One should be cautious here, for Stirner is not saying that freedom is insignificant. He is only questioning its unparalleled rank in the hierarchy of goods, as well as the means by which one achieves it. To choose the “I” as beginning, middle, and end is to decide on how one seeks freedom in the first place, where it is sought, and to what ends. Ownness orients the generality of freedom back to the singularity of the individual. This disalienation of freedom is its very consumption. Praising freedom while ignoring the conditions by which it is realized only mystifies its power over us. Stirner rather asks, who frees who, how, and when? Between a vague hope for freedom and a clear presence of I, Stirner chooses I:
Am I not worth more than freedom? Am I not the one that makes myself free, am not I the first? Even unfree, even in a thousand fetters, I still am; and I am not, like freedom, only existing in the future and in hopes, but even as the most abject slave I am—present.76
A slave can be her own while not being free, Stirner claims, whereas a slave not her own can never be free. Ownness thus conditions freedom, determining its proper form as self-emancipation. Self-emancipation as the meaning of owned freedom parallels Stirner’s earlier discussion of self-empowerment as the meaning of owned property. “All freedom is essentially—self-emancipation—that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my ownness.”77 Freedom in the form of self-emancipation is absolute. Anything besides self-emancipation is only a “particular freedom” and, as Stirner argues, a “piece of freedom is not freedom.”78 There are two meanings of freedom here: one conditioned by ownness and accomplished through acts of self-liberation, and one conditioned by others, accomplished through “petitioning” and granted by “grace.”79 The explicitly political value of Stirner’s concepts become clearer here, for not only does he describe different strategies for becoming free, but different meanings underlying them as well.
Stirner makes this point through the example of freedom of speech and a free press. This was a crucial political issue for Stirner since his friends, “The Free”, were constantly getting arrested, and their work often censored and banned. In fact, Stirner’s own book was immediately banned upon publication, but was released a few days later because the Minister of Interior considered it “too absurd to be dangerous.”80 Directly challenging his own persecuted friends, he puts forward the argument that the demand for free speech only furthers one’s subjugation. Like property, true freedom cannot be bestowed, only taken. To ask for permission to be free is thus absurd, since that renders one’s freedom dependent on the grace of another, and thus unfree. Thus, “freedom of the press is only permission of the press, and the state never will and never can voluntarily allow me to smash it by means of the press.”81 For speech to be truly free, it must be free from the state, not within it. Petitioning for freedom is like asking someone else to eat for you.
Instead of asking for a free press, Stirner provokes us to occupy it: “Ownness of the press, or property in the press, that is what I will take.”82 To read this as literally “owning” the press in the capitalist sense of private property is ridiculous, for no matter who legally owns it, the limits of speech are still regulated by the state. Press-ownness means creating one’s own means of speech in whatever shape or form, legal or not. To make the press into one’s own property is to expropriate it, consume it, negate it and replace it. Freedom is thus achieved only when asking for it becomes irrelevant. “I am not wholly free until I ask about nothing.”83
In another example, Stirner describes how proletarians in the modern bourgeois state are dependent on capitalists for their income. “But how is it with one who has nothing to lose, how is it with the proletarian? Since he has nothing to lose, he doesn’t need state protection for his ‘nothing.’”84 The capitalist state does nothing for the worker, except “suck his blood dry.” Wage-labor “is not recognized as to its value; it is exploited, a spoil.” The whole “machinery of the state” is poised against workers, biased in favor of the private-property-owning capitalists. Because of their non-possession, proletarians “have nothing to lose” when they revolt. Asking for higher pay in order to “realize” the true value of their labor is absurd, since proletarians already have the “most enormous power in their hands.”85 That is, workers have the power to strike, to refuse work. But they must recognize this power first, and claim it as their own. If only the workers became “conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only have to stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs, and enjoy.”86 In other words, class struggle gets the goods. Proletarians do not emancipate themselves by begging, by compromise and petitions. They get free by recognizing their own power, and acting upon it. To realize this power is at the same time to abolish their own status as powerless, propertyless subjects.
Here once more, Stirner situates power in the hands of those who are subjugated, those who not only have nothing, but need nothing. Their ownness is the source from which they draw power to realize their value and overturn their alien conditions. This not only means striking from labor, but striking against labor as well. And what if the state or capitalist concedes and offers to set you free? Stirner’s anti-libertarian response: “The one set free is nothing but a probationer, a libertinus, a dog dragging a piece of chain with him: he is an unfree man in the garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion’s skin.”87
Self-Consumption
Out of ownness, the owner consumes its properties, rendering them nothing. That is, it incorporates otherness into itself, and affirms its own power as unique. It seems as though the owner exists both outside and inside its own activity of consumption. Outside, since it exists separate from its property, consuming it as its own; inside, since the owner is not grounded by some transcendental ego, but only exists in its activity. Where, then, is the I? Is it a black hole that absorbs everything into itself? Is it a fixed point, an absolute ground, an ontological substance? “The I is not all, but destroys all,” Stirner remarks. “Only the self-dissolving I, the never-being I, the—finite I is actually I.”88 The actual, finite I is not a stable ground of action or consumption. Rather, it is produced through its consumption, and consumed through its production. Produced, since the I emerges out of the singular history of its own consumption. And consumed, because the I dissolves into the temporal stream of its own production. Circulating through production and consumption, Stirner’s “self-dissolving I” takes on and discards multiple forms of appearance, but always circles back to the creative nothing at the center of its ownness.
