticks, instruments we
have summoned) are capable of obliterating the entirety of humanity and the
human world. (AM II, 404)

The ‘broomstick’ is the Goethean reference, today we have vaccines, PCR tests, titanic
enough for Anders’ Promethean vision, as we may again recall Ferdinand Barth’s
abjectly monumental and picture book nineteenth-century illustration of an adolescent
sorcerer eking a spell from a book, broomstick propped against it with conjured spirits
already eagerly swirling around (see Figure 12.9, Ch. Ten above). Our problem with
such precociously radical prospects, with thinking exceptionality, is precisely what
Anders, who speaks of the “emancipation of objects” (AM II, 406), calls our apocalypse
blindness. In the midst of disaster, especially grievous disaster, we do not see ourselves,
 
Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 205

neither the where nor the how of what Anders calls the “situation.” Lacan, in another
context, speaks of this as the Real.
In his own day, Anders argued that nuclear preparedness requires a constant state
of violence. For, even if and even as we manage not to see it, “the devil has moved into
a new apartment [Der Teufel hat einer neue Wohnung bezogen]” (AM II, 410).
For Anders, even as we do not like to be lumped together, the point of invoking
this “new apartment” together with our complacency with nuclear preparedness as
with nuclear energy as with drone attacks at a distance—and Sloterdijk discusses the
continuity of drone attacks and the history of bomb warfare from one world war to
the nuclear climax of the other—cannot but entail that all of us must be counted as so
many new “sons of Eichmann,” implicated by nothing other than our inaction, even if
we name that non-action by the fetish name nonviolence, peaceful resistance. Thus, we
are complicit in a planned crime against humanity and not less against all other living
beings, all plants and animals, and even the earth itself, that same Gaia having already
been blown to bits on a regular basis by atomic testing in deserts, Pacific islands, and
oceans, earth and sea and air contaminated already for millennia to come. In the face
of the violence of violence, our complicity not only gives consent but perpetrates
violence. There is no non-violent action.

Violence Contra Violence

Chernobyl is everywhere, more than ubiquitous, more than ongoing.35 And, how, in the
wake of Fukushima, are we not able to see this today? To be sure, part of the problem
is the invisibility of radiation, the slowness of radiation. Its protractedness is the deep
time that belongs to nuclear contamination.36 If Erwin Chargaff, a trained chemist the
author went out of her way to meet when she first arrived in New York three decades
ago, could already criticize genetic engineering as “practicing biology without a
license”—and it is to be noted that in Heidegger’s Gelassenheit lecture it is chemistry
and biology, the science of tweaking life that is for Heidegger the greatest danger of the
day, even more than nuclear power or nuclear bombs.37 To that end to be sure, we need
to read Virilio and Illich in addition to Anders.
Reflecting on the near-and-present danger of globicide by specifically reflecting on
“incidents” at nuclear power plants, just as the media suppresses such incidents by
failing to mention them altogether or underreporting them,38 Anders writes:

Although I am very often regarded as a pacifist, I have in the interim come to the
conclusion that nothing more can be attained by nonviolence.39

As we have seen: “Renunciation of action does not suffice as action.”40 Thus, Anders
refers to the proportionate challenges of emergency, Notstand, and the need in such
exceptional circumstances to defend oneself [Notwehr] by any means possible.41
The underreporting of the media is more than a problem of so-called and recently
thematized “fake news.” For the problem of the media is that it has been an organ of
206 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

public opinion from time immemorial but specifically calculatedly so since the end of
the First World War, when Bernays published his Crystalizing Public Opinion and that
project drove the coordination of industry, media, government, and especially military
interests. Thus, as David Bertolloti has argued in his chapter on the bomb in his Culture
and Technology, US media censorship went hand in glove with national interest during
the war, with nary a sense of this censorship, and it is noteworthy that discussion of this
censorship, quite official, quite successful, remains unquestioned to this day.

There were also times before the attack when the secret of the atomic bomb was
in jeopardy, and in danger of being uncovered. In one instance, a reporter from
the El Paso (Texas) Herald investigated reports of a huge explosion on July 16,
1945—the date of the test bombing. The official report stated that an underground
ammunition dump had accidentally exploded. Such a mundane story was
too bland for this enterprising reporter who went on to embellish his account
with exaggerations of “the greatest fireworks show” which “illuminated whole
mountain chains.” (Apparently, Japanese spies did not read the El Paso Herald—
circulation 27,046). Another near disclosure occurred when reporters asked what
was being built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in October of 1944. The response was that
“35,000 workers are making Roosevelt campaign buttons.” Even comic strips were
censored to ensure that the slightest hint of disclosure would not occur. In an April
14, 1945 Superman comic strip, Superman was to be bombarded by a 3,000,000-
volt charge generated by a cyclotron: “Even Superman can’t take it.” Superman had
been warned.42

As Bertolotti adds, the comic book was told to cease and desist, and cease and desist it
did. As Bertolotti cites The Newsweek article, “The Superman Way”:

Superman could take it and did. What he couldn’t take was the office of censorship
which asked McClure Newspaper Syndicate to discontinue references to atomic
energy. A new series of strips, then in production, was cancelled, and Superman
went into a sequence in which he played a baseball game single-handed.43

Significantly, and this bears on the question of the story, the official narrative, and
engineering and scientific assessments, echoes of 9/11; thus, Bertolotti recounts the
systematic efforts to resist or tweak eyewitness perceptions of this, spinning the sunset
itself. Thus, and this is significant in the plain-talking Midwest:

Chicago readers had to be assured that an exceptionally dramatic sunset in the

west had no relation to the atomic bombing. Said a meteorological forecaster: “Any
time you get smoke and moisture in the western sky you have a red sunset.”44

Of course, the same tactics continue to this day when it comes to explaining the
significance of what is otherwise visible in the sky as signs of weather manipulation
and geoengineering, about which more in the final chapter.
 
Political Media Theory, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Power Plants 207

What about Violence: Yes? or No?

Baudrillard’s “Speech without Response” turns out to be a particularly effective way,
along the lines of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, to print the “legend” rather than
the fact.45 Nevertheless, and this is the point that is also exemplified in John Ford’s film,
the problem remains the violence of violence. For violence does not leave one with the
choice of non-violence in response. The Stoic counsel of ataraxia reminds one that one
cannot respond at all, no #metoo, which means that one is bodily bound, even as one
keeps one’s spirit, which one does by acknowledging what is and what is not up to us.
The engine of technology has its way with whatever is set in motion. For this reason,
the Ancient Greek tragedian, Aeschylus reminds us: by the sword you did your work,
and by the sword you die (Agamemnon, line 1558). And we read too as we may prefer,
the Gospel, to cite the King James version: “Then said Jesus unto him: Put up again
thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”
(Matthew 26:52).
Jesus, who said, we are told, “I am the life,” encourages non-violence—for the sake
of life.
It is Anders who reminds us that the path of non-violence is not a means of
resistance. For this reason, at the moment of violence incited by the High Priest, the
bodily seizure of Jesus by the guards who would bring him to Pontius Pilate, before
torturing him to death—the same torture common among Romans at the time, highly
effective for “encouraging the others,” as it was then supposed and as it was still in the
last century, wreaked upon the British to compel them to leave Palestine (the so-called
“Seargent’s affair”)46—Jesus responds to one of his followers who sprung to his defence
to sheath his sword instead and allow the violence about to transpire to transpire. This
practical syllogism entails the crucifixion.
Let me be clear, Anders, a perfectly good if atheist-minded Jew, is not himself
talking about Jesus Christ, another perfectly good Jew, to vary Jacob Taubes’ encomium
of a “nice guy.”47 Anders much rather underlines that non-violence offers no defence
against violence. In the parallel I draw here, the non-resistance on the part of Jesus’s
disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, so little resists that it is central to the myth
of redemption that is sacrifice, yielding Jesus bodily (again, we recall the stakes of
the aphorism cited earlier from Epictetus’ Enchiridion), to be carried off to a vapid
conversation with the man in power (about truth), thence to a desultory sentence
to death, and then, in short order, to whipping, piercing with thorns, heavy labour,
including three falls, and, finally, as the antecedents are crucial to the quick fatality of
the last, crucifixion.
Anders’ reservations concern the impotence of the impotent and thus the culpability
of recommending an ineffective form of resistance. Does one think, he asks Manfred
Bissinger,48 that anyone with power cares in the slightest about the sandwich
[Schinkenbrot] one does or does not eat? The only thing done by one’s hunger strike is
suggest to you, the self-starving one, that you are doing something, which of course
you are doing to yourself. Masks, as we know, especially as self-imposed, quarantine,
as self-imposed, work the same way. This is the great achievement of the ascetic, as
208 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Nietzsche points out. One takes what one does not do, not eating in the case of a hunger
strike, turning the other cheek in the case of non-violence, keeping away from social
contact, refraining from free breathing, as if it were an action.
If Anders was critical of the “happenings” of the 1960s, it was because unlike those
who were young in the 1960s, Anders, who was already old at the time, saw non-violent
actions, handing over bouquets of forget-me-nots to soldiers, as bits of “theatre,” to
which, like fascism, he said they were related. Beyond anything so phenomenologically
ready to hand as the quotidian illustration that captured Heidegger’s readers in 1927,
of a broken tool, Anders recalled the violent, near invisibility of what had struck him
some ten years earlier, at the age of fifteen, on his way home after the First World War,
spent as a much too-young soldier/volunteer in France. This trauma we have already
cited as it would stay with him:

On my way back, at a train station, maybe it was in Liege, I saw a line of men, who
strangely seemed as if they began at the hip. These were soldiers who had been set
on the platform on their stumps, leaning them against the wall. Thus they waited
for the train that would take them home49

Today’s medical interventions entail that more shattered soldiers survive than ever
before. Anders reminds us, this is the point of his “Promethean shame,” that the
violence continues.
For Anders: “Today, the real danger consists in the invisibility of the danger.”50
 13

“The Devil’s New Apartment”

Apocalyptic Thinking
This is the last chapter but cannot be a conclusion. At stake is the current “situation,”
that is what is jargonistically—in the sense in which Adorno speaks of “jargon”—called
“climate change,” and at stake is the question of a range of personal freedoms such as
the same freedoms Adorno himself took for granted, already, presciently feeling guilt
for the givenness that once was the freedom to breathe when others had been gassed
in camps and firestorms, the freedom to move in the world, freedoms which were
never to be sure without complicity; we human beings deal death with every step, every
breath we take. These are choices, not in the way popular culture invokes such issues,
as if what is at stake turns between climate change “deniers” and virus deniers—the
language is intended to punish those who do not think in accord with the mainstream,
AIDs deniers and suchlike, as opposed to those who acknowledge (and whose virtue
is rewarded for acknowledging) “climate change,” specifically global warming, which
warming is then urged may be combatted with geoengineering, already underway for
decades, but due radical expansion.
Given today’s health crisis of militarized governmental restrictions, lockdown and
quarantine, mandatory masks and vaccines, ubiquitous surveillance via contact tracking/
tracing, it is necessary to add a reflection on the positioning of attention and focus. For
to date, the activist or crusader or protester might have assumed, as Anders did assume,
that others need only be persuaded to see the dangers posed by human incursions on the
world and that those others might, collectively, be moved to stop or to litigate or legislate
against such incursions: less drilling, fracking, mining, fishing, logging, and so on.
Adorno reminded us in his broadsided attack against jargon as such (and not
only Heideggerian authenticity) that the rhetoric of wellbeing now well-ensconced
as mantra of the new capitalist world order is inherently empty. For Adorno, as
co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, points to the suspicion that we should
not lose sight of,

that, after all, the overpowering conditions of society really were made by men
and can be undone by them. … It was not Man who created the institutions but
particular men in a particular constellation with nature and themselves. This
210 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

constellation forced the institutions on them in the same way that men erected
those institutions, without consciousness.1

But that is only one side. From another perspective, things take on a frightening guise.

Nightmare
Sometime late in 2019, a terrible dream left me with the uncanny and unpleasant
insight that, from a certain point of view, the great thundering concern with Thunberg,
the rightful and important Dakota pipeline protests, agitation and despair in the face
of the burning of the Amazon along with the murder of its peoples, concerns with
Monsanto’s destruction of the agricultural ecosphere on so many levels, protests against
waterway poisoning consequent to feedlots, protests against the fracking industry that
destroys aquifers and consumes pure water to suffuse it with chemical contaminants,
because that is how fracking works, protests against the deployment of 5G, along with
the 9/11 truth movement initiative on the part of engineers and architects (contra
official, government narratives), grievous worries about industrial farming practices
and the depletion of the soil, beach modification and the destruction of coastline, the
bees, dolphins, trees, koalas and kangaroos, and now so many vanished beings after
the fires in Australia, geo-“accelerated” as they were, a loss compounded these days
by increased and heedless logging, all that and more in a single sentence that could be
infinitely expanded, all of it could be regarded very differently indeed.
One can see all this as horrific and as compelling a programme of change or “reset”:
“we” must stop, “we” must reverse course, and so on.
But from another perspective, a perspective easy to consider as it is the perspective
of government and corporate power, the problem is the protesters who gather to block
the streets, the workers who strike, unwelcome emigrants from other nations.
This is the uncanny insight into “what is,” to use Heidegger’s language. This is the
insight into the world of power and privilege, the view from the perspective of those
Rilke, in the last century, could, once again, name without flinching:

The kings of the world are old and feeble.

They bring forth no heirs.
Their sons are dying before they are men,
and their pale daughters
abandon themselves to the brokers of violence.

To be sure, as Anders would remind us, there are numerous ways to read this. Today,
Heidegger tells us, these are the wealthy, again, as Rilke’s verse continues:

Their crowns are exchanged for money

and melted down into machines,
and there is no health in it.2
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 211

Today, so go the arguments since the zero population growth movements of the
1960s,3 arguments advanced by the wealthy, by the United Nations, the World Health
Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum in
Davos, what is needed, what would solve everything, is fewer people. This is the new
blue and red pill question for a new Matrix reboot. But to be sure, and despite the dark
value of the Netflix series, Black Mirror (2016–19), we find it hard to grasp the notion,
relegate such considerations to conspiracy theory and react, overreact to alternative
accounts such as this perspective shift.
The zero population growth movement has gotten more attention today given
the renewed focus on Bill Gates, who advocates sterilization built into vaccinations
distributed to the poor of not only the various countries of Africa but also India,
Southern Asia, and so on. A lot fewer people, millions fewer, billions fewer. Thus, the
roster listed earlier, the UN, WHO, the World Economic Forum in Davos, represents a
range of clubs for the wealthy, thus the metonymic justification for citing Rilke’s “kings
of the world,” a text Heidegger cites in Wozu Dichter? [What are Poets For?]. Heidegger
reminds us that this poem is drawn from Rilke’s beautifully moving Stundenbuch,
The Book of Hours. These are from The Book of Pilgrimage, written just after the end
of Rilke’s love affair with Lou Salomé.4 Heidegger’s text dates from 1946, and I have
suggested that it would have mattered for Anders just owing to this engagement, as
Heidegger quotes Rilke, were that not enough, as writing/citing: “Gesang ist Dasein.”5
I have twice cited verses Heidegger quotes—and this overlaps, despite manifest
animosity, with Adorno’s reflections on “humanity” already cited earlier—dedicated
to what Rilke in a letter calls the “vibrations of money.”6 Today we know Heidegger’s
references to the “open” in part owing to readings transmitted via Jacques Derrida
and Giorgio Agamben, but fewer thinkers have drawn attention to Rilke’s “kings”
and the larger portion of extant scholarship focuses on the references to the child,
valuable and important as these are in a world captivated by the nostalgia for the
child, just to recall Simone de Beauvoir’s chapter on “Childhood” in The Second Sex,7
or Gary Shapiro’s reflections on Nietzsche’s world-child, among others reading Rilke,
perhaps to peak in the opening poem-film sequence echoing the filmic montages of
a more elegiac era, Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin, Peter Handke’s Lied vom
Kindsein, “Als das Kind Kind war [When the child was a child],” in Wings of Desire
(1987).8
Thinking of “what becomes questionable along with the thingness of things,” at
issue is “human material” for Heidegger who thereby observes that the “menace” of
technology may not be ascribed to growing “Americanism” inasmuch as it had already
ensconced its danger from some time ago, cites at length Rilke’s letter of March 1, 1912,
from the height of European culture, sugar Gothic and all, writing from Duino itself:

The world shrinks into itself; for things, for their part, likewise do the same,
shifting their existence [Existenz] ever more into the vibrations of money [die
Vibration des Geldes], developing there for themselves a sort of ghostliness
[eine Art Geistigkeit], which even now already surpasses their graspable reality
[greifbare Realität].9
212 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

At issue is a focus on the thing qua thing, for Heidegger, materiality per se, including
the human as material, and thus gold as such, when, as Rilke writes, “money was still
gold, still metal, a beautiful thing [eine schöne Sache], the handiest [die handlichste],
most understandable thing of all.”10
Faced with scarcity, for those who understand economics, one has two choices.
One can either modify one’s course, embrace Schumacher style “small is beautiful”
economics, adopt local resources for local needs, and so on, or, and this is the going
alternative, one can eliminate other interests in the older and time-honoured tradition
of aggression, intervention, direct action. If we want what others have, or if we want
others to refrain from impeding our access to what we want, as Plato points out at
the start of his Republic, we shall find that we are at war. But war can be conducted in
many ways; thus, the aforementioned litany of transgressions against the natural world,
including the ‘harvesting’ of human material, is a war.
War can also be waged by weather manipulation as such “weather wars” have been
practised for some time. Peter Sloterdijk reminds us that this begins with the Battle of
Ypres, Sloterdijk gives us the date, and in Dresden, and of course in Korea and Vietnam.
Such weather wars via atmosphere, and Sloterdijk has texts on that as well, are best
fought in the background, invisibly, via “acts of god,” and the kind of thing insurance
declines to cover, ongoing to the present day including chemtrail atmospheric
contaminants, aluminium and other metals, theragrippers and nanomaterials and
microplastics, bioweapons of various kinds, quantum dots and other tracer IDs—this
is in part what may be found in such chemtrail contaminants—all with a long track
record of scientific publications, government documents, press releases coupled with
official denials, and general incredulity even among academics who suppose that “they”
would never do such a thing, quite in the face of government publications attesting to
the same plan to spray the world with poison just to block the sun, of course necessary,
think global warming, in order to modify the weather, geoengineer the earth.
Despite this, one imagines that “terraforming,” to the extent that we possess such
techniques, would, despite the name, be deployed on other planets, supposing “we”
ever get there rather than here on good old Terra.
And then there are bioweapons.
The United States has, this is a matter of public record, been working on bioweapons
since the Second World War quite along with other combatant nations. It has used these
as well, to certain effect, also a matter of record, in its wars since the 1950s and so on.
Indeed, there are scholars who argue that two centuries ago, smallpox was deployed as a
vector of deliberate depopulation in the United States. This is disputed and reargued in
academic flurries that keep busy across the disciplines, following mainstream schools
that flourish—“normal science” emphasis on the normativizing force of the same—
from time to time, before fading. And a similar case may be made for introducing
alcohol, devastating, poisonous in direct effect, to peoples who previously had no
exposure to grain alcohol. Or refined (white) sugar, a variant/version of the same. But
these are subtle arguments, and we are addicted to both so it is hard if not impossible
to see these things as “poisons.” Surely not. And if so, ubiquitous, and slow in any case,
at least to us, acclimated as we are to both alcohol and white sugar. To cite Wilhelm
Busch, the German physician’s Die fromme Helene:
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 213

Es ist ein Brauch von alters her, Wer Sorgen hat, hat auch Likör!
[It is a custom from days of yore: Those with troubles, also have liquor (i.e., and
thus the joke: “the cure”)]. (Ch. 16)

The beauty of disease as an agent in war is that the agent, this is beautiful for criminal
logic, is already at hand as scapegoat and it works invisibly. It works via the immunity
of some, which would be the European settlers for whom smallpox was not a problem
and the lack of immunity on the part of native peoples who die so catastrophically,
so dramatically, that lands are cleared for expansion, in effect, from sea to shining sea.
Afterwards, the entire academic community will occupy itself with denial, refusing
the suggestion that the contamination was deliberate, because there are, after all, other
hypotheses. Act of god, divine right, white man’s burden, all that.
Genetic modification is part of this (GMOs are made using viruses), and what better
vector than the common cold, that is, “Coronavirus,” if one means to develop a viral
pathogen to be used on an enemy population? Alternately, relatedly, vaccination is part of
this because new, viral or mRNA nanotech is part of the novel vaccine. What better way
to introduce that material into a population than by injection? In the olden days, one
gave blankets away in cold winters. Today, we have vaccines. Thus, very directly, one can
deploy such a means of population control on the population as a whole for the sake of
reducing population. And primed to work in tandem with the virus not in vitro/in vivo
(the distinction dissolves in this case), the virus in the wild, the fatal effects take months
or years. And such outcomes, of whatever various kind, varying from person to person,
underlying condition to underlying condition, is a ‘side effect.’
The best way to kill, Plato tells us this, will be via those whose mission is otherwise
dedicated to saving lives. For the sake of health, for your own good.
Thus, my realization from the end of last year, a lifetime ago: we need, I maintain,
to change what we are doing to the world, the rapacious way we live, fishing, hunting,
mining, logging. This kind of change is unlikely as all the powers that be are aligned
against this.
What is however likely, nightmare or not, as there is massive support for
this, popular as socially engineered, psychologically induced, and at the highest
governmental and NGO levels, all “we” need to do is to reduce the number of people
living on the earth who are doing these things to the world.
Do that and everything changes. The tragedy of the commons becomes a paradise
if only you reduce the numbers of those with access to that same commons. Then,
the ones still standing after the reset—those will be the wealthy, the true “kings of the
world”—may then do whatever they like for as long as they like.

Counting Industrial Revolutions

I have called attention to Anders’ habit of listing industrial, technological revolutions
by number. The “technological” in question Anders borrows from Walter Benjamin
but not less from the Heidegger, who antedates Benjamin on the question of the work
of art. Heidegger looks to origins, Benjamin and Anders look to the transforms, the
214 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

more Husserlian phenomenological variations on the work of art as it changes, both

the work and, as Anders emphasizes, the “consumer” of the cultural work of art,
the manufactured, delivered, imposed work of art in the age of the mechanization,
industrialization; today we do not wish to simply say “technologization” but also
“digitalization,” “mediatization” in our own accelerationist intensification of Benjamin’s
original title quite as Anders himself accelerates the point and then revisits the same
acceleration. Nor does it stop.
Anders writes in advance of the war on terror, of climate and weather control,
and of the current pandemic. One might think that Anders would predate all
conspiracy theories (as these are of recent vintage and it hardly helps to call Malthus
a conspiracy theorist) but in fact the notion was deployed contra Anders as thinker
of Prometheanism, so Christopher Müller argues, a subtle point repeated by Müller
together with Christian Dries in their introduction to their jointly edited 2019 issue
of Thesis Eleven dedicated to Anders and entitled Inverted Utopias.11 And inasmuch as
Anders is a thinker of broadly apocalyptic thought, the “inversion” that he attributes to
Beckett in his central chapter, “Being Without Time,” seems consummate.12 The trouble
is that it is difficult to parse such concepts: How can we think the unthinkable?
Prometheus, an Aeschylean figure, articulates an uncanny titanism, as Aeschylus
tells us that mortal beings owe the sum of their technical arts to Prometheus only
to add, as counterpoint it resounds in Seneca, that craft fails in the face of necessity:
ανάγκη [Prometheus Bound, 511]. The contrast as it is echoed in Hölderlin’s reflections
on nature and art (the Greek is τέχνη) corresponds to a Nietzschean constellation of
shame. Thus, and quite with respect to the notion of sin, good and evil, Nietzsche
commissions a woodcut of a liberated Prometheus as frontispiece for his first book
The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche contrasts Semitic and Aryan forms of sin
or transgression—and shame, the same shame Nietzsche foregrounds in several
books of The Gay Science. Technology, in its Aeschylean expression, corresponds to
the titan’s gift to us, as creatures of lightning and blood and titanic ash, in language
taken from the alternate title of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, A Modern Prometheus.13
Thus, to this day technology is the engine of our ambition and fraught signifier of
the future. Technology promises limitless possibility, even to the extent, as Anders
wrote in a parallel with Adorno’s reflections on breath in Minima Moralia, of “shaming
us” by comparative contrast, leaving us to dream of a posthuman condition beyond
the human just to the extent that we feel inadequate by comparison with the orderly
Ge-Stell of the tool, any tool, the inveigled array that is part and parcel of Zeug, as
Heidegger writes in Being and Time.
Anders’ “Prometheus effect”14 has long since been transmogrified into
transhumanism and the cargo-cult aspirations of the same.15 Like Adorno, who
raised the question of our complicity in genocide,16 Anders raises the question of our
complicity in the ongoing violence of nuclear power plants as these are, quite as the
political theorist Langdon Winner argues, and as we may rephrase with reference to
Clausewitz, the continuation of bombs by other means.17
We are sure that Heidegger, when asked about technology, erred in his claim that
only a god can save us. Today, we suppose ourselves in need of no god but and only the
right tech, the right entrepreneur, cue Elon Musk or whoever the next guy might be. If
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 215

Anders, via Goethe, had already highlighted the problem of geoengineering with his
discussion of the sorcerer’s apprentice and his broomsticks, Sloterdijk clarifies the
problem as human waste, spewn forth, into the wind, the ocean, everywhere:

Nowadays what human beings meet in the weather are their own expectorations—
become atmospherically objective—of their own industrial-chemotechnical,
militaristic, locomotive, and tourist activities.18

Weather Talk: How to Do Things with Clouds

Perhaps better than most philosophers, even better arguably than Baudrillard,
Sloterdijk knows how the names we give to things plays itself out in the media. And
Nietzsche had already told us that everything depends on what things are called. In
this way, the back story to all “fake news” concerns how what is “fit to print” gets
into print and how what is silenced is silenced. Think of Harvey Weinstein over the
years but think too of all the Harveys there have been in the entertainment industry, in
academia, anywhere there is power, countless, unmentioned scandals.
If Latour has for some time been telling us that we have never been modern, his
recent reflections concern the weather, Facing Gaia.19 By contrast, Sloterdijk gives
us the birthday of our real, all-too-real modernity, adumbrated via atmospheric
expectorations, with The Battle of Ypres, including the why and the how, gas warfare in
the First World War, born on:

April 22, 1915, when a specially formed German “gas regiment” launched the
first, large-scale operation against French-Canadian troops in the northern Ypres
Salient using chlorine gas as their means of combat. (TA, 10)

This is not the place for it, but one might with profit return to Sloterdijk’s rather detailed
discussions of the colours—yellow— of destroyed lungs, the foaming of breath, and the
ongoing respiratory damages effected from the poisoned air as it affected the lungs as
this was also attributed to the media descriptions of Coronavirus.
For his part, Sloterdijk carries his question through two world wars, including the
firebombing of Dresden but also deployment of (and the denial of) weather control in
Vietnam as Anders likewise details the same weather control and the nuclear attacks
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This kind of warfare has yet to cease, if the current Covid-
19 crisis has worked to make it plain that weaponization may be the least of it. Indeed,
as Steve Fuller argues, what is essential is “controlling”; this is the language of the
social sciences to be sure, the “narrative.”20 Thus, trumping many political philosophy
media analyses, Fuller assesses the importance of what things are called, to use the
terms already introduced with reference to Anders, Heidegger, Rilke, and Nietzsche,
in their more conventional branding practice. Fuller is interested in assessing the long
game as it were, and in ensuring a certain militaristic process for research funding and
although he plays both rhetorical sides in the process, he is not on the side of Anders
or Agamben much less Adorno.
216 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

On the terms of Sloterdijk’s own “spherical” analysis, “terror from the air” is the
escalation of modern warfare as wars of action-at-a-distance, “the de facto norm for
‘air battles,’” as “one-sided, irreciprocable air strikes” (TA, 51). Today’s ongoing wars,
whether declared and not, are “ex-plicated” in this way at a distance. Social distancing
consequent upon the political measures undertaken in the wake of Covid-19 is to this
extent only the most recent articulation. Sloterdijk is one step beyond the rhetorical
question concerning wars that do or do not “take place,” as Jean Baudrillard put it21: past,
present, and future. In this way, Sloterdijk frames his discussion of the “militarization
of weather,” variously, in the third of his three volume Spheres: Schäume and Luftbeben,
“Airquake,” and Terror from the Air.22 To this must be added the militarization of the
air we breathe in proximity to those around us, reinhaling, to vary Sloterdijk’s point for
today, our “own exhalate,” whilst creating the other as a mutually and reciprocally deadly
danger to collective health. The benefits for totalitarian regimes remain unlimited.
Sloterdijk’s invocation of Taubes and not less Gnosticism, especially with reference
to Heidegger and Adorno reminds us of Marinetti’s celebration of what the Italian
Futurist calls the “beauty” of gasmasks, made still more clearly with Sloterdijk’s
discussion of the aesthetics of yellow foam characteristic of fatal lung damage.
These are/should be alarming topics—quite as awful as Anders’ references to those
US soldiers who returned with gold teeth extracted from the jawbones of Japanese
soldiers—and Sloterdijk takes his points a little further than we are accustomed to
seeing in professors of philosophy who are usually fast students of convention. To
tell the story of war in the age of its technological reproduction, its escalation, as a
“force multiplier” (to quote the Pentagon as Sloterdijk does),23 Sloterdijk explains the
technique involved at Ypres at some visceral length—thus, again, the colour of the
foam that so uncannily maps on to the damage done to lungs by today’s Covid-19, but,
more technically, he goes on to describe the firebombing of Dresden as a “blast furnace
effect”:

the attackers aimed to generate a fiery central vacuum by dropping a high

concentration of incendiary bombs, to produce a hurricane-like suction effect—a
so-called firestorm. (TA, 54)

The result of these “surgical” bombing effects was the production of

a special atmosphere capable of burning, carbonizing, desiccating, and

asphyxiating at least 35,000 people in the space of one night [which] constituted a
radical innovation in the domain of rapid mass killings. (TA, 66)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute force “multipliers” of the Dresden tactics deployed
by Winston Churchill and Bomber Harris.
Here there is not just (to use a gaming metaphor) a “levelling up” (mere escalation)
but ex-plication. Articulating Ge-Stell, Sloterdijk’s explication corresponds to “the
scandal of Being taken to its dark limits” (TA, 64). Here it is what we do not say that
is key as all of this takes place against a backdrop of censorship. Sloterdijk’s making
“radioactivity explicit” contrasts with the expressly inexplicit: occupation censorship,
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 217

as he explained, entailed that the very mention of even the deployment of the bombs
would be denied in Japan until 1952. And if one can deny an atom bomb, as one did
do, for some seven years after a fact trumpeted in lock step on the front page of every
newspaper in the United States, to deny chemtrails overhead is a piece of proverbial
cake. The same holds for the listing of numbers, as Fuller points out along with
Agamben another analysts speaking of the death rates and the assembly of such rates
as reported for Covid-19.
Such silencing accompanies explication as before; thus, this is a standard protocol—
nor to be sure, do we, the consumers, worry about microwaves or about cell phone
radiation and even 5G continues to concern few (despite the abundance of scientific
and medical concerns) as consumers happily munch away at genetically crisped apples,
and salmon, and apart from social media indignation are quite content to take their
energy needs from pipelines and fracking or windfarms and solar panels as these fit
into the same electrical grid provided by the same energy utilities.24
In consequence, we have a “radically new level of latency” (TA, 64). As Sloterdijk
explains this latency, he means the term with uncomfortable precision because he
is talking a metaphor for contamination, radiation, inflammation, sickness, and
poisoning:

