All Things Are Nothing to Me

by Jacob Blumenfeld

  To become a free individual is to kill the master in oneself, consuming and dissolving oneself in the process. It means finding one’s ownness and finding others who have found their ownness as well. This is how one singularizes life, gives it a meaning and power from which to connect to others as something more than just a particular member of a generality, but instead as a universal singularity. “They will find each other,” Landauer writes with assurance. Only through an “unprecedented, intense, deep experience” of “chaos and anarchy” can individuals birth a new world, together. These “scattered individuals” do not resign themselves to isolation, apathy or nihilism, but throw themselves into the fire of life, burning every last instant up.

  To understand Landauer’s appropriation of Stirner, one needs to know a little bit about Jewish mysticism. In the mystical branch of Judaism known as Lurianic Kabbalah, God does not simply create the world out of nothing. Rather, as infinite, it must first contract itself, limit itself to make room for nothingness, emptiness. Only in this emptiness can it create something, can it bring forth creations from itself. Through its withdrawal, or tsimtsum, it allows space for creation. In exile from itself, God then pours its divine essence into ten vessels or Sephirot which can receive and transmit its infinite light in various shades. But these vessels are too fragile to contain the light, they break open, shattering the divine essence into scattered sparks across the universe. The shattering of the vessels, shevirat ha-kelim, produces chaos. According to Gerschom Scholem:

  Nothing remains in its proper place. Everything is somewhere else. But a being that is not in its proper place is in exile. Thus, since that primordial act, all being has been a being in exile, in need of being led back and redeemed. The breaking of the vessels continues into all the further stages of emanation and Creation; every thing is in some way broken, everything has a flaw, everything is unfinished. 128

  In exile, the scattered sparks of the divine mingle with the material world. They are trapped, waiting for release. Only through individual human acts of tikkun, repairing or mending, can the world be redeemed.129 But this “redemption is no longer looked upon as a catastrophe, in which history itself comes to an end, but as the logical consequence of a process in which we are all participants.”130 Landauer fuses this mystical anarchism with Stirner’s savage “egoism” in order to create something uniquely his own.131 For Stirner, I consume the world by dissolving my relation to property, and releasing my ownness, my nothingness: “I, this nothing, will bring forth my creations from myself.”132 Landauer lyrically translates the power of self-consuming ownness into forms of self-negating tikkun:

  One acts with others; one purses municipal socialism; one support farmers’, consumers’, and tenants’ cooperatives; one creates public gardens and libraries; one leaves the cities and works with spade and shovel; one organizes and educates; one simplifies one’s material life for the sake of spiritual luxury; one struggles for the creation of new school and new forms of education. However! None of this will really bring us forward if it is not based on a new spirit won by the conquest of one’s inner self. We are all waiting for something great – something new. All of our art bears witness to the anxiety involved in preparing for its arrival. But what we are waiting for can only come from ourselves, from our own being. It will come once we force the unknown, the unconscious, up into our spirit; it will come once our spirit loses itself in the spiritless psychological realms that await us in the caverns of our souls. This marks our renewal as human beings, and it marks the arrival of the world we anticipate. Mere intervention in the public sphere will never bring this world about. It is not enough for us to reject conditions and institutions; we have to reject ourselves.133

  All these acts of resistance and creation, of destruction and construction, are wrecked upon the anxiety and anticipation of the world to come. But this world will never just arrive, it can only be produced. This production of the unknown, this forced renewal of the unconscious, does not emerge through political intervention, but through self-negation. For we ourselves are the broken vessels, and we must break ourselves once more in order to repair the world. One must be prepared to be consumed in the process. For Landauer, the revolutionary task is not to organize the future step by step, but to release it from the strictures of the present into the freedom of uncertainty. Redemption runs through the narrow gate of self-annihilation, in which one’s fixed identity as I, you, or we is reborn in new modes of being and new forms of relating:

  ‘Do not kill others, only yourself’–such will be the maxim of those who accept the challenge to create their own chaos in order to discover their most authentic and precious inner being and to become one with the world in a mystical union. What these human beings will be able to bring to the world will be so extraordinary that it will seem to have come from a world altogether unknown. Whoever brings the lost world in himself to life–to individual life–and whoever feels like a true part of the world and not as a stranger: he will be the one who arrives not knowing where from, and who leaves not knowing where to. To him the world will be what he is to himself. They will live among each other in common – as belonging together. This will be anarchy. It might be a distant goal. However, we have already come to the point where life seems without reason if we do not aim for the unconceivable. Life means nothing to us if it is not an infinite sea promising eternity. Reforms? Politics? Revolution? It is always more of the same. Anarchism? What most anarchists like to present to us as an ideal society is too often merely rational and stuck in our current reality to serve as a guiding light for anything that could or should ever be in the future. Only he who accounts for the unknown gives an adequate account, for the true life, and the human beings that we truly are, remain unnamed and unknown. Hence, not war and murder – but rebirth.134

  “Do not kill others, only yourself”: this is Landauer’s ethical reading of Stirner’s call to uniqueness. Landauer does not care about this reform or that law; even ideal utopias are nothing but rational extensions of the present, and thus do not truly escape it. For life to become an “an infinite sea promising eternity,” it can no longer be determined by wage-labor, above all. To bring the “lost world” in oneself to life will require new forms of belonging together and living together, forms yet unnamed and unknown, perhaps even unconceivable.

