Giorgio Agamben: A general demobilisation

In 1932, Ernst Jünger published Der Arbeiter [The Worker], a work in which this new figure of humanity pointed to the new world order. The centrality of work corresponds to the dominance of technology. Expanding on concepts he had expressed in his book of two years prior, Total Mobilization, Jünger writes: “Technology is the way in which the worker form mobilises the world.” This diagnosis, which revisited Marx’s analyses from an entirely different perspective, exerted considerable influence on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

It is therefore all the more surprising that this decisive figure of the era has disappeared for some decades now. Technology continues to govern the world and has certainly increased its power everywhere, but it is no longer “the way in which the worker form mobilises the world.” On the contrary, in the form of artificial intelligence, it seems to imply rather the decline of the centrality of work that Jünger had in mind. Instead of the servitude linked to exploitation and mobilisation, technology, by progressively blurring the identities of social classes and estates, seems today to be heading towards an unprecedented form of subjugation through a kind of general demobilisation.

Quodlibet, 01/10/2026