All Things Are Nothing to Me

by Jacob Blumenfeld

  Who is Max Stirner? Fifth reading: not the last Hegelian but the first poststructuralist.12 Reading Stirner’s philosophy as an epistemological critique of essences instead of a metaphysical exposition of reality, some recent philosophers have situated Stirner’s project within and beyond a poststructuralist framework. Assimilated into French philosophy, Stirner can now be read alongside Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze in their unified assault on the traditional Western metaphysical concepts of truth, history and subjectivity. Although this reading is interesting for its contemporary relevance, it levels the nuances of Stirner’s argument, as well as the differences between all those other subsumed philosophers.

  More? Sixth, existentialist.13 Seventh, individualist anarchist.14 Eighth, proto-right-wing libertarian.15 Ninth, fascist.16 Tenth, insane.17 Eleventh, twelfth… Man, our head is spooked! How many more can we fit in here? Our “earthly apartments” are becoming “badly overcrowded.”18 Which spooks then should we evict? How about all of them? Fine, no more wheels in the head.

  What dogma unites all these “Stirner studies”? Simply put, historicism. By historicism I mean the tendency to reduce one’s work (or thought) to a necessary result of a socioeconomic, political, and philosophical aggregate which one can call “historical context” or “age.” Stirner is a product of his age, his times—1840s, Berlin, Germany—which were, of course, dominated by Hegelianism and its followers, the critique of theology, France’s revolutionary legacy, burgeoning industrial capitalism, the dominance of liberalism and the opening breaths of socialism and so on.

  Stirner himself exposed the fallacy of historicism. In relation to Feuerbach’s doctrine of sensualism, he asked: what makes someone uniquely who they are? What makes a person singular, this one, and not another? Sensuousness can be a condition of my identity, but not a determinate factor of who I am. Ventriloquizing Hegel, he asks, “If I were not this one, for instance, Hegel, I should not look at the world as I do look at it, I should not pick out of it that philosophical system which just I, as Hegel, do.”19 Can we perhaps extend this to materialism, empiricism, and historicism? To Stirner, any theory which only considers the aggregate of conditions (e.g. senses, matter, facts) from which something emerges will never be able to fully show how that emergent something became itself in its singularity. An analysis of historical, empirical conditions will only tell us the clothing that such a singularity wears.

  Stirner rejects philosophical determinism, including the claim that every action must have some identifiable cause which can be reconstructed in principle. But Stirner does not retreat into religion, declaring that something can come from nothing, ex nihilo, since that is how God works, for instance. But is there a third option? A rigorously atheistic rejection of determinism which does not lapse into mysticism or the absurd? It is here, on the edge of an abyss, where Stirner proclaims the idea of the creative nothing [schöpferische Nichts], “the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”20 For Stirner, there is always an excess of being that outstrips the possibility for conceptual capture in a regime of representation. Excess is a misleading word, since Stirner’s Eigenheit also refers to that which is below or underneath, that which lacks the full presence of a mediating concept.

  The idea of the un-man [Unmensch] animates this point. What is the un-man? “It is a man who does not correspond to the concept man, as the inhuman is something human which does not conform to the concept of the human.”21 Not someone other than myself as human, but that part of myself which is not explainable by my “humanness” or species qualifications. I am un-man when I exceed, fall short, disrupt, cancel, or displace myself from being interpreted through the grid of the concept man, human being. Stirner’s un-man makes the point that my humanness is an amoral category, a manipulation of biological taxonomy for political justifications of power. The un-man is that homo sacer which founds and negates the liberal project of human rights. It is that real part of me which cannot be symbolized in any order, yet which structures the symbolic order as such. The un-man does not just ring the morning bell of the “death of man”, but rather it signifies that supplement which binds itself to any essentializing logic. Go ahead and posit man, Stirner seems to say, but know that it is not I, for I am either too much or too little for any such category. I am, in a sense, subtracted from man, not because I desire something else, but because I have no desire to fulfill the imposed criteria of humanity.

  In a defense of Stirner, most likely written by Stirner himself in 1847, “G. Edward” captures this rage against the category of the human:

  Against this phrase of ‘humanism’, Stirner posits the phrase of ‘egoism’. How? You summon me to be a ‘human being’; more precisely, that I should be ‘man’? Well! I was already a ‘human being’, ‘bare homunculus’ and ‘man’ in the cradle; that is what I am for sure; but I am more than that, I am what I have become through myself, my own development, by the appropriation of the outside world, of history, etc. I am unique. But that is not what you really want. You do not want me to be a real man, you do not give a penny for my uniqueness. You want me to be ‘man’, as you have constructed him, as an ideal for all. You want to make the ‘loutish principle of equality’ the standard of my life. Principle around principle! Demand around demand! I posit the principle of egoism against you. I just want to be ‘I’, to despise nature, men and their laws, human society and their love, and cut loose from every general relation, even the one of language, with you. Against all the impressions of your ‘ought’, all designations of your categorical judgments, I posit the ‘ataraxia’ of my ‘I’; I am already lenient when I make use of language, I am the ‘unsayable’, ‘I merely show myself’. And am I not entitled to the terror of my ‘I’, which repels all that is human, when I do not allow you to disturb me in my self-enjoyment, just like you with your terror of humanity which labels me an ‘unman’ when I sin against your catechisms?22

