‘Forest passages’: Narratives of withdrawal and ecological thought

Abstract

In this essay, I explore how a potential ‘politics of withdrawal’ resonates with current concerns in ecological thought. In particular, I propose that a possible genealogy for such politics of withdrawal may contain authors from across the political spectrum, from revolutionairies to conservatives. In constructing such a genealogy, I pay close attention to parallels between the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernst Jünger, Guy Debord, and Giorgio Agamben: four writers from seemingly opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. All, however, express their criticism of (political) modernity, understood as governed by the logic of technocracy, extractivism, and capitalism. I argue that their common political project constitutes a ‘politics of withdrawal’ which is relevant for today’s environmental politics and thought, as it attempts to move beyond (political) modernity and its topoi of the polis, antagonism and conflict, toward an anti-modern politics of the shelter and the forest.

Introduction: A politics of withdrawal?

The prevailing tone in prominent responses to the ecological crisis is one of urgency. The temporality of news coverage as well as scientific reports regarding climate change is not so much the future but the present tense: ‘act now!’ (or else risk having no future at all). For example, Extinction Rebellion, arguably one of the most prominent and mediatized environmental activist organizations, is adamant: ‘This is an emergency’, their website headlines. ¹ Emergencies leave us no other response but to act in the here-and-now, to rush toward wherever danger lurks. Extinction Rebellion’s call to arms can be read as a synopsis of the dominant narratives in environmental activism and research:

Life on Earth is in crisis. Our climate is changing faster than scientists predicted and the stakes are high. Biodiversity loss. Crop failure. Social and ecological collapse. Mass extinction. We are running out of time, and our governments have failed to act. Extinction Rebellion was formed to fix this. We have a moral duty to take action. ²

‘We are running out of time’, Extinction Rebellion states, the present is all we have left as the future promises ‘social and ecological collapse’ and ultimately mass extinction. In its manifestos Extinction Rebellion emphasizes that changes in the climate and the environment are accelerating: ‘the crisis is already with us’, they write, ‘destruction that was forecast decades from now is already here’. ³ The future spells nothing but death and destruction; it is devoid of any substance or positive connotation. It is only by acting now – by canceling a certain future of ecological catastrophe caused by the inertia of our governments – that ‘the human species can avoid total ecological collapse and possibly our own extinction’. ⁴

Extinction Rebellion thus mobilizes the fractured temporality of ‘crisis’ involving ‘[. . .] a sense of disconnection and disorientation, collapsing linear temporality’ (Boletsi et al., 2021: 4), while at the same time using it as ‘[. . .] a speech act, that is, a declaration that issues a judgment or diagnosis of the present fraught with implications for meaning-making, subject-formation, temporal and spatial orientation, infrastructures, and the liveability and survival of people and/or the planet’ (Boletsi et al., 2021: 4). The diagnosis made by Extinction Rebellion foremost concerns modernity. The climate crisis heralds the failure of modernity, not just as the historical period that witnessed the Industrial Revolution and the emerging Anthropocene, but also as providing their epistemological framework. This is why the term ‘ecological crisis’ should be understood in its ambiguity: it is both a catastrophe of climatic and biological ecology, affecting the multiplicity of life-forms on earth, as well as a catastrophe for the ideas, images, philosophies and discourses we had developed since roughly the early 1500s to represent and capture the world, and not in the least our own place in the world. The ‘ecological crisis’, therefore, is not a ‘crisis moment’ to be overcome or ‘solved’, since it cannot be solved with the conceptual, or for that matter aesthetic, instruments at our disposal. It excedes our modern understanding of our life-world: it is also a crisis of the topoi of modernity, its very language. In this sense, the ‘ecological crisis’ heralds not solutions but a radical change of ways of thinking, new myths and foundational images and ideas against and beyond modernity. Extinction Rebellion is emblematic of much of today’s environmental activism and thinking in that it has given up on the idea of the future as progress; the future no longer holds the promise of brighter days. As the cultural theorist Franco ‘Berardi’ argues, ‘the future is not an obvious concept, but a cultural construction and projection’ (2011: 17); ‘the idea that the future will be better than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model’ (2011: 18). The narrative of historical progress was central to modernity: the future held the promise of collective and individual emancipation. In modernity, to ‘act now’ – to act politically – meant to usher in progress, to follow and accelerate the march of history toward universal emancipation which could already be glimpsed on the horizon. In contrast, the injunction to ‘act now’ issued by organizations such a Extinction Rebellion is premised on the absence of such a horizon, and constitutes a break with the temporality and concurrent political logic of modernity. According to Berardi, it is due to the internal contradictions of the ‘bourgeois production model’ itself that we have lost our trust in the future: on the one hand, capitalist modernity hinges on ‘the future’ as the promise of unending growth; on the other hand, this promise is incompatible with the ecological realities of a finite planet. As a consequence, ‘at the end of the century that trusted in the future’, Berardi writes, ‘utopia gives birth to the kingdom of dystopia’ (2011: 45). It is with the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972 that the modern, progressive image of the future is put in reverse (Berardi, 2011: 45): the late 20th century constitutes a watershed in which, albeit reluctantly, modern teleology (the future as the telos or horizon of historically unavoidable emancipation) is left behind in ‘the passage beyond modernity’ (Berardi, 2009: 14). This reversal is, in a sense, completed in the logic that drives Extinction Rebellion’s peculiar rallying cry: act now to prevent the future from happening.

