In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

254 CODES
attention through the tension it establishes with its environment. Whoever
performs a direct Action seems to claim implicitly that it is absolutely
the right thing to do, apart from generally accepted reasons, expectations,
or legislation. Once such an Action has been performed, its
mere facticity as a transgressive event appears to sanction the subjective
grounds out of which it emerged, thus encouraging repetition or continuation.
Many German authors use the word Tat for "direct Action," and
they thereby distinguish it from Handeln and Handlung-forms of Action
which, as part of what Heidegger calls "average everydayness," are
expectable and do not require particularly strong subjective decisions. It
is thus not surprising that Tat becomes a key concept in Ernst Junger's
Feuer and Blut (Fire and Blood), an account of trench warfare during
the Great War: "There is a lot of smoking, despite the bad air, and the
jokes and cheers of encouragement create an atmosphere of joviality. The
candidates of the great world-historical examination are feverishly tense,
but quite optimistic. The quiet chattering of teeth, the incredible alertness
of the senses, which precede the great and decisive Tat, sound
through each laugh" (98). Here again, an Action-more precisely, the
waiting for an imminent Action-generates an atmosphere of intensity.
It stands in sharp contrast to the chaotic environment of trench warfare.
Intensity and alertness come from the future. They produce a specific
anxiety, which results from the vague proximity of death and victory in
the future. [see Boxing, Bullfighting, Mountaineering, Immanence =
Transcendence (Death)]
There is no direct Action, no Tat, without this tension coming from
and pointing toward the future. It is no accident that the German periodical
Die Tat is subtitled Monatsschrift fur die Zukunft deutscher Kultur
(Monthly Journal for the Future of German Culture). Once an Action
has occurred and has thus been transformed into an experience on which
one can look back, it immediately becomes an incitement toward further
Actions. It is this motivational component which surrounds the Action
with the halo of an aesthetic object: "Yes, if it were not for the golden
shine that goes with the hardness of extraordinary deeds and which Fate
perhaps produces only in order to make us willing to carry out its plans
by giving us the illusion of harboring great individual happiness, we
would have given up a long time ago. Let the city dwellers call us
mercenaries and adventurers; we know that man fulfills his greatest and
most natural duty with the highest degree of satisfaction" (Junger, 46).