Your suggestion to put Eumeswil on my essential reading list actually occurred to me already. The list now only contains works that can be read online, but a link to your post on which a commenter posted a link to a downloadable version (which is how I was able to read the book: I might now be willing to spend that kind of money on the book after reading it, but there’s no way I was going to take a chance on a book for that kind of money until I knew how good it is) might fit the bill. Eumeswil will be the only novel on the list, but I think an exception can be made in this case.

While the distinction between the anarchist and the anarch is critical, I don’t necessarily think it’s that stark. I see similarities between Juenger’s concept of the anarch and the concept of the Remnant set forth by Albert Jay Nock (in his essay Isaiah’s Job and in the last few paragraphs of Our Enemy, the State), who did describe himself as an “anarchist” and who along with Lysander Spooner was already far and away my favorite “political” thinker until I came across Juenger. Juenger for example in Eumeswil had good things to say about Benjamin Tucker, citing approvingly his expression “Anarchy is Order” (which actually predated Tucker and is often attributed to Proudhon), which is the basis for the red circled-A in the right sidebar of this blog. I expect I will now be using the word “anarchic” and “anarchy” more often and the word “anarchist” less often or not at all. There is a tension and arguable contradiction in an anarch PUBLISHING a book like On the Marble Cliffs, or Eumeswil for that matter. Such books have an EFFECT, and are not written only for the author. They are benevolent and generous with their insight. They blow the cover of the “master spy” to whom Juenger compared the anarch. They are not without risk to the author, especially in the case of On the Marble Cliffs. I think Stirner really hit the nail on the head with his concept of the insurgent and insurrection, and his relation of these concepts to Jesus and the first Christians.

Thank you, by the way, for your answer over on your blog to my question about the meaning of “pendant.”

And allow me a frank question: with such a high opinion of Eumeswil, why so much emphasis on anarchism, which Juenger clearly puts on a lower or at best a preparatory level to that of the anarch?

Yes, I also believe Jünger improved on Stirner’s Only One, and I totally share your view on Eumeswil. Thanks for the link too!

Regarding pendant, I just answered who I believe must be you on my blog – the word pendant also bothered me, unnecessarily cryptic. But Neugroschel perhaps used it because he had already used “counterpart” early in the paragraph. See my blog comment

By the way, might you have some insight into what Juenger means by calling the anarch the “pendant” of the monarch?

Thank you for commenting. I just finished reading Eumeswil last night. It’s one of the greatest if not the greatest book I’ve ever read. I’ve been to your blog and learned much, and as you can see I’ve linked to it in my blogroll to the right. I believe Stirner was likewise an anarch as distinguished from an anarchist, and that Juenger acknowledged his debt to him in the passages above. I also do believe Juenger improved on Stirner.

On the contrary, the distinction between anarchist and anarch is one of Jünger’s main means of defining the anarch.

For example, from Eumeswil, where the anarch is defined:

“It is especially difficult to tell the essential from that which is similar to and indeed seems identical with it. This also applies to the anarch’s relation to the anarchist. The latter resembles the man who has heard the alarm but charges off in the wrong direction.”

There are numerous other examples of this available on my website (“Anarch quotes”, and in certain anarch vs anarchist blogs.”