All Things Are Nothing to Me
Page 11
Levinas
In discussing the relation between two “uniques”, Stirner notes:
The last and most decided opposition, that of unique against unique, is at bottom beyond what is called opposition, but without having sunk back into ‘unity’ and unison… The opposition vanishes in complete––severance or uniqueness. This might indeed be regarded as the new point in common or a new parity, but here the parity consists precisely in the disparity, and is itself nothing but disparity, a par of disparity, and that only from him who institutes a ‘comparison.’100
This confrontation between unique and unique perfectly captures the relation between Stirner and Levinas, two wildly different philosophers whose thought touches at the extremes. Levinas, the 20th century French phenomenologist, declared that ethics is first philosophy. As the thinker of alterity, he argues for the ontological primacy of the “other” over oneself. Levinas’s phenomenological analysis of human beings results in the thesis that each and every human being has an infinite responsibility to the “other”. The infinity of the other is not just posited, according to Levinas, but concretely experienced in the relation between another and I, particularly through face-to-face interaction.
Between Stirner and Levinas, there appears to be an absolute contradiction of viewpoints: one privileges the “ego” above all others and one privileges the “other” above all egos. Yet, it can be shown that Levinas’s thought complements Stirner’s. Their disparate starting points allow them to meet on their own terms. Their differences only mask their proximity.
In the first half of Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, Levinas describes the preconditions for experiencing the infinity of the other person. He calls this phenomenological condition separation, complete atheistic egoism, and it forms the initial break with the concept of totality. With his unique syntax, Levinas writes:
To separate oneself, to not remain bound up with a totality, is positively to be somewhere, in the home, to be economically. The ‘somewhere’ and the home render egoism, the primordial mode of being in which separation is produced, explicit. Egoism is an ontological event, an effective rending, and not a dream running along the surface of being, negligible as a shadow. The rending of a totality can be produced only by the throbbing of an egoism, that is neither illusory nor subordinated in any way whatever to the totality it tends. Egoism is life: life from…, or enjoyment.101
The separated ego, according to Levinas, loves life and all its singular pleasures. The enjoyment of the ego is guaranteed by its separation from all generalities, by its absolute uniqueness or unicity, as Levinas calls it. “This logically absurd structure of unicity, this non-participation in genus,” Levinas claims, “is the very egoism of happiness.”102 The separated ego enjoys not only its life, but its possessions as well, for in its possessions it confirms its self once more.
With this brief description, it is easy to see the connection between Stirner and Levinas. In short, Stirner’s philosophy articulates the condition of possibility for Levinas’s ethics. The Einzige describes a radical separation, the negation of totality, that which refuses to be thematized or subsumed under any fixed concept. The individual—the owner, unique, I—is life expressed as enjoyment, or as Stirner calls it, self-enjoyment.
Levinas’s critical modification is to claim that this egoism of the ego, this anarchic I, is still too autarchic. Completely free to be what its ownness desires, Stirner’s ego is its own master. This means that the ownness of the I, even when incomprehensible or unintelligible to me, is still mine. The creative negativity that consumes gods, man and worlds as its property, that births the uniqueness of the owner from nothing, is inescapably bound to my will. Ownness, in other words, always refers back to me. This circle between the ego and its own, between the unique and its property, treats the power of ownness as a property of the contingent I. In attempting to free ownness by situating it in the empty core of one’s self, however, Stirner sinned against his own axiom: “If they nevertheless give you freedom, they are simply rogues who give you more than they have. For then they give you nothing of their own, but stolen goods: they give you your own freedom, the freedom that you must take for yourselves.”103 To be truly one’s own, the site of ownness should be displaced from oneself. If it remains within my I, then I cannot truly own it, for it was never taken, seized, expropriated. Ownness must come from the outside. To Levinas, this outside is the other. Ownness, therefore, comes from the experience of the other.
Without Stirner’s Einzige, the infinite relation to the other would always be blocked by a given mediation. The total secession from similarity through absolute difference and unicity rightly dissolves both comparison and unity. By shattering every fetter of generality, Stirner’s separated I can only be related to another through an absolute relation, an infinite one. For Levinas, the concretely experienced infinite relation is the ethical relation to the other.