The long concealed, the unknown, the unconscious, the never-known, the never-
noticed and imperceptible, were forthwith forced to the level of the manifest
becoming indirectly noticeable in the form of peeling skin and ulcers, as if they
were the result of an invisible fire. (TA, 64)

Sloterdijk’s “atmospheric explication,” includes current weather manipulation (and it is

routine for academics, especially academics, to deny as “conspiracies” aka “fake news”
anything but the official story on anything from JFK to 9/11, or indeed the very idea of
weather control, including HAARP).
Yet my speaking of chemtrails, my relatively frequent mention of 5G (mainstream
academics do not mention this at all, even when writing about such thinkers as
Anders), not to mention weather control, violates all standards of academic complicity.
Only Illich, a priest and provocateur of another generation, himself born in the city
in which Anders would die, could remind his listeners, very subtly of the original
meaning of conspiracy: Das Geschenk der Conspiratio, the gift of conspiracy, a lecture
he gave on being awarded the Bremen peace prize in 1998.25 Illich begins his lecture by
remembering other commemorative events at the same locus (in Bremen), disparate
interests, research projects, friends from across the world, not all of whom would
get along with one another after his death, such that even this tenuous collectivity
would vanish, this is the way of the same spirit with which Illich kept his faith.
Very differently than Sloterdijk, speaking of air, of gas and vapours, Illich confesses
that he speaks of “atmosphere,” lacking a better option, “faute de mieux” and this ‘spirit’
is part of his notion of gratuitous or unearned grace or Umsonstigkeit:

In Greek, the word is used for the emanation of a star, or for the constellation that
governs a place; alchemists adopted it to speak of the layers around our planet.
218 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

Maurice Blondel reflects its much later French usage for bouquet des esprits, the
scent those present contribute to a meeting. I use the word for something frail and
often discounted, the air that weaves and wafts and evokes memories, like those
attached to the Burgundy long after the bottle has been emptied.26

Illich’s theme, as elaborated from conspiratio, is “the commingling of breaths,”27 and

in an era that has seen the closing of churches and the distancing of community
members, including close family, Illich’s emphasis on the complex history of the
Christian greeting, the kiss of peace that is part of Catholic ritual28—it is this point that
our current horror of death, care of and for the self, would seem to alienate. Contra the
contract as such, as it were, Illich argues:

Community in our European tradition is not the outcome of an act of authoritative

foundation, nor a gift from nature or its gods, nor the result of management,
planning, and design, but the consequence of a conspiracy, a deliberate, mutual,
somatic, and gratuitous gift to one another. The prototype of that conspiracy lies in
the celebration of the early Christian liturgy in which, no matter their origin, men
and women, Greeks and Jews, slaves and citizens, engender a physical reality that
transcends them. The shared breath, the con-spiratio, is peace, understood as the
community that arises from it.29

If Illich is correct, the wearing of masks cannot but have political consequences, as the
shortest path to ending community.
Just as much as today’s academic denounces those who question the received view
on Coronavirus, a faith which turns a complex shifting of official doctrine into the
social media equivalent of Keystone Cops worthy turns and reverses, it is also typical
to mock the notion of weather manipulation, chemtrails, 5G, what have you, as if
there were or had to be assumed as unquestionable article of faith (“Faith”?—the very
term should get some attention in this context) that the government could not, would
not be involved in any such thing. Claims of government incompetence that vitiate
intentionality loom large in such accounts.
Like HIV, Coronavirus has a standard story that must be observed. And gas warfare
is something that Nazis do, thus deploying such weapons of mass destruction is for the
likes of villains such as Saddam Hussein, and if Iraq, in truth, never had such weapons,
this is the point of Fuller’s rhetoric of “post-truth,” as cited earlier, we are not deterred
in assuming it must be true of Syria or some other foe du jour.
The language of concession compounds any issue of discussion. If scholars
rarely invoke weather weaponization, it is also uncommon to speak of 5G, although
some medical doctors have written about this, or else of “inventing” HIV (although
virologists and molecular biologists like Luc Montagnier and Peter Duesberg do
so, with career-killing consequences, consider the different cases of Franz Moewus,
who crossed or otherwise somehow annoyed his Cold Spring co-researchers or
Bruno Latour when he disturbed a certain status quo in writing about the Salk
laboratory).30
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 219

If the weather comes up at all, it is named geoengineering as if we were in the middle

of a sci-fi story and could “terraform” the world overnight in the hoary fashion of a Star
Trek film, rather than doing the geoengineering we have always been doing (ordinary
anthropocene slash and burn, that is gardening, that is palm oil agriculture) and certainly
as opposed to the explicit military application of such interventions. Hence, in the case of
9/11, the process theologian, who better to speak truth to power, David Ray Griffin did
write about this, a range of books, some thirteen of these apparently. Here I cite just one:
The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé.31
If, in philosophy of science, one simply fails to cite outlier views, the practice works
across the board, and the first chapter of this book began by detailing its effects in
scholarship as a whole. Thus, at the beginning, I noted Don Ihde’s pioneering tactic of
silencing, a tactic by no means limited to Anders, used to great advantage in philosophy
of technology and philosophy of science and overall. Thus, one may write essay after
essay about Anders and related themes, one may raise questions about otherwise
“damned” topics like the work of Ludwik Fleck and others in philosophy of science,
and with respect to the sociology of models, social science, what have you. But this can
be so much talking to the wind as one’s colleagues do not read what one writes, and
once they realize that one has written such things, they quickly cease to engage.
The tactic has a name in German, academically, and it is what happened to
Nietzsche following his first book on tragedy, a silencing that is still in effect to this
day in philosophy more generally, in Nietzsche studies specifically, and above all in
Classics: Todtschweigerei. And all of this is done with a good conscience: no one thinks
that their practices are unfair or indeed that they are silencing anyone, even as they
reject applicants for academic positions and grants, refuse to publish their work, omit
to mention them in their own research, and above all fail to include them in official
conferences and speaker’s programmes. The violent resurgence of mobbing and claims
of pseudoscience and suppressed research in the current and ongoing Coronavirus
pandemic is only the latest instantiation.
I have repeatedly noted that it is only Sloterdijk who cares to mention weather
manipulation. And patently pointing to such a thing is problematic, given that, as
Sloterdijk writes,

Built-in to the premises of weather weapons research is a stable moral asymmetry

between US acts of warfare and every potential act of warfare: under no other
circumstances could there be any way to justify investing public funds in the
construction of a technologically asymmetrical weapon of an evidently terrorist
nature. Democratically legitimizing atmoterrorism in its advanced form requires
a concept of the enemy that gives the use of means for the enemy’s special
ionospheric treatment an air of plausibility. (TA, 51)

Sloterdijk’s point concerns HAARP, citing, likewise as already noted, the US

Department of Defense 1996 publication, “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the
Weather in 2025” (TA, 64), naming the 1990s a decade of military escalation not only
previously unthinkable but, “largely unbeknownst to the public, in the possibilities of
220 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

atmoterrorist intervention” (TA, 64), including the logical implications of the use of
drone warfare under Obama (and normalized as and qua propaganda, as already noted
by way of a Hollywood movie, Eye in the Sky [2015]), which are quite “far from providing
the antidote for terrorist practices, the stratification of weaponry works toward their
systematization” (TA, 53). Indeed, as Agamben and Adorno remind us when it comes to
the culture industry, montage is everything. Thus, in the aforementioned film, neither
Helen Mirren nor Alan Rickman met the other during the filming. They seem to be in
the same production, but they communicate virtually, just as the film itself was made,
at a distance. Today’s Zoom instruction replicates the illusion of communication.
It is in this “framed” sense that Baudrillard writes of the Gulf War. We see what
we are shown, and since Hitler the movie industry has played several roles in various
war efforts, all of them on the government side, one or the other, remember Steve
Fuller’s instructions on writing about pandemics for nationalist fun and glory. As
Garrett Stewart writes as apothegmatic banality in his “Preface: Returns of Theory” to
his Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance, “All montage is espionage.”32
Remaining on theme, and note that the Covid-19 virus still has us concerned with
air and not less as Agamben has observed, with the conditions (if not the declared fact)
of war, Sloterdijk observes:

The fact that the dominant weapons systems since World War II, and particularly
in post-1945 US war interventions, are those of the air force, merely betokens the
state-terrorist habitus and the ecologization of warfare. (TA, 53)

Explaining that

Air-design is the technological response to the phenomenological insight

that human being-in-the-world is always and without exception present as a
modification of “being-in-the-air.” (TA, 93)

Sloterdijk highlights the difference between phenomenologists who “explicate human

dwelling in its global atmospheric conditions” and Irigaray’s material insight “that
Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung be bracketed and replaced by a meditation on air”
(TA, 93). For her part, focused on breath, Irigaray reminds us that:

It is not light that creates the clearing but light comes about only in virtue of the
transparent levity of air. Light presupposes air.33

Confined to our homes for months, confined to our masks, rebreathing our own
exhalations, forbidden fresh air, we could do well to read and reread Irigaray. And
perhaps recall the ancient breath techniques, as she did, of yoga.
At stake here is the state of what Heidegger called “the question,”34 as questioning
is transformed as a possibility in the wake of technology. If we, as I argue, as Adorno
and Anders articulated the basis for critical theory to recall this possibility, we are
still trying to catch up to the intersection in thinking between Heidegger and Adorno,
and even Heidegger and Anders, as well as Adorno and Anders, just to begin to be
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 221

able to explicate Sloterdijk’s “highly explicit procedures.” Thinking Being, we can

forget the “stars down to earth” such that, for Sloterdijk, “any thinking that stays
phenomenological for too long turns into an internal water colour which in the best of
cases fades in to non-technical contemplation” (TA, 934).

The “Modern Prometheus”

The allure of the titan’s gift to us, creatures of lightning and blood and the titan’s
own vaporized ash, is the alternate title of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.35 The title,
the reference, is part of Langdon Winner’s concerns in his book, twice written
on the same theme, first with a clear reference to Shelley’s creature, Autonomous
Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, published in
1978 to virtually no response among political theorists and an if-possible-yet-more-
becalmed reception among philosophers of technology. The California-born Winner
updated the argument and refined the focus, to little resonance in a second book
published with a more popular title ten years later, The Whale and the Reactor, now
in its second edition.
Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, her modern Prometheus fashioned a creature of cobbled
together body parts, medical detritus, a creature, as a result, of “proud” flesh, insulted,
inflamed: in stasis between necrotized tissue and still viable, still functioning organs.
This condition of necrotization and inflammation is the condition of any transplant and
the drugs one takes to prevent rejection of the organ are as much to prevent the body’s
reaction to decay in today’s medical innovations, transplanted partly decayed hearts and
kidneys, lungs and livers, from cadavers, human and not (xenotransplantation),36 but
above all skin, even faces,37 and limbs. It is significant that, not unlike Shelley’s sombre
nineteenth-century vision, Ridley Scott’s 1982 Bladerunner shows us a dark world
of barely integrated cyborgs, filthy urban landscapes, complete with environmental
catastrophe. Nanotech is invisible by contrast but the effects are just as real.
Even if we have not read Adorno, we live the culture industry: the consummate
Ge-Stell of digital media including the all-encompassing Imaginary that is the screen.
But even scholars focused on technology and sociology of knowledge, conversant with
digital media, seem unaware of the rather more prosaic bubble in which we live—and
on the terms of which we publish. It is not possible to buy anything one might desire
in the supermarket market: rather, it is only possible to buy what is available there.
Increasingly, after months of lockdown, consumers have adjusted their demands to
suit what is available, when it is available. And count themselves lucky.

Geoforming, Masks, and Us

Adorno argued a painfully key bourgeois point in an aphorism entitled Antithesis, set
into the contradiction that it is “to stand aloof ” as he begins by writing for the very same
reasons that Anders points to his own reflections on Kafka and in general. For Adorno,
in Minima Moralia, the danger is that of the elitist in an impossible circumstance as
222 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

one thereby “runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his
critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.” The trouble is the dialectical
fiasco that it is to write an autocritical sociology or phenomenological anthropology of
one’s own culture from within that culture: “Against such awareness, however, pulls the
momentum of the bourgeois within him. The detached observer is as much entangled
as the active participant.”38 Thus:

The notion that every single person considers themselves better in their particular
interest than all others, is as long-standing a piece of bourgeois ideology as
the overestimation of others as higher than oneself, just because they are the
community of all customers. Since the old bourgeois class has abdicated, both lead
their afterlife in the Spirit [Geist] of intellectuals, who are at the same time the
last enemies of the bourgeois, and the last bourgeois. By allowing themselves to
still think at all vià-vis the naked reproduction of existence, they behave as the
privileged; by leaving things in thought, they declare the nullity of their privilege.39

Uncannily, as we began this closing chapter by noting, it is Adorno’s famous line on

shame, the shame that connects his thinking with Anders, that is the shame of “still
having air to breathe.”40 For those who still breathe freely, this holds more than ever.
We dedicate our minds, ignoring the possibilities that those minds can be subject
to strictures of “control” beyond the “culture industry” of which both Heidegger and
Adorno speak or else reviewing the use of music as a different kind of military “air-
conditioning,” in Kittler’s words. Sloterdijk takes the point to reflect that

infrasonic waves affect not only inorganic material but also living organisms—
in particular the human brain, which operates in these low frequency zones—
HAARP includes the prospect of developing a quasi-neurotelepathic weapon
capable of destabilizing the human population with long-distance attacks on their
cerebral functions. (TA, 68)

It is time to bring Heidegger and Anders/Adorno together, highlighting their common

focus on phenomenology towards a critique of technological reason. Talking weather,
daring to question events like “bomb cyclones,” or everyday things like chemtrails and
so on runs the risk of speaking of truth to power but also, and this is worse for academics,
invites mockery, as what Sloterdijk calls “a form of incitement to blasphemy.”
As our insurance policies spell it out for us, rather in the way that todays’ emergency
vaccine manufacturers are indemnified against any untoward side effects of their new
vaccines: things like weather are not covered; these are “acts of God”.41 As Sloterdijk
writes, “the principle of the weather is like that of birth and death: it comes from God
and from Him alone” (TA, 88). Thus, we prefer to talk about climate change rather than
weather manipulation.
And there is such a thing as climate change but, like Pogo looking for the enemy, it is
us. Better said, we are the immediate cause and the intended target of the efforts underway
with weather manipulation to contain and correct it. And if these efforts succeed,
humans will die along with those beings humans already kill. If Anders, via Goethe, had
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 223

already highlighted the problem of geoengineering with his discussion of the sorcerer’s
apprentice and his broomsticks, today’s effective equivalent is nanotechnology. Sloterdijk
clarifies that and buried in the listing of our “industrial-chemotechnical, militaristic,
locomotive, and tourist activities,” it is important to highlight the “militaristic.” Thus
toward the end of Terror from the Air, Sloterdijk explains that:

In the age of atmospheric toxins, strategies, and hidden agendas all such quasi-
religious consenting to place one’s trust in one’s primary surroundings—be it
nature, the cosmos, creation, homeland, situation, etc.—takes on the guise of an
invitation to self-harm. Advancing explication not only forces a semantic change
in the meaning of naivety, it means that it becomes increasingly in-your-face, and
even objectionable; the naïve, nowadays, is that which encourages sleepwalking in
the midst of present danger. (TA, 108–109)

Beyond Heidegger, and Sloterdijk, we are still in the wake of modern technology and
all its force multiplying effects, and we still need to ask after questioning.
But even there, we have a problem. We are currently living under lockdown,
currently enduring mask mandates, enforced or constrained vaccination schemes, as
if the science on vaccination had been settled as it has not and as only fiat could make
it so. The silence of intellectuals on these matters is painful and telling, and for this
reason alone, had we no other reason, and we have many, Anders is worth reading.

“Cosmic Parvenus”
Designating the citizens of his time—and I do not think he would exclude the citizens
of 2020/2021—as “cosmic parvenus, usurpers of the apocalypse,” Anders argues that
quite in the face of the fact that we ourselves have caused this (think climate change,
think susceptibility to social media manipulation), “sleepwalking,” we exempt ourselves
from fault in advance, excusing our inaction.
To this we should add what Virilio described as our “silence,” which in the current
crisis is endemic. There is complicity on the part of the average academic regarding
social distancing and the oppression that is the wearing of masks, the blocking of
breath, especially for children.42
Thus the new “Fat Man” (to take over the military codename for the bomb dropped
on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945) is a metonymic signifier for an ultimate “trolley
problem,” as analytic philosophers fond of calculating ethical consequences name
such things, considering the death of one of unlovely girth, deliberately thrown from a
bridge, supposed thereby, according to projected calculations, so to offset the imminent
or threatened death of a certain number of others (five or so, more or less) on a given
track. Anders contends that even apart from such stochastic calculations, we imagine a
constant state of vigilance, the go-to description for nuclear preparedness as entailing
a constant state of violence. The parallel with the current Coronavirus crisis is obvious.
Thus, on the level of global endangerment, it is argued that climate change demands
active or overt geoengineering, rather than the covert kind already in play, and thus
224 Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology

insists that the only way to fight the poison we manufacture, what Sloterdijk rightly
called our “expectorations” mentioned earlier, has to be not with ceasing our drilling,
our fracking, the burning of forests, the mining of rare earths, the raising and killing
of animals on an industrial scale, the trawling and seizing, repeatedly and massively, of
all manner of ocean creatures on factory processing ships, and thereby the devastation
of the world, land and air and sea, but and only to add yet more poison, that is the idea
of geoengineering via atmospheric dispersants, coupled with radio frequencies, scalar
transmitters, and so on.
To quote this again, Anders’ old-fashioned and sardonic observation: “the devil
has moved into a new apartment” (AM II, 410) seems bound to remain with us even
as we dismiss it—we do not “believe” in “such things.”43 The dark star that followed
Anders seems to be reflected in this notion, more than banal, of a new locus of evil,
corresponding to our complacency with vaccine mandates (note how much more
efficient these are than mere chemtrail dispersants could ever he), along with passports
to ensure compliance, our support of nuclear technology (bombs and energy), our
tolerance of not only weather manipulations, human-animal “chimbrids” (all as noted
earlier), but also drone and other attacks; all this would seem to ensure that we must
be counted, all of us, as so many new “sons of Eichmann,” implicated by our inaction,
even if we name that non-action by the fetish name: nonviolence, peaceful resistance,
“sleepwalking.”
The term “sleepwalking” is Sloterdijk’s as cited above. Anders himself quotes Max
Scheler who, unlike most modern thinkers (including Heidegger who explicitly denies
a connection between technology and deviltry), emphasized that he maintained his
‘belief ’ in the devil. Speaking of the devil’s “new apartment,” Anders’ point is that the
apartment is the one next door, which means that even as we seek to “smoke him out,”
as Anders writes, the devil is easier to miss than ever before.
In his Kafka book, and this is unsettling, Anders reminds us that it is imperative to
recognize that it is not only war that can continue under another name. Thus, he writes,
quite with Nietzsche in mind, that

it is the particular stage of disbelief reached at any given time that is itself interpreted
in a religious light. Nature, though neither created by God nor inhabited by any
specifically divine presence, still awakens diffusely religious sentiments. ... or else
the “twilight of the gods” has apocalyptic and therefore religious significance; or
man “heroically confronting the ultimate nothingness” becomes the object of a
mystique—the belief in a superman; or finally, unable to find God, the poet sings
the mysterious lament of Rilke’s poems in which the singing itself becomes an act
of praise for the divine absence.44

This, as Anders concluded in the second volume of human antiquatedness,

outdatedness, “is our doom” (AM II, 471). For Anders, who also had recourse to the
figure of Benjamin’s angel of history in his notion of “historians turned toward the future,”
everything would turn on whether we might be capable of a newly phenomenological
hermeneutics, able to descry “in the machines of today the humanity coined by” the
same, not to be part of this new future or to hack it, but for the sake of “interruption.”
 
“The Devil’s New Apartment” 225

The problem is not simply climate change, but geoengineering, cloud seeding and
5G and soon, 6G, and so on, ‘multiplied’ to use the military expression of choice. The
problem is the wearing of masks, the complicity with lockdown regimes and self-
imposed quarantines, the susceptibility to social media manipulation. The problem is
the shunning of the old and the ill by agreeing to prohibitions against hospital visits
and care home visits, the problem is agreeing to zoom one’s lectures, agreeing to a
simulacrum of life, to virtually, as it were, teach, love, theorize, socialize online. But
that is nowhere real or true, and this is not abrogated by the fact that it is all we (take
ourselves to) have. This is the softest war against the all, that is against, in Adorno’s
words, they, the people, that has ever been undertaken, and it is soft because it can be:
there is no resistance.
Under his dark star, Anders himself could not have been particularly sanguine
about the success of any undertaking that might seek to challenge the consequence of
the new social and world order under which we live and have lived thanks to modern
media technology from radio to the internet. Nevertheless, Anders argued, and we
should note his clarity and philosophical rigor, given that “impossibility has not been
proven, it is morally impossible to renounce the attempt.”
226
 Notes

Introduction
1 The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 2, N-Z. ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993 [1973]), 2713.
2 Ernst Schraube attests to this breadth in his essay, “‘Torturing Things Until They
Confess’,” Science as Culture, 14 (2005): 77–85, underlining the relevance (and the
challenge) of “a huge oeuvre that constitutes an extensive critique of technology: one
meter of writings, more than 20 books and 100 articles, and 70% of his work yet to be
published” (78). Yet the reasons are not simply subjective irrepressibility but what I
am here noting as a negative constellation, that is a kind of black star, and consequent
readerly “scotosis,” just to use a technical, scholastic term. As Schraube goes on to
observe, “Few other intellectuals share Günther Anders’ way of combining theory and
practice” (Ibid.). Just this combination and style requires attention to phenomenology,
Husserl style, classically regarded, and Heidegger style, hermeneutically conceived.
3 Anders, “Sein ohne Zeit,” AM I, 222.
4 The term “anthropological phenomenology” can refer to anthropology or
ethnography per se and is still relevant in connection with Anders in contemporary
research, cf. Ehgartner et al., “On the Obsolescence of Human Beings in Sustainable
Development.” Global Discourse. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and
Applied Contemporary Thought, 7, no. 1: After Sustainability—What? (2017): 66–83.
See here, among others, van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2000 [1998]). More broadly and with specific reference to Adorno, see Dennis
Johannssen’s “Toward a Negative Anthropology.” Anthropology and Materialism, 1
(2013): 1–14.
5 This term also appears as the title of a collection edited by Helmut Reinalter and
Andreas Oberprantacher, Außenseiter der Philosophie (Würzburg: Köngishausen und
Neumann, 2012). Predictably, the collection includes some authors who are, factically
speaking and by contrast with Anders, quite mainstream, such as Montaigne, Pascal,
William James, Franz Rosenzweig, and Hannah Arendt along with Simone Weil
and Günther Anders. Christian Dries counts Hans Jonas among the excluded in his
Die Welt als Vernichtungslager. Eine kritische Theorie der Moderne im Anschluss an
Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt und Hans Jonas (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012). See
further in a related lineage, Édouard Jolly, Étranger au monde: Essai sur la première
philosophie de Günther Anders (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019) as well as Adi Armon,
“The Parochialism of Intellectual History: The Case of Günther Anders.” Leo Baeck
Institute Yearbook, 62 (2017): 225–41.
6 See for a discussion my several essays on Nietzsche, perhaps (most accessibly): Babich,
“The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and
the Art of the Polemic.” Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Christa Davis
Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 171–90.
7 See, especially for its relevance for phenomenology, Theodor Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973 [1966]).
228 Notes

8 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Collected Works,
Volume 6 Marx and Engels, 1845–1848 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 477–96.
9 Important sections of this text can be found together with valuable accompanying
reflections in Müller’s Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human
Obsolescence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) in addition to chapters that were
originally published contemporaneously in translation.
10 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 487. Thus, it can be useful
to cite the German original: “Die fortwährende Umwälzung der Produktion,
die ununterbrochene Erschütterung aller gesellschaftlichen Zustände, die ewige
Unsicherheit und Bewegung zeichnet die Bourgeoisepoche vor allen anderen aus. Alle
festen eingerostetenVerhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen
und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern
können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und
die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen
Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augenanzusehen.”
11 This is featured in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous Ausgabe letzter Hand. Band
1–40 in 20 Bänden (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta: 1830 [1827]), Vol. 1, 217–20.
See overall Daniel Ogden, “The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Pancrates and his Powers in
Context (Lucian, ‘Philopseudes’), 33–6.” Acta Classica, 47 (2004): 101–26. In the related
framework of the need to control science/technology’s potential overgrowth, see Anthony
R. Michaelis’ editorial of the same name as Ogden’s essay, on the 1940’s film Fantasia,
“The Apprentice’s Sorcerer,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 9, no. 1 (1984): 1–3.
12 The Manchester-based philosopher and gaming designer, Chris Bateman, uses this
term in a dialogue with the current author, Babette Babich, and Christopher Bateman,
“Touching Robots.” Online https​:/​/on​​lyaga​​me​.ty​​pepad​​.com/​​only_​​a​_gam​​e​/201​​7​/02/​​
babic​​h​-and​​-bate​​man​-​t​​ouchi​​ng​-ro​​bots. Accessed September 1, 2019. on his blog, “The
Last of the Continental Philosophers.” Only a Game. November 29, 2016. Online.
https​:/​/on​​lyaga​​me​.ty​​pepad​​.com/​​only_​​a​_gam​​e​/201​​6​/11/​​babic​​h​-and​​-b​ate​​man​-1​​.html​.
See further, for a fuller elaboration of Bateman’s reflections here, and note that the
publishers own name reflects this portable—and invisible—rubric, The Virtuous
Cyborg (London: Eyewear Publishing, 2018).
13 Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (London: Indigo, 2019).
14 Ibid.
15 Anders, “The World as Phantom and Matrix.” Norbert Gutterman, trans. Dissent, 3,
no. 1 (1956): 14–24.
16 Ibid., 19, translation slightly altered.
17 See Tom Stoelker’s January 2020 video interview with “Babette Babich on Love, Social
Media, and Megxit.” Video Interview. January 16, 2020. Online. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​
com​/w​​atch?​​v​=9Em​​​j6JAE​​VKs.
18 See for references and discussion, Babich, “The Question of the Contemporary in
Agamben, Nancy, Danto: Between Nietzsche’s Artist and Nietzsche’s Spectator.”
Futures of the Contemporary, ed. Paulo de Assis and Michael Schwab (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2019), 49–82.
19 The author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), Kate Manne, uses the term, which she tells us she does not coin, to characterize
the circumstance wherein a male, even a criminal, can elicit more sympathy than his
(female) victim. In philosophy, we need only think of leading scholars accused of
harassment whose careers continue and, in the plural and very recently as well, in the
political sphere, of sitting Supreme Court judges.
 
Notes 229

20 See most recently, my contribution, “Good for Nothing: On Philosophy and Its
Discontents.” Why Philosophy?, eds. Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2019), 123–50. It is to the point of the entitlement that drives “himpathy” that even
mentioning the analytic continental divide can irritate colleagues, just talking about
it seems sufficiently incendiary. See my “Philosophy or Love, Actually” a lecture for
the faculty at Fordham University, February 1, 2019. The video version is available
online: https://youtu​.be​/zCef5sEje2w. I included reference to the aftermath of such
#metoo style aggression on 30 March 2019 in a lecture presented to the North Texas
Philosophical Society, Dallas, Texas, March 30, 2019 and, more broadly on “James
& Husserl & Analytic Philosophy: On Love, Actually.” Boston College Graduate
Colloquium: Remembering Richard Cobb-Stevens, September 20, 2019.
21 The quote by Jean-Pierre Dupuy is part of the publisher’s features for Bischof, et al.,
(eds.), The Life and Work of Günther Anders: Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of
Letters (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014). See too, Christian Fuchs, “Günther Anders’
Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology in the Age of Big Data Capitalism.”
tripleC, 15, no. 2 (2017): 582–611. Online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.tri​​ple​-c​​.at​/i​​ndex.​​php​/t​​riple​​C​/
art​​ic​le/​​view/​​898.
22 Thus, Müller and Mellor write in their editorial to the 2019 issue of Thesis Eleven,
dedicated to Anders, reflects that in the course of “the last 25 years, this has
given rise to a now vast body of scholarly work in German, French, and Italian
. . . and this special journal issue marks the growing interest in Anders’s work
in Anglophone research.” Christopher John Müller and David Mellor, “Utopia
Inverted: Günther Anders, Technology and the Social.” Thesis Eleven, 153, no. 1
(2019): 3–8.
23 Fuchs, “Günther Anders’ Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology.”
24 I discuss some of this in my “Are They Good? Are They Bad?”
25 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction.” In Walter Benjamin (ed.), Illuminations: Essay and
Reflections, 1–55 (New York: Schocken, 1969), 1.
26 Thus, although this continues to be repeated in commentary on Anders, it is
important to underline that Anders was not Benjamin’s “second cousin” or “distant
cousin.” As his nephew, David Michaelis replied to my query concerning their
relation: “Yes, they were cousins, not distant. My grandfather and his father were
brothers.” Private communication with the author: December 12, 2019.
27 See James Dawsey, “The Life of a Rescuer: Eva Michaelis-Stern in Dark Times,” June
25, 2019. Online. https​:/​/ww​​w​.goo​​gle​.c​​om​/ur​​l​?sa=​​t​&rct​​=j​&q=​​&esrc​​=s​&so​​urce=​​web​
&c​​d=​&ca​​d​=rja​​&uact​​=8​&ve​​d​=2ah​​UKEwi​​OsZbC​​utHpA​​hWzqH​​EKHeB​​PC5cQ​​FjAAe​​
gQIAh​​AB​&ur​​l​=htt​​ps​%3A​​%2F​%2​​Fwww.​​natio​​nalww​​2muse​​um​.or​​g​%2Fw​​ar​%2F​​artic​​
les​%2​​Flife​​-resc​​uer​-e​​va​-mi​​chae​l​​is​-st​​ern​-d​​ark​-t​​imes&​​usg​=A​​OvVaw​​3AodL​​tsezu​​xLID0​​
q3ojP​​Z0. David Michaelis wrote to say that Anders was given to tell his sister, that is,
Michaelis’ mother, “we wrote while you did.”
28 See William Stern and Clara Stern, Die Kindersprache. Eine psychologische und
sprachtheoretische Untersuchung (Leipzig: Barth, 1907) as well as their Erinnerung,
Aussage und Lüge in der ersten Kindheit. For discussion, see Werner Deutsch and
Christliebe El Mogharbel, “Clara and William Stern’s Conception of a Developmental
Science.” European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, no. 2 (2011): 135–56.
For Anders, called “Heinz” in his mother’s recollections, Clara Stern. Aus einer
Kinderstübe: Tagebuchblätter einer Mutter (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1914), and already
represented in the studies co-authored with Anders’ father, the lability of names may
have been quasi-second nature.
230 Notes

29 Stern, Die Rolle der Situationskategorie bei den “logischen Sätzen.” Erster Teil einer
Untersuchung über die Rolle der Situationskategorie (Diss. Freiburg/Brsg. 1924).
30 See for a discussion of Anders and philosophical anthropology, beginning with a
reflection on the difficulty of categorizing Anders on the terms of the same academy
that excluded him, Marcel Müller, Von der “Weltfremdheit” zur “Antiquiertheit.”
Philosophische Antrhopologie bei Günther Anders (Marburg: Tectum, 2012). See too
Christian Filk. “Der Mensch ist größer und kleiner als er selbst” Günther Anders’
“Negative Anthropologie im Zeitalter der ‘(Medien-)Technokratie’.” Medienpulse, 50,
no. 2 (2012): 1–19. as well as Filk, “‘Frei sind die Dinge: Unfrei ist der Mensch’—Zur
Entwicklung von Günther Anders Negativer Anthropologie im technisch-medialen
Zeitalter.” MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen/Reviews, 23, no. 3, (2006): 277–91.“
Both of Filk’s essays constitute contributions to media-anthropology, a field that
has had an efflorescence that has also split into several different directions in many
cases steered by the dominance of names other than Anders. Valuable here is the
attention to the complexities of Anders’ person in addition to the difficult—and still
very immediate presence—of the theme of philosophical anthropology brought into
connection with media, or what Anders understood under the notion of having and
which we might better understand via the concept of the consumer as Adorno also
understood this by way of the culinary. Filk also notes Nietzsche in conceiving the
distinction between the human and the animal for Scheler/Plessner and Anders (this
last a bit tendentious as we will see in the following text).
31 Cf. Anders, Musikphilosophische Schriften. Texte und Dokumente, ed. Reinhard
Ellensohn, (Munich: Beck, 2017), 15–140.
32 By contrast, Adorno, for all his revolutionary sense and sensibility, was able to secure
his own academic credentials, securing a Habilitation under Tillich by submitting,
quite cannily and contrary to Adorno’s own research interests, not a thesis on
the same sociology of music Adorno also wrote on as he like Anders had a keen
interest in the topic and would go on to write extensively on it, but and just at hand,
matched to Tillich’s interests, such is academic politics, on Kierkegaard. See: Adorno,
Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1962). Boer argues, quite conventionally, that the book is not sufficiently adverted to
as the point of departure for his essay “A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard.”
Cultural Critique, 83 (Winter 2013): 1–30. This is inaccurate as there are a number of
books that directly engage this connection, especially via aesthetics, as may be seen
in Hullot-Kentor’s reception of Adorno and most conspicuously (in the literal sense
of the conspicuous, qua Adorno Prize winner), in spite of the author’s otherwise
limited familiarity with Adorno’s work (not that this is all that uncommon), Peter
Gordon who wrote a monograph perpetuating the identification of Kierkegaard with
existentialism as a philosophical rubric. On the question of academic facility, beyond
questions of acknowledgement and privilege, Heidegger insists on naming Adorno’s
original teacher—Hans Cornelius, whom Adorno followed sufficiently dutifully that
the former would refuse to direct the text submitted as a Habilitation (because lacking
distinction from his own work). Cf., inter alia, Babette Babich, “Between Heidegger
and Adorno: Airplanes, Radios, and Sloterdijk’s Atmoterrorism.” Kronos Philosophical
Journal, VI (2017 [2018]): 133–58.
33 Stern/Anders, Über das Haben.
34 See for a discussion from an importantly Francophone perspective—including
reference to Gabriel Marcel—Daglind Sonolet, Günther Anders: phénoménologue de la
technique (Bourdeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006), here esp. p. 41ff.
 
