25. EO, 44
26. EO, 43. “Wheels in the head” loosely translates the German idiom “Sparren zu viel haben.” It can also be: “you have a screw loose”, or plainly, “you are crazy.”
27. EO, 44
28. EO, 89
29. See, for instance, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) or Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
30. See EO, 90: “Let us then hold together and protect the human being in each other; then we find the necessary protection in our holding together [Zusammenhalt], and in ourselves, those who hold together [Zusammenhaltenden], a community of those who know their human dignity and hold together as ‘human beings.’ Our holding together is the state; we who hold together are the nation.”
31. EO, 100
32. EO, 91
33. See EO, 224: “To whoever knows how to take and defend the thing, it belongs, until it is taken away again by another, as freedom belongs to the one who takes it.”
34. EO, 96–97
35. See Marx, On the Jewish Question, MECW 3: 146–175. We know Stirner read this because he cites it at EO 158, criticizing Marx’s use of the concept of “species-being” [Gattungswesen]. See note 42.
36. EO, 105
37. Ibid.
38. EO, 108
39. Moishe Postone makes a similar criticism of “Traditional Marxism”, insofar as it takes labor to be the standpoint of critique and not the object of the critique of capitalism. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993).
40. EO, 107–8
41. See, for instance, Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1973), Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), or, again, Postone (1993).
42. EO, 158: “To identify me now entirely with the human being, the demand has been invented, and stated, that I must become a ‘real species being’ [wirkliches Gattungwesen].” Marx most likely took this concept from Feuerbach, who most likely adapted it from Hegel. Stirner’s criticism again emphasizes the non-identity of the I.
43. EO, 111
44. EO, 106. Lump is translated as “ragamuffin” by Byington and Leopold. “Pauper” or “bum” makes more sense though.
45. EO, 112
46. EO, 118
47. Ibid.
48. EO, 159
49. Ibid. Stirner never denies that individuals are human, animal, alive, etc. Rather he rejects the claim that such qualities exhaust me, or fully identify me. For instance: “You are more than a living essence or animal, this would mean, you are still an animal, but animality does not exhaust what you are.” Stirner’s Critics (2012), 89
Part III: My Stirner
On the rubble of smashed idols, including God, humanity, liberalism, work, the state, and freedom, Stirner begins to lay out his own theory of ownness, the I, and the unique one. But since any positive theory has the potential of becoming a new ruling principle, he repeatedly undoes his project by relating it back to his own nothingness. As owner, I relate to the world through property, power, and ownness; I interact with others and use everything for my own self-enjoyment, as I expect others to do with me. The escape of property from my power into alienty parallels the escape of Stirner’s own philosophy from fluidity into dogmas. To Stirner, I should not let my property slip into fixity, just as I should not let myself slip into an identity. “Everything is my own,” Stirner declares, “therefore I bring back to myself what wants to escape me; but above all I always bring myself back when I have slipped away from myself into any servitude.”1 This incessant self-persecution, this holding-itself-hostage of the I, exposes the delicate balance between the ego and its own, the unique and its property. But not only that, it also reveals the gap between Stirner and his philosophy, between us and the text as well.
Acknowledging this fragile composition, I will now reconstruct the strange logic of Stirner’s argument, step by step. My aim is to give a consistent reading of the text, articulated not in the order Stirner himself laid out, but as I reconstruct it through the text, perhaps even despite it. As Fred Madison said in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, “I like to remember things my own way. Not necessarily the way they happened.” This is one way through the twists and turns of Stirner’s argument, my way.
I
I am that I am—this is how God introduces himself to Moses, and Stirner follows suit. I am—not the tautology of I am I, as in Fichte, but a declaration of singularity: I am, this I, me. A seemingly non-controversial starting point, yet we know already that this is not a “presupposition” in the normal sense. It is not the posited fact of being a self that grants validity to starting with the I. Rather, the continuous act of positing myself grants stability to the individuality of I, or at least the appearance of stability. Recall Stirner’s disavowal: “I do not presuppose myself, because at any moment I just am positing or creating myself in the first place.”2 This incessant positing and creating is not supported by any hypokeimenon, any elemental substrate or immaterial identity; rather, the loop of self-creation is unceasing, occurring only on the surface of nothingness.
In order to make sense of Stirner’s unique understanding of the I, one should first differentiate it from Fichte’s superficially similar use of the same term. A Fichtean interpretation of Stirner would consider the I to be a fundamental a priori principle—that from which the particular I that I am could be deduced. Stirner’s “I”, however, is always mine first, never transcendental. Fichte’s “I” is a condition of possibility for experience as such. Stirner’s I is not a principle or thesis in the construction of any theoretical system, but a moment in a phenomenological description of experience from the first-person singular perspective.