As the above example of Extinction Rebellion shows, contemporary environmental activism and political ecological thought often try to push beyond a modernist political idiom, as, in the Anthropocene, modernity becomes a narrative of promethean hybris. However, we may argue that the impetus to ‘act now’ constitutes, to an extent, a reminder of modernity’s temporal and political rationale. We continue to be asked to do something, to follow the course of history (or at the very least to recognize that there is such a thing) and act accordingly, this time around not to advance it but to slow it down or reverse it (another promethean undertaking). In contrast to such calls to action, we also see a different kind of response emerging, a seemingly oxymoronic ‘call to inaction’, to dis-engage rather than to ‘do something’. For philosopher Marielle Macé, the emblematic place for contemporary politics is ‘the hut’ [la cabane] (2019): rather than to ‘act out’ our political desires and aspirations in the world, we now feel the need to seek refuge, to find a shelter to distance us from the here-and-now, as a prelude perhaps to relate to the world differently. Macé sees both a figural and literal proliferation of shelters in our contemporary world, in particular the ZAD’s [zone à défendre] in France. The ZAD constitutes a space to which we may withdraw, quite literally in hand-made huts, in order to experiment with new forms of ecological and anti-capitalist living. Similarly, for the ‘recovering environmentalist’ and essayist Paul Kingsnorth, the homestead or even the hermit’s cave are sanctuaries in a profoundly damaged world in which it is too late to act, for contemplation as well as new relationalities vis-à-vis the environment, thought and tradition alike (2017, 2023).

In what follows, ⁵ I would like to address political narratives that similarly conceive the confrontation with the ecological catastrophe in terms of withdrawing from the origins of the catastrophe, that is, withdrawing from political modernity; that is to say: a withdrawal from technocratic reason, from a sense of progress, from a certain instrumental, solutionist logic. We could call this a politics of withdrawal, a pulling out of political modernity, in particular in its entanglement with technology, capitalism and the political institutions (the polis, the metropolis) and subjectivities (the individual) that are central to it. As we will see, such a politics of withdrawal is difficult to pinpoint according to the binaries of political modernity, as it moves beyond the progress/reaction, modern/archaic, left/right divide.

Indeed, a ‘politics of withdrawal’ (Hesselberth and De Bloois, 2020) appears to be a contradiction in terms: withdrawal entails non-action, inoperativity, dis-engagement, whereas our instinctive sense of politics is for it to be all about action and engagement, a struggle over the ways and means by which to organize society (or the polis). As Chantal Mouffe succinctly claims, in European political thought, ‘the political’ is defined ‘as a space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (2005: 9). ‘Act now’ for a polis that is no longer governed by the demands of fossil capital. To withdraw – if only in response to such an understanding of politics as polemos or conflict – would seem apathic, profoundly a-political, even harmful, for example, as it postpones tackling the climate crisis. However, what if the apparent withdrawal from politics in fact signifies a prelude for the radical overhaul of politics: a politics no longer conceived in terms of conflict, antagonism, and struggle. In this light, withdrawal may be seen as a form of disinvestment from capitalist politics: ‘To withdraw, here, means to take one’s distance, to disinvest in the status quo – that is, to pierce an overture toward alternative modes of being, not by facing the status quo head-on, but rather by removing oneself from it’ (Hesselberth and De Bloois, 2020: 5). A politics of withdrawal asks for a new idiom, new places where politics may occur, new collectivities. In this essay, I would like to examine some of the recurrent motifs/ideas of such a politics of withdrawal, and more importantly, a potential genealogy which brings together a series of writers and thinkers we may not be inclined to think together or even associate with ecological thought: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernst Jünger, Guy Debord, and Giorgio Agamben.

‘The collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past’: Pasolini’s ‘anthropological mutation’

In his ‘Article on the fireflies’ [l’articulo delle lucciole], written only a few months before his violent death in November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, Pier Paolo Pasolini decries the ‘anthropological mutation’ ⁶ that he is witnessing in Italian society. The original title of his short essay is Il vuoto del potere: the ‘void’ or ‘hollowness’ of power. Famously, Pasolini uses the disappearance of Rome’s fireflies due to environmental pollution as a metonymy to speak of the collapse of an ecology that not only consists of natural beings such as the fireflies, but, crucially, also includes Italian and European culture as ‘forms-of-life’ (Agamben, 2000). ⁷ Pasolini refers to the disappearance of the fireflies as ‘an event’, a point of no return, an irreversible mutation:

At the beginning of the sixties, the fireflies began to disappear in our nation, due to pollution of the air, and the azure rivers and limpid canals, above all in the countryside. This was a stunning and searing phenomena. There were no fireflies left after a few years. Today this is a somewhat poignant recollection of the past – a man of that time with such a souvenir cannot be young among the young of today and can therefore not have the wonderful regrets of those times. The event that occurred some ten years ago we shall now call the ‘disappearance of the fireflies’. ⁸