Stirner’s use of economic language is no accident, for he takes individuals first of all to be consuming and producing beings, with material wants, bodily desires, and physical needs, and not as autonomous free wills with abstract rights, moral duties, and universal consciousness. Economic relations of property, not ideal categories of right, form the material conditions for life. To gain power over one’s life then requires appropriating those conditions, owning them, consuming them, dissolving them, and using them for oneself. It means becoming an owner, not something owned, becoming a unique I, not a generic bearer of alien functions. The unique I, however, must not be confused with its material body and properties; it is never identical with its conditions, but rather expressed through the singular and dynamic process of consuming those conditions.
Neither a formal essence nor a material body, Stirner’s I at points resembles the self-mediating power of negativity that Hegel identifies as spirit or Geist. But whereas Hegel sees the absolute subject-object of Geist in the movement of history towards freedom, Stirner sees the end of history in me, this one, I. To begin from myself means owning these presuppositions of history, these conditions of what I am and what I could be, consuming them, discarding them, becoming something else. Never satisfied with one constellation of property and self, the owner consumes itself as its consumes the world.
In other words, for the owner to remain its own, it must tirelessly ward off its own petrification i
nto something alien, dead. It must dissolve itself whenever it becomes fixed in one form, one identity. That means, it must become food to itself, property to be consumed. How can I become my own property? This is not an economic-legal question but an ethico-political one. Not how can I acquire a property right in myself, but how can I relate to myself such that I remain my own even in the form of another. In Stirner’s framework, to become my own property means allowing myself to be consumed by my ownness. It means letting go of myself, renouncing my absolute will to be unique, separate from others, for that too traps me into one form of being I. To remain one’s own is thus to let go of the will to be only one’s own.
Ownness, however, needs no permission to act upon me. It takes, occupies, expropriates and dissolves my I into nothing, so that I can be reborn again, produced and consumed anew. Where does the I fall in this process? This is the wrong question, for the I is not in this process, but is this process. “That I consume myself, means only that I am.”89 I am an auto-cannibal, eating myself to protect myself from my own loss into something other, something fixed, alien. If I fail to destroy myself on my own terms, then I am destroyed by another. The process by which one loses oneself precisely due to the fact that one attacks one’s own defenses can be called autoimmunity.
Jacques Derrida described an “autoimmunitary process” as “that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity.”90 Derrida relates this medical logic to the political procedure behind the event of September 11th, 2001. On a different scale, no less singular, an autoimmunitary logic can be attributed to each and every instance in which an individual loses itself in something alien, some fixed generality it can no longer control or even recognize itself within. For instance, becoming a “citizen”, a “worker”, or a “human.” All these slippages occur against the owner’s own internal protection against fixity. These identities (citizen, worker, human) are better conceived as immunities. These immunities supply the backbone to community as opposed to the ownness that defines Stirner’s union or association. Stirner interprets these collapses into alienated identities as self-incurred processes, as the result of one’s own failure to consume oneself. Fixed identities are practices of the self that no longer care for itself. Every time I fail to consume myself as property, I reify myself, and acquire an identity. I am no longer I but it.
Right before Stirner walks off stage in the same manner he strutted on (in the clothes of Goethe, announcing “all things are nothing to me”), he restates this paradoxical, ethical injunction. In order to own oneself, one must affirm their own self-negation. In other words, one must acknowledge the finitude of existence not as some ultimate ground of meaning, but as one last property to be consumed: “If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself.”91 The self-consumption of the I is thus not a heroic act of freedom or autonomy but rather a submission to the power of ownness and the dissolution of identity. To be a unique one, concerned only for oneself, is to be nothing, nothing at all.