Although both depart from the I, Stirner and Fichte’s conceptions are distinct in terms of form and function, content and method. Fichte’s transcendental “I”, according to Stirner, makes the same error as Feuerbach does with “humanity” and Marx does with “species-being”: it imposes an ahistorical and external form on the dynamic content of my existence; it attempts to determine the essence and limits of my experience according to an identity or principle alien to me. It is, in short, an identification of the non-identical. The reasons for this are not just philosophical, but social and political, since each fundamental categorization of the finite I according to some anthropological principle brings along with it social-political consequences for the organization of the state, economy, and society. Stirner wants to stop the machinery of alienation by blocking the initial categorization of the self as something external to its own self-determination. In one of the clearest statements of Stirner’s rejection of the unmediated identity of universality and particularity in the coerced fusion of species and I, he writes:
The species is nothing, and, if the individual lifts himself above the limits of his individuality, this is rather his very self as individual; he exists only in raising himself, he exists only in not remaining what he is; otherwise, he would be done, dead. The human being is only an ideal, the species only something thought. To be a human is not to realize the ideal of the human being, but to present oneself, the individual. It is not how I realize the universal human that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. I am my species, am without norm, without law, without model, etc. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the state.3
Without norm, without law, without model—I am nothing but what I make of myself, against my constraints, even if this turns out to be very little indeed. Stirner’s radical break with a priorism and all kinds of determinism—biological, metaphysical, material—strongly suggests an absolute freedom of the contingent I to determine its own conditions of possibility. Fichte’s transcendental I, and other similar forms of self-identification, must therefore be rejected.4
A different, more adequate interpretati
on of Stirner’s I is that it begins where Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ends.5 The dialectic of spirit ends in absolute knowledge, the moment when I truly know myself as I, this I which experiences itself as the movement and result of self-consciousness. As the mediated unity of subjective and objective consciousness, the self-aware, self-differentiating subject of absolute knowing does not rest in its “final” status. Rather, satisfied with the relation between its universal form and particular content, the I can finally begin to consume everything as its own.6 In the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on “Absolute Knowing”, Hegel makes this clear:
The nature, moments and movement of this [absolute] knowing have thus turned out to be such that this knowing is the pure being-for-itself of self-consciousness; it is ‘I’, which is this I and no other, and is just as much the immediately mediated or sublated [aufgehobenes] universal ‘I’. — It has a content that it differentiates from itself, for it is pure negativity or the dividing of itself; it is consciousness. This content is, in its differences, itself the ‘I’, for it is the movement of sublating itself, or the same pure negativity that is the ‘I’.7
Usually glossed over in Hegel’s concept of absolute knowing is its radical negativity, its power as a force of dissolution of everything separate from the I, everything alien to it. Stirner’s I begins from this radically negative standpoint of absolute knowledge, which now has no need to reflect backwards on its dialectical progression. On the contrary, the task is to move radically forward, consuming every obstacle in its path. This negativity of the I—its restless labor of dissolving externality into itself—propels Stirner’s negations of all fixed ideas. As Lawrence Stepelevich correctly notes,
His particular complementing of Hegel consisted in taking the ‘we’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology—that constant observer and sometimes director of the course of knowledge from its beginning in apparent sense-certainty to its conclusion in absolute knowledge—as himself… Stirner, however, does not give himself either the name ‘I’ or ‘Stirner’ but rather introduces into philosophical literature a new term intended to convey the note of radical exclusiveness, a term that would lie outside of all classifications: ‘Der Einzige.’8
Whereas Hegel’s task is to raise thought to the level of spirit, Stirner’s goal is to bring spirit back down to me. Only I, he says, as the unique one [Einzige] can do this. Stirner asks,
Who, then, will dissolve the spirit into its nothing? He who by means of spirit presented nature as nothing, finite, transitory, he alone can bring down spirit too to the same nothingness. I can do it, each one of you can who rules and creates as an unlimited I; in a word—the egoist can.9
The I that can do this does not emerge merely out of the path of negation, but also in an act of radical affirmation: I can. Stirner thus not only presupposes Hegel’s science of the experience of consciousness, he consumes it.
Individuals
Stirner begins by affirming the unique individuality of the I against all attempts to classify it, limit it. But how is this I an individual? It is not so easy to decipher the meaning of individuality in Stirner. To say that the I is an individual seems obvious, and yet, to determine the limits of individuality poses all sorts of metaphysical conundrums. The problem is not about what constitutes the essence of an individual, that is, some ideal unity, material cohesion, reason, name, etc. That question either ignores or takes for granted who this individual already is. The issue is rather about the scale and meaning of individuality as an ontological category.