Pasolini is not simply a nostalgic, but rather offers us a diagnosis of our present day: an epochal event has taken place which has opened a chasm between generations. The young are now of a different species, but equally a chasm has opened within individual subjects like Pasolini himself. In contemporary texts such as his ‘Repudiation of the Trilogy of Life’ (2005: xix), Pasolini describes how his own body, his own desires are prone to the ‘decay’, as he calls it, he sees proliferating across Italian society. Having, in his life and career as a writer and filmmaker, strongly identified and worked in solidarity with ‘the people’ (for Pasolini the Roman proletariat acted as the embodiment of anti-capitalist, anti-modern, authentic forms of life), ‘the people’ have now disappeared into the abyss of hedonistic consumerism. As Pasolini writes: ‘anthropologically speaking, the people are long gone’. ⁹ Pasolini uses the harshest of terms to renounce his films of the early 1970s, in which he was dreaming up a sensuous ecology of young (proletarian) bodies set in a resolutely pre-modern world (taken from the Decameron, Canterbury Tales and Thousand-and-One Nights); the Trilogy of Life is the acme of Pasolinian political aesthetics: this vitalist ecology of innocent bodies and authentic traditions, dialects and idiosynchrasies constitutes the counterweight to the death drive of post-war consumerist capitalism. This political-aesthetic phantasy is now denounced by Pasolini himself: the death drive of late capitalism can no longer be warded off; he precisely repudiates his work from early 1970s as a lamentable phantasy: ‘the collapse of the present implies the collapse of the past. Life is a pile of insignificant, ironic ruins’ (2005: xix). Pasolini even speaks of the ‘retroactive degradation and devaluation of bodies and sexes’ ¹⁰ : the ruins were already there, the anthropological mutation had already been in full swing in the 1950s and 1960s; it did not bring ‘happiness and lightness’ into the lives of the young, but in fact consolidated the anthropological mutation. All there is left to do, Pasolini concludes, is to confront the devastation in the present head-on.

In the article on the fireflies, Pasolini refers to this ‘devastation of the present’ as the ‘new fascism’. In contrast to Mussolini’s ‘old fascism’, the new fascism is strangely hollow. Old fascism in the 20th century was merely spectacle, a kind of political opera, and not a very compelling one as it did not, according to Pasolini, alter popular consciousness and popular forms of life (the immense diversity of Italian local idiolects could have emerged from the material devastation of the Second World War unscathed were it not for the Americanization and technocratization of Italian society). The new fascism, however, is far more authoritarian and effective because it is hollow and lacks any positive content (not even the old fascism’s kitsch or buffoonery). Consumer capitalism, for Pasolini, is a kind of ever-expanding abyss that swallows the ecology of customs, of bodies, sensuous experiences, dialects and their local natural surroundings. Equally, contemporary, essentially technocratic power has what Pasolini calls ‘a dramatic void’ at its core: it is devoid of any emancipatory promise (other than the ‘liberation’ of the indivual in so far as the latter is always already seen as an atomized consumer). And it is this void that is the root cause of the anthropological mutation that Pasolini now sees fully realized, which he proposes to 8ase head-on, most notoriously in his final film Salò, finished shortly before his murder. Pasolini holds on to the word ‘fascism’ because we are again faced with ‘the brutal, totalitarian reorganization and homogenisation of the world’; the ‘anthropological mutation of the Italians is this complete homogenisation into a single model’, ¹¹ the replacement of what Pasolini calls the European ‘humanistic-rhetorical model’ with the ‘American pragmatic model’. ¹² To describe Italian post-war society, Pasolini uses the metaphor of the ruin repeatedly; consumerist hedonism and its political twin, technocracy, have left nothing but ruins: environmental ruins, cultural ruins, bodies in ruins.

Pasolini’s work was obviously cut short by his brutal assassination, but he is by no means alone in raising the issues addressed in his later writings and cinematographic work. In the post-war period, especially from the mid-1970s onwards, we see how a new kind of political thought crystallizes, which attempts to holistically (or better still: ecologically) think together environmental ruination – the degradation of the natural, living environment, as well as that of collective life-forms – and cultural (and even: ethical or spiritual) ruination: the degradation of environment, body, mind, history, language, customs, and community seen as a continuum. Moreover, the response to this dual ontological/environmental catastrophe takes the shape of a refusal of modernity, of a withdrawal from political modernity. Briefly, ‘political modernity’ is understood here in its emphasis on technocratic governance, on instrumental reason, a sense of progress, on the individual as the nucleus of modern society.

Pasolini is but one name in a genealogy that would also include far-left writers such as Marxist and situationist theorist Guy Debord, but also (as we will see) conservative writers such as Ernst Jünger (see below), ‘Christian-Anarchists’ such as Jacques Ellul (1964 and 2018) and Ivan Illich (1973), philosophers of technology such as Günther Anders (2002) and Lewis Mumford (1970), or closer to home notably a philosopher like Giorgio Agamben (see below), but also post-anarchist initiatives such as the Invisible Committee (2017), and a host of writers on digital platforms such as Substack and social media who operate in the no man’s land between the Rousseauist Left and the reactionary Right (i.e. the ‘recovering ecologist’ Paul Kingsnorth mentioned earlier). They all share an idiom that is highly critical of modernity, technology, and technocracy and that explicitly sees these issues as an ontological and political question, often drawing on Heidegger’s denunciation of technology as the nemesis of Being (see Heidegger, 2008), as well as Pasolini’s denunciation of the bio-politics of the ‘anthropological mutation’. They also identify contemporary power in terms of vacuous, technocratic authoritarianism that feasts on the ruins of European civilization and forms of life. They find political resistance, autonomy and political imaginaries in scavenging among those civilizational ruins, and see alternatives in tradition and anachronism, in what remains of authentic culture: dialects, jargons, shared (pre-industrial) ways of living, local traditions, and pre-industrial relations to the land, but also, crucially, in the cultural archive.