Nothing
Before this final exit, Stirner distinguishes his positions from that of Feuerbach and Hegel, the philosophical authorities of his time. Stirner opposes himself to them not in order to produce some “third thing that shall ‘unite’” all the differences, some synthesis or such.92 No third party will show the truth behind opposing sides, no common trait or equal point will be shared. As he puts it, “the opposition deserves rather to be sharpened.”93 In this sharpening, Stirner coughs up another clue into the cannibalism of the ego:
Feuerbach, in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, is always insisting upon being. In this, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, he too is stuck fast in abstraction; for ‘being’ is abstraction, as is even ‘the I’. Only I am not abstraction alone: I am all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing: I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world. Hegel condemns the own, mine [das Meinige] –– ‘opinion’ [Meinung]. ‘Absolute thinking’ is that which forgets that it is my thinking, that I think, and that it exists only through me. But I, as I, devour again what is mine, am its master; it is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change, annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach wants to smite Hegel’s ‘absolute thinking’ with unconquered being. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is my being, as the other is my thinking.94
Foreshadowing Marxist critiques of ideology, poststructuralist critiques of meta-narratives, and standpoint critiques of epistemology, Stirner’s claim here is simple. Nominally, it is that Feuerbach’s “sensuous” philosophy relies on abstraction as much as Hegel’s “absolute” philosophy does. Feuerbach and Hegel, according to Stirner, both reify thought and being, separating them from me, the finite owner of thoughts and being. For Stirner, I am the living negativity that provides the fuel for idealist and materialist philosophies. Absolute thinking is my thought, unthinkable being is my being—I am all of them and none of them, for they are mine to use and abuse at will. Being and thought are my predicates, my properties, not my essence or ideal, but merely my food.
How am I “all and nothing”? The all of the I can be correlated to the ownness of the owner, that which remains even through one’s self-consumption. But what about the nothing of the I? This nothing is not a simple negation of the all, but rather its very condition. The totality of the I—my property, power, consumption, dissolution, and even ownness—is grounded in nothing. All relations and actions of my I circulate into and out of this nothing. Stirner calls this the “creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”95 This nothing is not empty, but rather the source of the I’s ownness. The I is not a thing, it cannot be reduced to a thing, or come from anything. As a singular non-thing, the I can only come from nothing. One way to grasp the “creative nothing” out of which the I as creator creates everything is to think of it as time. Stirner hints at this when he writes that the true way to become who you are is to “dissolve yourself as time dissolves everything.”96 For time is the non-thing that destroys and gives life to all things, that consumes and produces everything as its own, that annihilates and creates everything out of itself. All things are nothing to me, for I am time, the destroyer of all things.
Stirner gives a proper name to the nothing that is I. As that which has no substance, no distinguishing marks, no differences, it can be named precisely for being different in its radical indifference. Absolutely split from all, the nothing is not only singular, but the source of singularity. Anything else is “something”, that is, already related to other things. The nothing is that from which ownness emerges. The consumption and dissolution of any thing separate from me as my own property confirms my power, my ownness. Ownness, to Stirner, is not grounded in any other principle; it comes from nowhere, from nothingness, no place at all. But this nothingness, due to its radical indifference to all, marks it as singular. As such, this nothingness deserves a proper name, proper because it has no generality.
Stirner’s philosophy hinges on this nomination, this proper name for the I: the Unique [Der Einzige]. The unique is the proper name for the nothing that conditions our being. But this name is also not a name, for any name that can express the nothingness of the I would make it into something, and thus reify it.97 In his replies to critics, Stirner dwells upon this problem of naming the unique. Writing in the third person, he welcomes this paradox of the unnameable name: “Stirner names the unique and says at the same time that ‘names don’t name it.’ He utters a name when he names the unique, and adds that the unique is only a name…The unique is an expression with which, in all frankness and honesty, one recognizes that he is expressing nothing.”98 Stirner rejects every attempt to fix one’s identity through a concept.
To call onesel
f “unique” is to thus to recognize the lack of self-identity and to acknowledge the impossibility of attributing a fundamental essence to oneself. Instead, Stirner highlights the contingency of any and every property of oneself, whether that be reason, language, mind, sociality, humanity or whatever.
All things are nothing to me, but yet I am. The proper name for the nothingness of the I is Einzige, or unique. This name communicates without communicating anything. It has no conceptual content, except in expressing its emptiness. Stirner wants a concept that communicates non-conceptually, a word that expresses non-linguistically, a name that names non-nominally. The content of the Einzige negates the form of its enunciation, and yet this negation is telling of its content. Stirner’s dance with nominalism thus comes to a head in proposing a name that names nothing except the unnameability of a singular nothing:
The unique is a word, and everyone is always supposed to be able to think something when he uses a word; a word is supposed to have thought content. But the unique is a thoughtless word; it has no thought content. So then what is its content, if it is not thought? It is content that cannot exist a second time and so also cannot be expressed, because if it could be expressed, actually and wholly expressed, it would exist for a second time; it would exist in the ‘expression.’ Since the content of the unique is not thought content, the unique cannot be thought or said; but since it cannot be said, it, this perfect phrase, is not even a phrase.99
Since the unique names nothing, it does not even matter that it is just a word, for it is a word used against the tendency to fix its meaning in language. To be unique is not to be a word or an idea, but to be oneself, I, this nothing. An I is unique precisely in how it relates to the nothing from which it emerges and towards which it courses. To be a unique one then means attempting to own the nothingness that underlies one’s brief existence. In other words, it is to own time.
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