The location of the origin of ownness is the difference that distinguishes Levinas from Stirner. Levinas shifts the site across the abyss of two singular individuals. This other unique one, the neighbor, communicates my ownness through the lens of their face. To a Levinasized Stirner, the infinite experience of the other counts as an experience of unowned ownness. Perhaps this explains the seeming paradox of why two philosophers whose philosophical projects center around diametrically opposed points—Stirner’s I vs. Levinas’s Other—are often described with the same adjective: anarchic.104
Unique
The unique has the power to consume all and be consumed in the process. This annihilating drive is not just negation or nihilism, but the full consumption of life. Stirner asks, “How does one use life?” Answering himself, he declares: “In using it up, like the candle, which one uses in burning it up. One uses life, and consequently himself the living one, in consuming it and himself. Enjoyment of life is using life up.”105 There is no authentic self to realize, no essence to reveal or identity to defend. There is only the singular experience of consuming life to its end. “The question runs not how one can acquire life, but how one can squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce the true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself out.”106
The drive to live oneself out, to dissolve oneself in the process of life, is a threat to anything that seeks to remain solid, stable in its identity. What wants to remain solid? Fixed ideas, spooks, gods, states, law, morality, truth, humanity—that whole gambit of alienated powers encountered in the first part of Der Einzige. These alienated properties constantly struggle to solidify the negativity of the owner into an identity, to wrest the uniqueness away from the I, to generalize it, capture it, control it. Stirner labels this process policing, more specifically, the police-care of the state.
Like Foucault a century later, Stirner claims that the police function of the state is not merely to coerce individuals, but to care for them. The state “presumes the worst about each one, and takes care, police-care, that ‘no harm happens to the state.’”107 Police-care is the taming of one’s life through one’s own self-repression. It is the creation of “spies” and “secret police” in all of us.108 Police-care of the self can also be expressed through one’s political identification with the state: “Anyone in whose head or heart both the state is seated, anyone possessed by the state, or the believer in the state, is a politician, and remains such to all eternity.”109
If the state is just a fixed idea, then will its consumption make it disappear? If I do not treat the state as an independent power over me, does it vanish? According to Marx, Stirner believes this to be the case, and thus, he is a fool. In The German Ideology, Marx writes,
On the contrary, now that he [Stirner] no longer looks at the world through the spectacles of his fantasy, he has to think of the practical interrelations of the world, to get to know them and act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic corporeality which the world had for him, he finds its real corporeality outside his fantasy.
With the disappearance of the spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the actual power of whom he can now at least appreciate in all its scope.110
Derrida punctuates this in Specters of Marx: “When one has destroyed a phantomatic body, the real body remains.”111 But what constitutes this “real” body? Work, labor, the “practical interrelations of the world.” One must now begin the work of mourning, the real work, factory work, production. For Derrida, this practical delaying and deferring of the ego’s fullness in its consumption constitutes Marx’s critical incision into the heart of Stirner’s project. For Marx, the consumption and dissolution of abstractions, ideologies and specters forms merely the preconditions for the real labor of materialist critique. Serious critique looks at the social, political, and historical conditions of production, not their reflection in idealist philosophy.
According to Marx, Stirner is a pre-materialist thinker. This is not convincing. In Der Einzige, Stirner sketches the practical obstructions that block the consumption of reified ideas and alienated relations: money, religion, law, power, police, submission, petition, vanity, addiction. In so doing, he does not provide the first step of materialist critique of social relations, but the last. In other words, Stirner should not be read as a pre-materialist thinker, ignoring the “practical interrelations of the world”. Neither should he be read as a materialist philosopher, centering his analysis solely on historical relations of production. Rather, he should be interpreted as post-materialist. That is, Stirner assumes the necessity of materialist analysis as a prior condition for the consumption and dissolution of reified ideas and alienated relations.
When the real body is destroyed, the phantom body remains—that is Stirner’s rebuff to Marx. Ideologies outlast their function, identities survive their origin, even economic systems carry on like zombies after they collapse. In attacking this particular establishment, that specific state or master, one unwittingly sets up another form of domination in the process. And this is not by chance. For Stirner, “the craving for a particular freedom always includes the purpose of a new domination.”112 This is why he favored social insurrection over political revolution; the former breaks with the form of rule, the latter only the content. The “progressive” transitions from Christianity to humanism, from monarchy to law, from slavery to work are all just a “change of masters” from one kind of rule to the next.113 The form outlasts the content, and so it too must be emptied.
State
If Stirner’s work is supplementary to materialist critique, then what is the status of those forms of alienated property which the unique dissolves in the process of its consumption? At their base, Stirner calls them “fixed ideas”, and one iteration of them is the “state.” But if the state as idea can only be consumed once we work through the materiality of its domination, then maybe a reversal of privileging needs to occur. The state should not be seen as one of many fixed ideas, but rather fixed ideas should be seen as one form of the state, as one state-form.
There is a reason why Stirner repeatedly focuses on the relation between the individual and the state, and not between the individual and other forms of alienation. The state’s conditioning of the individual as subject—vegetating in subjection, as Stirner puts it—provides the primary education for revolt. The experience of state-subjection enables one to confront fixed ideas, moralities, truths, and all other types of alienated property and ruling principles. If the nothing is the source of singularity, then the state is the seed of generality: “Every I is from birth already a criminal against the people, the state … The unrestrained I––and this we originally are, and in our secret inward parts we remain so always—is the never-ceasing criminal in the state.”114 The state formalizes fixed ideas, and dominates through them. Thus, every unique I must come up against the limits of the state. The unique nothing, the Einzige, consumes this power, and annihilates its false pretenses.