What crystallizes here is a kind of political ecology that is hard to pinpoint as belonging to either the Left or the Right, Revolution or Reaction. It denounces the technocratic vacuity of late capitalism or neo-liberalism not only vis-à-vis their material conditions, but also, and perhaps more importantly so, their ontological (and philosophical, moral) a priori. It promises a politics that is radical (perhaps even revolutionary) in its own right, but that takes the shape of a politics of withdrawal from modernity and its most recent installments. As we argued earlier, a politics of withdrawal is non-polemical, non-antagonistic politics; its defining gesture is that of a retreat from the status quo, a negative gesture, a gesture of suspension/and de-activation. In this sense, a politics of withdrawal is ‘anti-modern’ as it opposes the modern definition of politics as antagonism (i.e. class or ethnic antagonism), of politics as a process (dialectical or otherwise) of progress and emancipation. A politics of withdrawal is non-solutionist (it does not propose a solution or blueprint), as it privileges the moment or gesture of retreat: its prime aim is interrupting, opening up a potential for recalibration rather than presenting a ready-made alternative. In this light, an ecological politics of withdrawal disrupts the logic of technocracy, disrupts the instrumental and extractivist reason that brought about the ecological catastrophe. There are many examples of such an eco-politics of withdrawal in the ecological movement: the aforementioned ZADs in France (where occupied land becomes a space for experimentation with alternative forms of life) (Mauvaise Troupe, 2018), the turn toward biodynamic agriculture since the 1970s, but also the ‘repair movement’ ¹³ and anti-technological (Biagni et al., 2007) or even neo-Luddite initiatives (Mueller, 2021). In all these cases, there is the awareness that the current ecological crisis is an ontological one, and that finding a response to the ecological emergency is not the same as proposing a ‘solution’ (as solutionism and technocracy are the problem): the proper response may be to withdraw from the aspirations of modernity, from the modes-of-being that were constitutive of modernity. What is fascinating in reading such narratives of withdrawal, is that these often refer to the natural environment as a place of shelter, of isolation and renewal: the forest (as we will see), the cave, the mountain, the desert: the withdrawal into the natural world takes on a political as well as ontological meaning: the forest becomes a shelter against the catastrophe of modernity and a place for experimentation with new forms of being and thinking (often forms of being that are dismissed in modernity as archaic, insufficiently productive).

‘The home of the Word is the forest’: Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage

In the following, I would like to further consider the potential genealogy of such an ‘eco-politics of withdrawal’ by examining a short but fascinating text by Ernst Jünger: The Forest Passage, before turning, more briefly, to Guy Debord and Giorgio Agamben. In recent years, Ernst Jünger’s short but intriguing text The Forest Passage has gained (renewed) attention from the reactionary right, ¹⁴ and is often read as a call for the refusal of democratic politics and the rejuvenation of European mythology. Without denying that Jünger’s essay can be read in this way (after all, Jünger is a figurehead of the so-called German ‘conservative revolution’ of the 1930s) – and while fully acknowledging that Jünger’s oeuvre has many darker corners – it is also worth proposing a different reading of The Forest Passage, a reading that highlights Jünger’s resonances with decidedly left-wing thinkers such as Debord and Agamben (although, interestingly, this resonance may also shed a different light of their revolutionary credentials. . .) as part of a potential genealogy for a politics of withdrawal.

The original German title of The Forest Passage is Der Waldgang: German emphasizes the aspect of escape or exodus more than English does (Jünger, 2014). The Forest Passage was published in 1951, and written shortly after the first democratic elections in what was then the Federal Republic of Germany. In this context, it is an astonishing text as Jünger rejects both the parliamentary democracy that was only recently re-installed in West Germany by the Allied forces after 1945 and the totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic (but neither is he a nostalgic for German imperialism). Central to Jünger’s text is his gesture of absolute refusal, and subsequently, of withdrawal. In this light, The Forest Passage constitutes a turning point in Jünger’s writing: it announces the figure of the anarch that will play a central role in his last major novel Eumeswil (2021, first published 1977). Briefly put: the anarch is the embodiment of absolute refusal, a radically singular figure; a kind of active Bartelby (Melville, 2021); a futuristic Nietzschean hero for nascent post-modernity. Crucially for us today, the anarch finds his shelter, a shelter against political modernity, in the forest.

The Forest Passage opens with Jünger’s skepticism with regards to the recent elections in Germany. He rejects the elections for celebrating what he calls ‘the cult of the majority’ (2013: 17). For Jünger, the greatest taboo in both real (parliamentary) and fake (communist) democracy is abstaining from voting. In both the democratic Federal Republic and the increasingly totalitarian German Democratic Republic, one needs to be seen voting; Jünger mocks the ethical obligation to publicly cast one’s vote: ‘[the voter] is called on to participate in a vote for freedom, or perhaps a peace referendum. But who does not love peace and freedom? Only a monster’. (15) According to Jünger, however, it is this monstrous figure of the non-participant – whom Jünger will later on in the book call the anarch – this ‘third figure’ (beyond the binary democracy/totalitarianism) who represents true freedom, precisely because he challenges the entire edifice of modern politics. As Jünger writes: ‘Non-participation is one of the attitudes that unsettles the Leviathan [. . .]’ (15) (Jünger being a contemporary and a reader of Carl Schmitt, the Leviathan here represents political modernity) (see Schmitt, 2008). In the opening paragraphs of The Forest Passage, Jünger muses on the different forms this non-participation could take, on subtle forms of sabotage of the voting process, for example, by scribbling down a resolute ‘No’ on the voting ballot:

A short ‘No’ would suffice, because everyone whose eye it caught would know exactly what was meant. It would be a sign that the oppression had not entirely succeeded. [. . .] One could further abbreviate and, in the place of ‘No’, simply use a single letter – say, an R. This could indicate: Reflect, Reject, React, Rearm, Resist. It could also mean: Rebel. This would be a first step out of the world of statistical surveillance and control (2013: 19).

