The individual is something quite new which creates new things, something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own. Ultimately, the individual derives the values of his acts from himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative.41
The individual contains the history of its evolution. Nonetheless, it is unique. It interprets, that is, consumes and owns its world as well as its values. “All its acts are entirely its own.” Even expropriating something of another can still be a “creative” act. Nietzsche:
The ‘I’ subdues and kills: it operates like an organic cell: it is a robber and violent. It wants to regenerate itself—pregnancy. It wants to give birth to its god and see all mankind at his feet.42
Nietzsche’s description of the individual I parallels Stirner’s portrayal of the all-consuming and all-dissolving individual owner, the I that expropriates and destroys its property in order to remain unique. The I acquires its content through the theft of experience; it is a “criminal” in Stirner’s vocabulary, set against every attempt to capture it. Continually regenerating itself, presupposing itself, consuming itself—the I never rests. While Nietzsche’s individual gives birth to gods, Stirner’s I consumes them. This is perhaps the greatest difference between Stirner and Nietzsche. Stirner eats gods, dissolving their potency and using their power for himself. Nietzsche births gods, creating new ones beyond himself that one day will exceed him as well.43
For Nietzsche, as with Stirner, there is nothing hidden beneath the mask of the ego; the “ego” as such is an illusion, a spook projected onto those who do not conform to the image of a proper subject, citizen, worker, consumer, or human being. “The ‘subject’ is only a fiction,” Nietzsche writes, “the ego of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist at all.”44 This does not mean that individuals do not exist, only that there is no generic individual. Each I is constituted by the singular history of its actions and conditions, property and consumption.
Stirner and Nietzsche both mock the socialism of their day, but their targets and reasons are different. Stirner’s derision towards “social liberalism” and what he calls “communism” is a critique of utopian socialist ideology of the 1840s, not a denunciation of actual workers’ struggles or revolts of the poor and oppressed. For Nietzsche, the actual socialist movements are nothing more than expressions of slave morality, decrepit egalitarianism, and bad health. Also, their “collectivism” betrays a weak kind of individualism, one which reflects a modest, unconscious stage of the will to power:
Individualism is a modest and unconscious form of the ‘will to power’; here it seems sufficient to the individual to get free from an overpowering domination by society (whether that of the state or of the church). He does not oppose them as a person, but only as an individual; he represents all individuals against the totality. Socialism is merely a means of agitation employed by individualism: it grasps that, to attain anything, one must organize to a collective action, to a ‘power’. Anarchism, too, is merely a means of agitation employed by socialism; by means of it, socialism arouses fear, by means of fear it begins to fascinate and to terrorize: above all—it draws the courageous, the daring to its side, even in the most spiritual matters. All this notwithstanding: individualism is the most modest stage of the will to power.45
Nietzsche reads Stirner’s individualism as the secret motivation behind socialism, since socialism only ever desires a collectivist order of equal egos. This weak individualism does not rise to the true overcoming that Nietzsche seeks. Whereas Nietzsche understands the individual as only one expression of the will to power, Stirner’s Einzige does not express any other deeper force, for any other constraint would bind the radical singularity of the I to another property, and hence, rob it of its unconditioned nature. One could interpret Nietzsche’s criticism of weak individualism similarly to Stirner’s critique of humane liberalism. In that case, the stated individualism is only individualism-for-another-purpose, e.g., humanity, the good, etc. Stirner’s immodest egoism cares little for such causes. Nietzsche, however, still remains enthralled by a spook, a cause beyond himself—the will to power. Stirner ultimately lets go of that as well.
Expropriation
How does the owner relate to its property? Proudhon, in his 1840 treatise What is Property?, writes: “Roman law defined property as the right to use and abuse one’s own within the limits of the law—jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur.”46 He then illustrates the continued use of this definition in the Declaration of Rights of Man of 1793 and in the Napoleonic Code of 1804, article 544. Distinguishing between property and possession, he states that the former concerns absolute domain and sovereignty over the thing (naked property), whereas the latter concerns only a “matter of fact.” To clarify this distinction, he offers a comparison: if “a lover is a possessor,” then “a husband is a proprietor.”47 Proudhon’s aim is to defend possession against property, to prove the injustice behind the so-called “natural right” of property, and argue for its abolition.