Stirner’s dangerous question according to Deleuze, the question which unraveled and ruined the dialectic, is Which one?10 Which one is the subject of absolute knowing, which I bears the spirit of history? We can ask the same question concerning the individual: Which individual? Which individuality? A common assumption is that the individuality of the I is guaranteed by its body. The body is one, and since the self-positing, self-dissolving current of the I is empirically indistinguishable from the solid unity of the body, we can safely assume that the I is one as well. If individuality is established with reference to corporeally distinct human beings, then affirming the sovereignty of the I entails privileging human beings as individual persons. An individual, therefore, is a person.
Stirner rejects this. His argument is not anthropological, in fact cares little for anthropology, man, or the human species. He derides the political viewpoint that privileges human beings above all as “anthropocracy,” the rule of man.11 The point is rather ontological. The individuals that Stirner describes are entities, individuated bodies that reject formalization. We can see this most clearly in his persistent attack on generalities, which he calls spooks or specters. A generality is always deceptive to Stirner, perhaps necessary, but deceptive nonetheless. To unquestionably believe in generalities is to theologize, to import essences behind things, to act like the adolescent “Christian” who trusts in spirits, the citizen who believes in the state or the bourgeois who has faith in the market. Although this may seem like a kind of nominalism, it is not. For Stirner does not deny the existence of universals, he only denies their absoluteness, their unconditionality. To Stirner, universals are one-sided, incomplete expressions of truth. They thus must be domesticated, qualified and mediated through the singularity of individuals.
Stirner makes this clear when he criticizes humane liberalism for trying to fix a ground for equality between individuals in some common identity or trait: “I do not count myself as anything special, but as unique. Without a doubt, I am similar to others; however, this holds good only for comparison or reflection; in fact, I am incomparable, unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind. If you bring them under the generalities ‘flesh, mind’, those are your thoughts, which have nothing to do with my flesh, my mind.”12 Stirner does not disclaim the existence of general comparisons between individuals, but mediates them as partial representations of singularities. Even my flesh and mind—metonyms for the material and immaterial sides of my I—are also individual, uniquely incomparable parts of myself. Parts of myself, that is, qualities, characteristics, and properties, can also be conceived as individual. Their generality is only warranted by an epistemological or linguistic necessity. Deepening this reflection on the problem of universals, Stirner writes,
We are equal only in thoughts, only when ‘we’ are thought, not as we really and bodily are. I am I, and you are I: but I am not this thought-of I; this I in which we are all equal is only my thought. I am human, you are human: but ‘human’ is only a thought, a generality; neither you and I are speakable, we are unutterable, because only thoughts are speakable and consist in speaking.13
The generic equality between you and I as “we” does exist—in thought. Thoughts, universals, generalities are not unreal, but they are not all reality. The singularity of the individual can never be fully expressed in thought or speech, for both are partial expressions of the infinite negativity of I. To Stirner, speech is not a screen of transparent communication from one individual to the next, but a generalization of one’s individuality thrown against the generalization of another. The individual does not coincide with the speaking subject, but rather defies it. In this sense, individuality can only be thought as the movement of resistance within and against the logic of generalization. Otherwise, it is not thought at all, but enacted.
In another example, Stirner claims that the shift from Christian identity to the “newly discovered” human identity is only a step forward within religion, not out of religion.14 For “the subject is again subjected to the predicate, the individual to something general.”15 The political form of humanism is the state, that structure which “has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the individual—to make him subject to some generality or other.”16 The individual is therefore the “irreconcilable enemy of every generality.”17 However, subjection and predication occur not only with individual persons, but with any individual case of which we can speak and think. The individual subjec
ted to a predicate, “tamed” by a generality, can be this paper, that shadow, his smile, her kiss. Any of these things can be generalized away from the singularity of their existence into something other. In this sense, individuality does not entail the specific negation of generality, but rather a condition of it.
For Kant, the structuring of the manifold of experiences and objects is subsumed under the general categories of reason, and made coherent through the transcendental unity of apperception. For Stirner, reason’s labor of subsumption violates the singularity of individuals. This is why individuals, in the end, cannot be fully comprehended. To Stirner, “only thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It is not thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable, incomprehensible, that frees me from possession.”18
Possession here signifies being possessed by dogmas of thought. But individuals possessed by ideological spirits cannot exorcise themselves through thinking alone, since thoughts can never every fully escape their universal form of presentation. And this form itself is the problem for Stirner, for reason and language necessarily mutate every singularity into a universal. To break this sequence is to strike against the immanent production of transcendental illusions, a seemingly impossible task.
In this schema, not only are subjects considered individuals, but objects too. Yet, if everything that exists is ultimately an individual, then what is the status of universals? The problem of universals was a key issue in medieval and early modern philosophy, and still resonates in contemporary metaphysics.19 To Hobbes, “universals” do not exist except as common names used to describe the diversity of singular things: “There being nothing in the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of them individual and singular.”20 The convention of universal names is necessary, according to this view, because grasping the individuality of every object is impossible for the human mind. It would overload the ability to think across differences, crushing the capacity for generalization.
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