In the figure of the solitary voter who scribbles down the R-for-Rebel – which Jünger describes as a kind of ‘hieroglyph’ that will remain enigmatic for the Leviathan – Jünger recognizes the forest rebel in his embryonic shape. Non-participation in the democratic process plants the seed of a much more radical rejection of the Leviathan of political modernity, a first step toward what Jünger now calls the forest passage [der Waldgang]:

In the forest passage we consider the freedom of the individual in this world. An account must additionally be given of the difficulty – indeed of the merit – of managing to be an individual in this world. There can be no disputing that the world has changed and continues to change, and that by necessity; yet freedom thereby also changes, not in its essence but in its form. We live in the age of the Worker; since its conception this thesis can only have become more apparent. The forest passage establishes the movement within this order that differentiates it from zoological formations. Neither a liberal act nor a romantic one, it is rather the arena of a small elite, which knows what the times demand, and something more (20).

The forest passage represents a politics of withdrawal: the shape that resistance takes in the age of the Worker – that is to say: in the age of modern technocratic rationality (akin to Heidegger’s Gestell: the-world-a-resource (Heidegger, 2008) – is to pull out, to retreat into the forest which is both part of the natural world and the world of cultural myths, as we will see. Crucially, for Jünger, this also challenges the idea of politics as a collective endeavor; interestingly, Jünger describes this individualizing gesture of refusal and retreat in ontological rather than directly political terms:

[. . .] we are no longer dealing with numerical ratios here, but rather with a concentration of being, and with that we enter a different order. In this new order it makes no difference whether the voice of one individual contradicts a hundred or a thousand others. So too, his judgment, his will, and his effect can outweigh that of ten, twenty, or a thousand other men. The moment he [the forest rebel] decides to take the risk and abandon the realm of statistics, the senselessness of these pursuits, which lie far from the origins, will become clear to him (2013: 21).

With the passage from voter to forest rebel, we also move from political modernity (the Leviathan) to something else, a new mode of being – and as we will see: of being together – from the polis to the ulé (wood or forest in ancient Greek) as the place for the establishment of a community. Jünger is clearly on the lookout for a space (literal and imaginary) outside of modernity, outside of a certain technocratic rationality that took on its most catastrophic form in the Second World War. In The Forest Passage Jünger – again, in terms quite close to Heidegger, for example in his Letter on Humanism argues that the war had testified to

[. . .] the escalated mechanical development, which approaches extreme limits of automatism. This brings with it intensified assaults on nomos and ethos. [. . .] The material battle escalates into one of encirclement and annihilation, into a Cannae without the ancient grandeur. The suffering increases in a manner that must necessarily exclude any heroic element. (2008: 23).

Modern technology, and with it modern rationality, has turned into an autonomous force, destroying not only innumerable physical human lives, but more importantly (since Jünger was no pacifist and was not in any way opposed to polemos, to war and conflict), unleashing a technology-fuelled death drive (far worse and far grander than any human death drive), an inhuman fully automated nihilism that destroys the old anthropocentric nomos and ethos (that still left room for individual heroism and grandeur). ‘It is the apparatuses, in particular machine technology, that render the world void’, Jünger writes, and this echoes writers such as Pasolini, Debord or Agamben for whom technocratic modernity precisely is a kind of non-being, a world made of falsehood, a mere spectacle (2013: 43). Clearly, Jünger sees how this ‘automatism’ very much remains at work both in the capitalist West and communist East, both heavily industrialized mass societies. Jünger then asks:

It is at this point that the question arises, not merely theoretically but in every human existence today, whether another path remains viable. After all, there are mountain passes and mule tracks that one discovers only after a long ascent. A new conception of power has emerged, a potent and direct concentration. Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with this word today (2013: 24).

If the two great alternatives of political modernity (liberalism and totalitarianism; capitalist parliamentary democracy and socialism) are in fact the two faces of the Leviathan of modern technocratic power, how do we escape from this chokehold? The key word for Jünger precisely is escape (exiting, pulling out). However, he is well aware of the paradoxical nature of this escape, and we may add that this paradox remains highly topical in the context of what we now call the Anthropocene: how do you withdraw from catastrophe, from a catastrophic course of events which affects everyone and everything? ‘How does man behave in the face of and within the catastrophe?’ Jünger asks, before adding that ‘This theme presents itself more urgently with each passing day’ (2013: 32). Jünger draws an analogy between the Leviathan and the Titanic: ‘The historical world in which we find ourselves resembles a fast-moving vehicle, which at one moment presents its comfort aspects, at the next its horror aspects. It is the Titanic, and it is Leviathan’ (2013: 30). The comfort offered by technology and post-war consumerism obscures the impending catastrophe – which for Jünger, as is the case for Pasolini, is both ethical and spiritual as well as environmental in nature. The forest is a real place (outside the metropolis), but also ‘the harbor, our homeland, the peace and security that everyone carries within them. We call it the forest’ (2013: 30).

The forest thus becomes a shelter against the catastrophe, a place to recalibrate politically as well as spiritually. ‘The forest is heimlich, secret’, Jünger claims.