Notes 231

35 Stern, Über das Haben. Sieben Kapitel zur Ontologie der Erkenntnis (Bonn: Cohen,
1928). See for a discussion of Anders in the phenomenological tradition, Laurent
Perreau, Günther Anders à l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Kimé, 2007),
especially foregrounding Husserl in addition to: Édouard Jolly, Günther Anders.
Une Politique de la Technique (Paris: Decitre, 2017). Contemporary approaches
foreground the ongoing turn to religious approaches, including Jason W. Alvis,
“Transcendence of the Negative: Günther Anders’ Apocalyptic Phenomenology.”
Religions, 8, no. 59 (2017): 1–16. https://www​.mdpi​.com​/2077​-1444​/8​/4​/59, and
see too Eckhard Wittulski, “Der tanzende Phänomenologe.” Günther Anders
kontrovers, ed., Konrad Paul Liessmann (Munich: Beck, 1992), 17–33. But see also
the always-excellent Lütkehaus, most recently his Philosophieren nach Hiroshima.
Über Günther Anders (Berlin: Fischer, 2018 [1992]), in addition to his Schwarze
Ontologie. Über Günther Anders (Lüneberg: Zu Klampen, 2002). Anders himself
also published in French in the mid-1930s, which explains some of the attention of
French scholarship, including his acknowledged influence on Jean-Paul Sartre, “Une
interprétation de l’a posteriori.” Recherches philosophiques, IV (1934–1935): 65–80 et
“Pathologie de la liberté. Essai sur la non-identification.” Recherches Philosophiques,
VI (1936–1937): 22–54.
36 F. Joseph Smith, the musicologist and philosopher, argues that Husserl himself
was influenced by Wilhelm Stern’s tone variator for his own analysis of tone: “In
discussing tonal apprehension [Auffassung], Husserl follows W. Stern, emphasizing
the fact that apprehension is not instantaneous, a thing of the moment but that it
builds up gradually. . . . A series of musical tones builds a successive unity which
is apprehended as such.” See Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to
a Phenomenology of Music (New York/Montreux: Gordon and Breach, 1979); here
Smith goes on to characterize the perception of a symphonic form in the case of
Sibelius, from “motives enunciated by the cello in the opening bars.” Synthesizing
the opposition, Heidegger poses contra Husserl, indirectly, saying that we never
hear tones, Smith writes: “Tones are in themselves, as it were, dead entities, regarded
acoustically, easily identifiable as the same continuous tones; but in phenomenal flux,
as they appear in immanent time, tones are alive and fluid, and so are the forms they
generate.”
37 A related distinction informed the heard/lived-experience of tones in Anders’ various
writings on philosophic music aesthetics and history and musical sociology.
38 In addition to several sections that appeared in English simultaneously, the
first part of this Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur philosophischen
Anthropologie (Munich: Beck, 2018), “Uber prometheischer Sham,” is included along
with valuable commentary in Müller’s Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and
Human Obsolescence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 23–95.
39 This first section is available in English translation as “On Promethean Shame” as
cited above.
40 An outstanding translation by Martin Esslin has been available since 1965 in
collaboration with Anders himself. It is intriguing to note how excellent this reading
is, especially as Anders points to an observation that makes his own what can
otherwise seem to be a clear recognition of a kind of Kojèvian shift of thinking, noted
not by name but only from the period in which Anders found himself, “Since the
early thirties when Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s theory of the class struggle began to
interest the younger generation in France, the famous image of the pair ‘master and
servant’ from Hegel’s Phaenomenologie des Geistes so deeply engraved itself into the
232 Notes

consciousness of those intellectuals born around 1900 that it occupies today the place
which the image of Prometheus held in the nineteenth century.” Anders, “On Beckett’s
Play, Waiting for Godot,” trans. Martin Esslin and revised by Anders, Samuel Beckett:
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1965) , 140–51, here 149.
41 Anders, “Reflections On The H Bomb,” Dissent, 3, no. 2 (Spring 1956): 146–55. See
too, with Claude Eatherly, Burning Conscience: The case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude
Eatherly, Told in His Letters to Günther Anders. Preface by Bertrand Russell; Foreword
by Robert Jungk (New York: Paragon, 1961). Later concerns include Anders, “Ten
Theses on Chernobyl.” Sixth World Congress of the International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War in 1986. Online. https​:/​/li​​bcom.​​org​/l​​ibrar​​y​/ten​​-thes​​es​-ch​​
ernob​​yl-​%E​​2​%80%​​93​-g%​​C3​​%BC​​nther​​-ande​​rs. Accessed March 8, 2018,” as well as,
as Harold Marcuse notes, a translation from a translation, of “We, Sons of Eichmann:
An Open Letter to Klaus Eichmann.” Jordan Levinson, trans. 2015. Online. http:​/​/ant​​
iconc​​ept​.p​​hpnet​​.us​/e​​ichma​​​nn​.ht​​m.
42 See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso,
1996).
43 Thus, Marco Marian connects Anders with the Situationists, Marian, “Günther
Anders and the Modification of Reality.” Journal of Historical Archaeology &
Anthropological Sciences, 3, no. 6 (2018): 789‒92.
44 In English since 2017, as Anders, “The Obsolescence of Privacy.” Christopher John
Müller, trans. CounterText, 3, no. 1 (2017): 20–46.
45 At Stony Brook in the 1970s, Ihde sidestepped any mention of Anders in his
courses on the philosophy of technology (an opposition he would later, and
repeatedly, brag about). The refusal was deliberate and, in a recent autobiographical
reflection, still seeking to highlight what others lack, Ihde associates his refusal of
Anders’ contributions (along with Hannah Arendt) in: Don Ihde, Husserl’s Missing
Technologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), xiv.
46 van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology. See for a recent, Ihde-influenced
reading, conceived as counterpoint, Dominic Smith, Exceptional Technologies: A
Continental Philosophy of Technology (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
47 See overall but especially the first chapters of Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender
of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
48 See the contributions to Yunus Tuncel (ed.), Nietzsche and Transhumanism: Precursor
or Enemy? (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017). See too Steve Fuller’s many recent
books on the theme of what he calls the proactionary stance.
49 See on this Tim Adams’ interview (with) “Sherry Turkle: ‘I Am Not Anti-technology, I
Am Pro-Conversation.’” The Guardian. October 18, 2015.
50 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from
Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011) and see too Nicholas Carr, The Shallows:
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011)
restating/updating Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death in the Age of Show Business
(New York: Penguin, 1985). Dallas Smythe makes this point in “Communications:
Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/
Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, 1, no. 3 (Fall/Automne 1977): 1–27.
Drawing on the history (and politics of technology) and writing with reference to
Anders’ notion of obsolescence, see Slade’s Big Disconnect: The Story of Technology
and Loneliness (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012) and Made to Break: Technology
and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Cf. too
 
Notes 233

Langdon Winner. The Whale and the Reactor. Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
51 Anders, “The World as Phantom and Matrix,” see, using an analysis of the evolution of
interior design, 17.
52 Ibid., 15. A helpful discussion, for those interested in the economics of political
economy, is offered in the chapter, “The Audience Commodity and its Work.” In
Smythe’s Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981), 22–51.
53 It is useful in this connection to read the provocative online essay by Franz Schandl,
“Work Will Not Set You Free: Notes on Günther Anders.”
54 A recent and critical mainstream discussion appears in Seymour, The Twittering
Machine noted above but see too, more conventionally, Tim Wu, The Attention
Merchants (London: Penguin, 2016), amid a number of other discussions including,
Shoshana Zuboff ’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future
at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile, 2019), and her “Big Other: Surveillance
Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information
Technology, 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89 as well as the contributions to the security-
minded collection edited by Elmer et al., Compromised Data: From Social Media to
Big Data (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), but which must be matched to the mediatic
phenomenology of simulation in Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), in addition to his The Consumer
Society: Myths and Structures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
55 I refer to the title of Morozov’s To Save Everything Click Here: Technology, Solutionism,
and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist (London: Penguin, 2014). In addition
to Baudrillard, Friedrich Kittler also sought to make related point. See also David
Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). See the chapter
on “Television and the Art of Symbolic Exchange.” Baudrillard and the Media: A
Critical Introduction, ed. William Merrin (London: Polity, 2005), 10–27, for a useful
discussion in Merrin, Baudrillard, and the Media and for an early overview of
Baudrillard, see Mark Nunes, “Jean Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality,
and Postmodernity.” Style, 29, no. 2, From Possible Worlds to Virtual Realities:
Approaches to Postmodernism (Summer 1995): 314–27.
56 See, for example, my “Musical ‘Covers’ and the Culture Industry: From Antiquity
to the Age of Digital Reproducibility.” Research in Phenomenology, 48, no. 3 (2018):
385–407.
57 See, for example, on the socio-theoretical but no less literally material notion of
‘entanglement,’ Babette Babich, “Heidegger on Verfallenheit.” Foundations of Science,
22, no. 2 (2017): 261–4.
58 Anders, “Einleitung. Die drei industriellen Revolutionen (1979).” In Die Antiquiertheit
des Menschen 2, 16. See for a discussion of “unsalararied” work: Müller, “Die
Unangestellten. Ein Blick in die Zukunft der Arbeit.”
59 Arendt, “Introduction,” 5.
60 Ibid., 6.
61 (Concerning honour without fame/concerning greatness without glory/concerning
dignity without compensation). Benjamin published Deutsche Menschen. Von Ehre
ohne Ruhm. Von Grösse ohne Glanz. Von Würde ohne Sold. Eine Folge von Briefen
(Lucerne: Vita Nova, 1936) using the name Detlef Holz.
62 Cf. Arendt, “Introduction,” 16.
63 Ibid., 17.
234 Notes

64 Cited in Ibid.
65 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka.” In Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essay and
Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 117.
66 Babich, “Musical ‘Covers’ and the Culture Industry.”
67 As I show in The Hallelujah Effect: Music, Performance Practice and Technology
(London: Routledge, 2016 [2013]), Jeff Buckley is more commonly associated with
covering Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah, even more than Cohen himself, certainly
more than k. d. lang and so on.
68 Cf. here H. Stith Bennett differently minded but still phenomenologically articulated
sociology of music, Becoming a Rock Musician (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018 [1980]). The new edition features a preface by Howard Becker.
69 See the first chapter of Babich, Nietzsches Antike (Berlin: Academia, 2020), 17–48.
70 Michael Theunissen, The Other.
71 See Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd,
2000 [1971]). See for a discussion of Illich, including reflections on the crisis of
the university today, Babette Babich, “Getting to Hogwarts: Michael Oakeshott,
Ivan Illich, and J.K. Rowling on ‘School’.” Education and Conversation: Exploring
Oakeshott’s Legacy, ed. David Bakhurst and Paul Fairfield (London: Bloomsbury,
2016), 199–218, as well as my “Tools for Subversion: Illich and Žižek on Changing the
World.” Making Communism Hermeneutical: Reading Vattimo and Zabala, ed. Sylvie
Mazzinie and Owen Glyn-Williams (Frankfurt am Main: Metzler, 2017). 95–111.
72 See for a discussion of Illich with specific reference to medical technology, Babich,
“Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show’: On the Expropriation of
Death,” Nursing Philosophy, 19, no. 1 (2018): 1–13.
73 Ivan Illich, “An Address to ‘Master Jacques.’” The Ellul Forum, 13 (July 1994):16–17.
74 Heidegger, What Is Philosophy, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New
Haven: College and University Press, 1958), 20–21.
75 Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy — Thinking and Poetizing, trans. Phillip Jacques
Braunstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1.
76 Heidegger, What Is Philosophy, 20–21.
77 Thus, the Günther Anders-Journal, Jg. 1. Sonderausgabe zur Tagung “Schreiben für
übermorgen.” Forschungen zu Werk und Nachlass von Günther Anders, Online. http:​/​/
www​​.guen​​ther-​​ander​​s​-ges​​ellsc​​haft.​​org​/w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/20​​17​/12​​/m​%C3​​​%BCll​​er​
-20​​17​.pd​​f, was founded as a conference publication of a 2014 conference on his work
as the journal of the Austrian Internationale Günther Anders-Gesellschaft.

Chapter 1
1 Sven-Olov Wallenstein counts four lectures in “The Historicity of the Work of
Art in Heidegger.” In Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Hans Ruin (eds.), The
Past’s Presence: Essays on the Historicity of Philosophical Thinking (Huddinge:
Södertörns högskola, 2005), here: 144. It is useful to look at Jacques Taminiaux,
“On Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art.” New Nietzsche Studies,
2, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter 1999): 1–22. See too David Espinet and Tobias Keiling (eds.),
Heideggers Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Ein Kooperativer Kommentar (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 2011). See too, as this is also related in this context, Jacques
Taminiaux, “Arendt, disciple de Heidegger?” Études Phénoménologiques, 1, no. 2
 
Notes 235

(1985): 111–36. Heidegger’s theme is the origin of the artwork as such. Focusing on
Walter Benjamin’s (different) study of the work of art in an age of “technological”
reproducibility. the technological era, Christopher P. Long recounts the seeming
convergence of themes in his reflection, “Art’s Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger,
Art and Politics.” New German Critique, No. 83, Special Issue on Walter Benjamin
(Spring–Summer, 2001): 89–115.
2 See Heidegger, “Einblick in das was ist, Bremer Vorträge 1949.” In Bremer und
Freiburger Vorträge, GA 79 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), 5–80.
3 The accounts of the history of the Frankfurt School tend to be enthusiastically
partisan (think Habermas loyalists), counting in some names and excluding others.
Thus, Anders does not appear in Emil Walter-Busch, Geschichte der Frankfurter
Schule. Kritische Theorie und Politik (Munich: Fink, 2010), although Hannah Arendt is
duly mentioned as Heidegger’s ‘Geliebte.’
4 See Babich, “Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger.”
In Babich and Dimitri Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2014), 163.
5 Thus, Christian Dries makes this claim as point of departure for his “Technischer
Totalitarismus: Macht, Herrschaft und Gewalt bei Günther Anders,” Etica & Politica/
Ethics & Politics: Rivista di filosofia, 15, no. 2 (2013): 175–98; but other specialists
have also found it difficult to read Anders on the issue of power. Liessmann, for
example, reads Anders in correspondence with Arendt. See Liessmann’s “Thought
after Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt.” Enrahonar,
46 (2011): 123–35; but cf., Babette Babich, “Martin Heidegger on Günther Anders
and Technology: On Ray Kurzweil, Fritz Lang, and Transhumanism.” Journal of
the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, 2 (2012):
122–44, as well as Édouard Jolly, “Entre légitime défense et état d’urgence. La pensée
andersienne de l’agir politique contre la puissance nucléaire.” Etica & Politica/Ethics
& Politics: Rivista di filosofia, 15, no. 2 (2013); in addition, in the same online locus:
Vallori Rasini, “Il potere della violenza. Su alcune riflessioni di Günther Anders.”
“Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics: Rivista di filosofia,” 15, no. 2 (2013): 258–70. See too
James Dawsey, “Ontology and Ideology: Günther Anders’s Philosophical and Political
Confrontation with Heidegger.” Critical Historical Studies, 4, no. 1 (Spring 2017):
1–37.
6 There are exceptions. For some of these, in media theory, see Timo Kaerlein, “Playing
with Personal Media: On an Epistemology of Ignorance.” Culture Unbound, 5 (2013):
651–70, as well as the reference to Fuchs earlier and Müller’s wide-ranging analysis
on media and digital culture in Prometheanism. See again Konrad Paul Liessmann
(ed.), “Thought after Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Günther Anders and Hannah
Arendt.” Enrahonar, 46 (2011): 123–35, in addition, again, to Schraube, “Torturing
Things Until They Confess” and, for a commentary that was, alas, for a long time itself
unreceived, Van Dijk’s Anthropology in the Age of Technology.
7 Dawsey uses this term to describe Anders in “Ontology and Ideology: Günther
Anders’s Philosophical and Political Confrontation with Heidegger.” Critical
Historical Studies, 4, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–37, concluding by observing that
“Günther Anders role in the ‘Heidegger wars’ has still not received due attention
in the Anglophone world” (37) but limiting himself exclusively to Alan Milchman’s
and Alan Rosenberg’s 2003 essay, “Martin Heidegger and the Political: New Fronts
in the Heidegger Wars.” See Review of Politics, 65, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 439–49, to
make his case.
236 Notes

8 When we make decisions, we can more easily project or predict possible or desired
positive consequences than possible or even likely negative outcomes which are then
discovered in practice. See, for a systematic discussion in a related context, Katinka
Waelbers, “Technological Delegation: Responsibility for the Unintended.” Science and
Engineering Ethics, 15, no. 1 (March 2009): 51–68. I explore this further with regard to
automation and invisibility in Babich, “Necropolitics and Techno-Scotosis.” Philosophy
Today, 65, 2 (2021).
9 Sometimes this is argued to be a result of what is called the “empirical turn,” a
focus on technology rather than the sociological or the political, a turn that has the
convenience of assuming as point of departure what might otherwise need to be
argued. See, for “empirically” inclined special overview, Paul Brey, “Philosophy of
Technology after the Empirical Turn.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology,
14, no. 1 (2010): 1–11, as well as Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical
Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (College Station: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2005).
10 See in the first instance the many studies of Jacques Ellul, for one example, Ellul’s The
Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1967 [1964]),
as well as the many studies of Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Less critically but no
less usefully, see Michel de Certeau’s reflections on the “arts of doing,” The Practice of
Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
See too, although more directly concerned with labour as indeed education, Stanley
Aronowitz et al.
11 Bruno Latour might be noted in the foreground, though there are others, but see for
example, and with reference to anthropological reflection on contemporary culture
perhaps first and foremost authored with Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction
of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), as well as Latour’s obviously titled, Aramis
or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996), and perhaps most instructively, if for Anglophone readers, elusively argued, The
Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press 1988 [1984]), in addition to his We Have Never Been Modern, trans.
Catherine Porter (New York: Harvester Books, 1993). See for discussion and further
references, Babich, “Hermeneutics and Its Discontents in Philosophy of Science: On Bruno
Latour, the ‘Science Wars,’ Mockery, and Immortal Models.” In Babich (ed.), Hermeneutic
Philosophies of Social Science (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 163–88.
12 I cite exemplary discussions throughout and in the notes to follow, but see, in
particular, Langdon Winner, John Street, Gilbert Germaine, all cited later in the text.
Thus it should not be assumed that no one had yet considered the problem from the
point of view of political theory; hence, see also Michael Allen Gillespie, “The Future
of Political Theory: Using the Canon to Prepare for Tomorrow.” February 23, 2017.
Online. https​:/​/hu​​manit​​iesfu​​tures​​.org/​​paper​​s​/fut​​ure​-p​​oliti​​cal​-t​​heory​​-usin​​g​-can​​on​
-pr​​​epare​​-tomo​​rrow/​. I note that Tracy B. Strong includes reflection on some of these
questions in the final chapter, “At Home Alone: The Problems of Citizenship in Our
Age” of Strong, Learning One’s Native Tongue: Citizenship, Contestation, and Conflict
in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 287–314.
13 George Kateb, “Technology and Philosophy.” Social Research, 64, no. 3 (1997): 1225–46.
14 See Kateb further but also see too Mark Blitz, “Understanding Heidegger on
Technology.” The New Atlantis, 41 (Winter 2014): 63–80.
15 John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See too the recent contributions
 
Notes 237

to David Pan’s edited issue of Telos on Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Technical
Rationality, No. 187 (2019).
16 See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology. Technics-out-of-Control as a
Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977) and Winner, The
Whale and the Reactor. Also useful for further if similarly mainstream minded,
if not (to date) received as such: although very insightfully articulated: Germain,
A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1993), in addition to John Street, Politics and
Technology (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), among others such as (in many
respects well received) Dominque Janicaud or Silvio Vietta or, indeed and to be
sure, Hans-Peter Hempel.
17 This is a personal communication, expressed on more than one occasion.
18 See in particular, although he wrote many books, Ellul, The Technological Society (New
York: Knopf, 1964 [1954]), including an introduction by Robert K. Merton, who also
ensured the translation and publication, with an introduction (also ensured from
Thomas Kuhn) to Ludwik Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1935]).
19 Here it is common to refer to Marshall McLuhan and, see too, from another but
related vantage point, Neil Postman, especially his Technopoly. One may argue that
today’s popular contenders on the level of serious critical reception include names
like the late Bernard Stiegler and efforts to retrieve, not unrelated to Stiegler, Gilbert
Simondon, as well as Arthur Kroker. One would wish here to be able to add Stanley
Aronowitz but given an array of different concerns his engagement with technology
remained philosophically desultory (not to speak of engaging Anders), which may
also underscore the disciplinary difference between philosophy and sociology, but
which difference is not in evidence to the same extent in thinkers like Virilio or de
Certeau or Baudrillard.
20 Cf. too Hans Ruin, “The Inversion of Mysticism: Gelassenheit and the Secret of the
Open in Heidegger.” Religions, 10, no. 1 (2019). https​:/​/ww​​w​.mdp​​i​.com​​/2077​​-1444​​/10​
/1​​​/15​/h​​tm.
21 Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2017), and Han’s The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2015).
22 For a constitutive discussion of this conventional problem, see Verbeek, What
Things Do.
23 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939-1944), GA 96 (Frankfurt
am Main: Klosterman, 2014), 198. For reflections on this constellation and the
deliberately prepared dimensionality of the Black Notebooks, see Babich, “Heidegger
Hermeneutik.” In Alfred Denker und Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch
12. Zur Hermeneutik der Schwarzen Hefte (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2019), as
well as Babich, “Heidegger on Nietzsche’s ‘Rediscovery’ of the Greeks: Machenschaft
and Seynsgeschichte in the Black Notebooks.” Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 51, no. 2 (April 2020): 110–23.
24 See for a broad discussion, especially including José Ardillo, Ellul, La Liberté dans un
monde fragile: Écologie et pensée libertaire (Paris: L’Échappée, 2018) and see, too, the
contributions to Jerónimo et. al. (eds.), Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in
the 21st Century (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2013).
25 This was often well intentioned as prejudice tends to suppose itself. Thus, Carl Mitcham
did seek to engage Ellul and, later Illich, but not Anders. For his part, Paul Durbin
238 Notes

likewise failed to engage Anders. Peter-Paul Verbeek, owing to be sure to van Dijk, does
engage Anders, but Verbeek’s focus excludes the concerns Anders raises, which must be
read, as I shall argue, through Virilio and Baudrillard, and of course Heidegger.
26 Thus, one can read Gottlieb’s edited collection compiling Arendt’s (and not
coincidentally also Anders’ in the case of the first chapter) Reflections on Literature
and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2007), and so too generic discussions of philosophy and literary authors. Traditionally,
these have tended to be oblique readings.
27 See Anders, “Kafka: Ritual Without Religion: The Modern Intellectual’s Shamefaced
Atheism.” Commentary (December 1949): 560–9, and Anders, Kafka, Pro und Contra.
Die Proceß-Unterlagen (Munich: Beck, 1953 [1951]): in English as Anders, Franz
Kafka, trans. A. Steer and A. K. Thorlby (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1960). See too
Gellen’s “Kafka, Pro and Contra: Günther Anders’s Holocaust Book.” In Arthur Cools
and Vivian Liska (eds.), Kafka and the Universal (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 283–304,
as well as, to be sure, the article by Bernhard Fetz, “Zwischen Heidegger, Kafka,
und der Atombombe: Zur veröffentlichten und unveröffentlichten Essayistik des
Schriftstellers und Philosophen Günther Anders.” In Michael Ansel, Jürgen Egyptien,
and Hans-Edwin Friedrich (eds.), Der Essay als Universalgattung des Zeitalters:
Diskurse, Themen und Positionen zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Nachkriegszeit
(Amsterdam: Brill, 2016, 283–97), as well as the comparative discussion included in a
collection on Bourdieu and the sociology of art, once again, Sonolet’s “Literature and
Modernity: Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor W. Adorno – Interpreters
of Kafka.” In Jeffrey A. Halley and Sonolet (eds.), Bourdieu in Question (Amsterdam:
Brill, 2018), 426–41.
28 Goethe is a cliché of course. See, if hardly directly focused on Anders, Bettina Meier,
Goethe in Trümmern: Zur Rezeption eines Klassikers in der Nachkriegszeit (Frankfurt
am Main: Springer, 2019) and Goethe appears as well, although less on Anders than the
title might suggest as it focuses on Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften,
in Elio Matassi, “Die Musik Philosophie bei Walter Benjamin und Günther Anders.” In
Bernd Witte and Mauro Ponzi (eds.), Theologie und Politik. Walter Benjamin und ein
Paradigma der Moderne (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2005), 212–22.
29 Anders, Die molussische Katakombe: Roman (Munich: Beck, 1992), would, two
decades later be expanded in a new 2012 edition mit Apokryphen und Dokumenten
aus dem Nachlass.
30 Astrid Nettling, “Halsstarriger Streiter in Sachen Vernunft,” Deutschlandfunk
11.07.2012. https​:/​/ww​​w​.deu​​tschl​​andfu​​nk​.de​​/hals​​starr​​iger-​​strei​​ter​-i​​n​-sac​​hen​-v​​ernun​​ft​
.70​​0​.de.​​html?​​​dram​:article​_id​=214615.
31 See my own political reflection on reception in philosophy with respect to
hermeneutic approaches to the philosophy of science, that is, both the natural and the
social science, Babich, “Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics and
Citation in Philosophy, Asphodel and Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour and the ‘Science
Wars’.” In Paula Angelova, Andreev Jaassen and Emil Lessky (eds.), Das Interpretative
Universum (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), 259–90.
32 See, for a discussion, the clear account offered in a chapter of the same title (though,
manifestly, one should read the entirety of): Robert Bernasconi’s How to Read Sartre
(London: Granta, 2007), here: 70–81.
33 Fuchs, “Günther Anders’ Undiscovered Critical Theory of Technology.”
34 See, most recently, self-help style authoritarian optimism of Steven Pinker’s
Enlightenment Now. The fact that one feels compelled to engage Pinker is an
 