“What is property?” Proudhon wonders. Property is theft! A robbery of our common nature and our common labor. Possession, on the other hand, is a necessary part of social life; it is the temporary use of things for personal purposes. Possession cannot be abolished, since it is intrinsic to all human societies, a fact of life. Stirner clearly lifts his definition of property from Proudhon, but instead of advocating for its abolition, he radicalizes it. Stirner asserts,
Property is the expression for unlimited dominion over something (thing, animal, human being) which ‘I can dispose of at my will.’ According to Roman law, indeed, ‘ius utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur’, an exclusive and unlimited right; but property is conditioned by power. What I have in my power, that is my own. As long as I assert myself as possessor, I am the owner of the thing; if it gets away from me again, no matter by what power, for instance, through my recognition of another’s claim to the thing—then the property is lost. Thus, property and possession coincide. No right lying outside my power legitimizes me, but solely my power: if I no longer have it, then the thing slips away from me.48
Instead of seeing property as a relation constrained by law, Stirner takes property solely as a relation of power against the law. The law, as fixed idea and norm, constrains my power, blocks it and gives my property to the state; the law determines what I can and cannot own, and since law is the property of the state, the state is the ultimate owner of my property. To be an owner in Stirner’s sense of the term, that is, an owner against the law and state, does not mean that one should renounce private property in favor of small-scale personal possession. Stirner does not see the benefit in abolishing private property and returning it to the so-called original possessor of “society” or some “board of equity”, as Proudhon proclaims. That would only transfer the power to expropriate to someone else, and thus, grant others the right to steal from me. The goal is rather to empty the idea of property of any sacred right whatsoever, to desecrate it, loot its content.
To call property theft is to presuppose the concept of property and to criticize theft, whereas for Stirner, property should be praised since it first allows the possibility of theft! “Property is not theft, but a theft becomes possible only through property.”49
Theft is not intrinsically wrong, to Stirner. Rather, he thinks that theft is just one way of changing ownership. If he believed in rights, which he does not, then he would say that everyone has a right to steal. For Stirner, property has nothing to do with protecting or securing my liberty; it rather forms the basis for mutual violation—a positive social relation. When no one can violate the property of another, when no one can take another’s property for themselves, then all remain powerless. Since the true basis of property according to Proudhon lies in labor and society, he proposes to safegu
ard personal possessions and abolish property. Stirner conversely suggests associating in common for the sake of taking the property of the few:
There are some things that belong only to a few, and to which the rest of us will now lay claim or—siege. Let us take them, because one comes to property by taking, and the property we still lack now came to the owners also only by taking. It can be better put to use if it is in all our hands than if the few control it. Let us therefore associate ourselves for the purpose of this robbery (vol).50
Yet, Proudhon remains enamored by ghosts. Instead of recognizing the contingency and force at the source of property relations, he considers the “spook of society as a moral person,”51 as the original possessor and sole proprietor, as that spirit to whom we should return the stolen goods. Although Proudhon calls himself an anarchist, he makes the same error as the liberals, Christians and communists. In one way or another, according to Stirner, all of them replace the individual and its power with some alien cause and its authority.52 For Stirner, there is only one law of property: “Whoever knows how to take and to claim the thing, to them it belongs until it is again taken from them, as freedom belongs to those who take it.”53
All property follows the logic of occupation. To own is to occupy, to deploy force in relation to things and persons; property names this activity, not the thing. “My property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me; only my power is my own. Not this tree, but my power or disposal over it, is what is mine.”54
Stirner thus interprets property as a form of squatting, and justifies it. If property is a relation of power between individuals concerning external things, then the limits of property extend to the limits of one’s power to claim and defend something as their own. This understanding of property suggests the same strategy that Marx and Kropotkin all thought were essential if the poorest class was ever to succeed in regaining its power and dignity: expropriation. To expropriate in this sense does not mean to turn over private property to the state for the public good, but to take the property of another for one’s own good, one’s own friends or class, as it were. Whether accomplished by oneself or united with others, whether against capitalists, bureaucrats, or the state, expropriation is the self-emancipation of the Einzige.
Everyone is either an expropriator or an expropriated. Property must therefore be taken in order to be owned, not petitioned, protested or bought. Stirner’s point is that expropriation is not just a means of responding to the contemporary distribution of wealth; rather, expropriation is internal to the logic of property as such. All property is based on expropriation in some sense. This does not invalidate it, but reveals its truth. No one is going to simply give up their “unjustly” acquired property to a public authority. Everyone must take the chance to expropriate for themselves. Stirner calls this self-empowerment. Anything less is charity.
Consumption
Property names a relation of power, a certain manifestation of force that binds an object to an owner without it in turn determining the owner itself. Since property is not guaranteed by any authority to Stirner, it is ultimately precarious, continuously at risk of being lost. Property can be lost in two ways: it can either be taken by another (through someone else’s power)55 or it can transform into something else—fixed, solid, and sacred. If I do not keep guard over myself and my property, what I consider mine can become other, it can become my owner. This is the process of alienation and reification outlined earlier in relation to fixed ideas.