This is one of those words in the German language that simultaneously contains its opposite. The secret is the intimate, the well-protected home, the place of safety. But it is no less the clandestine, and in this sense it approaches the unheimlich, that which is uncanny or eerie (2013: 38).

What emerges in the forest passage is a politics that withdraws from some of the fundamental notions of modern politics; it is a politics of withdrawal in the sense that it is a non-polemical politics, non-confrontational (it does not imply two or more competing fractions, precisely because of the totalizing nature of the Leviathan). Since technocratic politics no longer allows for heroism, the forest rebel, the fugitive, the partisan become protagonist of a new kind of politics. In The Forest Passage, a relatively short essay after all, Jünger develops an impressive sequence of concepts and conceptual personae for a politics in the face of the catastrophe which he identifies as simultaneously technological and environmental (as mentioned earlier, he does this alongside contemporaries such as Günther Anders, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich). This sequence includes, obviously, the forest (the shelter and the retreat) as the new locus for politics. The ‘forest’ may not seem such a radical notion, but what Jünger in fact proposes is a politics beyond the idea of progress (which seeks shelter against the catastrophe of progress), a politics against the polis (which seeks a community in the ulé, far removed from the metropolis), a politics that eludes power (insofar as power now resides with technocratic automatism), a decidedly anti-modern politics that no longer puts its faith in the hands of technology and instrumental reason. The sequence also includes the conceptual persona of the forest rebel – it’s relevant to note that Carl Schmitt (2007) in the aftermath of the war theorized the ‘partisan’ as the new dominant figure of political resistance – as opposed to these other conceptual personae of modern politics (the worker, the citizen, the national subject, etc). Crucially, it includes the anarch who is not the individual who is so central to consumerism (but who is in the eyes of Jünger a false individual fostering an illusionary sense of freedom, illusionary because it is a ruse of technocratic capitalism); the anarch is also not the anarchist: in his adherence to yet another -ism, the anarchist’s individualism is equally false.

The forest passage, for Jünger, is an act of ‘self-affirmation’ (2013: 32) but against the comfort and the false freedom of modern individualism which is inextricably entangled with catastrophe. Thus, the forest is a kind of uncharted territory. In this sense, we can read Jünger’s ‘forest passage’ as an attempt to develop a political idiom for the Anthropocene, in the face of catastrophe (without necessarily adhering to Jünger’s conservatism). As Jünger writes, ‘In the forest passage we are forced to come to terms with crises in which neither law nor custom will remain standing’ (2013: 55). Left to his or her own devices, the forest rebel needs to unlearn the lessons of political modernity and needs to rediscover what Jünger refers to as ‘time-transcending powers’ (2013: 31). Somewhat esoterically (and with legion Nietzschean overtones) Jünger claims that

the forest passage should not be understood as a form of anarchism directed against the machine world, although the temptation is strong, particularly when the effort simultaneously aims at reconnecting with myth. The mythical will undoubtedly come; it is already on its way. In reality, the mythical is always present, and at the given moment it rises like a treasure to the surface. But it will emerge from the movement, as a heterogeneous principle, only at its highest, supremely developed stage. In this sense the movement is only the mechanism, the cry of birth (2013: 33).

The forest passage is not merely a reactive or reactionary gesture as this would still be part of political modernity: conservatism forever remains a response the French Revolution (the negation of modernity passes through modernity). Perhaps we could argue that Jünger, in The Forest Passage, attempts to move beyond his own, still too modern, conservatism insofar as it remained complicit with the Leviathan of the nation-state and national identity. In The Forest Passage, Jünger now calls upon us to regenerate modes of relating, of being together, that do not originate in catastrophic modernity. Hence the importance of finding a new language:

Even when language has declined to a mere instrument for technicians and bureaucrats and tries to borrow from slang to simulate vitality, in its latent power it remains utterly unweakened. The dullness and the dust merely touch its surface. If we dig deeper, we reach a well-bearing seam in every desert of this earth. And with these waters new fertility rises to the surface (2013: 64).

Here, Jünger draws an analogy between the forest’s soil as what we would now call ‘the commons’: a shared human patrimony, and language as a similar kind of patrimony. For Jünger, we need to wrestle language from the bureaucrats that have turned it into an arid desert (as they have turned the planet into a desert), to tap into its potential; but this can only be done if we withdraw into a place, a shelter where the world has not been reduced to a mere resource: ‘the home of the Word is the forest’, Jünger claims (2013: 63).

‘Being behind the times’: Debord & Agamben

Intriguingly, Jünger’s politics of withdrawal in The Forest Passage echoes Pasolini’s analysis of the ‘anthropological mutation’ brought about by post-war consumer society (and let’s recall that the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the Anthropocene starts around 1950, when both Jünger and Pasolini see the new Leviathan of technocracy and consumerism raise its head). For both, there exists a clear parallel between the ecological catastrophe of an increasingly artificial, mechanized world and the ontological catastrophe of a progressively uniform world populated by consumer-individuals (the former and the latter being hyphened by technology). Also for both, the way out of the catastrophe, precisely, is a way out: a retreat, a suspension of the status quo, a withdrawal into the potential of myth, of languages and cultures (and ironically, Jünger at times seems less conservative than Pasolini. . .). We find a similar reflection in the later works of French Marxist theorist Guy Debord (and it is perhaps telling that these, like Pasolini’s and Jünger’s are later works. . .). In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord argues how what he calls the ‘integrated spectacle’ has become a dispositif (or better still: an ecology) that has come to replace any remaining natural or cultural ecologies through, notably, the ‘combined effect [of] incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; [and] an eternal present’. (1990: 11). In his autobiographic account Panegyric, Debord painfully describes how the banks of the river Seine were turned into a motorway in a deliberate assault, on behalf of the integrated spectacle, on the forms of life that a city like Paris had allowed to flourish. As argued earlier in this essay, indicative of the genealogy of the gray area between progressive and reactionary thought is the central idea of an ontology (or ecology) that comprises both the natural and the cultural environment, the city as well as the forest, the museum and the library as well as the ocean. Debord clearly sees the replacement of the cultural environment as equivalent to ecocide (both are forms of ‘pollution’ in Debord’s 1980s parlance). In Comments of the Society of the Spectacle, Debord writes how

