The Age of the Totalitarian Domination of Technology

The almost complete publication of Heidegger’s university courses and unpublished works of the 1930s and 1940s allows us to reconstruct the genesis of his reflection on modern technology. The first public statements about this subject, which date back to the Bremen Lectures (1949) and the famous Munich conference The Question Concerning Technology (1953), gave the impression of a sudden “Technical turn”, but today we are able to retrace the long maturation – which lasted almost twenty years – of this theme, which will become central and dominant in Heideggerian reflection, starting from the post-Second World War. Heidegger admits that the early reading of Ernst Jünger’s Total Mobilization (1930) and The Worker (1932) plays a decisive role both for his ontological conception of the technology and for his original interpretation of Nietzsche, of the will to power and nihilism, which he undertakes in the same years. Starting with Jünger, Heidegger is able to grasp the ontological value and totalitarian character of modern technology, which influences the Epoch of Totalitarianism as well as the present day.