Notes 239

epiphenomenon of the circumstance that is the received view. One debates the
Harvard intellectual. See for a helpful example, however, Riskin’s exercise in refuting
(this is to state the obvious) of Pinker’s argumentation, “Pinker’s Pollyannish
Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics.”
35 I refer here to Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska, The Proactionary Imperative: A
Foundation for Transhumanism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and, on Ihde,
for example, see the contributions to Evan Selinger (ed.), Postphenomenology: A
Critical Companion to Ihde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
36 Illich’s readings of technology can be difficult to grasp inasmuch as he articulates these
from and including a spiritual dimension that is difficult for current readers. But see
Ivan Illich, Selbstbegrenzung: eine politische Kritik der Technik (Munich: C.H. Beck,
1998 [1973]) as well as, very importantly, inasmuch as this is increasingly relevant
for discussion today: Ivan Illich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on
the Historicity of ‘Stuff ’ (Dallas: Dallas Inst Humanities & Culture, 1985). Note here
that the broader sense of this historicity also maps onto what I call Heelan’s “material
hermeneutics.” See for a discussion, Babette Babich, “Material Hermeneutics and
Heelan’s Philosophy of Technoscience.” AI & Society, Vol. 35 (2020). April 14, 2020.
Online first. https​:/​/li​​nk​.sp​​ringe​​r​.com​​/arti​​cle​/1​​0​.100​​7​/s00​​146​-​0​​20​-00​​963​-7​.
37 See the discussion of Kittler here in Chapter 8, “Radio Ghosts.”
38 See again Timo Kaerlein, “Playing with Personal Media: On an Epistemology of
Ignorance.” Culture Unbound, 5 (2013): 651–70. In sociology proper, other names
would include Bourdieu, and, cited earlier, de Certeau and Aronowitz, balancing his
reading of technology between the radical and the conventional, if excludes mention
of Anders (among others) and (also not engaging Anders) C. Fred Alford.
39 See, however, for an invaluable discussion, Arne Johan Vetlesen, The Denial of Nature:
Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2015),
which should be read contra Habermas more generally and others such as, more
particularly, Steve Vogel as this has led to dangerous tendencies in environmental
thinking such that Heisenberg’s bon mot, as Heidegger cites this in The Question
Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks,
1977 [1962]), whereby the human encounters increasingly only the human,
augmented as this is in a media-focused world acquires theoretical respectability,
the respectability of blinders but a mindset nonetheless. For Vetlesen’s most recent
discussion key with regard to debates concerning post- and transhumanism, as
these concerns also bear on the current reading of Anders, see his Cosmologies of
the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism (London:
Routledge, 2019).
40 Exceptions include Hartmut Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur: Eine andere Theorie der
Moderne (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006). For an effort to integrate some of
the more mainstream of these concerns, see Konrad Paul Liessmann (ed.), Günther
Anders: philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen Revolutionen (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 2002). See, for an overview in Dutch, where technology studies have since
become more conventional, Achterhuis, van Dijk & Tijmes (eds.), De maat van de
techniek. Zes filosofen over techniek: Günther Anders, Jacques Ellul, Arnold Gehlen,
Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas en Lewis Mumford (Baarn: Ambo, 1992).
41 John Gray, “Why the Humanities Can’t Be Saved.” Online. https​:/​/un​​herd.​​com​/2​​019​
/0​​8​/why​​-the-​​human​​ities​​-cant​​​-be​-s​​aved/​. Gray goes back to Roger Kimball’s claim
in 1990 of a kind of biting the hand that feeds one savagery, whereby “an academic
nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack
240 Notes

the values of the societies that funded it.” Both draw their own analysis a little too
limitedly, as if the problem were a matter of academia and more specifically of tenure,
to wit Kimball’s rather inaccurate title, Tenured Radicals. Per contra, the radicals
in question hadn’t been radical since the late 1960s, and by the time they became
professors, much less tenured professors, had long since given up any activity that
might have justified the title. But the claim continues apace, and because it is a
complicated point, I review it in “Philosophy Bakes No Bread.” Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 48, no. 1 (2018): 47–55, along with a follow-up essay, “Good for Nothing:
On Philosophy and Its Discontents.” In Diego Bubbio and Jeff Malpas (ed.), Why
Philosophy? (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 123–50.
42 John Gray, “Why the Humanities Can’t Be Saved.”
43 See further, usefully, Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, “Appetite for Destruction:
Günther Anders and the Metabolism of Nuclear Techno-Politics.” Journal of
International Political Theory, 15, no. 3 (2019): 332–48, and Christophe David and
Dirk Röpcke. “Günther Anders, Hans Jonas et les antinomies de l’écologie politique.”
Ecologie & politique, 2, no. 29 (2004): 193–213. See too, again, Christian Dries,
Die Welt als Vernichtungslager. Eine kritische Theorie der Moderne im Anschluss an
Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt und Hans Jonas (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012).
44 Cited in Paul van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology, 6. Cf. Greffrath’s
interview with Anders, published posthumously in 2002 in honour of
what would have been his 100th birthday, “Lob der Sturheit.” Die Zeit, “Zeitläufte,”
28/2002.
45 “Aber wenn’s uns doch gelange, / abzuwerfen unsre Last, / und wir stunden, als
Gestänge / in Gestänge eingepaßt, // als Prothesen mit Prothesen / in vertrautestem
Verband, / und der Makel war gewesen, / und die Scham schon unbekannt —” (AM I,
39) Compare this to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 sci-fi story, with all-too-patent parallels to
the current mask and vaccine mandates, precisely qua ‘handicaps,’ but also computer
and cell phone chirp notifications: “Harrison Vergeron.”
46 But see for a discussion of sex robots quite in terms of this gendered differential,
Babich, “On Passing as Human and Robot Love.” In Carlos Prado (ed.), How
Technology is Changing Human Behavior (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2019), 17–26, as
well as my “Robot Sex, Roombas, and Alan Rickman.” de Gruyter Conversations:
Philosophy & History, August 17, 2017. Online. https​:/​/bl​​og​.de​​gruyt​​er​.co​​m​/rob​​ot​-se​​x​
-roo​​mbas-​​al​an-​​rickm​​an/.
47 See Babich, “The Essence of Questioning after Technology: Techne as Constraint
and Saving Power.” British Journal of Phenomenology, 30, no. 1 (January 1999):
106–24.
48 Heidegger, Die Frage nach der Technik, 1.
49 For one discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of freedom informed by the political
reception of Heidegger’s thinking, see Mark Basil Tanzer, Heidegger: Decisionism
and Quietism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002). See, in addition, Peter Trawny,
Irrnisfuge. Heideggers An-Archie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2014), and indeed:
Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
50 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Once again,
I note that this book, although it ought not to perhaps continue to be as useful as it
is, given the changes on the tech horizon, remains the best book on technology and
society and the political simply because it has not been bettered. And part of the
 
Notes 241

reason it has not been outclassed is that, like Erwin Chargaff ’s uncomprehending
colleagues, political theorists seem to constitute a set dedicated to excluding not only
Anders, as mentioned earlier, but critical theorists in general, to the mutual detriment
of both groups.
51 See, again, for another take on this same question of names and naming, Adi Armon,
“The Parochialism of Intellectual History.” I earlier speak to a similar set of questions
as these were originally inspired by Heidegger’s French translator, François Vézin, in
his “L’étendue du désastre” (8 août 2014), in the aftermath of the Black Notebooks
scandal and given the constellation of names posed as excluded or silence with respect
to Heidegger, Babich, “Heidegger et ses Juifs.” In Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-
Orly (eds.) Heidegger et les Juifs (Paris: Grasset, 2015), 411–54 (a related version
appears in English as “Heidegger’s Judenfrage”).
52 See here Reinhard Ellensohn, Der andere Anders: Günther Anders als Musikphilosoph
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). Elsewhere I note that the musicologist F. Joseph Smith had
for years sought to draw attention to Anders’ work only to be rebuffed (and ultimately
silenced to inattention by those interested in acoustic phenomenology) by the same
Don Ihde, who also silently borrowed his research.
53 Note here the title of Steve Fuller’s Humanity 2.0. What It Means to be Human Past,
Present and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
54 I discuss Baudrillard along with Virilio in the latter sections of Babette Babich,
“The Question of the Contemporary in Agamben, Nancy, Danto” as well as:
“Musical ‘Covers’ and the Culture Industry: From Antiquity to the Age of Digital
Reproducibility.” Research in Phenomenology, 48, no. 3 (2018): 385–407.
55 I note an email communication from David Michaelis, Anders’ nephew, who wrote
to me at the end of 2013 in response to my review of Maier-Katin’s 2010 Stranger
from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (New
York: Norton, 2010). Michaelis wrote, here cited verbatim: “When Gunther asked
me—or gave me the book ‘burning conscience,’ I always had a hard time grappling
with it. I was 14 years old. . . . Your review of the book Strangers from Abroad is a
fair assessment of Gunter and Hanna relationship. It is really important that Anders
philosophical work will be introduced to the English-speaking world. His point was
always that no one can translate his German special language into English. I think if
he would have met you today he would reconsider.”
56 See for one assessment of one of the reasons for what is clearly an overdetermined
question, somehow managing to avoid the most obvious benefit of the playing of
overloud music, even without jukeboxes and thus utterly owner-driven “noise,” as
the tactic insures a relatively speedier turnover than a quieter ambiance might invite:
lingering over conversation, with dinner. See Kate Wagner, “How Restaurants Got
So Loud. Fashionable Minimalism Replaced Plush Opulence. That’s a Recipe for
Commotion.” The Atlantic, November 27, 2018. Online. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​atlan​​tic​.c​​
om​/te​​chnol​​ogy​/a​​rchiv​​e​/201​​8​/11/​​how​-r​​estau​​rants​​-got​-​​so​-lo​​ud​/57​​6715/​, and see, too,
the Vox essay by Julia Belluz. “Why Restaurants Became So Loud—and How to Fight
Back. “I can’t hear you.” Vox, July 27, 2018. Online. https​:/​/ww​​w​.vox​​.com/​​2018/​​4​/18/​​
17168​​504​/r​​estau​​rants​​-nois​​e​-lev​​els​-​l​​oud​-d​​ecibe​​ls.
57 If only for a discussion of GPS, see Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing
Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (New York: Norton, 2017). I refer to Milner’s
work on music/audio technology in The Hallelujah Effect: Music, Performance Practice
and Technology (London: Routledge, 2016 [2013]).
242 Notes

58 See Babich, The Hallelujah Effect as well as, for a more focused reflection overall,
including still further references, Babich, “On The Hallelujah Effect.”
59 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. It is not irrelevant that, since 2000, one of the
main research resources for scholarship, including essential links to further research
on Anders, was hosted by Harold Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse’s grandson and
professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Marcuse gives
his own account of their relationship, and for another discussion, see Christian
Fuchs, “Zu einigen Parallelen und Differenzen im Denken von Günther Anders
und Herbert Marcuse.” In Dirk Röpcke and Raimund Bahr (eds.), Geheimagent
der Masseneremiten (St. Wolfgang: Art & Science, 2003), 113–27, and cf., for
a discussion in connection with Heidegger, Martin Woessner, “Hermeneutic
Communism: Left Heideggerian’s Last Hope.” In Silvia Mazzini and Owen Glyn-
Williams (eds.), Making Communism Hermeneutical (Frankfurt am Main: Springer,
2017), esp. 40–3.
60 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso,
2016 [1976]). For a general discussion not specifically centred on Anders (and
not particularly “Nietzschean”), see Rolf Wiggershaus, “The Frankfurt School’s
‘Nietzschean Moment’.” Gerd Appelhans, trans. Constellations, 8, no 1
(2001): 144–7.
61 See again, the chapters on desire, male and female, in Babich, The Hallelujah Effect
and, again, and importantly, Manne’s Down Girl.

Chapter 2
1 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit nämlich bei Heidegger (1936).” In Über Heidegger
(Munich: Beck, 2001).
2 Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy.” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 8, no. 3 (March, 1948): 337–71. I discuss this striking
image as it also haunts Nietzsche’s inaugural lecture on Homer in Basel, which I read
in connection with Hans Ruin’s 2019 study of physical anthropology, articulated in
dialogue with Michel de Certeau (on Michelet and history): Hans Ruin, Being with the
Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2019) in: Babich, “Blood for the Ghosts: Reading Ruin’s
Being With The Dead With Nietzsche.” History and Theory, 59, no. 2 (June 2020):
255–69.
3 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973
[1966]), 75.
4 To wit, Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen. Schriften zur philosophischen
Anthropologie.
5 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124. Others in addition to Adorno and Anders shared
this view; see Gail Soffer, “Heidegger, Humanism, and the Destruction of History”
as well as, and beyond the scope of the present chapter, a range of discussions of
Heidegger and ecology and ecofeminism, and so on.
6 Some readers can take this ambiguity to write Anders in the posthuman tradition,
beyond the “anthropocene.” See Christopher John Müller, “Desert Ethics: Technology and
the Question of Evil in Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida.” Parallax, 21, no. 1 (2015):
87–102 and Andreas Beinsteiner, “Cyborg Agency: The Technological Self-Production
 
Notes 243

of the (Post-) Human and the Anti-Hermeneutic Trajectory,” Thesis Eleven, 153, no.
1 (2019): 113–33 as well as for a statement of the optimistic sentiment of humanist
transhumanism: Mark O’Connell’s 2018 “hackeristically” styled manifesto: O’Connell, To
Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the
Modest Problem of Death (London: Granta, 2018). Cf. further, note 10.
7 See here the contributions to Enders’ and Zaborowski’s curated issue of the 2014
Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie, Vol. 13 (Freiburg: Alber, 2014), on Nietzsche, along
with Eugen Biser, Nietzsche—Zerstörer oder Erneuerer des Christentums? (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002); it is worth reviewing Ernest Fortin’s
writings on Nietzsche, and, for a focus on recent conventional authors, see Hans Ruin,
“Saying Amen to the Light of Dawn: Nietzsche on Praise, Prayer, and Affirmation.”
Nietzsche-Studien, 48 (2019): 99–116.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen
(Chemnitz: Verlag von Ernst Schmeitzner, 1883). Online. http:​/​/www​​.zeno​​.org/​​Philo​​
sophi​​e​/M​/N​​ietzs​​che,​+Fri​​edric​​h​/Als​​o​+spr​​ach​+Z​​arath​​ustra​​/Zar​a​​thust​​ras​+V​​orred​​e,
“Vorrede,” 3.
9 Ibid., 4.
10 See for example, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “From Nietzsche’s Overhuman to the
Posthuman of Transhumanism,” English Language and Literature, 62, no. 2 (2016):
163–76, in addition to Tuncel (ed.), Nietzsche and Transhumanism as well as Nick
Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values.” Journal of Philosophical Research, 30 (2005): 3–14,
along with Steve Fuller, Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of
the Transhuman Era (Basel: Schwabe, 2019) and Jeffrey Bishop, “Nietzsche’s Power
Ontology and Transhumanism: Or Why Christians Cannot Be Transhumanists.”
In Steve Donaldson and Ron Cole-Turner (eds.), Christian Perspectives on
Transhumanism and the Church: Chips in the Brain, Immortality, and the World of
Tomorrow (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2018), 117–35.
11 “Yet if I derived my existence from myself, then I would neither doubt nor want, nor
lack anything at all; for I should have given myself all perfections of which I have
any idea.” René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33.
12 Ibid.
13 “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit nämlich bei Heidegger (1936).” In Über Heidegger
(Munich: Beck, 2001), 33.
14 “d. h. das Sein des Menschen ist in der vulgären ebenso wie in der philosophischen
‘Definition’ umgrenzt als ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, das Lebende, dessen Sein wesenhaft durch
das Redenkönnen bestimmt ist.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer,
1984), 48. Hereafter: SZ.
15 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit,” 37.
16 Ibid.
17 I foreground this stylistic tactic in Babich, “A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger,
Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing Brass.” Man and World,
26 (1993): 239–60.
18 “Die Uneigentlichkeit kann vielmehr das Dasein nach seiner vollsten Konkretion
bestimmen in seiner Geschaftigkeit, Angeregtheit, Interessiertheit, Genußfähigkeit”
(SZ, 43).
19 “Ego certe, domine, laboro hic et laboro in me ipso: factus sum mihi terra difficultatis
et sudoris nimii.” Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), X, 25, 193.
244 Notes

20 This has been done, to be sure, especially with reference to time. See, for a start, Jean
Grondin, “Heidegger und Augustine.” In: Ewald Richter, ed., Die Frage nach der
Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 161–73 in addition to the late
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, “Die ‘Confessiones’ des Heiligen Augustinus im
Denken Heideggers,” Questio, 1 (2001): 113–46.
21 See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-
1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
22 This is the point of departure for Pierre Hadot as he reflects on the path of historical
philology, citing Pierre Courcelle’s conventional-literary as opposed to biographical
account, scandalous then, as Hadot emphasized that the scandal would endure. To
quote Hadot, “Alerted by his profound knowledge of Augustine’s literary procedures
and the traditions of Christian allegory, Courcelle dared to write that the fig tree
could well have a purely symbolic value, representing the ‘mortal shadow of sin,’ and
that the child’s voice could also have been introduced in a purely literary way indicate
allegorically the divine response to Augustine’s questioning.” Pierre Hadot, Philosophy
as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
23 See the first chapter of David Blair Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
24 See Matthias Rath, Der Psychologismusstreit in der deutschen Philosophie (Freiburg i.
Briesgau: Karl Alber Verlag, 1994).
25 Gottlob Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische
Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner, 1884), x.
26 See Jean-Claude Monod, “‘L’interdit anthropologique’ chez Husserl et Heidegger
et sa transgression par Blumenberg.” Revue germanique internationale, 10 (2009):
221–36, as well as Françoise Dastur, “La critique heideggérienne de l’anthropologisme,”
In: Heidegger et la pensée à venir (Paris: Vrin, 2011). And see more broadly, Kai
Haucke, “Anthropologie bei Heidegger. Über das Verhältnis seines Denkenszur
philosophischen Tradition,” Phil. Jahrbuch, 105. Jahrgang / Π (1998): 321–45. For a
discussion (in two parts) of Heidegger and (Bourdieu’s) anthropology, see James F.
Weiner, “Anthropology contra Heidegger Part I: Anthropology’s Nihilism.” Critique
of Anthropology, 12, no. 1 (1992): 75–90 and “Anthropology contra Heidegger Part II:
The Limit of Relationship.” Critique of Anthropology, 13, no. 3 (1993): 285–301.
27 Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedmann
(Stanford: Stanford University, 2004), viii. Kant includes chemistry in his roster of
non-sciences, and it can seem that this goes too far but philosophy of chemistry has
very only recently habilitated itself, and it is indisputable that physics remains the
queen of the sciences. See Michael Bennett McNulty, “What is Chemistry, for Kant?”
Kant Yearbook, 9 (2017): 85–112, as well as Baird, Scerri, and McIntyre’s introduction
to their collection on the topic, “Introduction: The Invisibility of Chemistry.” In Davis
Baird, Eric Scerri, and L. McIntyre (eds.), Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a
New Discipline (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 3–18, as well as Jaap Van Brakel. “Kant’s
Legacy for the Philosophy of Chemistry.” In Davis Baird, Eric Scerri, and L. McIntyre
(eds.), Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Dordrecht: Springer,
2006), 69–91.
28 Baird, Scerri, and McIntyre, “Introduction: The Invisibility of Chemistry,” 3.
29 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 124.
30 Ibid.
31 See Babich, “Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Tension and Hume’s Standard of Taste.” In: Reading
David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 236. See on
 
Notes 245

Kant and the extraterrestrials, Peter Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials:
Cosmopolitical Philosofictions, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2013), as well as, earlier, David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and
Its Others.” The New Centennial Review, 1, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 201–89, in addition to
Holger Schmid’s afterword to a French translation of Kant’s text: Sur les extraterrestres:
Théorie du ciel (Paris: Editions Manucius, 2019). But see too, Tyke Nunez, “Logical
Mistakes, Logical Aliens, and the Laws of Kant’s Pure General Logic.” Mind, 128, no.
512 (October 2019): 1149–80.
32 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentnor (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 62.
33 Ibid.
34 Anders, Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen zum atomaren Zeitalter
(Munich: Beck. 1993) , 57, cf. 106f.
35 See, my retrospective essay, Babette Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age
of the Show’: On the Expropriation of Death,” Nursing Philosophy, 19, no. 1 (2018):
1–13.
36 “The events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima can indeed be repressed in memory (insofar
as they ever penetrated into it)—and that is in fact what has happened. But what
cannot be repressed by contrast is their repeatability. Since these two events—i.e., now
for more than twenty years—so-called ‘natural death’ has become an obsolete special
privilege and the possibility of humanity’s violent self-annihilation continuously
virulent. And since then we have been continuously defined by this non-stop
possibility.” Anders, Die atomare Drohung, 57. Cf. van Munster and Sulvest, “Appetite
for Destruction.”
37 See Fuller as cited above in addition to Vincent Blok’s insightful: “Denken als
Handlung. Heideggers Besinnung auf das Wesen des Menschen im Zeitalter des
human enhancement.” In Holger Zaborowsky and Alfred Denker (eds.), Heidegger
Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2017), 265–79.
38 See for a discussion of the broader European tradition in ethnography, Dennis
Johannßen, “Mensch und Dasein in Heideggers’ Sein und Zeit.” In Thomas Ebke
and Caterina Zanfi (eds.), Das Leben im Menschen oder der Mensch im Leben?
Deutsch-Französische Genealogien zwischen Anthropologie und Anti-Humanismus
(Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2017), 91–104. For another discussion,
more precise, terminologically regarded, see Annette Sell, “Leben führen—Dasein
entwurfen: Zur systematischen und gesellschaftspolitischen Bedeutung von Plessners
anthropologischem und Heideggers fundamental-ontologischem Konzept des
Menschen.” In Kevin Liggieri and Julia Gruevska (eds.), Vom Wissen um den Menschen:
Philosophie, Geschichte, Materialität (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2018), 46–61. On
anthropology, see Sato, “The Way of the Reduction via Anthropology: Husserl and
Lévy-Bruhl, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss.” Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, X,
no. 1 (2014): 1–18. See, too, Alfred Schütz, “Phenomenology and the Social Sciences,”
In Maurice Natanson (ed.), Collected Papers I. The Problem of Social Reality (Dordrecht:
Kluwer (1972)), 118–39. Cf. Philippe Cabestan, “Phénoménologie, anthropologie:
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre.” Alter, 23 (2015): 226–42, and, again, as cited earlier, Dastur.
Anders had been both Husserl’s and Max Scheler’s student, among others. See
Christophe David, “Fidélité de Günther Anders à l’anthropologie philosophique :
de l’anthropologie négative de la fin des années 1920 à L’obsolescence de l’homme.”
L’Homme et la société. La Question anthropologique, no. 181 (2011/3): 165–80. See too
Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Philosophical Anthropology from the End of World War I to
the 1940s and in a Current Perspective.” Iris, 1, no. 1 (2009): 131–52.
246 Notes

39 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 24. For Adorno, “The painfulness of experimentation finds
response in the animosity toward the so called isms: programmatic, self-conscious,
and often collective art movements. This rancor is shared by the likes of Hitler,
who loved to rail against ‘these im- and expressionists,’ and by writers who out of a
politically avant-garde zealousness are wary of the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde.”
Ibid.
40 Martin Kusch, “The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge: A Case Study and a
Defense.” In Kusch (ed.), The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2000), 15–38. Kusch gives the locus here as “1910, p. 516.” See too Kusch’s
valuable discussion: Psychologism as well as the sections on Heidegger in Kusch,
Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium, 135ff.
41 Reiner Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time (London. Routledge, 2008), 56.
42 Ibid.
43 Françoise Dastur, “The Critique of Anthropologism in Heidegger’s Thought.” In James
E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), Appropriating Heidegger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119–34.
44 Daniel Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
45 I make the connection between Heidegger and Nietzsche on questioning and science
in Babich, “On Heidegger on Education and Questioning.” In Michael A. Peters (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Singapore: Springer, 2017),
1641–52, and “The Essence of Questioning after Technology: Techne as Constraint
and Saving Power,” British Journal of Phenomenology, 30, no. 1 (January 1999):
106–24.
46 Cf. here Marco Cavallaro, “Der Beitrag der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls
zur Debatte über die Fundierung der Geisteswissenschaften.” Phänomenologische
Forschungen (2013): 77–93, as well as Dieter Lohmar, “On Some Motives for Husserl’s
Genetic Turn in his Research on a Foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften.” Studia
Phaenomenologica, 18 (2018): 31–48, and for a different logical take on a theory
of everything social, assuming as the author says, that “social theory is not just
‘social philosophy for failed philosophers.’” Frédéric Vandenberghe, “Empathy as
the Foundation of the Social Sciences and of Social Life: A Reading of Husserl’s
Phenomenology of Transcendental Intersubjectivity.” Sociedade e Estado, Brasília, 17,
no. 2 (2002): 563–85.
47 See George A. Schrader Jr., “Heidegger’s Ontology of Human Existence.” The Review
of Metaphysics, 10, no. 1 (1956): 35–56. See too and in general the contributions to
Zaborowsky and Denker, eds., Heidegger Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber,
2017), particularly Raimon Paez Blanch, “Dasein und Mensch bei Heidegger. Eine
Überlegung anlässlich des ‘Humanismusbriefes.’” In Holger Zaborowsky and Alfred
Denker (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch 10 (Freiburg im Briesgau: Alber, 2017), 165–77,
and especially Zaborowski, “Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten des Humanismus –
heute. Jaspers, Heidegger und Levinas zur Frage nach dem Menschen.” In Zaborowsky
and Denker (eds.), Heidegger Jahrbuch 10, 251–64.
48 This fluidity opens a set of possibilities. See my reflections on the question of the
human in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, “Heideggers ‘Brief über ‚Humanismus’.
Über die Technik, das Bösartige des Grimmes—und das Heilen.” In Alfred Denker
and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger und der Humanismus. Heidegger-Jahrbuch,
Bd. 10 (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2017), 237–50, as well as Matthew Calarco,
“‘Another Insistence of Man’: Prolegomena to the Question of the Animal in Derrida’s
Reading of Heidegger.” Human Studies, 28, no. 3 (November, 2005): 317–34, and,
 
Notes 247

more conventionally, Simon James, “Phenomenology and the Problem of Animal

Minds.” Environmental Values, 18 (2009): 33–49.
49 It is for this reason that Perlman can point to the distinction between speaking of
Mensch (Perlman writes “man”) and Dasein between Heidegger and Heschel. See
Lawrence Perlman, The Eclipse of Humanity: Heschel’s Critique of Heidegger (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2016), see esp. 29–31.
50 Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, 57.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 See Babich, “Being on Television: Wisser—Heidegger—Adorno.” In John Rose (ed.),
52nd Annual Heidegger Conference (Baltimore: Goucher College, 2018), 81–95.
A sharper version of this was presented in German at a May, 2018 meeting at the
Heidegger Archiv in Messkirch, and see too, with reference to geoengineering,
“Between Heidegger and Adorno: Airplanes, Radios, and Sloterdijk’s Atmoterrorism.”
Kronos Philosophical Journal, VI (2017 [2018]): 133–58.
55 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV, 198.
56 Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick
(Munich: Beck, 2011).
57 Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 346, note 11.
58 There are fellow travellers, with variously different approaches, such as Calarco,
Zoographies or Francione and Charlton, Eat Like You Care or Donaldson and
Kymlicka, Zoopolis, or indeed, and I tend to note such contributions for personal
reasons, as I began as a biologist before turning to philosophy, Marc Bekoff, Wild
Justice, as well as, in sociology, Jeffrey Bussolini, who works on important themes of
recognition and respect between disciplinary fields and has a critical and valuable
reflection, “Felidae and Extinction: ‘Victim’ and ‘Cause’.”
59 “Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie
die Fabrikation fon Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe
wie die Blockade und Aushungern on Landern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von
Wasserstoffbomben.” Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, 27. I have been
writing about this since my 1992 essay, “Heidegger’s Silence.”
60 Adorno himself takes the title from a popular overview: Paul Eiper’s Tiere siehen
dich an (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer / Ernst Vohsen, 1928), and which also becomes a
politicized vehicle as a 1944 documentary, a fact after the war to justify a (humanistic)
concern/unconcern with animals.
61 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left, 1997
[1974]), §68, 105.
62 Ibid.
63 Anders (Stern) (1934/35) “Une interprétation de l’a posteriori.” Recherches
philosophiques, IV (1934–1935): 65–80, and (1936–7) “Pathologie de la liberté. Essai
sur la non-identification.” Recherches Philosophiques, VI (1936–1937): 22–54.
64 Hannes Bajohr, in his review of the Anders’ posthumous Die Weltfremdheit des
Menschen, reminds us that drafts of what appears in Anders’ Die Antiquiertheit des
Menschen had already appeared in French in 1937–8, an esoteric reference made
even more salient as the, “Pathologie de la liberté [The Pathology of Freedom],” is
missing the German original, such that our only English access to Anders’ text is via
the French. Cf. Bajohr, “World-Estrangement as Negative Anthropology: Günther
Anders’s Early Essays.” Thesis Eleven, 153 (2019): 141–53.
248 Notes

65 Cf., Babich, “Nietzsche’s Antichrist: The Birth of Modern Science out of the Spirit
of Religion.” In Markus Enders and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Jahrbuch für
Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg i. Briesgau: Alber, 2014), 134–54, together with Babich,
“Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews,” Symposium: Canadian Journal
of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale, 14, no. 1,
(2011): 110–45.
66 Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Transcendentalism.” Research in Phenomenology, 35,
no. 1 (2005): 35.
67 See Kostas Axelos, Einführung in ein künftiges Denken. Über Marx und Heidegger
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966 [1961]).
68 Dominique Janicaud, Powers of Rationality: Science, Technology, and the Future of
Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 [1985]).
69 See for this articulation, Patrick Aidan Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965).
70 Anders, “Wesen und Eigentlichkeit,” 38.
71 Denis de Rougement, “On the Devil and Politics.” Christianity and Crisis, 1 (June 2,
1941): 2, and cf. The Devil’s Share.
72 For a discussion from the point of view of Ignatius of Loyola of some of the good faith
complexities of this Dominican sense of evil and of heresy, see Antonio de Nicolas’
importantly historical and geographically contextualized discussion of the Spanish
Inquisition in Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loyola: A Philosophical Hermeneutic of
Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1986), beginning with 9–10.
73 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Viking, 1963), Jacques Maritain, Thomas and the Problem of Evil (Milwaukee:
University of Marquette Press, 1942), and Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An
Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See
also, although more elliptically, Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David
Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009 [1947]), as well as, bringing in
Löwith’s Meaning in History, notable in the current context given Löwith’s subtitle,
The Theological Implications of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949), Willem Styfhals, “Evil in History: Karl Löwith and Jacob Taubes on Modern
Eschatology.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 76, no. 2 (April 2015): 191–213, and
Marin Terpstra, “The Management of Distinctions: Jacob Taubes on Paul’s Political
Theology.” In Gert Jan van der Heiden, George Henry van Kooten, and Antonio
Cimino (eds.), Saint Paul and Philosophy (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 251–68. And see,
particularly useful in connection with Anders, Manfred Frings, “Max Scheler: A Novel
Look at the Origin of Evil.” Philosophy and Theology, 6, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 201–11.
74 Wolfgang Palaver, “The Respite: Günther Anders’ Apocalyptic Vision in Light of the
Christian Virtue of Hope.” In Bischof, Dawsey and Fetz (eds.), The Life and Work of
Günther Anders, 82. Palaver’s reference, thinned as this is via the language of rational
choice, is to Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est
certain (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
75 Hannah Arendt, in a tiny solecism, asserts that de Rougement establishes his reading of
the devil via G. K. Chesterton rather than Baudelaire. For a political, historical discussion
of the furor de Rougement raised in general, see Jeffrey Mehlman, Émigré New York:
French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (Plunkett Lake Press, 2019).
76 For political reasons of exile, one always has to read Anders with (and through)
the French, as he himself would have read his Baudelaire and his Gide and his de
 
Notes 249

Rougement: “Mes chers frères, n’oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le
progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il
n’existe pas!” Charles Baudelaire. “Le Joueur Généreux.” Le Figaro: February 7, 1864.
77 Martin Buber, Gottesfinsternis (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1953).
78 Ernst Bloch, “Die riesige Gebietskategorie des Bösen ist eine der am wenigsten
durchdachten, sie kommt fast nur adjektivisch vor und dann matt, so etwa in der
Phrase vom blutbesudelten Hitlerregime.” Experimentum Mundi (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1976), 231.
79 See, Giorgio Agamben, Una domanda. April 13, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.quo​​dlibe​​t​.it/​​
giorg​​io​-ag​​amben​​-una​-​​doman​​da. I discuss this originally in an online lecture on
the 20th of May 2020 and now in print in Babich, “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News:
‘Inventing’ Epidemics and the Police State.” In Irene Strasser (ed.), The Psychology
of Global Crises and Crisis Politics - Intervention, Resistance (Singapore: Springer,
2021).
80 See on teaching, especially today in the wake of the zoomification of the university,
Babich, “Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Educational Institutions’ with Jaspers & MacIntyre
on ‘The Idea of the University’—and Severus Snape.” Existenz, Vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall
2020).
81 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? Eine notwendige Diskussion (Munich: Knaur, 1987).
82 Jacob Taubes (ed.), Der Fürst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Fink,
1983).