the spectacle makes no secret of the fact that certain dangers surround the wonderful order it has established. Ocean pollution and the destruction of equatorial forests threaten oxygen renewal; the earth’s ozone layer is menaced by industrial growth; nuclear radiation accumulates irreversibly. It merely concludes that none of these things matter. It will only talk about dates and measures. And on these alone, it is successfully reassuring – something which a pre spectacular mind would have thought impossible. Spectacular democracy approaches matters with great subtlety, very different from the straightforward brutality of the totalitarian diktat. It can keep the original name for something secretly changed (beer, beef or philosophers). And it can just as easily change the name when the thing itself has been secretly maintained (1990: 34–35).

The world of the integrated spectacle is that of the final stage of commodity production: the problem here is no longer quantitative (how to flood the world with even more commodities?), but qualitative (how to push the world beyond breaking point, beyond its disappearance; how to push the world’s ecosystems beyond extinction? – a point that Debord develops in his short but prophetic essay A Sick Planet, written in 1971 (2008)). The eradication of history, the replacement of cultural heritage with kitschy doubles and the pollution of the life-world are all part of the same ecological disaster (cultural replacement and inauthenticity become a form of extinction in themselves). ‘Historical consciousness has never been in such great and urgent need of mastering its world, for the enemy at its gates is no longer illusion but its own death’, Debord poignantly writes (2008: 86). Like Pasolini, Debord is not merely a nostalgic (a disillusioned and pedantic soixante-huitard). Debord sides with Pasolini and Jünger in his rejection of what he too sees as a kind of ‘anthropological mutation’ (the extinction not only of natural life, but also of European culture: ‘the degeneration of the totality of the natural and human environment’, as Debord describes it in A Sick Planet (2008: 78). In the face of such a mutation, historical consciousness has now retreated into the forest of myth, into the shelter of cultural history (of the literary and artistic canon, folklore, dialects, of the historic city against the museified city – all recurrent themes in Debord). Although he is not engaged in any direct dialogue with contemporaries such as Pasolini, Jünger, Illich or Ellul, Debord’s anti-modernism does resonate with their diagnosis of technocracy or ‘the technological system’ (Ellul, 1964, 2018) (in its ontological and spiritual dimensions) and their pleas for a truly ‘post-industrial’ society (llich, 1973). In a society where technocracy has enforced an eternal present, anti-modernity becomes imperative to survival. As Debord writes in Panegyric: ‘When ‘to be absolutely modern’ has become a special law decreed by some tyrant, what the honest slave fears more than anything is that he might be suspected of being behind the times’ (2004: 66).

‘Being behind the times’, here, means to remain in withdrawal vis-à-vis imperative modernity, and this is exactly where Debord sees a modicum of resistance against the integrated spectacle. Hence the emphasis in the later Debord on autobiography, on dissident (anti-spectacular) forms of life (which peculiarly combine a kind of anachronistic hedonism and a concern or even care for patrimony, cultural and even culinary traditions). There is a strategic meaning to Debord’s incessant reminiscing of his bohemian years in works such as Panegyric, but also his recounting of his (borderline sentimentalist and sometimes cliché-ridden) depictions of his life and romantic conquests in Florence and Andalusia, and his withdrawal into the solitude of the French countryside in the forests of the Auvergne: these are all meant to be read as maneuvers against the integrated spectacle. The withdrawal into nature, tradition and the artistic canon in Debord becomes a kind of modern-day otium.

Finally, the contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben ¹⁵ perhaps best exemplifies the politics of withdrawal we saw emerging across the political spectrum, mid-way Debord and Jünger. In his works written during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic – which, for Agamben, is emblematic of the current combined ecological/ontological catastrophe – Agamben paints an apocalyptic picture of our current predicament: ‘We live in houses, in cities burned to the ground, as if they were still standing; the people pretend to live there and go out into the streets masked amid the ruins as if these were the familiar neighborhoods of times past’ (2022: 8). In the pandemic, we dwell, masked and faceless, among the ruins of our life-world, but also, for Agamben, among the ruins of language and politics. In When the House Burns Down many of the key elements of Agamben’s political thinking recur: politics is not exclusively confined to the polis, the city; politics is not exclusively a public matter, but also involves the familiar, the customary, the locus for which is the house [oikos]. The house is home to the family, it is our openness – quite literally our doorstep – to the world; the house opens to the community in that it is in the house where we learn to speak, where language as such is transmitted to us. It is where we first recognize the faces of others, where we discover our openness to the other, to the world. It is within the house that we learn and later find familiar gestures, customs, argot. The house, in Agamben, is not so much a shelter against the world, but it shelters a world. The house, the familiar, is not the opposite of politics, of the private, but its condition sine qua non. And it is the house that is so central to Agamben’s political thought, that is on fire – in fact, it is already burnt down, in ruins, yet the ruins remains invisible to most.