  Stirner’s refusal to be a “human being” is not just some vulgar anti-humanism. It rather represents a deep problem for any philosophical-political framework that abstracts from the singularity of individual existence, sacrificing it to some higher cause, universal category, general rule, or moral duty separate from the individual. Stirner poses the question: How can I be fully I? We can translate this as such: How can I refuse the social mediation of domination? Against being flattened into an identity, function, role, community, nation, or job, Stirner “just want[s] to be ‘I’, to despise nature, men and their laws, human society and their love, and cut loose from every general relation, even the one of language, with you.”23 Clumsily, and ahead of his time, Stirner is trying to think through the problem of non-identity, the nadir of subjectivity that breaks with the objective determinations of society.24

  Rejecting the dialectic of idealism, the determinism of materialism, and the mysticism of religion, Stirner seeks to understand the self-creation of concrete singularity out of abstract universality. In mundane terms, he wants to know how someone can evade domination by the real abstractions of social customs, economic laws, political rights, moral duties, and religious rules, and instead, become something unique, self-determined, their own. The question for Stirner is not how a unique something can come out of an indefinite nothing, but how can a unique nothing create itself out of indefinite somethings.

  Is it possible then to read Stirner “out” of context? This would mean reading him not only at a point in time, but as an interruption of time, as someone whose thought defiantly evades its time. To read Stirner this way is to take his thought seriously as a challenge. It means, above all, to honor him by consuming him, and ultimately, desecrating him.

  Stirner: Practical Philosophy

  How then should one interpret the thought of Max Stirner? As Stirner suggests, one person’s thoughts are another person’s property: “Your thoughts are my thoughts, which I dispose of as I will, and which I strike down unmercifully; they are my property, which I annihilate as I wish.”25 To trea
t thoughts as property here does not mean that they are sacred or inviolable; they are not protected by copyright and law. Rather, for Stirner, in order to treat your thoughts as my property, I must violate them, make them my own. This is because Stirner thinks that I can only make something my own by taking it, by using and abusing it in my own way. If I refrain from taking and using something uniquely, then I run the risk of letting it control me, dominate me in its fixity or stability. The capacity to appropriate something as mine constitutes my power, and the resistance from others to my doing so constitutes theirs. Property exists only in this “manifestation of force.”26

  Stirner thus challenges the reader: Do you have the power to appropriate me? Can you make me your own? If property is only meaningful in relation to our power of appropriation, then to declare Stirner’s thought our property is to expropriate it for ourselves, and violate its boundaries. Violation is the only possible basis for one’s property, but even this is not enough, for it is precisely unique violation, my violation that justifies me, and your violation that justifies yours.

  The longer we let Stirner’s thoughts stiffen and harden over time, the more enslaved we will become to their independent power, their congealed status as alienated property or “alienty” [fremdentum] against us.27 On these terms, to consume Stirner means not only to interpret him through our own framework, but rather to mutate his concepts into ours, to violate them until they “bleed to death.”28 In short, to make his thoughts our own, we need to become their “most irreconcilable enemy.”29

  First violation (reading): Stirner should not be read in a doctrinaire manner, as one who posits a system of concepts which cohere on their own. He is not a metaphysician or a systematic writer. This is Marx’s great mistake in reading Stirner: he takes him to be laying out thesis after thesis, building up a system which is internally inconsistent and hence, laughably absurd. Marx’s reading is violently flat, atonal. How could he have missed such voice, such performance? The “first readable book in philosophy that Germany has produced,” as Ruge called it, Der Einzige is nothing if not flamboyant.30 Let us then read it performatively as a text that utilizes numerous strategies (deduction, dialectic, etymology, allegory, repetition, shock, syllogism, metaphor, neologism, aphorism) to show something in its development, a text which provokes an experience in the reader that can only be drawn out indirectly. This operation of the text is self-reflective, revealing its own holes along the way, making the reader often uncomfortable in reading it. Everyone must therefore write their own version as they read it, scalpel in hand.

  Second violation (translating): Stirner’s language cannot be taken at face value, it must be interpreted. In this reading, I propose numerous translations of Stirnerisms in order to make sense of what appears senseless. This is the double-sided nature of a consumptive reading, both negating and creating, what Bakunin called “creative destruction” in 1842 and Marx would call “productive consumption” in 1857. “Egoist”, for example, does not mean “self-interested” or “selfish”, but should rather be translated as “one who acts without cause”, “unalienated”, “unique”, “I”, “owner”, or “squatter.” These seemingly disparate terms express more precisely the content of Stirner’s concept than our common-sense intuitions of the word “egoist.” Other translations would be reading “property” as expropriation, “ownness” as responsibility, “unique” as non-identical, “union” as commune, and “ego” as void.