Chapter 3
1 In English reception, this goes way back; thus, one may note Marshall Montgomery,
“Hölderlin and ‘Diotima’.” The Modern Language Review, 7, no. 2 (April, 1912):
193–207, as well as the recent ventriloquism, mixing as advertised, “fiction and non-
fiction,” David Farrell-Krell, The Recalcitrant Art: Diotima’s Letters to Holderlin and
Related Missives, trans. Douglas F. Kenney and Sabine Menner-Bettscheid (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2000), in which Krell, via Gontard, writes himself into Hölderlin’s place.
See also the first section of my essay on Wallace Stevens focusing on several recent
and technically “romantic” readings of “Ganymede” variations in Hölderlin, Goethe,
Schiller (and Schumann) “Wallace Stevens, Heidegger, and the ‘Virile Hölderlin’:
Poetry and Philosophy and The Travelogue of the Mind.” Borderless Philosophy, 3
(June 2020): 1–31.
2 I write about some of the tricky details that can be involved in the masculinist world
of philosophy when it comes to such pairing and our assessments, enthusiastic and
not, pro and not, of the same in my “Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & the Virtues of
Keeping One’s Feet on the Ground.” MP: An Online Feminist Journal, 3, no.1 (August
2010): 57–78.
3 See for references to the literature and discussion, my essay, “Reading Lou von
Salomé’s Triangles.” New Nietzsche Studies, 8, nos 3 & 4 (2011/2012): 82–114.
4 This begins, to be sure, with Lou herself: see Lou Andreas Salomé, You Alone Are Real
to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Angela von der Lippe (Manchester:
Carcanet, 2006 [1928]) and Rolf S. Günther, Rainer Maria Rilke und Lou Andreas
Salome: auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt: Traumerzählung (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2005).
250 Notes

5 Usually a matter of the salacious, even when treated by academic authors, the
relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir was of a piece with their philosophy,
most notably Sartre’s own. See on this, patently, Edward Fullbrook and Kate
Fullbrook, Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre (London:
Continuum, 2008), and see too the contributions, including a text by Edward
Fullbrook, to Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, eds., Beauvoir and Sartre: The
Riddle of Influence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
6 See my aforementioned essay for a discussion of the politics of who we name by name,
that is, on a first-name basis, even when we do not happen to know them personally.
See further, my Babich, “Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt: On Politics, Science, and
Communication.” Existenz. An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics,
and the Arts, 4, no. 1 (Spring 2009). Online. https​:/​/ex​​isten​​z​.us/​​volum​​es​/Vo​​l​.4​-1​​Bab​
ic​​h​.htm​​l. There are many discussions of Arendt and Heidegger, to be sure, but see
Lütkehaus’s Hannah Arendt–Martin Heidegger: Eine Liebe in Deutschland (Marburg:
Basilisken-Presse, 1999). But see, too, antagonistically minded, Emmanuel Faye, Arendt
et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016).
7 I will be focusing on the triangle; most discussions of Heidegger and Arendt detail
the dyad, and there is also Carl Djerassi’s play on the quadrate, Foreplay: Hannah
Arendt, The Two Adorno, and Walter Benjamin (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2011). In addition, there is also the focus on the better-known name in all these
discussions; this is one critical meaning of the currently popular foregrounding of
“public philosophy,” such as we may see in the focus of Margarethe von Trotta (Dir.)
2013, Hannah Arendt. See, for a discussion, also foregrounding Jaspers by way of yet
another triangulation with Heidegger, Babich, “Thinking on Film: Jaspers, Scholem,
and Thinking in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt.” German Politics and Society,
Issue 118, 34, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 77–92.
8 Lüdger Lütkehaus, “‘In der Mitte sitzt das Dasein’. Die Philosophen Günther Anders
und Peter Sloterdijk lesen zweierlei Heidegger.” Die Zeit, January 24, 2002.
9 Anne Carson, Eros, The Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),
12–13.
10 Ibid., 13.
11 Andler hypothesizes the pathos (and staging) of famous triangular studio photograph
of Lou von Salomé and Paul Rée and Nietzsche, describing the puzzle of the
1882 Lucerne photograph including a crouching Lou Salomé in a garden cart—which
Lou recalls as “little (far too little!)” in her posthumously published (1951) memoire.
Charles Andler, Nietzsche sa vie et sa pensée II. Le pessimisme esthétique de Nietzsche.
La maturité de Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1958 [1920–1931]), 440–1. Anders’
footnote references medieval woodcuts and sculptures depicting Aristotle on all fours
and Phyllis on his back. Cf. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich
Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft, 2 Vols (Jena: E. Diedrichs, 1908). See, again, for further
references, Babich, “Reading Lou von Salomé’s Triangles.”
12 See Kerstin Putz, “Nachwort: Korrespondenzen Hannah Arendt and Günther
Anders.” In: Anders/Arendt, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich, Kertin Putz
(ed.), (Munich: Piper, 2016), 229. See too, quite as Putz herself draws on, Iven’s 2013
“Spurensuche: Hannah Arendt und Günther Anders in Nowawes.” Mitteilungen der
Studiengemeinschaft Sanssouci e.V., 18 Jg. (2013): 122–34. All of this should be set, this
adds complexities, in the context of Anders, Kirschenschlacht, 5.
13 Although Heidrun Friese does not take account of the complexities I engage in my
discussion of Lou and Nietzsche’s encounters, she benefits from Günter Wohlfart’s
 
Notes 251

discussion of the “blink of an eye,” “Augenblick,” see Friese, “Leseszenen: Gelehrte

lessen vor.” In Alf Lüdtke and Reiner Prass (eds.), Gelehrtenleben: Wissenschaftspraxis
in der Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 252ff. Friese emphasizes the tendency that
captures women who seek as Arendt sought, in her aspiration to talk openly with
Heidegger, which is to be sure an aspiration for or towards intellectual conversation,
to have “effect,” or academic importance, in their nature as women. Thus, even as
Jonas focuses on what he assesses to have been an intellectual lack of parity in her
relationship to Anders, Arendt is still assessed in and via her position as a woman, as
Anders’ wife.
14 Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of
Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 53.
15 Arendt/Anders, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich. Briefe 1939 bis 1975, Texte und
Dokumente. ed. Kerstin Putz (Munich: Piper, 2016), 33/35.
16 In our era, ‘texts’ are ubiquitous and only make matters worse, more insidious, as one
cannot “miss” a text even if one has no time to respond properly, as one has seen (even
if one has not read) the text and, worse yet, the other will also know, be that other the
sender himself or herself, or government or corporate surveillance, that one has “seen”
the text. See Babich, “Texts and Tweets: On The Rules of the Game.” The Philosophical
Salon: Los Angeles Review of Books, May 30, 2016. Online. https​:/​/th​​ephil​​osoph​​icals​​
alon.​​com​/t​​exts-​​and​-t​​weets​​-on​-t​​he​-ru​​les​​-o​​f​-the​​-game​/; but see also Chapter 9 on
media control and “überveillance,” and Anders’ idea of radio range and connectivity
as tether or leash.’
17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs, trans.
Richard McCleary (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
18 Giuseppina Moneta, “Profile.” In Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought,
Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1995), 206.
19 Ibid., 205.
20 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971), 58.
21 Moneta, “Profile,” 207.
22 Arendt/Anders, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich, 86.
23 Ibid., 87.
24 Moneta, “Profile,” 206.
25 On Maier-Katkin’s account, Heinrich Blücher almost necessarily becomes the loyal
husband, a counterpart to Heidegger’s wife Elfriede. We learn that Heidegger found
Blücher congenial because of his insights into Nietzsche. Regrettably the point is not
developed, but given Arendt’s own interest in Nietzsche (it can be argued that she
studs her footnotes with references to Nietzsche, as she does in the latter pages of The
Human Condition, to appeal to Heidegger) one wonders if these references also spoke
to Blücher.
26 See, just for one example, Christian Dries’s afterword sketch of the relationship
between Anders and Arendt in Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht.
27 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).
28 I quote here the first three verses to give a sense of Schiller’s poem: “In einem Tal bei
armen Hirten /.
Erschien mit jedem jungen Jahr, / Sobald die ersten Lerchen schwirrten, / Ein
Mädchen, schön und wunderbar. // Sie war nicht in dem Tal geboren, / Man wußte
nicht, woher sie kam, / Doch schnell war ihre Spur verloren, /.
252 Notes

Sobald das Mädchen Abschied nahm. // Beseligend war ihre Nähe / Und alle
Herzen wurden weit; / Doch eine Würde, eine Höhe / Entfernte die Vertraulichkeit.”
29 Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger,
Friendship and Forgiveness (New York: Norton, 2010), 22.
30 For a direct account of Taubes’ cavalier attitudes in this regard, see my “Ad Jacob
Taubes.” New Nietzsche Studies, 7, nos. 3 & 4 (2007): v–x, an editorial titled to echo
Taubes’ own small book on Carl Schmitt, cited note 42 below.
31 Arendt/Anders, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich. Cf., too Neumann,
“Noch Einmal: Hannah Arendt, Günther Stern/Anders mit bezug auf den jüngst
komplettierten Briefwechsel zwischen Arendt und Stern und unter Rekurs auf
Hannah Arendts unveröffentlichte Fabelerzählung Die weisen Tiere.” In Bernd
Neumann, Helgard Mahrdt, and Martin Frank (eds.), “The angel of history is looking
back”: Hannah Arendts Werk (Würzbach: Königshausen u. Neumann, 2001), 107–26.
32 See on Arendt and Blücher, Neumann, Hannah Arendt und Heinrich Blücher.
33 One titular exception is Jenny Lyn Bader’s play, recently performed in both New Jersey
and Berlin: Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library.
34 The Fluxus artist and philosopher, Bazon Brock tells the current author that Heidegger’s
wife, Elfriede, had confided to him that Heidegger, dating back to an illness early in
their marriage, was constitutionally impotent, entailing that the majority of his affairs
were things of the spirit rather than the body, as such. This is neither unheard of nor
implausible; it may, as I have argued elsewhere, be the quasi-rule. In literal terms,
however, see Paul Feyerabend’s Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) on the matter of marriage and impotence
and its complications. Nothing is simple.
35 Cited in Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad, 75.
36 Ibid., 52.
37 This would be the Leitmotif and complement to Anders’s reflection on Prometheanism
in Anders, The Antiquatedness of Humanity. Emphasis added.
38 Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad, 222.
39 Ibid.,137ff.
40 Ibid., 147.
41 Ibid., 149–50.
42 Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt (New York: Columbia University, 2013 [1987]),
9–10. See for a discussion, Christoph Schmidt, “The Leviathan Crucified. A Critical
Introduction to Jacob Taubes’ ‘The Leviathan as Mortal God’.” Political Theology, 19
(2018): 172–92.
43 “Na, der guckt mich an, der Beamte, mit Genuß und Sadismus, ha, das dauer‘ drei
Monate bis so‘n Zettel bearbeitet wird.” Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus:
Vorträge gehalten an der Forschungsstätte der evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft in
Heidelberg, 23-27 February 1987 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1995 [1993]), 134.
44 As Taubes explains, having gone to the head librarian to inquire further, “Soldaten
fahren da in die Enklave, holen die Bücher, stecken die in die Hosen, bringen sie
runter und so weiter.” Ibid.
45 Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, 11.
46 Ibid.
47 This is drawn, as I am reminded by Tracy Strong, from Arendt’s July 20, 1963,
letter written from her 370 Riverside Drive address (in NY) to Gershom Scholem,
addressed as Gerhardt: “Ich liebe in der Tat nur meine Freunde und bin zu
aller anderen Liebe völlig unfähig.” Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, Der
 
Notes 253

Briefwechsel, Marie Luise Knott (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010),
439. See Lüdger Lütkehaus, “Unversöhnte Dissonanz. Der Briefwechsel zwischen
Hannah Arendt und Gershom Scholem.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 4, 2010.
See also Annette Vowinckel, Geschichtsbegriff und Historisches Denken bei Hannah
Arendt (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001), 183.
48 David Michaelis. Personal communication, December 12, 2019, 20:07, via Facebook.
49 This is noted in its own range of complexity by Kerstin Putz herself, who edited the
correspondence between Arendt and Anders, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich.
Briefe 1939 bis 1975, Texte und Dokumente. ed. Kerstin Putz (Munich: Piper, 2016),
252. Putz underlines this complexity in her own “Afterword,” citing Eva Michaelis-
Stern’s contribution “Trägt ihn mit stolz, den gelben Fleck!” In F. A. Krummacher
(ed.), Die Kontroverse, Hannah Arendt: Eichmann – und die Juden (Munich:
Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1964), 152–60.

Chapter 4
1 Translation by Kata Gellen in her analysis “Kafka, Pro and Contra,” 284.
2 There are a number of discussions of Kojève. See for a recent discussion with a title
reminiscent of what would have been (but for publisher’s preferences) the title of the
current volume—Black Star—Jeff Love, The Black Circle: A Life of Alexander Kojève
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) and for a measured overview, see Ethan
Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005).
3 Gellen, “Kafka, Pro and Contra,” 283.
4 Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt, Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich. Briefe
1939 bis 1975, Texte und Dokumente, Kerstin Putz (ed.) (Munich: Piper, 2016), 179.
5 Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2003 [2000]).
6 Anders, Franz Kafka, 32.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 9.
9 See Ernst Schraube, “‘Torturing Things Until They Confess’: Günther Anders’
Critique of Technology.” Science as Culture, 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 77–85 and on trial
metaphorics in Kant, see Howard Caygill’s “Taste and Civil Society.” In Babich (ed.),
Reading David Hume’s ›Of the Standard of Taste‹ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019) , 177–212.
10 Ibid., Franz Kafka, 42.
11 See my “Nietzsche and Eros between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Erotic
Valence of Art and the Artist as Actor—Jew—Woman.” Continental Philosophy
Review, 33 (2000): 159–88.
12 Anders, Franz Kafka, 51.
13 Ibid., 51–2.
14 Certainly Arendt writes on Valentine’s Day in 1956 to Anders, requesting his Kafka
book.
15 Rilke, Duino Elegies, cited in Anders, Franz Kafka, 60.
16 Anders, Franz Kafka, 60.
17 Ibid., 61.
18 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” In Arendt, Reflections on Literature and
Culture, 1.
254 Notes

19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, trans. Nicholas Walker

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 37. Not dissimilar to Anders (or indeed
Adorno), Gadamer tells us that his reading of the beautiful in the artwork articulates
a specifically philosophical anthropology, recounting the key turns of his essay, “First,
we looked for the anthropological foundations of art in the phenomenon of play as an
excess. For it is constitutive of our humanity that our instincts are under-determined
and we therefore have to conceive of ourselves as free and live with the dangers that this
freedom implies. This unique characteristic determines all human existence in the most
profound fashion. And here I am following the insights of philosophical anthropology
developed by Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen under Nietzsche’s inspiration.” Ibid. 46.
20 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 34, citing Rilke, Duino Elegies VII.
21 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 34.
22 The posthumously collaged version of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory appeared in 1970,
before Gadamer’s original lectures given in 1974. However, and to be sure, and this is
in the spirit of Gadamerian history of effects, Wirkungsgeschichte, Adorno had given
lecture courses in Frankfurt on Aesthetic Theory beginning in 1950 and continuing
for almost two decades. It is worth reading Max Paddison’s review of the original
translation 1984 by Christian Lenhardt. Here too it can be useful to read Geoff
Waite, “Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy.” In Bruce Krajewski
(ed.), Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 169–211.
23 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 53. For Arendt and Anders, and this will be
their difference with and as opposed to Gadamer’s echo of Hölderlin, it will not be
“enough for the transformation simply to say the sayable to the angel; it endures only
in repeated retelling (7th Elegy). The human being undertakes this rescue because he
therein finds access to the ‘other relation.’” Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 7.
24 “Aber das Saitenspiel tönt fern aus Gärten: villeicht, daß / Dort ein Liebendes spielt
oder ein einsamer Mann / Ferner Freunde gedenkt und der Jugendzeit.” Hölderlin,
Brot und Wein. My translation. I discuss (some) of the challenges of thinking the
relation between the inner city and the market and the garden as this goes back, as
Nietzsche notes, to Epicurus. See Babich, “Epicurean Gardens and Nietzsche’s White
Seas.” In Vinod Acharya and Ryan Johnson (eds.), Epicurus and Nietzsche (London:
Bloomsbury, 2020), 52–67.
25 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies.” In Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 1.
26 Ibid., 2.
27 Here, to be specific, and this is, for Anders, always also a reference to Busoni as
much as to Schopenhauer, where the “word music does not signify any worldly thing
encounterable in the world.” Anders, “Musikalischen Situationen,” 16.
28 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 4.
29 Ibid., 23.
30 Ibid.
31 See Chapter 5.
32 Rilke, Das Stundenbuch (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1905), 9.
33 Deutsch, “Preface to Rilke, The Book of Hours,” 6.
34 Rilke, Das Stundenbuch, 9.
35 Günther Stern, mit Hannah Arendt, “Rilkes Duineser Elegien.”
36 Kohn, “Introduction” to: Hannah Arendt, Understanding 1930–1954, xv.
37 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies.”
38 I am indebted to Holger Schmid for this.
 
Notes 255

39 Arendt, “Introduction,” 32.

40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 41.
42 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 1.
43 Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu Adonai ehad (Deuteronomy 6:4)
44 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 1.
45 Ibid., 2.
46 Ibid., 3–4.
47 Ibid., 4.
48 Ibid., 4.
49 Ibid., 5.
50 Ibid., 6.
51 Ibid., 9.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 10.
54 Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 7. My translation.
55 Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, 77.
56 Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 7. My translation.
57 Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 7–8. Author’s translation.
58 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 12–13.
59 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 12.
60 Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?,” 252. See for discussion, Babich, “Heidegger and Leonard
Cohen: ‘You Want it Darker,” Religions, 12, 488 (July 2021).
61 Ibid., 253.
62 Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?,” 269.
63 Rilke, from The Book of Pilgrimage, I, 24, as cited in Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?,” 269.
My translation.
64 Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?,” 290. My translation.
65 Thus, it is to be hoped as I have already expressed, I repeat, my hope that someone
finds his or her way to the critical sensitivity, the light humour, and above all, perhaps,
to the Schelerian but also Beethovenian depth of heart needed to translate Die
Kirschenschlacht. Dialogue mit Hannah Arendt. Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht.
66 Anders, La bataille des cerises, trans. Philippe Ivernel (Paris: Rivages, 2013).
67 Dücker, “Blühende Kirschbäume” in Machen–Erhalten–Verwalten, here: 184.
68 Anders, Besuch im Hades, 191.
69 Cf. Liessmann, Günther Anders: philosophieren im Zeitalter der technologischen
Revolutionen, 115.
70 Raulff, “Asche und Ambivalenz,” 83. Citing Anders, Besuch im Hades, 203.
71 Ibid. Citing Reemtsma, Vertrauen und Gewalt, 339.
72 Gerhard Oberschlick, “Editorische Notiz.” In Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht, 61–72.
73 Anders, Die Kirschenschlacht. Dialoge mit Hannah Arendt, ed. Gerhard Oberschlick,
(Munich: Beck, 2011). To this must be added, reflecting at the age of eighty-six, the
same title, featuring four interviews and an unwritten letter, circa 1988, on lice and
such as was his material wont, crippled as he was by arthritis, Anders, Schriften zur
philosophischen Anthropology, 331.
74 Allen and Axiotis, “Heidegger on the Art of Teaching,” 32. Five years later, this essay
now clearly indicated as an imaginary exercise, avowing the parallel with Socrates’
apology, itself becomes the basis for a genuine translation, Allen and Axiotis, L’Art
d’enseigner de Martin Heidegger.
256 Notes

75 Allen and Axiotis, “Heidegger on the Art of Teaching,” 29. See too for useful, if
approximately analytic and non-Heideggerian, discussion of the logos spermatikos,
albeit qua glossed, whereby Heidegger is represented as characterizing rhetoric not in
Platonic terms of “wind-eggs” but as the third in the series of the trivium, “the bastard
son of academe.” Ibid., 35.
76 See Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel” in and “Appendix” (the original French
text), following thereupon, 208–248, and Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the
Translator.”
77 We will come back to this in the last chapter.

Chapter 5
1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Hannah Arendt (ed.),
Illuminations: Essay and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257.
2 Ibid., 257–58.
3 See further, already cited earlier: Daniel Ogden, In Search of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice:
The Traditional Tales of Lucian’s Lover of Lies (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales), 2007.
4 Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (Fortress Press, 2004),
217, here Moltmann cites Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende. Gedanken über die atomare
Situation (Munich: Beck, 1972 [1959]).
5 Latour, The Pasteurization of France.
6 For example, the contributions in Liessmann, ed., Günther Anders kontrovers or else
Margret Lohmann’s dissertation, Philosophieren in der Endzeit or, again, Lütkehaus,
Philosophieren nach Hiroshima as well as Lütkehaus’ Schwarze Ontologie. I have cited
English language and other studies in the earlier chapters.
7 “What then is time’? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I want to explain it to
someone who asks, I don’t know.” Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), XI, 14.
8 See my discussion, “Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Educational Institutions’ with Jaspers &
MacIntyre on ‘The Idea of the University’ — and Severus Snape.”
9 See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009 [In German in 2002]).
10 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 13. See too the more mainstream title,
Huie, The Hiroshima Pilot.
11 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 13.
12 Ibid.
13 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 1.
14 Ellul, The Technological Society. The original, 1954, title was in advance of Anders’ work:
La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle. See Christophe David, “Günther Anders et la question
de l’autonomie de la technique,” which also includes a brief note on Taubes on Anders
which to be sure Taubes regarded in terms of his own eschatological perspective, as he
discusses this in his posthumously gathered reflections on Paul—David cites the French
translation (and locus): Taubes, La théologie politique de Paul (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 164—
and articulated between the right (Carl Schmitt) and the left.
15 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 11.
16 Ibid.
 
Notes 257

17 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, “μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον τὸ δ᾽, ἐπεὶ φανῇ . . .”
(1224f).
18 This common quotation from Yeats is cited here following John Holcombe’s online
critical notice: “Translating Sophocles 3,” a notice that draws for its own part on
Michael Gilleland’s scholarly, critical discussion, “Yeats and Sophocles.”
19 A “straight flush” is jargon for a poker hand of five cards in sequence and of which
there are better and worse kinds. In Eatherly’s case, the name of his B-29 Superfortress
was illustrated on the nose of the plane with a depiction of a toilet bowl with a
downed Japanese pilot in the toilet and using the toilet seat as a flotation device with a
disembodied hand on the right-hand side poised to pull the chain, for a “straight flush.”
20 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 49.
21 Ibid., 12.
22 Ibid., 11.
23 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 20.
24 Stern, Über das Haben.
25 Anders and Eatherly, Burning Conscience, 12.
26 Ibid., 13.
27 In this same context, Anders claims Jules Verne as the patron saint of modern
technology: “The Prophet of the Technological Revolution.” AM II, 428.
28 Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute.
29 I discuss Anders in connection with Adorno on the space of sound and in connection
with Nietzsche on time and rhythm in The Hallelujah Effect.
30 Hoeckner, to be sure, as a historian of music, does not attend to the breadth of this
array as I am discussing Anders here, and prefers the more common constellation, as
most scholars do, of the names he cares to name in his own study.
31 Hoeckner’s reflections are broad ones but I argue here that to have the measure he
wishes and needs, even more damned names (in the Fortean sense) are required than
Anders’ own. I am speaking of the now-nearly forgotten Siegmund Levarie, and I
discuss this (in another context) in The Hallelujan Effect; see 7 as well as 196ff.
32 Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute, 16.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 17.
35 Ibid. See for the same citation, Benjamin, GS V: 1, 578, Günther Figal’s chapter:
“Aesthetic Experience of Time” in Figal, For a Philosophy of Freedom and Strife, 121.
36 J. Robert Oppenheimer, on the thoughts and reactions on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity
atomic bomb test site. “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people
laughed. . . . A few people cried. . . . Most people were silent. I remembered the line
from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince
that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and
says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that,
one way or another.” In The Decision to Drop the Bomb, NBC documentary, 1965.
37 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 1312.
38 Günther Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende. Gedanken über die atomare Situation
(Munich: Beck, 1972 [1959]).
39 The historian Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust thus borrows from Isaac Bashevis Singer. For the quote here, see Patterson,
Eternal Treblinka, 183.
258 Notes

40 Robert Jungk, Strahlen aus der Asche. Geschichte einer Wiedergeburt (Munich: Scherz,
1991 [1959]), 317; the English edition was published only two years later in 1961 as
Children of the Ashes. The Story of a Rebirth (London: Heinemann, 1961).
41 Holger Nehring, “Cold War, Apocalypse and Peaceful Atoms. Interpretations of
Nuclear Energy in the British and West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements,
1955–1964).” Historical Social Research, 29, no. 3 (2004): 150–70. Nehring also refers
to Anders in the same time era.
42 See David S. Bertolotti, “The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima.” In Bertolotti, Culture
and Technology (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984),
81–112.
43 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Modern Library,
2004).
44 Sebald, “Air War and Literature.” In On the Natural History of Destruction, 30.
45 Karl Löwith, “European Nihilism: Reflections on the Intellectual and Historical
Background of the European War.” In Löwith, Martin Heidegger, and European
Nihilism. Gary Steiner, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 173–284,
as well as Karl Jaspers, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man, trans. E. B. Ashton
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). For the specifically American context
here, see Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1962), and for a discussion of Kahn from a present-day context, Sharon
Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear
War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
46 To this end it can be useful to read Jeffrey Bussolini’s “Los Alamos as Laboratory
for Domestic Security Measures: Nuclear Age Battlefield Transformations and the
Ongoing Permutations of Security,” both in the current context and with respect to the
closing theme, if this is not his question, of the geopolitics that is the geoengineering
that Sloterdijk for his part traces and that for Anders requires the consideration of the
atrocities that took place in the Pacific at the hands of the good guys, on the right side,
the American soldiers quite beyond the atrocities we are still attempting to think with
respect to Europe.
47 See Babich, “Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr / The Danger.”
48 Eatherly and Anders, Burning Conscience.
49 See again, Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason. Cf. Babich, “Sloterdijk’s Cynicism.”
50 Adorno, Minima Moralia, §148, 233.

Chapter 6
1 The formula is striking and, again, I recommend as already cited at the outset,
Schraube’s study, “Torturing Things Until They Confess.”
2 See, again, Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer, (Glasgow:
University Press, 1949).
3 Marcel: “Herr Gunter Stern’s book Ueber das Haben (published at Bonn by Cohen,
1928)” in Marcel, Being and Having, 157.
4 Ibid., 158.
5 Marcel on Anders, in ibid., 157.
6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust – Eine Tragödie. Beide Theile in Einem Bande
(Stuttgart und Augsburg, J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1858), Kapitel 6.
 
Notes 259

7 I refer to Adorno’s 1937 Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (the dating of which
Adorno recalls in the foreword to his 1966 Negative Dialectics and which he
subsequently revised in the 1950s). In his preface to the 1970 edition, Adorno writes
that he began work on his “Three Studies of Hegel” as early as 1934, making 1934–7 the
years of composition. See Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Drei Studien zu Hegel.
8 As cited in Mark Levene, The Meaning of Genocide: Genocide in the Age of the Nation
State (London: Tauris, 2005), 35; see also Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and
Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide
Research, 3, no. 3 (2011): 366.
9 Levene, The Meaning of Genocide, 35.
10 Günther Anders, Visit Beautiful Vietnam (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968).
11 There is, it should be noted, a relative dearth of research on this question with the
received view mustered, as might be expected, on the side of denial. But see Fenn,
“Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America,” and tellingly, given the
locus of publication The Journal of American Folklore, Adrienne Mayor, “The Nessux
Shirt in the New World: Smallpox Blankets in History and Legend.” The Journal of
American Folklore, 108, no. 427 (1995): 54–77 But see: Kristine B. Patterson and
Thomas Runge, “Smallpox and the Native American.” American Journal of Medical
Science, 342, no. 4 (April 2002): 216–22.
12 Rolf Tiedemann, “‘Do you know What it Will Look Like?’ On the Relevancy of Adorno’s
Theory of Society.” Sean Nye, trans. Cultural Critique, 70 (Fall 2008): 123–36, here 126.
13 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), 25–6.
14 See here, critically and in particular: Debra Bergoffen, Contesting the Politics of
Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body (New York: Routledge,
2011) Rape as well as Allison Ruby Reid-Cunningham, “Rape as a Weapon of
Genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention, 3, no. 3 (December 2008): 279–96;
Sherrie L. Russell-Brown, “Rape as an Act of Genocide.” Berkeley Journal of Law, 20
(2003): 350–74.
15 See Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
16 Cited in Schwartz, The Curse of Cain. I thank Holger Schmid for calling Schwartz’s
book to my attention.
17 The economic geographer, Donald Worster, highlights just this in his book, Nature’s
Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977), although this is hardly his central point.
18 Patterson, Eternal Treblinka.
19 Briton Cooper Busch, The War Against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal
Fishery (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1987).
20 Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity, 1 and Grandin, “The Other ‘Moby Dick’:
Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’ is an Analogy for American Empire.” Here it is useful to cite
the extended title: “Captain Ahab isn’t the only Melville character that stands to teach
us something about unhinged American power.”
21 See further, among others in Jason Frank’s edited collection, A Political Companion
to Herman Melville (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), Strong, “Follow
Your Leader,” here 281–309 as well as Balfour, “What Babo Saw,” 259–80.
22 Anders AMI II, 432, cites Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, I, 8.
23 Anders, Die Antiquirtheit des Menschen II. Note to be sure that this text exists in
French translation under the name: “Monsieur autrement.” See a discussion, largely
260 Notes

in response to the first volume, by Thierry Simonelli, “Le monde, ‘Vu à la télé’” in the
online journal founded by Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Dogma—Revue électronique de
Sciences Humaines.
24 See Bernasconi & Mann, “The Contradictions of Racism.” See too Vall’s edited
collection, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy and cf. Farr, “Locke, Natural Law,
and New World Slavery.”
25 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical [Technical]
Reproduction.” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 241.
26 Paul Virilio, Art & Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2003 [2000]), 16.
27 Ibid., 17.
28 Bruno Latour, “Biography of an lnvestigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence.”
Cathy Porter, trans. Social Studies of Science, 43, no. 2 (2013): 292.
29 Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky and Other Poems (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc.,
2001), 20.