Agamben’s visceral reaction to the anti-COVID regulations that were imposed in Italy and elsewhere in Europe – expressed in the polemical texts collected in Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics (2021) – can perhaps be explained by the fact that the pandemic confined us in our homes, it turned the shelter into a prison: the epidemic as politics (the subtitle to the book) constitutes the triumph of the city/polis over the oikos, technocratic reason over life itself, as we also saw in Pasolini, Jünger, and Debord. The epidemic allowed for the administration, the regulation and, consequently, the extreme reduction of our environment and modes of being together. For Agamben, our current crisis is environmental as well as symbolic; the loss of our life-world, as expressed in a virus that was, according to him, the direct result of the global exploitation of the living world, cannot be seen apart from modernity’s destruction of centuries-old modes of living, of languages and embodied worldviews that defy modernity’s rationalist and extractivist logic (leaving us defenseless, literally bereft of language, against its ravages).

By transforming the house into a prison (with all its Foucauldian, biopolitical undertones), the pandemic cuts us off from all these things that constitute the house as precondition for the constitution of forms of life (Agamben, 2000). The house loses its primordial political function, and it is turned into ruins. Agamben’s musings in When the House Burns Down show us some of the principal elements of Agamben’s political thought: a politics of proximity, of the home (and the people who dwell there) versus the State, of the potential of authentic speech versus empty exchange, of the customary as collective form-of-life, that is to say as the collective experience of shared language, gestures, emotions and behaviors. The politics of proximity, of a living, embodied community, against the abstracting, calculating machine that is the State. Such a politics implies, in a sense, a ‘politics of truth’: the subject that speaks from the openness/communicability that we are, simultaneously seizes the truth about itself, about the collective of which it is part and about the essence of politics. Political subjectivity, even if ‘subjectivity’ here is radically plural, is anti-universalist, anti-State, disruptive of the technological-capitalist dispositif (that is to say: first and foremost opposed to the project of modernity, political or otherwise). Once more, we see how a politics of withdrawal from political modernity is taking shape.

Both Debord and Agamben advocate a politics that is wilfully ‘behind the times’. If the current multidimensional catastrophe – which is environmental and socio-cultural, material and symbolic – is the result of modernity’s drive forward, completing the homogenization and monetization of the living world under the heading of historical ‘progress’, then resistance means pulling the breaks, abandoning not only the destructive logic of historical progression (and its supposed inevitability), but also scavaging the ruins left behind by modernity’s rampage for languages and other forms of symbolization, other (collective) forms of life to face the catastrophe on terms different form those of modernity, to built, or better still: re-built other symbolic environments.

Conclusion

In Pasolini, Jünger, Debord, and Agamben, we see how the contours of a politics of withdrawal in response to the ecological emergency or catastrophe take shape; a response that has its own peculiar and complexe genealogy, across and beyond the fundamental divides of political modernity. This latter point is crucial: it is tempting to misread the four thinkers central to this essay as later-in-life conservatives, merely disappointed in the failed promises of revolution (be it left- or right-wing revolution). All four of them are acutely historically aware of the profound mutation that is the Anthropocene and do not simply seek to restaure a bygone cultural or social order (all of them remain anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist thinkers in their own way, for example). They venture into uncharted political territory, and they do so precisely because they are painfully aware of the catastrophic nature of modernity, environmentally, politically and epistemologically speaking: what opens up here, is the possibility of a radically new non-, alter-, or anti-modern thinking and political activism, and more generally, non-modern ways of living – which avoids current calls for urgent action that remain within the temporality of modernity, or apocalyptic narratives of disappearing mankind and its civilization (to imagine oneself to be ‘the last generation’ means asserting modernity as the Alpha and Omega of historicity).

Obviously, this genealogy remains to be established in much more detail (including many more thinkers, some of which already mentioned here: Illich, Ellul, Mumford, Anders, Heidegger), but what is crucial for us, in face of today’s ecological catastrophe, is the potential offered by a mode of thinking that escapes the pitfalls of political modernity as it attempts to think ‘shelter’ and ‘place’ without becoming nativist, that seeks for alternative forms of thought and forms of life in the cultural archive without becoming traditionalist or outright reactionary, that sheds off technophilia without indulging in nostalgia. As we saw in our analysis of Pasolini, Jünger, Debord and Agamben, this mode may be a form or other of withdrawal. Such a politics of withdrawal, ideally, is not purely negative, reactive, but in fact seizes the cultural, epistemological and ontological dimensions of the current crisis. We should, however, be aware of the pitfalls of a politics of withdrawal, as has also become clear in our brief reading of the authors central to this essay. The search for new symbolic forms may, at least in part, need to pass through the cultural archive and involve scavenging of modernity’s ruins for forms of life and myths that allow us to, if not overcome, relate differently to the ecological crisis, but this entails a real risk of (relatively benign) romanticization or (politically nefarious) regression into traditionalist tropes of an authentic and somehow redemptive pre- or anti-modernity. It is by reading them purposely together that we can distinguish these pitfalls in Pasolini, Jünger, Debord and Agamben (without resorting to a ‘horseshoe’ theory, it is in analyzing these theorists side-by-side that we can flesh out the revolutionary aspects in Jünger as well as the conservative streak in Pasolini, Debord, and Agamben). This should be the preliminary critical work to any politics of withdrawal – it will no doubt lead us through many future forest passages.