It is easier to protect one’s property from someone else than it is to guard it from oneself. To own something is a practice, a technique or skill that must be continually renewed in relation to the object at hand; if not, the property relation will harden, coagulate, and petrify. In order to secure one’s property against this particular kind of threat, one must constantly destroy its separation from the owner. That is, one must consume it, dissolve and annihilate it. The loss of property is the triumph of its autonomization. Any relation that escapes the power of individuals to control it is doomed. Stirner: “I want only to take care that I secure my property to myself; and, in order to secure it, I continually take it back into myself, annihilate it in every movement toward independence and consume it before it can fix itself and become a ‘fixed idea’ or an ‘addiction’.”56 If property becomes an addiction or obsession, then it controls me, determines me; it is not mine, but I am its. The addict’s relation to its own property is a fixation, as Freud might say, a pathological investment of power in an object or relation that fixes the ego in a particular stage of development; fixed ideas and addictions to particular properties are thus symptoms of a blocked besetzung.57 When this occurs, I am no longer my own. I am occupied [besetzt] or possessed [besessen] by the thing. To maintain myself against my property, I must then devour it whole.
To know whether I own property or property owns me is then the test of its abuse, violation, and destruction. To destroy property is to reveal who is the true owner of it. When workers go on strike and destroy their own tools, when youth riot, burn their own neighborhoods and loot their own stores, when students occupy their own universities and render them inoperative, it is an assertion of ownership over the property in question, an assertion of power that validates the criteria of who and what rules. If a thing cannot be nothing to me, then it is not properly mine.58
Consumption, for Stirner, describes the real process by which an owner abolishes the separated power of the object of property. The form of consumption extends to all possible kinds of interaction between the ego and its own: eating, criticizing, wasting, wearing, whatever. To consume is to temporarily dissolve the gap between the subjective and objective sides of experience, to erase the independence and power of the owned, and compound the independence and power of the owner. To Stirner, consumption is the means by which fixed ideas, relations, and objects lose their external and objective form, and are released into free use.
To be clear, consumption does not mean the abolition of mediation in general or the celebration of pure immediacy; those are the delusional fantasies of a childlike ego. Rather, consumption incorporates its mediations, absorbs them into one’s power as property to be used and abused at will. There is no I without relationality, separation, or mediation; those are parts of oneself as much as anything else. To consume them is to dissolve their power over me, their capacity to determine me against myself. Domination can appear in myriad guises—immediately and mediated, directly and indirectly. One should thus beware of welcoming the content of slavery in the form of freedom. Indeed, binding one’s liberation to a fixed and frozen form of experience ensures the loss of oneself into a petrified state of being.
Out of consumption, I create myself. This unique pool of nothing into and out of which property flows is only conceivable when ripped from its activity and stabilized in thought and words. This analytic procedure punctures the flow of consuming, dissolving and creating, and allows for the owner to be named: I. But as Stirner repeats, this is only a thought-of I, not a living I. I cannot be fixed in language any more than I can fix language once and for all. This problem should not be avoided or mystified, but consumed. That means, recognizing the power of language over me, and letting go of trying to conquer it from within. Stirner writes,
I have thoughts only as human; as I, I am at the same time thoughtless. One who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only human, is a slave to language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or ‘the word’ tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this unrecognized ‘freedom of thought’ or freedom from thought, are you your own. Only from this do you succeed in consuming language as y
our property.59
Thinking and speaking are fundamental properties of the human being. Fine, Stirner retorts, but I do not want to be just human. To be merely human is to adapt oneself to a generic category, an empty container in which the dead weight of stale tradition and social convention predetermines the limits of one’s thoughts and the meaning of one’s words. Stirner rather wants to eat language and chew on history, to masticate and spit out half-baked concepts, to consume and be consumed by others in his own peculiar way. To step off the rails of thinking involves withdrawing from common patterns of thought, dissolving their autonomous power, and letting the unthought come to the fore. Whether this involves releasing the unconscious, confronting the uncanny, or speaking the taboo, Stirner is open to the infinite possibilities that arise when one stops trying to force oneself into processed containers of meaning.
Consuming language, or putting it to use as one’s property, means freely creating, negating, and developing words and thoughts at will. To balance thinking with thoughtlessness, at Stirner recommends, means circumventing the confines of petrified concepts, freeing oneself from the traditions of past categories, classifications, and identities. Thoughtlessness is not some mystical disengagement from life. On the contrary, it is an acute attentiveness to oneself and to the unconscious presuppositions of one’s thinking and speaking. For only through disciplined focus can one avoid becoming ensnared in one’s own head. To abstain from the temptation of certain general ideas takes work, perhaps training. In another era, Stirner might have even been called a Stoic.
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