Chapter 7
1 For a discussion, specifically directed to Francophone reception, Christian Sommer,
“«Ni homme, ni capucin, c’est un Dasein». Remarques sur Über Heidegger,” Tumultes,
n° 28–29, 1/2 (2007): 51–68. In the context not of a reading of Anders but Heidegger
and a reflection on reproductive technology, Jill Drouillard used Anders’ phrase
as subtitle for her lecture, “Heidegger’s Sexless Community,” published in the
2018 Proceedings of the Heidegger Circle.
2 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 13–14.
3 See, for discussion, the last section, “Afterword/Afterworld: On Embryonic Mosaics
and Chimeras, Animal Farm for the 21st Century” of Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical
Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show,’” 11–13.
4 Anders, Besuch im Hades, 195.
5 Ibid., 432.
6 Jean Baudrillard, Intelligence of Evil or, The Lucidity Pact (London: Bloomsbury, 2013
[2004]) in addition to his La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Editions Galilée,
1991).
7 Anders, Commandments in the Atomic Age in: Anders and Eatherly, Burning
Conscience, 11.
8 Nietzsche, Dionysos-Dithramben: “Zwischen Raubvögeln,” Nietzsche’s Werke. 1.
Abtheilung. Band VIII, 424.
9 Nietzsche, 1888, 16 W II 7a, NF 1887-1889, 488.
10 Virilio, La procédure silence, in English as Art & Fear. See, especially the section
entitled: “A Pitiless Art.”
11 Virilio, “A Pitiless Art,” in: Virilio, Art & Fear, 28–9.
12 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical [Technical] Reproduction,” 241.
13 Thus, the editor of Virilio’s Art & Fear, John Armitage, explains this focus as a result of
Virilio’s Catholicism.
14 Modern physiology has hardly abandoned pain experiments to this day, all designed
“to determine how all the different body parts react to pain.” Virilio, Art & Fear, 32.
Thus, one scholar rightly compares “Haller’s achievement . . . as accomplishing for
physiology what Copernicus, Newton, and Huygens accomplished for their fields.”
 
Notes 261

15 Here Virilio seems to anticipate the age of Trump and “the desolation of modern
times with their cardboard cut-out dictator that keeps popping up, whether it be
Hitler or the ‘Futurist’, Mussolini, Stalin or Mao Zedong.” Virilio, Art & Fear, 33.
16 Pierre Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues.” See further, Babich,
“Heidegger’s Jews,” here 144.
17 Patterson, Eternal Treblinka.
18 See, again, Babich, “Afterword/Afterworld” in “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the
‘Age of the Show.’”
19 Martine Rothblatt, “Biology is Technology.” Youtube Lecture. Online. https​:/​/ww​​w​
.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=wSZ​​​grEta​​kz8. See Jason Koebler, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to
Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm.” Motherboard. Vice. June 24, 2015.
20 Nick Thieme, “The Gruesome Truth About Lab-Grown Meat: It’s Made by Using Fetal
Cow Blood.” Slate, July 11, 2017.”
21 See again, Virilio ‘A Pitiless Art” as well as Joachim Müller-Jung, “Das Schwein, dein
Spender. Vermenschlicht: gentechnisch veränderte Ferkel aus München” in addition
to further references in the notes to Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the
‘Age of the Show.’” And see the contributions to Taupitz, Jochen and Marion Weschka,
eds., Chimbrids—Chimeras and Hybrids in Comparative European and International
Research: Scientific, Ethical, Philosophical and Legal Aspects (Frankfurt: Springer
Science & Business Media, 2009).
22 See Michael’s “Preface,” Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip
Implants, xxiv. The collection includes Albrecht’s “Microchip Induced Tumors in
Laboratory Rodents and Doges,” 281–318.
23 See here, for a very tame example of cyborg—elsewhere I note that the wearing of
contact lenses is adequate to qualify one as cyborg, however anticlimactic, Trafton’s
2019, “Storing Medical Information Below the Skin’s Surface.” Cf. Donnelly et al.,
Microneedles for Drug and Vaccine Delivery and Patient Monitoring (Oxford: John
Wiley & Sons, 2018).

Chapter 8
1 See here Carl Størmer’s 1928 report on a letter received from the Oslo radio engineer,
Jørgen Hals, in Størmer’s “Shortwave Echoes and the Aurora Borealis.” In Paris, in
the same year, Størmer also published a longer, more explicative account: “Sur un
écho d’ondes électromagnétiques courtes arrivant plusieurs secondes apres le signal
émis, et son explication d’après la thèorie des aurores boréales.” In a more “nominal”
echo, more recently, a Norwegian documentary directed by yet another Carl Størmer,
The Ghost Radio Hunter, follows the electronic artist-pair, Per Martinsen and singer
Aggie Peterson, tracking similar phenomena in recording the 2013 Frost album,
Radiomagnetic. Anders’ “Spuk und Radio” concerns rather lower atmospheric heights,
radio echoes of the same music heard in passing along a corridor or a street.
2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (Stuttgart und
Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1832 [1808]), 314.
3 Tracy B. Strong, Politics Without Vision: Thinking Without a Bannister in the Twentieth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 160. I am grateful to Tracy
Strong for reminding me of Freud’s quotation of Goethe in response to my constant
observation of Goethe’s importance for Anders.
262 Notes

4 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and

Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 13.
5 Stern (Anders), “Spuk im Radio” (on the title page of the journal) “Spuk und Radio”
on the essay itself.
6 See for a discussion, including further reference to the literature on this study, Babich,
“Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology,” in addition to Babich, The Hallelujah Effect.
7 See Adorno, Current of Music. Elements of a Radio Theory.
8 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 97.
9 See on, for example, the contributions to Janz, ed., Hermeneutics: Place and Space, as
well as, more broadly, the contributions to Pavlos Kontos and Veronique Fóti, eds.,
Political and Philosophical Essays for Jacques Taminiaux and for a more Ricoeur-
minded approach, Paul Downes, Concentric Space as a Life Principle Beyond
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur.
10 See, including illustrations, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, 121ff.
11 Anders, “Zur Phänomenologie des Zuhörens (Erläutert am Hören impressionistischer
Musik),” in Musikphilosophische Schriften, 211–225.
12 Adorno’s text was translated, as Ernest McClain (1918–2014) recounts this, by George
Simpson.
13 Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” in
Musikphilosophische Schriften, 15–140, but see too the correspondence concerning,
including an application to the Guggenheim Foundation to find support for the
preparation of an English version of his original 1937 manuscript, here: 145–73.
14 Adorno writes on this in Current of Music. For a specific discussion, see Babich, “On
The Hallelujah Effect.”
15 See further, again, Babich, “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology.”
16 See, for a discussion, Cornelia Epping-Jäger, “Lautsprecher.” In Daniel Morat and
Hans Jakob Ziemer (eds.), Handbuch Sound: Geschichte–Begriffe–Ansätze (Frankfurt:
Springer, 2017), esp. 396–7. And see too Thadeusz, “Nazi-Labor in Oberfranken.
Geheimwaffen aus dem Burgverlies.”
17 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96, 92.
18 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Gesamtausgabe 65, F.W.
von Hermann, ed., (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), GA 65, 131.
19 Theodor Lessing, Der Lärm. Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens
(Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1908).
20 Cited in John L. Snelly, The Nazi Revolution (Boston: B.C. Heath, 1959), 7.
21 See, in addition to the third section of Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, very specifically
and in physical detail Thanos Vovolis, Prosopon: The Acustical Mask in Greek Tragedy
and in Contemporary Theatre (Stockholm University of the Arts, 2009).
22 Babich, “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology,” and, again, The Hallelujah Effect.
23 Reinhard Ellensohn attends to Husserl in his book, citing the authority of Malwida
Husserl to testify to Anders’ phenomenological facility. See Ellensohn, Der andere Anders.
24 Stern and Anders, “Spuk und Radio,” 66.
25 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 99. Kittler references the Jürgenson wave in
his introduction, ibid., 13, via Walter Rathenau as well as Cocteau’s “radio theory,”
including a reference to “doppelgänger,” ibid., 192.
26 Stern and Anders, “Spuk und Radio,” 66.
27 To this extent, this differs from Edvin Østergaard’s thoughtful analysis of shadow (and
echo). See Østergaard, “Echoes and Shadows: A Phenomenological Reconsideration
of Plato’s Cave Allegory,” Phenomenology & Practice, 13, no. 1 (2019): 20–33.
 
Notes 263

28 Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV, GA 96, 265. I discuss this instantiation of radio and
its phenomenological significance in Babich, “Heidegger’s Black Night.” In Ingo Farin
and Jeff Malpas (eds.), Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2016), 59–86.
29 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign, here 169.
30 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 169. Cf. further Jean Baudrillard, Intelligence of
Evil or, The Lucidity Pact (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [2004]).
31 Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign, 170.
32 Ibid., 169.
33 Babich, “Screen Autism, Cellphone Zombies, and GPS Mutes.”
34 Knelangen contradicts Anders’ assertion that “only Adorno would have understood”
the tonal reference of rising and ascending tones (cf. Knelangen, “Günther Anders
und die Musik oder ‘Der Klavier-spieler mit dem Zeichenstift’,” here: 79), per contra,
see Babich, “O, Superman! Or Being Towards Transhumanism.”
35 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 37.
36 Ibid., 100.
37 Ibid., 103.
38 Ibid., 107–8.
39 Ibid., 111.
40 See for one author who draws a connection here Timo Kaerlein, “Playing with
Personal Media” and see too, albeit largely with approbative reference to Simondon,
Giovanni Carrozzini, “Technique et humanisme.”
41 This preconditioning is the condition for what has been called the current age of
omnipresent surveillance, well beyond any Benthamite or Foucauldian panopticon.
There are many discussions, but see, in addition Galič et al., “Bentham, Deleuze and
Beyond” as well as, including further references, Hauptman, “Surveillance” and,
for a recent popular account, Louise Matsakis, “How the Government Hides Secret
Surveillance Programs.” Wired, January 9, 2018.
42 Adorno, Current of Music, 73ff. See for discussion and further references, Babich, The
Hallelujah Effect, 144f.
43 This is the reason for my title, and I do this from the start, writing on “Effects,
Mediations, and Primes.” See Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, 1.
44 See further, Illich’s “The Age of the Show” and Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
45 Once again, I recall, as cited earlier that the philosopher and gaming designer names
our smartphones “pocket robots.” See Babich and Bateman, “Your Plastic Pal Who’s
Fun to Be With,” and Bateman’s The Virtuous Cyborg. Thus, I reflect not only on the
gender presumptions (and deficiencies) of sex robots Babich, “Robot Sex, Roombas,
and Alan Rickman,” as well as the relation between twitter and erotic communication.
Cf. “Texts and Tweets.”
46 Hofheinz, “Arab Internet Use” but see too Morozov, The Net Delusion as well as
Frischmann and Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity and, very conventionally, David
Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
47 See: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​time_​​​conti​​nue¼3&v¼vwSRqaZGsPw. See, for a
discussion, Lester, “Gil Scott-Heron: The Revolution Lives On.” In addition to an array
of cultural influences and echoes, including remix, this is also the self-reflexive title of
a documentary that should have been a point-counterpoint of the Venezuelan coup
264 Notes

contra Hugo Chavez (see here: the philosopher and film theorist and producer, Rod
Stoneman, Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Cf. Babich, “The Revolution
Will be Televised”).
48 This is thematized as our consumption of mass media in Anders’ interview with
Manfred Bissinger.

Chapter 9
1 For example, the aptly titled “Pariser Musikbriefe.”
2 Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische Situationen,” including
grant applications and other documents: MS, 145–173.
3 Theodor Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts.” In Richard
Leppert (ed.), Essays on Music, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 376.
4 Ibid.
5 Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
6 Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” and “‘What a Music
Appreciation Hour Should Be’: Exposé,” in Current of Music.
7 I am indebted for the reference to Adorno’s smile to Holger Schmid.
8 See Roholt, “On the Divide: Analytic and Continental Philosophy of Music,” but, as
if to confirm the aforementioned distinction, Roholt discusses mainstream analytic
academics, with the exception of Bourdieu inasmuch as Roholt follows Simon
Critchley’s claim that “there is no” such contingent, contra Reiner Schürmann, who
wrote on the distinction. See Schürmann, “Concerning Philosophy in the United
States.” Today, analytic philosophy increasingly occupies both sides such that few
representatives of Schürmann’s style of philosophising remain.
9 Roger Scruton, “Is Adorno a Dead Duck?” Lecture: Royal Musical Association Music
and Philosophy Study Group 2nd Annual Conference, King’s College London, 20 J.
10 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
11 See here: Lütkehaus, “Der ‘Atomphilosoph’ scheitert an der Musik.”
12 Stern, Die Rolle der Situationskategorie bei den logische Sätzen.
13 See, on guilt, Carl Schmitt, Über Schuld und Schuldarten. Eine terminologische
Untersuchung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblott, 1977 [1910]) and further, with respect to
Schmitt and music, Angela Reinthal: “Mich hält ein reines Intervall”. Carl Schmitt und
die Musik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblott, 2019).
14 Lütkehaus, “Der ‘Atomphilosoph’ scheitert an der Musik.”
15 Maurice Halbwachs, “La mémoire collective chez les musiciens.” Revue philosophique
(March–April 1939): 136–65.
16 Dilthey, “Other Persons and their Expressions of Life,” In Descriptive Psychology and
Historical Understanding (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 222/140.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., cited in Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über musikalische
Situationen,” 39.
19 Dilthey, “Other Persons and their Expressions of Life,” 140.
20 Ibid., 138.
 
Notes 265

21 Ibid., 138.
22 Ibid., 139.
23 Ibid., 141.
24 See Eugen Fink, Oase des Glücks. Gedanken zu einer Ontologie des Spiels (Freiburg:
Alber, 1957), and cf. my, “Artisten Metaphysik und Welt-Spiel in Fink and Nietzsche.”
25 Cf. Adorno’s 1955 “The Aging of the New Music,” an “aging” which proceed as it
might had done little to domesticate the new music for the concert programme, as
Gadamer also attests in his 1974 The Relevance of the Beautiful, and which still seems
to hold to the current day.
26 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful.
27 See further for a mainstream overview, Gratzer’s encyclopedia entry, “Listening to
Music: An Art in It Self or Not,” citing the variations on the art of listening per se,
as well as the generic concept of “musical appreciation,” 465–6, including reference
to Schmid’s broader study, Kunst des Hörens. Orte und Grenzen philosophischer
Spracherfahrung. Gratzer, who also refers to Konrad Liessman, is writing in the
context of a handbook that grew out of an Austrian conference on the theme of music,
foregrounding listening; thus, it is also worth noting the articles by Maus, “Listening
and Possessing” and not at all least: Christiane, “Everybody in the concert hall should
be devoted entirely to the music,” 441–60 and 477–99, respectively.
28 See, in addition to the Heideggerian and musicologist, F. Joseph Smith, Erik Wallrup’s
Being Musically Attuned. Wallrup attends to the tuning or attunement, Stimmung of
music, not unlike Anders’ own reflections on Zuhören, which in turn derive from
Heidegger. See too Wallrup’s earlier, explicitly Heideggerian, but with the focus on
belonging, still reminiscent of Anders, “Music, Truth and Belonging,” and again
sidestepping Anders, Thwaites, “Heidegger and Jazz.” See too in passing, as Fanon
notes one Günther Stern’s importance for his own reflections, Garcia’s instructively,
phenomenologically, and sociologically titled Listening for Africa, 11.
29 I have been reflecting on this question for some time. See for a general discussion of
masculine and feminine aesthetics in Nietzsche’s use of the contrast, complete with an
illustration, relevant to Anders, of Nietzsche’s commissioned woodcut of Prometheus
Unbound, in connection with Beethoven, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, 255.
30 Arendt and Stern, “Rilke’s Duino Elegies,” 4.
31 Many popular authors on media have drawn on and reference these studies and, in
philosophy Jean Baudrillard dedicated, as did Paul Virilio, considerable energy to
reflecting on the consequences of what Baudrillard called the “Sociological System of
Objects and their Consumption.” See Baudrillard, The System of Objects and Virilio’s
Desert Screen.
32 Anders, “‘What use is the Moon?’ (Molussian saying). At no time does the doubt ever
arise that something might not have a possible use.” AM II, 32.
33 This is also the connection that McClain seeks to make: see Anders, “Rückfrage
nach dem Element des Tönes,” MS, 98ff. And see my discussion of the acroamatic in
Nietzsche in Babich, “Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Educational Institutions.’”
34 Adorno, “The Social Situation of Music.” In Adorno, Essays on Music, Selected, with
Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 391–36.
35 Adorno’s “On the Fetish Character of Music,” 289ff.
36 Ibid., 289.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 290.
266 Notes

39 Julian Johnson, “‘The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia’: New Music Since Adorno.”
In Berthold Hoeckner (ed.), Apparitions: Essays on Adorno and Twentieth-Century
Music (London: Routledge, 2013), 69. See too, Daniel Chua, “Drifting: The
Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music.” In Hoeckner (ed.), Apparitions,
1–18.
40 Sonolet, already noted earlier, draws a parallel of this kind by comparing Anders with
Bourdieu at the outset of “Literature and Modernity,” specifically citing Bourdieu’s
habitus in order to articulate “the nature of power-dominated cultural consumption in
France, as is demonstrated in his extended study on taste.” Nevertheless, Anders’ focus
is both more critical and more fundamental.
41 Heidegger, “In der besorgenden Umsicht gibt es dergleichen Aussagen “zunächst”
nicht.” (SZ 157).
42 To be sure this too is a reference offered as a negative distinction: “Auf dem Grunde
dieses existenzial primären Hörenkönnens ist so etwas möglich wie Horchen, das
selbst phänomenal noch ursprünglicher ist als das, was man in der Psychologie
‘zunächst’ als Hören bestimmt, das Empfinden von Tönen und das Vernehmen von
Lauten” (SZ, 163).
43 [Das Horen konstituiert sogar die primare und eigentliche Offenheit des Daseins für
sein eigenstes Seinkonnen]. Heidegger here adds the important reference to the voice
of the friend, the reference is disputed, moving between Augustinian conscience and
the Aristotelian commonplace of another self: “als Horen der Stimme des Freundes,
den jedes Dasein bei sich tragt.“ To be sure this too is a reference offered as a negative
distinction: “Auf dem Grunde dieses existenzial primären Hörenkönnens ist so etwas
möglich wie Horchen, das selbst phänomenal noch ursprünglicher ist als das, was man
in der Psychologie “zunächst” als Hören bestimmt, das Empfinden von Tönen und das
Vernehmen von Lauten” (SZ, 163).
44 [“Zunachst” hören wir nie und nimmer Geräusche und Lautkomplexe, sondern den
knarrenden Wagen, das Motorrad. Man hört die Kolonne auf dem Marsch, den
Nordwind, den klopfenden Specht, das knisternde Feuer.] Ibid.
45 Note that Adorno engages Anders (as “Stern”) in Adorno’s Current of Music in “Space
Ubiquity,” 80f. Cf., Babich, “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology.”
46 On the Dionysiac in Nietzsche, see the final chapter of Babich, Nietzsches Antike,
299–344.
47 This is different from the sheer description of the phenomenon and assessment
of different responsive profiles—not everyone, famously enough, experiences the
phenomenon, thus leading to the straightforward research assessment in terms of
personality types and issues of suggestibility/susceptibility. See Fredborg, Clark, and
Smith, “An Examination of Personality Traits Associated with Autonomous Sensory
Meridian response (ASMR)” and Ahuja, “It feels good to be measured.”
48 Stern/Anders, “The Acoustic Stereoscope.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
10, no. 2 (December 1949): 238.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 239.
51 Ibid.
52 The View-Master, which had existed for some time, first introduced as a gadget for
the 1939 World’s Fair, was redesigned in 1958 by the Afro-American designer Charles
Harrison for Sears, Roebuck & Company, to be rereleased to great success.
53 Anders, “The Acoustic Stereoscope,” 239.
 
Notes 267

Chapter 10
1 See, again, Greg Milner, Pinpoint and cf., Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative
Media (London: Polity, 2015). And see too for reflections on the whereness of
“whereness,” Robin Mannings, Ubiquitous Positioning (Norwood: Artech House,
2008), here 19f. And cf. Alan Oxley, Uncertainties in GPS Positioning: A Mathematical
Discourse (London: Elsevier, 2017). See also Feldstein, “The Global Expansion of AI
Surveillance,” Bartlett, The Dark Net and my “Screen Autism, Cellphone Zombies, and
GPS Mutes.”
2 Adorno, “Musical Situation,” Current of Music, 83.
3 Ibid.
4 See for a discussion the author’s “Looking Right, Reading Left.”
5 Thus, in addition to Laurence Paul Hemming’s foreword to Ernst Jünger, The Worker:
Dominion and Form, trans. Bogdan Costea (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2017), see Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis, “Ernst Jünger, Total Mobilisation and
the Work of War.” Organisation, 24, no. 4 (2017): 1–23, and Antoine Bousquet, “Ernst
Jünger and the Problem of Nihilism in the Age of Total War.” Thesis Eleven, 132, no. 1
(2016): 17–38. And see, too, very insightfully, Vincent Blok, Ernst Jünger’s Philosophy
of Technology: Heidegger and the Poetics of the Anthropocene (New York: Routledge,
2017).
6 Pietsch, et al., eds., Berechenbarkeit der Welt?: Philosophie und Wissenschaft im
Zeitalter von Big Data (Frankfurt: Springer, 2017), and see Lin’s “Ethics of Hacking
Back.”
7 I cite Joseph Nye Welsh, counsel for the US Army under investigation for communist
activities, delivered June 9, 1954, during the Army-McCarthy Hearings in
Washington, DC.
8 There are thousands of engineers, architects, chemists, and so on who have pointed
to this particularly naked emperor, but, for example, note Harry G. Robinson,
III: “The collapse was too symmetrical to have been eccentrically generated.
The destruction was symmetrically initiated to cause the buildings to implode as
they did.”
9 Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales
from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
10 See here Françoise Levie, L’homme qui voulait classer le monde. Paul Otlet et le
Mundaneum (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2006).
11 Cf. in this constellation the contributions to the late Frank Hartmann’s collective
volume, Vom Buch zur Datenbank. And cf., too, my “Necropolitics and Techno-
Scotosis,” Philosophy Today, 65 (2021): 305–324.
12 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly, 176 (1945): 101–8.
13 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 13.
14 Don Gordon, Electronic Warfare: Element of Strategy and Multiplier of Combat Power
(New York: 1981).
15 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 13.
16 Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
17 Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Opinion (New York: Liveright, 1961).
18 Paul Forman, “Kausalität, Anschaulichkeit, and Individualität, or How Cultural Values
Prescribed the Character and the Lessons Ascribed to Quantum Mechanics.” In N.
268 Notes

Stehr and V. Meja (eds.), Society and Knowledge: Contemporary Perspectives in the
Sociology of Knowledge (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984), 333–47.
19 Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical
Research in the United States, 1940–1960.” Historical Studies in the Physical and
Biological Sciences, 18 (1987): 149–229, and see too Forman’s earlier essay: “Weimar
Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German
Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment.”
20 Street, Politics and Technology, 44.
21 See, for one example, Steve Fuller, Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past,
Present, and Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and see too Robert Frodeman,
Transhumanism, Nature, and the Ends of Science (New York: Routledge, 2019).
22 I owe this account to Arun Tripathi, via email, personal communication.
23 Ihde, Listening and Voice. It should also be said that Ihde drew for that study both
on the insights of his colleague Patrick Heelan, the hermeneutic phenomenologist of
perception and philosopher of science, author of Space-Perception and the Philosophy
of Science, and Smith, author of The Experiencing of Musical Sound. Even more than
Anders, Smith was ignored by his contemporaries. Smith, editor of Understanding the
Musical Experience, was also author of Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae.
24 This makes an ongoing difference for philosophical reflection, and I have addressed it
on numerous occasions. See perhaps most accessibly the first of the dialogue initiated
by Chris Bateman—“The Last of the Continental Philosophers,” in addition to a book
looking at the implications of the analytic turn for Francophone philosophy, the
frankly titled: La fin de la pensée? as well as “Politik und die analytische-kontinentale
Trennung in der Philosophie. Zu Heideggers sprechender Sprache, Nietzsches
lügender Wahrheit und der akademischen Philosophie” in: Babich, “Eines Gottes
Glück voller Macht und Liebe” and “An Impoverishment of Philosophy,” and, most
recently, “Good for Nothing: On Philosophy and Its Discontents.”
25 This connection is evident on Harold Marcuse’s web page subpage dedicated to
Anders, featured for many years on the Marcuse website, http:​/​/mar​​cuse.​​facul​​ty​.hi​​
story​​.ucsb​​.edu/​​​ander​​s.
26 Quite as David Gill writes, and although Anders is not his reference, there is a clear
parallel as “Ellul is often dismissed as a backward-looking, world-fleeing pessimist,
and a superficial reading of his work sometimes invites this response.” See Gill,
“Jacques Ellul and Technology’s Trade-Off,” as well as Rose, “Errors of Thamus” and
Matlack, “Confronting the Technological Society.”
27 See Ogden, “The Apprentice’s Sorceror.” I am grateful to Joel Relihan for discussion.
28 For a discussion of Goethe’s indebtedness to Wieland’s translation of Lucian and the
subsequent history of effects or influence, see Ernst Ribbat’s wonderfully titled (from
the perspective of a text on Günther Anders), “‘Die ich rief, die Geister . . .’ Zur späten
Wirkung einer Zaubergeschichte Lukians,” especially “Mysteriose Poesie,” 290ff.
29 See for an analysis, Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive
Social Action,” here 903. As cited above, Goethe writes his own paradox into the
mouth of Mephisto: “Teil von jener Kraft Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute
schafft”/“Part of that Power which would/The Evil ever do, and ever does the Good”].
Goethe, Faust, Ch. 6.
30 See Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? See too, systematically on this very topic, Orrin H.
Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t
Predict the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). As well as, as already
cited and as the phenomenon is not new, David S. Bertolloti, Jr., Culture and Technology.
 
Notes 269

31 See Alexander Stingl’s The Digital Coloniality of Power: Disobedience in the

Social Sciences and the Legitimacy of the Digital Age (Lanham, MD: Lexington
Books, 2015).
32 Here Anders refers the reader to his effort in his 1956 volume, to analyse television
quite and already in this same direction: AM I, 99.
33 See Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
(New York: Public Affairs, 2018), as well as the contributions to the collection
already cited above, M. Michael and K. Michael (eds.), Uberveillance and the Social
Implications of Microchip Implants: Emerging Technologies (Hersey: IGI Glbal,
2013) as well as, modulated for today’s mainstream, Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism.
34 Julie Accardo and M. Ahmad Chaudhry, “Radiation Exposure and Privacy Concerns
Surrounding Full-Body Scanners in Airports.” Journal of Radiation Research and
Applied Sciences, 7, no. 2 (April 2014): 198–200. See also Rebekka Murphy, “Note,
Routine Body Scanning in Airports: A Fourth Amendment Analysis Focused on
Health Effects,” Hastings Const. L.Q., 39 (2012): 915.
35 Anders, “Being Without Time,” 145.
36 Ibid., 146.
37 Ibid., 148.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 149.
40 Ibid., 142.
41 Ibid., 148–9.
42 Adorno, Current of Music, 128ff.
43 Ibid., 137.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., Emphasis added.
46 See Kittler’s Aufschreibsysteme and his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
47 There is an abundance of literature on this. See for pop summaries focused on the
United States, Gerald Carson, “The Piano in the Parlor,” American Heritage, 17, no. 1
(December 1965): 54–9 and Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family
Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Baudrillard’s
System of Objects offers a discussion from a French perspective, as does, in a different
sense Bourdieu’s Distinction, and in Germany the theme is a focus for Heidegger fairly
early on.
48 See, for example, again, Spigel, Make Room for TV.
49 See Anders, “The Outdatedness of Privacy.”
50 Thus, several authors characterize this using the language of “Effect,” drawing out
the seemingly programmed efficacy of the gambling trick, that is, the use of a like
button.
51 Anders, “Being Without Time,” 148.

Chapter 11
1 As Gadamer writes, to cite the quote in context: “it is the hermeneutic identity that
establishes the unity of the work. To understand something, I must be able to identify
it. For there was something there that I passed judgment upon and understood. I
270 Notes

identify something as it was or as it is, and this identity alone constitutes the meaning
of the work.” The Relevance of the Beautiful, 25.
2 Adorno, “Situation” in: Aesthetic Theory, 38. Emphasis added.
3 In “Totalitarianism without Terror,” which we might today rename, as Anders does
himself, as “soft totalitarianism” and should be read in correspondence with Hannah
Arendt (and Herbert Marcuse), in: Anders, AM II, 241.
4 It is this that Adorno overlooks in his discussion of Anders in Current of Music, 136,
142, etc.
5 Hawaii in general was influential in pop music in the 1950s and earlier. Indeed, one
unfortunate title going back to Tin Pan Alley in the mid-1910s, “Oh How She Could
Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo”—performed by Eddie Cantor no less. Cf., Tyler, Hit
Songs, 1900-1955, 87.
6 Babich, “Getting to Hogwarts.”
7 See here Babette Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement.” In Jason Holt (ed.), Leonard
Cohen and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014), 123–34.
8 Cf. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938).
9 See too Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
10 Thus, asked by a friend, Bill Richardson, for a song at the age of ninety-six, I am
Gonna Live Until I Die, it turned out to be Frankie Laine’s recording (rather than
Frank Sinatra’s). Cf. Finch, “Twelve Songs That Everyone Thinks are by Other Artists”
as well as, technico-legalistically, Catherine L. Fisk, “The Modern Author at Work on
Madison Avenue.” In Paul K. Saint-Amour (ed.), Modernism and Copyright (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 173–94.
11 To look at this I draw on phenomenology to look at recording under all mediatic
forms, radio and social distribution (this includes television and cable and YouTube
references) as it also involves the invisibility of the effects of the same (this is the
culture industry) on our consciousness, individual and collective, the “space” and
“time” as Adorno would have it, of musical sound as it was and could/might be as it is
and is not.
12 Anders, “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 370.
13 See again, The Hallelujah Effect as well as Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement.”
14 See Nietzsche, On the Theory of Quantitifying Rhythm.” James W. Halporn, trans.
New Nietzsche Studies, 10, nos 1 & 2 (2016): 69–78.
15 Nietzsche’s original notes to his Zur Quantierenden Rhythmik suggest a link to
Aristoxenus. Cf., albeit without reference to Nietzsche, Williams, The Aristoxenian
Theory of Musical Rhythm.
16 Ullrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, “Future Philology.” Gertrude Postl, Babette
Babich, and Holger Schmid, trans. New Nietzsche Studies, 4, nos 1 and 2 (2000): 1–32.
17 The theologian, David Strauss, as writer and confessor.
18 That is, Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben.
19 In addition to Benjamin’s famous essay, see Adorno’s Current of Music as well as “On
the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Music” and “The Schema of Mass
Culture,” the first two essays in The Culture Industry, 29–60 and 61–97. See too the
chapter “Sociological Aspects” in Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films, 30–41.
20 See the author’s “The Revolution will be Televised.”
21 Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss me When I’m Gone? The Carter
Family & Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
22 Bennett, Becoming a Rock Musician.
23 See for context and (some) discussion, Leppert’s “Commentary,” esp. 219f.
 