  Third violation (philosophizing): What kind of book is Der Einzige? This question is important, because placing the book in any one category will both sterilize some of its richness and, simultaneously, put it into dialogue with others who can elicit more meaning from it through comparison. The process of sterilization and dialogue is unavoidable, for all texts share some affinities with others. I propose here to situate Stirner in at least three categories: “19th century German Philosophy”, “Anarchism”, and “Ethics.” The first is obvious, the second is controversial, the third seems completely absurd. Is Stirner not the most anti-ethical thinker, the destroyer of all ethical systems, the egoist, the nihilist? Ethics, however, as I use the term here, has nothing to do with moral rules but everything to do with one’s orientation to life.

  As Deleuze reads Spinoza,31 we can read Stirner: a practical philosopher, one who develops a whole grammar for living which fears no death. Stirner’s practical philosophy asks how one can become a unique subject, and answers it in terms of power and enjoyment, a language not at all far from Spinoza. In fact, the history of philosophy needs to be redrawn so that Stirner’s text finds its proper place, side by side with Spinoza’s Ethics, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. If there was not already such a crowd, Bakunin’s God and the State would join the fray as well.

  Each of these texts, operating in different registers for different purposes, develop a non-moralistic ethics, comprising an atheistic philosophical project that confronts the deep political and historical situation of their day. Whether through geometry, genealogy, phenomenology, dialectic, or political intervention, each text works on the subject who reads it in a similar way. These works propose a new relation of the self to the self, a turning of the self around itself, attuned to something new, uniquely comported to it. This “care of the self” as ethical subjectivation is what Foucault rightly spots in Stirner as a reawakening of the theme of epimeleia heautou from Hellenistic philosophy, especially from Stoicism.32 Can Stirner “the nihilistic egoist” be read in the same tradition as Marcus Aurelius and Seneca? Not as nihilist or egoist, but as the practical philosopher who advises to, “Ask yourselves and ask after yourselves—that is practical and you know you want very much to be ‘practical’.”33 With these violations accomplished, we can finally begin to read Stirner.

  Ich hab’ Mein Sach’ auf Stirner gestellt34

  I have no interest in egoism, whatever that vague concept signifies, and neither should anyone else who reads Max Stirner. The Ego and Its Own, or better, The Unique and its Property,35 has nothing to do with egoism, egos, egology, or the sort. All these words are stand-ins, filler for something non-conceptual, even non-representable. But what is this thing and how can it even be discussed? The ego—das Ich, I—is not a “thing” at all to Stirner, but a singular nothing. To examine it then requires different terminology and different methods, perhaps even a new ontology.

  It would be easy here to charge that we are speaking about a ghost, an abstraction that has taken on shape and become a specter, an apparition, a spook. To speak of something non-representable, in short, is theology. And is not Stirner’s project to destroy theology, to consume all gods and masters, and to annihilate anything beyond me which is above me, anything which determines me? “Stirner’s ghost-hunt has produced a ghost above all ghosts: the ego!” so goes the charge of Marx and those who follow.

  How does one respond to this accusation? In fact, Stirner already responded to this charge in his indispensable reply from 1845, written in response to criticisms of his work by Feuerbach, Bauer, Hess, and Szeliga. Stirner writes (in the third person): “What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is neither a word, nor a thought, nor a concept. What he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.”36 In other words, the actuality of any unique I is not identical with its expression in language or thought; the content exceeds the form, and yet to discuss it requires archaic words and static concepts. The objectification of the I into a thing, into an “ego”, is thus bound to the form of presentation, to language, and not to the content at hand. It is only by “running against the boundaries of language,” as Wittgenstein once said, that Stirner approaches the unthinkable, and wrests some truth from the limits of sense.37

  Truth, according to Stirner, is that which I can maintain against contradiction, and untruth is that which I let slip into contradiction through my own weakness.38 In holding Stirner close to us, how much truth are we willing to let go? This movement against our own
desires to let contradiction seep in at every chance we get is the opposite of criticism. This marks the intelligence of Stirner’s intervention into his own immediate circle—the young Hegelian “critical critics”, the Free.39 Against his own comrades who take criticism (and the belief in criticism) to almost apocalyptic heights,40 Stirner shows “critique” to be nothing but a game of adolescent power in which the players try to ward off their own impotence by wresting truth from their opponents, consuming it as their own property, and drawing power therein. To the Free, if I can slice your theory in half with a criticism—if I can find a contradiction inside you—then my power over you increases, my confidence strengthens, my self-worth enhances. For now, your truth is my truth, your power is my power. This logic of critique is a vulgarized Hegelianism, for the goal is to find negations that can propel forward the movement of history and spirit. Such negations, or criticisms, endlessly run around the track of contradiction and resolution, alienation and reappropriation.