Stirner defines the state-form as a mode of structured dependency: “What one calls a state is a tissue and network of dependence and adherence; it is a belonging together, a binding together, in which those who are placed together fit themselves to each other, or in short, mutually depend on each other: it is the order of this dependence.”115 The state is an order of dependence, a tissue, providing both cohesion and stability for the individual. Ideas are spectral not because they have taken on corporeal form, but because their corporeality has doubled, from state-form to thought-form. Stirner describes this doubling as the “state in the state,” or hierarchy. But the unique consumes this as if it was nothing: “I am the annihilator of its existence, since in the creator’s realm it no longer forms a realm of its own, not a state in the state, but a creature of my creative––thoughtlessness.”116
Another state in the state is the political party. Stirner criticizes the party-form as well as its goals: “The party is nothing but a state in the state, and in this smaller bee-state ‘peace’ will also rule just as in the greater.”117 The bee-state is a reference to his earlier metaphor of the bees who, even when they join together—as Kropotkin meticulously describes in Mutual Aid—remain bees nonetheless, that is, subjects to a queen. The formation of a “free” people doubles this, only forming a new state-in-the-state.
Liberalism, police-care, humanism, Christianity, the party—all these state-forms work to generalize the unique and distribute its singularity across a field of abstractions. Their presence suffocates me, steals the unicity of my nothingness and replaces it with its own. The victor of this struggle is called the truth: “Their truth, therefore, is you, or is the nothing which you are for them and in which they dissolve: their truth is their nothingness.”118 Overcoming their truth means reappropriating truth as one’s own, killing it so that it may live again for oneself. Prefiguring Nietzsche here, Stirner claims that the materiality of truth is more a question of health than a question of fact:
The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive—namely, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me.119
Like all properties, truth relates to the health and power of an individual. It is affective, and gives us enjoyment. Spinoza describes this as the third form of knowledge, that knowledge which is indistinguishable from the feeling of joy and the creation of power. Spinoza, Stirner, and Nietzsche form a discrete union in their views on truth, power, joy and individuality. There is already much research on Spinoza and Nietzsche, but perhaps it is now time to splice Stirner in between.
Landauer
How do we consume Stirner and not let his thinking become stale? This problem opens up the question of Stirner’s influence, of his legacy in philosophy and psychology, his spectral presence in the shadows of existentialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, and capitalism, all of which Stirner has been associated with or accused of at one point or another.120
To take up just one of his many owners, I want to focus on Gustav Landauer, the Jewish, anarchist mystic of fin de siècle Germany. At one point in his life, Landauer, along with anarchist Erich Mühsam and others, took over Munich for three weeks in the infamous Bavarian Soviet Republic (April 6th to May 3rd, 1919), before it was crushed by forty thousand armed troops of the Weimar Republic. An influence on Buber, Benjamin, and Scholem, Landauer’s life and work has been nearly forgotten. Like Emma Goldman and other anarchists of the time, Landauer was fascinated by Max Stirner and saw in him a strange prophet whose ideas helped shape his heretical socialism.
On October 26th, 1901, in the newspaper Die Zukunft, Landauer published “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism.”121 This article criticizes the anarchists of his day. “These anarchists are not anarchic enough for me. They still act like a political party.”122 They are “certainly dogmatists,”123 their spook lies in believing �
��that one can—or must—bring anarchism to the world; that anarchy is an affair of all humanity; that there will indeed be a day of judgment followed by a millennial era. Those who want ‘to bring freedom to the world’—which will always be their idea of freedom—are tyrants, not anarchists.”124
Humanity, anarchy, freedom—spooks! Freedom cannot be given, it must be taken, owned. And not simply by violent attacks or peaceful petitions. “The old opposition between destruction and construction begins to lose its meaning: what is at stake are new forms that have never been.”125 These new forms are not to be longed for, hoped for, waited for—that is all too Christian for Stirner, and Landauer as well: “Anarchy is not a matter of the future; it is a matter of the present. It is not a matter of making demands; it is a matter of how one lives.”126 What does it mean, then, to live? How should one become an individual? Landauer writes,
To me, someone without a master, someone who is free, an individual, an anarchist, is one who is his own master, who has unearthed the desire that tells him who he truly wants to be. This desire is his life. The way to heaven is narrow. The way to a newer, higher form of human society passes by the dark, fatal gate of our instincts and the terra abscondita—the ‘hidden land’—of our soul, which is our world. This world can only be constructed from within. We can discover this land, this rich world, if we are able to create a new kind of human being through chaos and anarchy, through unprecedented, intense, deep experience. Each one of us has to do this. Once this process is completed, only then will anarchists and anarchy exist, in the form of scattered individuals, everywhere. And they will find each other. But they will not kill anyone except themselves—in the mystical sense, in order to be reborn after having descended into the depths of their soul.127