Notes 271

24 Von Bülow to Nietzsche, July 24, 1872. Nietzsche, Kritische Briefausgabe [KGB].
Not only does one fail the genius of genius—in Kant’s sense—when one’s artistry
is “natured” rather than “as if ” by nature but, as von Bülow noted, one fails far
more basically unless learns, qua composer, the grammar in which one intends
to express oneself. Sine qua non. This is the subject of another discussion on
Adorno and popular music or jazz and not less the “new music,” the rules of
composition.
25 Nietzsche’s draft to von Bülow contains this more defensive assertion (KGB, 77); the
version sent is more polished, invokes a scale of ironies, and is itself somewhat more
ironic or distant (ibid., 78–80). Only the (more self-defensive) draft is included in
Middleton’s Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, 106–7.
26 Michael James Roberts, Tell Tchaikovsky the News: Rock ’n’ Roll, the Labor Question,
and the Musicians’ Union, 1942–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
27 The concert including this performance was described in a 2000 National Public
Radio broadcast by Will Hermes. See transcript here: http:​/​/www​​.npr.​​org​/2​​000​/0​​5​/08/​​
10738​​​85​/4-​​33. See for a musicological reading Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence:
John Cage’s ‘4' 33″’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
28 See BBC News January 19, 2004. http:​/​/new​​s​.bbc​​.co​.u​​k​/2​/h​​i​/ent​​ertai​​nment​​​/3401​​901​.s​​tm
29 See, for example, the German gallery exhibition, SOUNDS LIKE SILENCE Cage
– 4'33'' – Stille 1912 – 1952 – 2012 (Dortmund, HartwareMedienKunstVerein,
Dortmunder U, third and sixth floors (Galerie), August 25, 2012 – January 6, 2013)
and Ross, “Searching for Silence” discusses one such exhibit, “The Anarchy of Silence,”
on Cage’s career and his myriad connections to other arts.
30 See Agamben’s painful, and beautifully, crafted, Una domanda, and for discussion, see
my “Retrieving Agamben’s Questions.”
31 See for a discussion the author’s “Spirit and Grace, Letters and Voice,” and (in
passing), “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show’.”
32 See Babich, “Heidegger and Leonard Cohen: ‘You Want it Darker.’”Religions (June 2021).
33 [Wer sich nicht auf der Schwelle des Augenblicks, alle Vergangenheiten vergessend,
niederlassen kann, wer nicht auf einem Punkte wie eine Siegesgöttin ohne Schwindel
und Furcht zu stehen vermag, der wird nie wissen, was Glück ist, und noch
schlimmer: er wird nie etwas tun, was andre glücklich macht.] Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen
und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben [1874], 1.
34 [gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zugunsten einer kommenden
Zeit—zu wirke] Nietzsche [1874] 1980, 247.

Chapter 12
1 Anders, Hiroshima ist Überall. Tagebuch aus Hiroshima und nagasaki. Der Briefwechsel
mit dem Hiroshima-Piloten Claude Eatherly. Rede über die drei Weltkriege (Munich:
Beck, 1982).
2 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? Eine notwendige Diskussion (Munich: Knaur, 1987),
21–2. See further, Elisabeth Rohrlich, “‘To Make the End Time Endless:’ The Early
Years of Gunther Anders’ Fight against Nuclear Weapons.” In Günter Bischof, et al.
(eds.), The Life and Work of Günther Anders: émigré, iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of
Letters (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2014).
3 Anders, Gewalt – Ja oder Nein? 22.
272 Notes

4 There is a lot to read on this complex topic but see just on the issue of theoretical (in-)
visibility of atomic waste in particular Pilkey-Jarvis, “Yucca Mountain” and “Giant
Cups of Poison” in Pilkey and Jarvis-Pilkey, Useless Arithmetic, 45–65/140–63. With
explicit mention of Anders, Jogschies thematizes invisibility with respect to atomic
catastrophe in his “Zur Chiffrierung von Atomkriegsängsten in Science-Fiction-
Filmen und ihrer De-Chiffrierung in der Politik.” See too, Babich, “Heidegger and
Hölderlin on Aether and Life.”
5 We don’t, as philosophers cite our colleagues in general, but when we do, we tend not
to know the names of outlier thinkers.
6 For a range of further references, see my essay “Adorno and Radio Phenomenology.”
7 See Babich, The Hallelujah Effect.
8 Just as Marcuse would also work on behalf of the government during the same
wartime effort, Adorno was also, in effect, “imported” to the United States. See Levin
and von der Linn, “Elements of a Radio Theory” as well as Cavin, “Adorno, Lazarsfeld
&The Princeton Radio Project, 1938-1941.” On Adorno especially, see Babich,
“Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology.”
9 Babich, “On The Hallelujah Effect” as well as Babich, “Texts and Tweets: On The Rules
of the Game.”
10 See here, again, Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media, in addition to the inevitable
update that lockdown has dated, as it were, before its time: Frith and Kalin, “Here,
I Used to Be” and Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the
Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
11 See again, Pilkey-Jarvis, “Yucca Mountain.”
12 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, p. xi. Very few people notice the error, though I thank Tracy
Strong for calling it to my attention but even the political theorist and former member
of SDS, Tracy Strong, got the military rank wrong as “Colonel Kilgore”—rather than
Lieutenant Colonel. And cf. Kittler “Weltatem.”
13 Stern, “Spuk und Radio.” This point is already related to Arnheim’s Radio and
Adorno’s Current of Music.
14 See references and further discussion, Babich, “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology.”
15 Smythe, in a footnote to his own text, refers the reader to Ewen’s 1976 Captains
of Consciousness for documentary evidence of what Smythe describes as the
“purposiveness with which monopoly capitalism used advertising and the infant mass
media for this purpose in the period around and following World War I.” Smythe,
“Communications,” 27.
16 See here, again, Epping-Jäger “Lautsprecher,” 396–7.
17 The reference here has been the subject of a 2006 HBO documentary, which is,
however strange this may seem, an effective way to drive something from public
consciousness, Hacking Democracy, and featuring Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne,
director and associate director, respectively, for the non-profit election watchdog
group Black Box Voting, not a matter of “Russian hacking” with the Trump election
2016 or indeed with Biden 2020 but, back to the famously disputed election between
Gore and Bush, inasmuch as, given digital technology, any election, anywhere,
anytime, can be hacked without anyone being able to detect the hack one way or the
other. That is the beauty of the digital; it is the same problem as some librarians have
noted this, with the digitization of books and the destruction or prohibition of access,
it is the same, to the originals. (See Sare, “A Comparison of HathiTrust and Google
Books Using Federal Publications.”) The question of digitized books and the dangers
(the books are destroyed or access is refused depending on geographic location),
 
Notes 273

one must be in the United States to use most digitized texts “owned,” one off, by the
Hathi trust. These questions, like the questions of voting hacks, are complicated. But
in the political realm, as the recent US elections demonstrated yet once again, the
problems were never resolved: claims of voter fraud, legitimate claims, go back and
forth—whatever “legitimate” might mean as the point of digital hacking is precisely
that there is no evidence of the hack. More recent discussions of the new kinds of
social media “hacking” correspond to ads and the like in those kinds of social digital
engineering that we happen to we know of, which does not mean that that we are
conscious of such manipulation nor indeed that we know its extent. The manipulation
of public opinion is what Adorno and Horkheimer named the “culture industry” and
called “programming.” Thus, such discussions go back to the beginnings of broadcast
technology as this concerns the control of public opinion, what Chomsky discusses in
his book Media Control.
18 See Milner, Pinpoint and see also Sheng-Chih Wang, Transatlantic Space Politics:
Competition and Cooperation Above the Clouds (London: Routledge, 2013).
19 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? 31.
20 See Adorno’s published research for the Princeton Radio Project, particularly “Music
in Radio” and a “Plugging Study,” and see further references in Babich, “Adorno’s
Radio Phenomenology.”
21 “If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be
angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and
mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?” Epictetus: Enchir., §28.
22 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 170. As Baudrillard, who was the author of the
political economy of the sign in which he had analysed this, the media thus make “all
processes of exchange impossible (except in the various forms of response simulation,
themselves integrated in the transmission process, thus leaving the unilateral nature of
the communication intact). This is the real abstraction of the media. And the system
of social control and power is rooted in it.” Ibid., 169.
23 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 169.
24 This, of course, drives datification. Indeed, one can even share the post on one’s own
page—a kind of a super “like” (similar to a retweet).
25 Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy.” In Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (eds.), The
Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection (Albany: The State University of New
York Press, 2002), 233–42, an acceptance speech presented at the Villa Ichon, March
14, 1998, for the Culture and Peace Prize of Bremen.
26 “Viel hat von Morgen an, / Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, /
Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind wir aber Gesang. / Und das Zeitbild, das der große
Geist entfaltet, / Ein Zeichen liegts vor uns, daß zwischen ihm und andern / Ein
Bündnis zwischen ihm und andern Mächten ist.” From: Hölderlin, Friedensfeier.
27 In a related hymn, Versöhnender, der du nimmergeglaubt, we read: “Ein Chor nun sind
wir. Drum soll alles Himmlische was genannt war, / Eine Zahl geschlossen, heilig,
ausgehn rein aus unserem Munde. / Denn sieh! es ist der Abend der Zeit, / Die Stunde
wo die Wanderer lenken zu der Ruhstatt. / Es kehrt bald Ein Gott um den anderen
ein.” Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 7, 159.
28 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? 31.
29 This is the subject of Anders’ 1956 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Vol. I), but
no less thematized as our consumption of mass media in Anders’ interview with
Manfred Bissinger, already cited earlier: Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? [Violence, Yes
or No?].
274 Notes

30 See my discussion quite on the level of transmission and effect, “Heidegger and
Hölderlin on Aether and Life.”
31 Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 170.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Anders was uncompromising in his conviction that the problem was not the
inferiority of Russian versus West-European or American technology (Anders,
Gewalt Ja oder Nein?, 21), and insisted much rather, just as he earlier declared
that “Hiroshima is everywhere” that Chernobyl only attests not to something so
adventitious as a possibility but rather a pestilence, an already pernicious “plague,” 22.
36 See for a discussion of some of the more everyday challenges of storing nuclear waste
precisely in a geological context, Pilkey-Jarvis, cited earlier but to be read in the
context of Pilkey’s discussion of geological processes.
37 Gehring briefly notes Anders and Chargaff in her discussion of Sloterdijk in
“Zwischen Menschenpark and Eugenics.”
38 See also, in addition to Fukushima already mentioned, the challenges of nuclear waste
and plastic and nanowaste are the newest variations on the same.
39 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? 23.
40 Ibid.
41 But it is hard to parse this, just as Horst Mahler writes in an immediate more
provocative refusal: “Oh mein Gott—was ist das für eine braune Soße, die da aus
Deiner Feder geflossen ist!” Horst Mahler: “Ist Dein Mut zu töten wirklich so groß?”
42 Bertolloti, “The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima,” 106.
43 Newsweek, August 20, 1945.
44 Bertolloti, “The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima,” 106.
45 The phrase is, in John Ford’s 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, based on
Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story of the same title first printed in the July 1949 issue of
Cosmopolitan—“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” As Timothy P. O’Neil
points out, “Dorothy M. Johnson, a journalism professor at the University of Montana,
had two other stories made into films, A Man Called Horse (1970) and The Hanging Tree
(1959).” See O’Neil, “Two Concepts of Liberty Valance: John Ford, Isaiah Berlin, and
Tragic Choice on the Frontier.” Creighton Law Review, 37 (2004): 471–92, 475.
46 Menachem Begin, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun (Jerusalem: Steimatzky, 1977), and
Saul Zadka, Blood in Zion: How the Jewish Guerrillas Drove the British out of Palestine
(London: Brassey’s, 1995).
47 Jacob Taubes, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, ed. Aleida and Jan Assmann
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), 14. Italicized, in English in the original.
48 Anders, Gewalt, Ja oder Nein? 24.
49 Cited in van Dijk, Anthropology in the Age of Technology, 6. Cf. Greffrath’s interview
with Anders, «Lob der Sturheit».
50 Anders, “Ten Theses on Chernobyl.”

Chapter 13
1 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowsky and Frederic Will
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1964]), 62.
2 Author’s own translation.
 
Notes 275

3 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. In support of Jeff Gibb’s claims in Planet of
Humans (produced by Michael More and released, gratis, Earthday 2020), note that
Ehrlich’s book was originally published under the imprint of the Sierra Club.
4 Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” 269.
5 Ibid., 292.
6 Ibid., 267.
7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York, Vintage. 1989,
1952 [1949]), 267–327.
8 See on the collaboration between Peter Handke and Wim Wenders, Barry, “The
Weight of Angels.”
9 Cited in Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?” 269. My translation.
10 Ibid.
11 See for example, Müller, “Desert Ethics,” as well as Meyer-Drawe, “Mit ‚eiserner
Inkonsequenz‘ fürs Überleben—Günther Anders.” See too, quite focused on the
question of globalization, Ehgartner et al., “On the Obsolescence of Human Beings in
Sustainable Development,” as well as, from a legal perspective, if not quite centred on
at least beginning with Anders, Sarat, et al., eds., The Time of Catastrophe, here 19–21.
12 See Alvis, “Transcendence of the Negative” in addition to Palaver, “The Respite:
Günther Anders’ Apocalyptic Vision in Light of the Christian Virtue of Hope” in:
Bischof et al. (eds.), The Life and Work of Günther Anders as well as Dupuy’s The Mark
of the Sacred.
13 Shelley, Frankenstein or a Modern Prometheus, 1818.
14 See here, Müller’s “Better than Human” in his Prometheanism and Babich,
“Geworfenheit und prometheische Scham im Zeitalter der transhumanen Kybernetik.”
15 Again, I refer the reader to Bostrom’s “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity” as well as,
on both sides, the contributions to Tuncel (ed.), Nietzsche and Transhumanism.
16 See the contributions to Crawford and Vogt (eds.), Adorno and the Concept of
Genocide.
17 See Winner, The Whale and the Reactor along with Weinberg’s “A Wake-Up Call for
Technological Somnambulists.” For discussion of Anders on violence and nuclear
power, see the contributions to Micaela Latini et al., La grammatica della violenza
and see directly in the wake of Chernobyl and after Anders’ death, Bahro, Avoiding
Social and Ecological Disaster as well as Lütticken, “Shattered Matter, Transformed
Forms.”
18 Later, Sloterdijk will go on to reflect on “the climate toxins emitted from people.
themselves, since, desperately agitated, they stand sealed together under a
communication bell-jar: in the pathogenic air conditions of agitated and subjugated
publics, inhabitants are constantly re-inhaling their own exhalate.” Sloterdijk, Terror
from the Air, 101. Hereafter cited in the text as TA.
19 Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (London: Polity, 2017).
Cf. Shiva, Biopiracy and Horn, “Air Conditioning.”
20 Fuller, “Creating the Covid-19 Story: How to Control a Pandemic’s Narrative.”
Thus, in milder, less world-domination directed stakes, as it were, one can prime
reception (this the language of psychology as I explore this in The Hallelujah Effect
and elsewhere) by speaking, circa January 2015 of a “Bomb Cylone” as the technical
term for the assault on the Eastern coast of the United States. See too, as of 2018,
Blinder et al., “Bomb Cyclone.” For an analysis of the use of Newspaper headlines
and cover pages, with respect to the First World War, see again, Bertolotti “The
Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima.” Today, an ongoing issue, part and parcel of the
276 Notes

Covid-19 story to which Fuller refers, would be bioweapons or the proactionary

threat of the same as most of the measures of 2020 were undertaken as precautions
in response to a model.
21 See Baudrillard, Intelligence of Evil or, The Lucidity Pact in addition to his influential
but more cited as a horror notion than actually read 1991 La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas
eu lieu.
22 Sloterdijk, Schäume, Luftbeben, “Airquake” and Terror from the Air.
23 See the US Department of Defense 1996 document: “Weather as a Force Multiplier:
Owning the Weather in 2025.” Sloterdijk dares collegial heresy as he here adverts to
public documents available from the US Department of Defense (the United States
long ago learned that the best way to conceal its motives was to hide them in plain
sight): thus, the organization of what Sloterdijk goes on to describe as “terrorist”
means of international aggression is justified, and no one notices any kind of
contradiction.
24 See Sharma and Kumar, “Changes in Honeybee Behaviour and Biology under the
influence of Cellphone Radiations,” as well as the WHO’s 2010 Electromagnetic
Fields and Public Health: Mobile Phones, Fact sheet No. 193, and note that this is
only the latest result of an ongoing project. See Establishing a Dialogue on Risks from
Electromagnetic Fields. A Handbook. Worth reading here, if only because the research
science needed to document the death of the bees was conducted in India, one of
the few places as the authors themselves observed, free of cell phone towers (at least
in some loci), and which can almost be singularly unnoted, is Visvanathan, “On the
Annals of the Laboratory State.” Cf. a 2020 European study of the same phenomenon
with bees, Thielens et al., “Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Field Exposure of
Western Honey Bees.”
25 The lecture title is rather incorrectly rendered as “The Cultivation of Conspiracy” in
Hoinacki and Mitcham, eds., The Challenges of Ivan Illich.
26 Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy,” 237.
27 Ibid., 239.
28 One can instructively read Illich—this has been done for some time after all—as a
Catholic theologian. See, for example, the essays in: Illich, The Powerless Church and
Other Selected Writings.
29 Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy,” 239.
30 I discuss Montagnier and Duesberg in Babich, “Calling Science Pseudoscience,” quite
where mobbing denigrations have so hampered the field of science studies that what
was (once) the “strong program” in the sociology of science is so debilitated that it
can never rise again. Moewus is a complicated story, vilified by those who research
his work as a simple hack (odd as this can seem for research that is meant to explore
the history of science but which proceeds), as if Herbert Butterfield had never written
his cautionary methodological study, The Whig Interpretation of History. See Jan
Saap’s normativizing account written, as such accounts are written to silence any
further questions: Where the Truth Lies. Note here and to be sure that if one were
to try to raise further questions, no press would publish one’s work. See just on this
all-too-academic detail, Pilkey (co-authored with his daughter, Pilkey-Jarvis), Useless
Arithmetic. I discuss some, not all of this, focusing on the targeted calumnies of
Alan Sokal (very much contra Latour) in my “Hermeneutics and its Discontents in
Philosophy of Science.”
31 David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé
(Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2008). But although Patrick Aidan
 
Notes 277

Heelan (1926–2015), philosopher and scientist (and himself a theologian), read

Griffin, found his arguments persuasive, Heelan did not write about Griffin.
32 Garrett Stewart, Closed Circuits: Screening Narrative Surveillance (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2015), ix.
33 Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader
(Texas: University of Texas Press, 1999), 166.
34 See for a recent focus on Heidegger and the question as such, Babich, “On Heidegger
on Education and Questioning.”
35 Shelley, Frankenstein or a Modern Prometheus.
36 See for a discussion including xenotransplantation, the closing section of Babich,
“Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show.’”
37 Alphonso Lingis has an important and disquieting reflection on the phenomenology
of medical practice as lived for recipients of face (and other) transplants. The outcome
of these much-touted media events are less than ideal for recipients.
38 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 26.
39 Ibid., 27.
40 Ibid., 28.
41 The term “act of God” has for insurance companies a technical, legal definition. As
with the current vaccines, all liability is passed on to the side of the consumer rather
than the corporate agent.
42 See further my contribution “Pseudo-Science and ‘Fake’ News: ‘Inventing’ Epidemics
and the Police State” to Irene Strasser and Martin Dege (eds.) The Psychology of Global
Crises and Crisis Politics – Intervention, Resistance, Decolonization. (London: Palgrave,
2021).
43 It is not for nothing that de Rougement begins his 1941 essay with the chauvinistic
but not inaccurate observation that “what is most lacking in America is belief in the
Devil.” De Rougement, “On the Devil and Politics,” 2.
44 Anders, Franz Kafka, 73–4. Note to be sure that Anders is not the only one to read
Nietzsche in this light but it has made it very difficult for those who read Kafka to
come to terms with Anders.
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 Name Index

Abelard 58 Bataille, Georges 124

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 1, 4, Bateman, Chris 228n, 263n, 268n
6, 8, 11, 15, 21f, 28, 36f, 37, 39f, 42, Baudelaire, Charles 2, 56, 248–9n
46f, 51, 56, 65, 68, 69f, 72, 83, 92, 102, Baudrillard, Jean 2, 4, 10ff, 24f, 39f, 89,
110f, 114, 137f, 139f, 143, 153f, 158, 105, 108f, 123, 127, 131, 143f, 148ff,
161, 163, 165, 176, 180, 182f, 187, 190, 151, 162, 169, 198, 201, 203, 207,
194, 209 215f, 220, 232n, 233n, 236n, 237n,
Aeschylus 10, 21, 24, 71, 207, 214 238n, 241n, 260n, 263n, 265n, 269n,
Agamben, Giorgio 2, 57f, 100, 123f, 192, 273n, 276n
211, 214, 217, 220, 228n, 241n, 249n, Becker, Howard 234n
257n, 271n Becker, Paul 148
Albrechtsberger, Johann Georg 192 Beckett, Samuel 2, 9, 17, 89, 175ff,
Alexander 59 214, 232n
Alford, C. Fred 26–7 Beethoven, Ludwig van 37, 102, 160,
Allen, Valerie 84 166f, 186f, 189, 192, 255n, 265n
Allen, Woody 41 Beinsteiner, Andreas 242–3n
Alvis, Jason 231n Benjamin, Walter 1, 3, 8, 14f, 22, 26f, 36,
Anacreon 59 65, 69f, 76, 88f, 91f, 97, 102, 106, 120,
Anaximander 24 164, 183, 188, 229n, 233n, 235n
Anderson, Laurie 146 Bennett, H. Stith 158, 190ff, 234n,
Archilochus 59 244n, 270n
Arendt, Hannah 1, 4, 7f, 14ff, 21f, 26f, Benny, Jack 185
29, 32, 36, 51, 55f, 58f, 66ff, 69ff, 78ff, Berg, Alban 161
89, 102, 118, 124, 152, 159, 162, 174, Bergson, Henri 185
248n, 230n, 251n Berlioz, Hector 166, 181
Aristotle 43, 44, 49, 58ff, 65f, 155, 162 Bernasconi, Robert 120, 239n, 260n
Armon, Adi 227n Bernays, Edward 171, 184, 206
Arnheim, Rudolf 17, 139, 272n Berry, David 26, 233n
Aronowitz, Stanley 27, 236n, 237n Bertolotti, David S. 106f, 206, 268n,
Augustine 28, 44, 50, 52, 61, 63, 67, 78, 275n
82, 92, 100, 128, 154f, 157, 164, 182f, Beuys, Joseph 130
193, 243n, 244n Birkin, Jane 182
Ausländer, Rose 83 Bizet, Georges 37
Axelos, Kostas 53 Blitz, Mark 236n
Axiotis, Are D. 83 Bloch, Ernst 9, 56, 249n
Blok, Vincent 245n, 267n
Bachelard, Gaston 25 Blondel, Maurice 217f
Bachmann, Ingeborg 69 Blücher, Heinrich 59, 63f, 65ff, 251n, 252n
Baez, Joan 61, 137 Bogart, Humphrey 7
Bardot, Brigitte 182 Böhme, Hartmut 239n
Barth, Ferdinand 173, 204 Bostrom, Nick 133, 243n, 275n
 
Name Index 313

Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 7, 24, 153, 238n, Dawsey, James. 229n, 235n

239n, 244n, 264n, 266n, 269n de Beauvoir, Simone 16, 58, 110, 118, 185
Brecht, Bertolt 139 Debord, Guy 12, 148, 179
Brendel, Alfred 191 Debussy, Claude 181
Brock, Bazon [Jürgen Johannes de Certeau, Michel 2, 7, 16, 237n, 239n,
Hermann] 66, 252n 242n
Brown, Norman O. 41 Degerman, Stig 107
Buber, Martin 16, 56, 249n del Caro, Adrian 85
Busch, Briton Cooper 118f Deleuze, Gilles 25, 123, 263n
Busoni, Ferrucio 159, 192, 254n de Rougement, Denis 55f, 224, 248–9n,
Bussolini, Jeffrey 247n, 258n 277n
Derrida, Jacques 25, 51, 106, 114
Cage, John 192f, 271n Descartes, René 2, 32f, 43f, 49, 67, 243n
Cain 99, 259n De Toqueville, Alexis 151
Cale, John 189 Dick Tracy 5
Callas, Maria 191 Dilthey, Wilhelm 156f, 264n
Camus, Albert 16 Dionysus 32, 128, 166, 226n
Čapek, Karel 29 Diotima 58
Carnap, Rudolf 161 Doré, Gustav 103f
Carroll, Lewis 102, 121f Downes, Hugh 190
Carson, Anne 59 Dreyfus, Bert 11
Carson, Gerald 269n Dries, Christian 83, 214, 227n, 235n,
Carter, Jimmy 116 240n, 251n
Caruso, Enrico 191 Drouillard, Jill 260n
Casals, Pablo 191 Dücker, Bürckhard 82f
Cassirer, Ernst 85 Duhem, Pierre 130
Castor 65 Dupuy, Pierre 56
Catullus 59 Durbin, Paul 237–8n
Cavell, Stanley 11 Dylan, Bob 184
Caygill, Howard 253n
Celan, Paul 83 Eatherly, Claude 89, 94ff, 97f, 99f, 106,
Chargaff, Erwin 205, 240–1n 108, 197, 232n, 256n, 257n, 258n, 260n
Clausewitz, Carl von 170 Eichmann, Adolf 56, 68, 89, 99
Cohen, Leonard 5, 181f, 185f, 189, 193, Eichmann, Klaus 68, 89, 197, 232n
234n, 271n Einstein, Albert 67, 102
Collins, Judy 185 Eisler, Hanns 155, 270n
Copernicus, Nicolaus 51, 85f, 156, 260n Ellensohn, Reinhard 167, 186, 230n,
Corbusier 170 241n, 262n
Cornelius, Hans 230n Ellul, Jacques 2, 7, 10ff, 23f, 95f, 127,
149, 169, 172, 234n, 236n, 237n, 256n,
Dahlhaus, Carl 187 268n
Dahlstrom, Dan 48, 53 Engels, Friedrich 4
Dali, Salvador 101 Enkidu 99
Dante 103 Epictetus 200, 204, 207, 273n
Danto, Arthur 192 Epicurus 254n
Darling, David 190f
Dastur, Françoise 48, 245n Fanon, Franz 16, 25
David 116 Fetz, Bernard 238n
David, Christophe 240n, 243n, 256n Figal, Günther 103, 257n
314 Name Index

Filk, Christian 230n Harré, Rom 45

Fink, Eugen 157, 265n Harris, Sir Arthur 107
Fleck, Ludwik 237n Heelan, Patrick Aidan 171f, 278n
Forman, Paul 171 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 2f, 4,
Foucault, Michel 100f, 174f, 263n 28, 50, 55, 63, 69, 87, 91, 231n
Frege, Gottlob 45 Heidegger, Elfriede 66, 251n, 252n
Freire, Paolo 16 Heidegger, Martin 1f, 8f, 11f, 15f, 21f,
Freud, Sigmund 64, 83, 111, 137, 184 24, 26, 28f, 32f, 42f, 45ff, 47f, 53, 56,
Freundlich, Elisabeth 28, 64, 66 59f, 61, 64f, 70f, 76, 83f, 88, 90, 92, 94,
Frith, Jordan 267n, 272n 97, 100, 107f, 121, 123f, 129, 132, 138,
Fuchs, Christian 7, 229n, 235n, 238n, 143, 153, 155f, 158f, 161, 166, 172, 174,
242n 180, 184f, 193f, 198, 292, 204f, 208,
Fuller, Steve 12, 25, 50, 133, 215, 217, 210ff, 213f, 216, 220, 222f, 227n, 230n,
220, 232n, 239n, 241n, 242n, 245n, 231n, 235n, 238n, 241n, 242n, 245n,
268n, 275n 231n, 252n, 255n, 256n, 260n, 266n,
269n, 273n, 277n
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 23, 26, 38, 72, Heinlein, Robert 4
84f, 103, 105, 154, 156f, 158, 172, 181, Heisenberg, Werner 53f
254n Helm, Birgitte 30ff
Gainsborough, Serge 182 Helöise 58
Gehlen, Arnold 26 Hempel, Hans-Peter 237n
Gellen, Kata 69f Hepburn, Katherine 7
Germaine, Gilbert 236n, 237n Herzl, Theodor 67
Geuss, Raymond 22 Hirst, Damien 130
Gide, André 55 Hitler, Adolf 58, 106, 139f, 150, 152, 220,
Gillespie, Michael Allen 236n 246n, 249n, 261n
Goehr, Lydia 153 Hoeckner, Berthold 102
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 15, 24, Hoffman, Anne Golomb 89
61, 65, 71, 78f, 90, 111f, 133, 137f, 164, Hoffmann, E.T. 166
172f, 178, 204, 215, 222, 228n, 238n, Hölderlin, Friedrich 36, 53f, 58, 71ff, 76,
249n, 258n, 261n, 268n 81, 90, 108, 115, 158, 163, 176, 202f,
Goodman, Steve 171, 199 214, 249n, 273n, 274n
Gore, Lesley 184 Homer 42, 116
Gould, Glenn 191 Honneth, Axel 97, 111
Grandin, Greg 119 Hook, Sidney 67
Gray, John 27, 239–40n Horkheimer, Max 4, 8, 11, 21, 37, 39f,
Grien, Hans Baldung 60 83, 143
Griffin, David Ray 219, 276n Huck Finn 65, 188
Grondin, Jean 244n Hullot-Kentor, Robert 83, 230n
Grönemeyer, Herbert 182 Hume, David 172, 183, 244n
Guthrie, Arlo 188 Husserl, Edmund 2, 8, 22f, 28, 45, 48f,
59, 111, 124, 137, 154f, 156, 159, 166,
Habermas, Jürgen 22, 26, 38, 88, 91, 98, 172, 174, 227n, 231n
103, 111, 239n Huxley, Aldous 141
Hadot, Pierre 72, 244n
Halbwachs, Maurice 155 Ihde, Don 10f, 23, 25ff, 133, 172, 219,
Han, Byung-Chul 237n 232n, 241n, 239n, 268n
Hanslick, 152 Illich, Ivan 2, 7, 11f, 16, 24f, 27f, 47, 53,
Hardy, Thomas 60 63, 148, 179, 193, 198, 201, 205, 217f,
 
Name Index 315

230n, 234n, 237n, 239n, 260n, 261n, Latour, Bruno 24f, 27, 91f, 121, 215, 218,
263n, 272n, 273n, 276n, 277n 236n, 238n, 256n, 260n, 275n, 276n
Irigaray, Luce 124, 185, 220, 277n Lazare, Bernard 67
Le Bon, Gustave 140
Janicaud, Dominique 53f, 237n Leibniz 2, 84ff
Jaspers, Karl 15, 63, 66f, 107, 169, 185, Levarie, Sigmund 191
227n, 240n, 246n, 250n, 258n Levene, Mark 112, 119
Jesus 53, 207 Levinas, Emmanuel 16, 25, 29, 51f, 114,
Johnson, Julian 161 246n
Jolly, Édouard 227n, 235n Levinson, Jerrold 153
Jonas, Hans 17, 26, 32, 63, 91, 93f, 227n, Levy, Ernst 191
251n Lewis, C. S. 56, 102
Jünger, Ernst 96 Liessmann, Konrad Paul 239n
Lincoln, Abraham 140
Kafka, Franz 2, 10, 14f, 24, 69ff, 176, Lingis, Alphonso 277n
221, 224, 234n, 238n, 253n Locke, John 120, 175
Kahn, Herman 107, 258n Lonergan, Bernard 38
Kant, Immanuel 2, 8, 22, 26, 28, 34, 42ff, Lovitt, William 40
45, 48ff, 52, 70, 93, 120, 123, 132, 155, Löwith, Karl 68, 92, 107, 248n, 258n
186, 189f, 244n, 253n, 259n, 271n Lubitsch, Ernst 185
Kateb, George 23 Lucian 5, 55, 160, 173, 268n
Kaufmann, Walter 186 Lühman, Niklas 26
Kayser, Hans 160 Lukács, György 96
Kendrick, Anna 187 Luther, Martin 56
Kepler, Johannes 86, 156 Lütkehaus, Lüdger 38, 59, 154f, 253n,
Kierkegaard, Søren 230n 231n, 250n, 252n, 256n, 264n
Kimball, Roger 27, 239n
Kircher, Athanasius 86 McClain, Ernest 187, 191, 262n, 265n
Kissinger, Henry 116 McCormick, John 23
Kittler, Friedrich 26f, 40, 70, 138f, 140f, McLuhan, Marshall 23, 95, 237n
145f, 149f, 162, 170f, 176, 178, 199, Maier-Katkin, Daniel 64, 66f, 251n, 252n
222, 233n, 239n, 262n, 263n, 267n, Manne, Kate 6, 41, 228n
269n, 272n Mannheim, Karl 22
Klee, Paul 5, 74, 89f, 106 Marcel, Gabriel 8, 15, 110f, 230n, 258n
Köhler, Wolfgang 8 Marcus Aurelius 97, 107
Kohn, Jerry 61, 75 Marcuse, Harold 232n, 268n
Kojève, Alexander 69f, 231n Marcuse, Herbert 11, 17, 39ff, 55, 125,
Kracauer, Siegfried 22 143, 169, 172, 240n, 242n, 268n, 270n,
Krauss, Karl 76, 88 272n
Kreisler, Georg 152 Marcuse, Ludwig 8, 17, 21
Kroker, Arthur 237n Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 129
Kuhn, Thomas 7, 237n Maritain, Jacques 55
Kusch, Martin 47, 246n Martin, George R. R. 37
Martin, Rickie 188f
Lacan, Jacques 41, 64, 88, 91, 99, 106, Marx, Karl 4, 28, 53, 71, 94, 116, 228n,
125, 173, 205 231n
Laine, Frankie 184 Matassi, Elio 238n
Lang, Fritz 29ff Meier, Bettina 238n
Lanier, Jaron 23 Mellor, David 7
316 Name Index

Melville, Herman 120 Prometheus 99

Mephisto 56, 110, 268n Ptolemy 86
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 16, 61f Putz, Kerstin 60
Merton, Robert K. 173, 237n, 268n Pythagoras 164
Michaelis, Anthony R. 228n
Michaelis, David 68, 228n, 229n, 241n, Rançiere, Jacques 16
253n Raulff, Helga 83
Michaelis-Stern, Eva 8, 68, 229n, 253n Rée, Paul 60
Milner, Greg 241n Reemtsma, Jan Philip 83
Milton, John 56, 133 Richardson, William J., S.J. 16, 49, 61
Minelli, Liza 184 Rickman, Alan 56, 102, 107, 182
Moltmann, Jürgen 91 Ricoeur, Paul 138
Moneta, Giuseppina 61f Rilke, Rainer Maria 15, 24, 58, 71f, 78f,
Morozov, Evgeny 13, 102, 233n 83, 89, 97, 154, 157, 159, 162, 176,
Moses 4 210ff, 215, 224, 254n
Müller, Christopher John 7, 214, 228n, Ritschl, Friedrich 65
229n, 231n, 233n, 235n, 242n, 275n Roberts, Mike 192
Müller, Marcel 230n Rohde, Erwin 65
Ropohl, Günther 26
Napoleon 116 Rose, Gillian 63
Nehamas, Alexander 55 Rossini, Gioachino 37
Nehring, Holger 106 Rothblatt, Martine 130
Neiman, Susan 55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 34, 43, 53, 164
Nettling, Astrid 24 Rowling, J. K. 102
Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 4ff, 8, 15ff, 27, 29, Ruin, Hans 237n, 242n, 243n
37f, 43, 48, 52, 58, 62, 70f, 73, 78f, 83f,
85f, 87, 90f, 96, 99, 102, 108, 116, 128, Salomé, Lou von 58, 249n
155, 158, 163f, 179, 182, 185f, 191f, Sappho 59f
193f, 227n Sartre, Jean-Paul 16, 25, 29, 32, 47f, 56,
Nono, Luigi 177, 192 58, 132, 185, 231n
Satan 56
Ogden, Daniel 228n Saul 115f
Orwell, George 6, 128, 168 Schandl, Franz 233n
Østergaard, Edvin 142m, 262n Scheler, Max 1, 8, 15, 43, 48f, 55, 87, 107,
Otlet, Paul 170 123, 131f, 156, 245n
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 48,
Paddison, Max 153, 234n, 254n 76, 155
Palaver, Wolfgang 56 Schiller, Friedrich 34, 46, 53, 64f, 186,
Pascal, Blaise 156 189, 249n, 251n
Patterson, George 118, 140 Schlegel, Friedrich 161
Pericles 140 Schmid, Holger 245n, 264n
Pinker, Steve 25, 238n, 239n Schmitt, Carl 23, 57, 67f, 155
Plato 43, 58, 67, 83, 161ff, 212f, 256n, Schoenberg, Arnold 192
262n Scholem, Gershom 67f, 89, 252–3n
Plessner, Helmut 8, 15 Schopenhauer, Arthur 158, 163f, 166
Pöggeler, Otto 83 Schraube, Ernst 70, 227n, 235n, 253n,
Pollux 65 258n
Postman, Neil 11f, 23, 232n, 237n Schürmann, Reiner 47ff, 53, 240n
Presley, Elvis 182, 191 Schwartz, Regina M. 259n
 
Name Index 317

Scott-Heron, Gil 150, 263n Tillich, Paul 8, 16

Scruton, Roger 153 Tolkein, J. R. R. 56
Sebald, Winfried 105, 107, 258n Tom Sawyer 65
Seymour, Richard 5f, 233n Trawny, Peter 240n
Shakespeare, William 5 Treitler, Leo 161
Sibelius 231n Truman, Harry 98, 116
Simmel, Georg 55, 87 Tudor, David 192
Simondon, Gilbert 2, 237n, 263n Turkle, Sherry 12, 23, 232n
Singer, Peter 173
Sloterdijk, Peter 24f, 57, 91, 94, van Dijk, Paul 11, 167, 169, 227n, 235n,
103, 108f, 198, 212f, 214f, 216f, 219, 238n, 240n
221f, 223, 256n, 258n, 274n, 275n, Verbeeck, Peter-Paul 11, 25, 236n, 237n,
276n 238n
Smith, F. Joseph 72, 158, 231n, 242n, Verne, Jules 102, 257n
268n Vetlesen, Arne Johan 26, 238n, 239n
Smith, Jonathan 29 Vézin, François 241n
Smythe, Dallas 23, 39, 232n, 233n, 272n Vietta, Silvio 237n
Socrates 14, 58 Virilio, Paul 2, 4, 6, 11, 24f, 70, 108, 117,
Sommer, Christian 260n 120f, 129f, 130f, 133, 171, 174, 205,
Sonolet, Daglind 24, 230n, 237n 223, 236n, 238n, 241n, 260n, 261n,
Sophocles 123, 257n 265n
Sorgner, Stefan 12 Vogel, Steve 239n
Speer, Albert 139 von Brentano, Margherita 69
Spinoza, Baruch 2 von Bülow, Hans 191
Steiner, Rudolf 164 von Hildebrandt, Dietrich 17
Stern, Carla 6, 8, 229n Vonnegut, Kurt 240n
Stern, Günther 14f, 59, 61, 65, 76, 110,
154f, 197, 229n, 231n Waelbers, Katinka 236n
Stern, William 8f, 14, 44, 142, 229n, Wagner, Cosima 192
231n Wagner, Richard 16, 37, 70, 152, 166,
Stewart, Garrett 220 186f, 199
Stiegler, Bernard 25, 237n Waite, Geoff 254n
Stoneman, Rod 264n Wallenstein, Sven-Olov 234n
Strauss, Leo 17, 67 Weber, Max 194
Street, John 169ff, 172, 236n, 237n, 268n Weil, Simone 227n
Strong, Tracy 137, 236n, 252n, 259n, Weill, Kurt 184
261n Wieland, Christopher Martin 5, 268
Stumpf, Carl 9, 72 Winner, Langdon 23, 233n, 236n, 237n
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 54, 162
Tanzer, Mark 240n Wohlfart, Günter 250–1n
Taubes, Jacob x, 27, 57, 64, 67f, 89, 216, Wölfflin, Heinrich 8
248n, 249n, 252n, 256n Worster, Donald 259n
Taubes, Susan 64
Thales 46 Yeats, William Butler 98, 257n
Theunissen, Michael 16, 34
Theweleit, Klaus 29 Zelka, Charlotte 28, 61, 66
Thoreau, Henry David 11 Žižek, Slavoj 41, 91, 109, 127
Thrasymachus 58, 93 Zuboff, Shoshana 233n
Tiedemann, Rolf 114 Zuckerman, Lord Solly 107
 Subject Index

4’33” 192f, 271n phenomenology 2f, 107, 121, 222,

9/11 127, 169, 170, 206, 210, 217, 219, 276n 227n
philosophical 8, 10, 22, 26f, 42f, 37,
acoustic 72ff, 76ff, 139f, 141ff, see also 82f, 230n, 254n
stereoscope physical 242n
double 138f sociological 107
lifeworld 141 Antigone 123
notification/signal 148, 168, 184 anti-Semitism 51, 92, 108
phenomenology 137f, 142f, 182, apocalypse 9, 24, 56, 88ff, 93, 97, 99, 101,
231n, 241n, 265n 105f, 109, 128, 203ff, 209ff, 214, 223f
reproduction 17 Apocalypse Now 199
acroamatic 160, 265n Archaic Torso of Apollo 72
Adorno Prize 83, 230n art, art culture 15f, 47, 88, 130, 133
advertising 13, 35, 39, 93f, 141, 150, 272n arthritis 255n
aesthetics, artist’s 125, 158, 192 ascetic, ascesis 58, 85, 144, 194, 207
spectator’s 4, 130, 150, 158, 185, 190 ASMR 143, 166, 184, 266n
Afghanistan 108, 112, 127 assignment 71, 75, 78ff
air 3, 62, 94ff, 109, 137, 144f, 146, 159f, atheism 52f, 85, 238n
170, 175, 205, 215ff, 220, 222ff Athens 32, 140
dead 192f atomic bomb, atomic power, Atomic Age 3,
Alexandrian 192 9, 17, 28f, 83f, 88, 94ff, 98, 103
American Gods 56 manufacture of 106
American Pie 188 neutron 117f
analytic philosophy 92, 111f, 153f, 172 war 126
dominance of 92, 112, 264n Augustinians 55, 124
Animal Farm 6 Auschwitz 47, 57, 69, 83, 106, 111, 113f,
animals 46, 49ff, 73f, 100, 109, 114ff, 117, 121, 126f, 129, 133, 197, 204,
130ff, 246n, 247n, 248n, 261n 245n
abused in art 130 -Birkenau 121, 129f
angel 14, 73f, 77f, 82, 88f, 90, 97, 102, authenticity 42, 44, 97, 124, 151, 163,
107, 124, 224, 252n, 254n 194, 209
Angelus Novus 14, 89f, 102 autonomy 145, 150, 202
annihilation 93, 96, 115ff, 132ff, 144f,
245n banality 89, 157, 220, 248n
Anthropocene 4, 50, 53, 219, 239n, 242n being-in-music 74, 142, 147, 157f
anthropocentrism 51f, 93 big data 12, 203, 229n
anthropologism 42, 45ff, 48, 244n Bilderverbot 106, 185
anthropology, anthropological 7, 22, biotech 125ff, 129, 130ff, 133
45ff, 48, 52f, 138, 244n, 245n, 246n, Blue Hawaii 182
see also ethnography body 32f, 53, 58, 101, 110f, 123f
media 230n naked 91
musical 164 parts, spare 127ff
 
Subject Index 319

bomb, see atomic bomb culinary 93, 124, 144, 159, 183f, 187,
Brave, New World 141 192, 230n
broadcasting 160, 176f, 184f, 188, 199 culture industry 12, 15, 37, 40, 93, 107,
Brot und Wein 72 144f, 149f, 160, 165ff, 171, 183,
192f, 194, 200, 221f, 222, 233n,
can do, can do-ability 90, 125 270n, 273n
obligatory, compulsory 131 Cup Song 187f, 190
capitalism, capital 2, 33, 56, 125, 150, Current of Music 138, 188, 200
179, 229n, 272n cyborg 5, 34f, 47, 221, 261n
disaster 56
surveillance 12, 233n, 269n Darling, David 190
cargo-cult 169, 214 Darwinism 51, 131
Carnivàle 56 Daseinsanalyse 163
causality 112, 183f data mining, datification 150, 201f, 203,
cell phones, mobile phones 5f, 34f, 36f, 233n, 273n
116, 148ff, 168, 180, 199f death 47, 97, 109, 183f, 193f
censorship 24, 206, 216f of God 29, 97, 198
Chernobyl 57, 129, 170, 175, 197f, 199, democracy impossible 200
205, 232n, 274n, 275n desire 41, 63, 154
chimeras, chimbrids, animal- Deutsche Menschen 14, 233n
human 116f, 120f, 130, 224, 261n devil, ‘deviltry’ 24, 50, 55f, 57, 248–9n,
City of New Orleans 188 277n
climate control/crisis 3, 87, 93, 109, 116, Dialectic of Enlightenment 21, 40, 209,
128, 133, 209, 214, 222ff, see also 242n
geoengineering Diamonds and Rust 61, 137
cold war 88, 91, 126f, 258n Die Kirschenschlacht 51, 61, 64, 78, 81ff,
commodity 144, 149, 159, 180, 233n, 93, 247n
256n Die molussische Katakombe 4, 24, 30,
Communist Manifesto 4 110, 124, 238n
Confessions 44, 82, 154, 182, 243n digital hacking 272n
conformism 10, 151, 203 dignity 46
consumers 4, 12ff, 37, 43, 93, 116f, diner culture, see jukebox culture
125ff, 131, 147, 149, 160, 192, 200f, Dionysus, dionysian, dionysiac 32, 166,
217, 221 187, 266n
society 35 Dionysus Dithyrambs 128
continental philosophy 92, 112, 264n, Dresden 105, 107f, 109, 212, 215f
238n Duino Elegies 71ff, 76, 89f, 142, 162,
corporeality, see body 254n
cosmos, cosmology 84ff, 93, 116, 160
covers, cover culture 13, 15, 30, 153, 177, earphones, -buds 39, 140, 146, 149
181ff, 185f, 187ff, 190, 234n eavesdropping 148, see also surveillance
critical theory ix, 1f, 21f, 25, 38f, 40, 55, echo 2, 72, 78, 176, 178
88, 106, 111f, 138, 152f, 154, 167, radio 137, 139, 141f, 156f, 261n
220, 233n economics 72, 109, 123f, 127f, 132f, 192,
thinking 28, 111 212, 233n, 259n
criticism, negative, revolutionary 22, 34, Eichmann in Jerusalem 68, 71, 248n
38, 88f, 94, 113, 153 ‘empirical turn’ 246n
Critique of Cynical Reason 108, 109 end-time, Endzeit 89f, 105
crystallization, political 141, 171, 184, energeia 155, 157
see also propaganda erotic 41, 58, 65, 70, 79, 124f, 199, 263n
320 Subject Index

eschatology 57, 92f, 248n, 256n GMO 3, 101, 129, 213

ethnography ix, 2, 45, 48, 121, 227n, gnostic, gnosticism x, 2, 56, 93
245n, see also anthropology Good Omens 56
evil 10, 28, 55ff, 248n, 88, 108f, 111, 116, GPS 39, 147, 169, 176, 179, 200, 241n,
173, 175, 201, 204, 214, 242n, 248n, 263n, 272n
275n guilt 99, 155, 169, 209, 264n
banality 96 guiltlessly guilty 95, 97, 105, 108f, 121
existentialism 45, 49, 53, 132, 163, 230n Gulf War 3, 108, 131, 220
extraterrestrials 46, 243n
HAARP 101, 217, 219, 222
Facebook 5, 13, 39f, 65, 144, 148f, 174ff, Hallelujah 181ff, 185f, 188ff, 193, 234n
179, 198ff, 201f ‘Hallelujah effect’ 39f, 63, 137, 167, 183f,
facts 48, 99, 236n 185, 192
‘fake news’ 12, 39, 141, 205, 215, 217, happiness 194
249n, 277n Happy Days 39
Fantasia 90 “Harrison Vergeron” 240n
Faust 78f, 137, 258n, 261n, 268n having 8f, 50, 96f, 101f, 105, 230n, see
Fear of Missing Out [FOMO] 146f, 168f also property
First World War 81f, 105 been 197
Frankfurt School 1f, 8, 22, 26, 38, 47, been born 51, 66
111, 125, 133, 183 done 110
free opinion 200, 202f headphones 146, 179, 199
free variation 141f hearing 74f, 159, 161, 163, 266n, see also
friendship 62ff, 67, 123 listening
Fukushima 57, 199, 205, 274n hearkening 159, 162
‘fun’ 92, 150, 220, 263n hear stripe 190
Hearts of Space 166
gadget/Gerät 2, 5, 33f, 40f, 43, 93, 96, hermeneutical phenomenology 49, 98,
100, 117, 167f, 266n 153, 224
gain of function 3, 100, 133 hermeneutics x, 1, 21, 16, 38, 49,
Garden Party 188 71f, 96, 103, 138, 111f, 154,
Gaza 112, 127, 131 163, 203
Gelassenheit 101, 127 material 239
Genealogy of Morals 52, 85, 144, 200f, Hey, Jude 189f
227n Hiroshima, Mon Amour 106
Genesis 10, 84, 99 Hiroshima/Nagasaki 9, 26, 28, 47, 56,
genocide 110ff, 114ff, 197ff, 223, 224 68, 82f, 94f, 96, 100, 105f, 108f,
animal 118ff 111, 116, 126, 170, 197ff, 204ff,
genocidal rape 259n 215f, 235n, 245n, 256n, 258n, 271n,
slave trade 119f 274n, 275n
geoengineering 3, 57, 87, 109, 128, 172, history 165, 194, 248n
205, 209ff, 215, 219, 224, 247n, Holocaust 28, 55f, 68, 115ff
258n animal 118
Ge-Stell 2, 35, 43, 54 homework, homeworker ix, 12f, 117,
ghosts 2, 42, 82, 137ff, 177f, see also 145, 147, 150, 160, 198
radio, ghosts Honolulu (love is only in) 182ff, 189f
effect, acoustic 139f human, humanism 42ff, 47ff, 132f, 197,
television 141 246n
global destruction, globicide 13, 50, 86f condition 50, 65f, 99, 121
 
Subject Index 321

destruction of 98f, 100f, 114f, 118, Luddite, luddism 11, 22f, 35, 88, 95,
120, 121, 205, 245n see also criticism
engineering 33, 66f, 102, 121, 129, lyric 16, 189
132f, 205, 245n, 263n, 268n subjectivity 189f
error 33
exceptionalism 54 McCarthyism 169
as indeterminate/unfinished Manhattan Project 106
animal 43, 51, 254n ‘mania for interpretation’ 71
as irrelevant 84, 93 ‘manufacture of corpses’ 52, 121, 131
musical situation of 164, 166 marketing 93f, 184f
total mobilization of 47f, 114, 134 mass, masses 10, 16, 141f, 148, 150f, 179,
humanity as a problem 29, 34, 43, 46, 48, 202f
52ff, 57, 98, 109 media ixf, 107, 126, 135f, 143, 161, 168f,
Hyperion 58 197f, 203f, see also social media
digital 141, 143, 184, 192, 203, 221
ideology 27, 49, 106, 116, 222, 235n Metropolis 29ff
inauthenticity 44 Minima Moralia 51, 144, 159, 176, 214,
incarnationist 57 221
industrial Platonism 138 mobbing 92, 219, 276n
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 69 monads 6, 84, 86f
Iraq 105, 112, 114, 127, 131, 218 mortality 81, 89, 97, 188
isolation ix, 13, 39, 149, 180, 199 Mündigkeit 44, 145, 202, see also
Israel 67f, 76, 112, 114f, 124, 274n autonomy
music 5, 37, 71f, 84, 152, 158, 165, 190,
jazz 32, 37, 142, 153, 154, 161, 181ff, 192, 257n
190, 192, 265n, 271n aesthetics 155, 231n
Je t’aime… moi non plus 182 appreciation 144, 153, 265n
Jewish science 130 background 159, 184, 241n
Judaism, Judaic tradition 1, 28, 50f, 67f, criticism 152f
74, 76, 99 electronic 146, 199, 261n
jukebox culture 39, 148, 179f, 184, 241n Greek 16, 37, 75, 140, 160f, 186, 262n
in- 9, 74, 158f
Korea 3, 82, 127, 212 live 145, 178
machine- 32
Lake Woebegone 6 making, musicking 15, 153f, 192
Lebensphilosophie, life philosophy 123f, modes 161
185 new 190, 192, 265n, 266n
listening-to 1, 9, 61f, 77, 138f, 141ff, 145, phenomenology 139, 190f, 265n
148, 153, 160f, 162, 178, 181f, 184, pop 182ff, 186ff, 190f, 192f, 270n, 271n
265n postmodern 166
active, attuned 158, 161, 189f, 265n sentences 156
lockdown 5f, 7, 39, 149, 168 situation 138f, 153ff, 160f
Lost in Space 29 sociology 8, 37f, 138f, 152f, 154, 157f,
loudspeakers 139f, 140f, 145, 147, 165, 158f, 165f, 178f, 180f, 190, 192,
191, 200, 262n, 272n 230n, 231n, 234n
love 58, 62ff, 65, 71, 78ff time, art of 102
affair(s) 63ff, 85f
erotic 70, 124f nanotechnology 2, 129
triangles 58f natality 29, 66, see also having, been born
322 Subject Index

Native Americans 113f, 121f post-truth 39, 43, 139f, 218

natural resources, exploitation of 117f, prayer 44, 54, 76, 93, 124, 159, 165, 185,
127 243n
human body tissue as 127f, 130f, 133f pre-emptive strike 88f, 108
navel 29 pre-established harmony 86
negativity 22, 51, 128, 131, 162, 172, priming 37, 39, 184, 200, see also
178 programming
neo-fascism 88, 91 Princeton Radio Project 138, 200, 272n
new age 4, 146, 166 privacy, private sphere 148f, 174f
newspaper 95, 107f, 149, 168, 206, 217, profit 8, 72f, 118, 127, 187
275–6n programming 12f, 38ff, 61, 94, 184, 189f,
New Testament 93 197ff, 272n
nihilism 2, 12, 56, 74, 92, 96, 244n, 248n, self- 146f, 190
258n, 267n Prometheus 99, 214, 221f, 232n, 265n,
non-violence 197f, 207f 275n
nothingness 74, 96, 204, 224 effect 143, 214
two 98, 128 propaganda 107, 139, 141, 183f, 220
now, the moment 105 property 124, 150f, 175
nuclear armaments, destruction, pseudo-concreteness 42, 44, 51, 57, 63,
preparedness 96, 101, 126 242n
nuclear waste 274n psychoanalysis 88, 151, 203
Nykia 42 psychology, 2, 6, 9, 41, 45ff, 48, 123, 138,
203, 229n, 264n, 275n
Oldest System Programme 76 psychologism 45f, 47, 246n
Only Fools Rush In 182, 191 social 124f, 203
opera 37, 90, 138, 191 psyop 61, 94, 203, see also priming;
programming
painting 72, 84, 89, 106, 167 public opinion 200, 206, 273n
Palestinians 67, 112, 114 public world, sphere 13, 36, 61, 148f, 179
Pasteurization of France 92, 236n Pygmalion 29
peeping toms 148
Pelléas et Mélisande 181 questioning 16, 21, 36, 44f, 48, 54, 73,
perpetual motion machine 125 77, 128, 153f, 155f, 158, 189, 220f,
The Persistence of Memory 101 223, 240n, 244n, 246n, 277n
Phaedrus 58
phenomenology x, 2f, 8f, 11, 23, 44f, 48, radio 15, 34f, 39f, 137ff, 147, 165, 261fn
111, 138, 181f broadcast, transmission 138f, 142,
hermeneutic 21, 44, 48f, 96, 98, 131, 146f, 181ff, 192f, 199f
153 face 137, 140, 188
musical 71f, 111, 137 ghosts 137ff, 141f, 156f, 176f
sociology 148 phenomenology of 137ff, 140ff, 188
philosophical anthropology, see plugging 15, 273n
anthropology spookiness 137ff (see also acoustic,
Philosophies for Sale 55 double)
phonograph 145, 150, 176, 178 theory 165, 178, 261n, 262n, 272n
positivism, see analytic philosophy radioactivity, radiation 193, 197f, 269n,
posthumanism 4, 37, 42f, 102, 214, 276n
242n, 243n, 275n, see also rape, genocidal 115
transhumanism rational choice 39, 248n
 
Subject Index 323

reactionary 35f, 38 Sigmund Freud Prize 83

reading, unlearning the art of 108 simultaneity 74, 142, 154, 158, 194
reception, cell phone, WLAN 36f, 182, situation 5, 8, 12f, 15, 22, 42, 69, 71ff,
203 74, 77f, 80, 99, 112, 126, 132f, 138,
recording 28, 97, 179, 184, 188f, 191ff, 152ff, 155f, 158, 161, 177f, 189, 205,
261n, 270n 209, 270n
consciousness 190f attunement 140
religion 2, 50, 74f, 76, 79, 96 musical 8, 138f, 153f, 155ff, 159,
Republic 67 160ff, 164, 167f, 178f, 182, 188
rhythm 16, 30, 32, 37, 110, 165, 186, question-worthy 155
257n, 270n at the same time 158, 194
Ride of the Valkyries 199 technopolitical 177, 204f, 209f
robot 29f, 46, 228n, 240n, 263n slavery, Slave Trade 113ff, 118ff
sex 30, 32, 240n, 263n social media 4, 39, 93, 143f, 174f, 176f,
rock intelligence 46 198f, 202f, 217f, 223f, 228n, 273n
romanticism 24f, 192 sociology, ‘social theory’ 1f, 6f, 12, 21ff,
R.U.R. 29 26, 37, 48, 107, 152f, 172, 219, 221f,
246n
schizoid-topic, schizo-topia 141ff, 145, Sonic Warfare 171, 199, 272n
160, 195f Sorcerer’s Apprentice 5, 10, 90, 111,
Schlaraffenland 105 172f, 215, 223, 256n
science 7, 17, 27f, 33f, 42, 45f, 48, 51ff, Sorge [care] 123, 125
70, 88, 130, 170, 172, 212, 223, 228n soundtrack 147, 179
aesthetic 48, 185, 194 space, spatiality 10, 77f, 79, 82, 97f, 101f,
capitalist 33 105, 137, 142f, 165ff, 139f, 146, 148,
experimentation 70, 130, 134, 205 160, 179, 182, 186, 188, 257n
fiction 4, 228n ubiquity 178, 266n
German 130 spectacle 148, 179
Jewish 130 ‘speech without response’ 143f, 148, 150,
Nazi 130f 198, 201, 207
philosophy of 88, 91, 219, 236n, 238n spook, spookiness 137f, 139, 141, 199
question of 48 ‘Spuk und Radio’ 72, 138, 200, 261n,
techno- 26f, 33, 108, 239n 262n, 272n
Science as Vocation 55 standardized ubiquity 39, 82, 168, 199
scotosis 51, 105, 227n stereophonic control 146
Second World War 3, 28, 82, 98f, 105, stereoscope, audio/acoustic 145, 166f,
107, 114, 141, 200, 212 188, 266n
seduction 78, 200 Star Trek 5, 102
Seinsfrage (Being question) 44, 47f streaming 4, 39, 144f, 179, 184f, 199f
sex 30, 51, 53, 58, 63, 65f, 70, 123f, 240n, Stundenbuch/Book of Hours 75
250n, 260n style 6, 22, 24, 26, 38, 40, 45, 51, 60,
-less 123f, 252n 66, 70, 77, 92, 101, 112, 140,
shame 2f, 4, 13, 28f, 30, 32f, 51, 99f, 155, 187, 227n
168, 174, 214, 222 subjectivity 49, 185, 189
Promethean 9, 13, 33, 40, 99, 105, superhuman 131, 133
208, 231n surveillance 12f, 91f, 101, 148f, 151,
shepherd of Being 93, 96, 116 168ff, 174f, 179f, 261n, 233n
of products/things 116 symphony
Siegfried motif 152f community building power 148
324 Subject Index

taste 38f, 120, 179, 183, 185, 189f, 192, True Blood 56
244n, 253n, 266n Twilight Zone 101
technification 95 Twitter 5, 40, 148f, 150, 174, 176f, 198f,
technological reproducibility 3, 73 201
technological sabbath 177
technology, nothing technological 184 vaccine, vaccination 88, 91f, 98, 100f,
technophobia 88, 91 120f, 127, 131ff, 171f
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 109 Vatican 56, 86
telephone 61f, 102, 125, 175, 179 Vietnam 3, 82, 105, 108, 113, 127, 181,
cell phone, smart phone 13, 33f, 37, 199, 212, 215, 259n
39, 116, 126, 133, 148f, 150, 168, Viewmaster 167, 266n
174, 180, 182l, 197, 199, 200, 203, violence 3, 15, 22, 57, 88f, 91f, 100, 114,
217, 240n, 263n 129, 199, 204f, 207f, 210, 214, 224,
tapping 175f, 179 273n, 275n
television x, 2f, 4, 12f, 22, 30, 37, 39f, 56, Of Vision and the Riddle 92
100, 101, 140f, 144, 147f, 150, 159, vocoder 146
168, 174, 177, 179, 184, 187, 189f, voice 38f, 61, 71, 78, 125, 137f, 142, 145,
198ff, 202, 233n, 247n, 269n 147, 159, 165f, 170, 178, 191, 244n,
terror, terrorism 98 266n
consumer 98 voluminosity 142, 166
war on 169 voluptas, see desire
Terror from the Air 94
theatre masks, in antiquity 140 The Walking Dead 56
theology, theological 2f, 23, 49, 78f, see ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ 122
also religion war 3, 29f, 121, 126ff, 129, 131, see also
astronomy 85 atomic bomb; nuclear
turn 2, 53f on terrorism 108, 129
theremin 137 weather control 3, 57, 109, 214f, 217, see
thinking 16, 111f also geoengineering
Thomism, Thomists 38, 55 Weibermacht 59f
time 1f, 92ff, 95, 98, 100f, 127, 257n Whaling 119f
travellers 101f When I am Gone 188
Titans 99 Whig history 276n
To Be or Not To Be 90, 101, 185 Wirkungsgeschichte 1, 23, 36f, 82
tonal ictus 186 Wormwood 56
tone 78, 142, 162f, 231n, 265n
data 163 xenotransplantation 126, 130, 277n
tone-variator 9, 142, 231n
totalitarianism 150, 169, 174f YouTube 5, 38, 144, 178, 184, 189f, 199f,
soft 270n 270n
total mobilization 46f You Want It Darker 193
transhumanism 37, 42, 47, 126, 131f,
214, 239n, 243n, 268n, 275n Zarathustra 16, 43, 84, 92, 202
translator 84f Zionism 67
Trinity atomic bomb 103f Zoom instruction 94, 180, 198, 224, 249n
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