  Landauer’s mystical appropriation of Stirner is completely his own. He turns Stirner into food for nourishment. Stirner reminds his readers: “For me you are nothing but—my food, just as I too am fed upon and consumed by you.”135 This is not reading or writing for the purpose of truth or accuracy. Indeed, as Stirner puts it, “to do the truth a service is in no case my intent; to me it is just nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes are for my digesting stomach, or a friend for my social heart.”136

  Against reform, revolution, resignation and isolation, Landauer’s communism or anarchy is primarily ethical. Its task is to foster the rebirth of the unique, the singular, the contingent—whether as I or we, but most of all now. Like Stirner, Landauer does not demand anything from society. He does not propose a strategy to realize communism in some distant future but describes a condition to cultivate in our lives today. This condition is freedom:

  What I am advocating here is by no means a demand to human society… I demand nothing; I only want to describe the inner condition from which individuals may perhaps come to exemplify communism and anarchy for others. All I want to make clear is that this freedom can only come to life in ourselves and must be nurtured in ourselves before it can appear as an external actuality.137

  On May 2nd, 1919, the Bavarian Republic was smashed and Landauer was killed. His final words, said to his captors as they killed him: To think that you are human. In Stirner’s framework, Landauer was beyond human, for he consumed his humanity as well.

  Union

  How do I relate to another I without sacrificing my uniqueness? Stirner does not think that ideas like “respect” or “love” are useful in g
uiding the interaction between individuals. Such Christian values have no place in Stirner’s universe. Instead, he highlights the reversibility of violation captured in his idiosyncratic view of property. Formally similar to Fichte and Hegel, Stirner makes reciprocal recognition key in the relation between unique individuals. But this is not the recognition of personhood, or freedom, but of the mutual power for violation, consumption, and expropriation.

  Remember, the “right” to property lies in its openness to mutual violation by all. This is not the same as the right to private property nor the public right to the commons. It is rather an openness towards bilateral consumption. Equality, according to Stirner, emerges in the dissolution of comparison through the sharpening of difference. This equality manifests itself in consuming and being consumed by another, in their mutual recognition of one another’s power of annihilation. One’s own property should be defended of course, but if you take it, enjoy! In fact, I’ll even smile about it afterwards.138

  Stirner calls the relation of mutual violation that takes place in between individuals an association, coalition, or union [Verein] of Is. This kind of association forms out of the dissolution of state and society, the consumption of their reified forms. In the political state, individuals are not recognized as unique Is but as generic persons, or “human beings”. A “society of human beings” is not based on the dynamic, mutual recognition between I and thou, as in a “union of Is”, but on alienated, moral rules for obedient subjects.139 Such a social formation, according to Stirner, is incompatible with truly “egoistic” relations, that is, relations in which individuals appear as singular to each other, and not as bearers of fixed identities, roles, or occupations. Accordingly: “‘Human society’ is wrecked on the egoists; for they no longer relate to each other as human beings, but appear egoistically as an I against a completely different and opposed you and yours.”140 Stirner’s claim here is that when social relations are already mediated through reified categories like “human being” (or “person”, “bourgeois”, “proletarian”, “citizen”), then who one concretely is no longer matters, it is irrelevant, for the way to relate to each other is already determined through the social norms attached to the identities fixed in the categories. Such identities may appear subjectively false, but they function as objectively real. For these “categories” are not just abstractions posited in individual minds but are organizing principles of social intercourse; they are determinate forms of interaction that effectively subsume the content of individual life into a predigested social mechanism with its own laws of motion. The so-called “egoists”, however, wreck this social machine by treating one other as I and I and I, that is, as unique, concrete, singular. To be a “human”, “worker”, “mother”, “student”, or “citizen” interferes with being myself, and so I prefer not to. Perhaps in the morning I am this, in the afternoon I am that, and in the evening, I am not I at all. I am you or we or a completely other form of belonging, but that is up to me and my accomplices to figure out.

  The word egoist makes sense in Stirner’s time as a provocative rebuke to the hypocritical demands of a self-sacrificing morality based in Christianity; but it no longer holds today. For today the “egoist” is the moral actor par excellence, the one who follows all the rules of the economy to maximize their self-interest and gain. The egoist is the paradigm of homo economicus, the economic human that seeks profit as producer and marginal utility as consumer, the self-entrepreneur, the self-exploiting manager of one’s own capital. As the unchosen envelope for modern individuality, the “egoist” must be consumed along with the state and economy as forms of abstract domination.

  To treat others as singular beings can no longer be called egoistic in earnest, but rather communistic or anarchistic, maybe even, surprisingly, humanistic. To Marx, the beings whose social relations of production do not dominate them as alienated forms, and who are able to relate to each other as they are and not through character-masks, are called social individuals.141 It does not matter what it is called. The point is that such modes of activity and forms of belonging are contradictory with the present state of affairs. To Stirner, no political, legal, or economic reform can break the fundamental alienation of the state. This requires abolishing the present form of society as we know it and forming free associations of social individuals in its place. As he writes: “We two, the state and I, are enemies. I, the egoist, have not at heart the welfare of this ‘human society’, I sacrifice nothing to it, I only utilize it; but to be able to utilize it completely, I transform it rather into my property and my creation; that is, I annihilate it, and form in its place the Union of Egoists.”142

  What distinguishes this union from the state? First, it depends on whether or not one can relate to it as a product of one’s own activity, that is, as a reflection of oneself, and second, whether or not one can dispose of it freely, that is, abandon, waste, or destroy it. The union of Is is the creation that reflects the creator, the association that expresses the associators. In that sense, Stirner’s union embodies Hegel’s concept of freedom as the mode of being with oneself in another [Beisichselbstsein in einem Anderen], or being at home in another.143 In an association of free individuals, a union of Is, a commune, or whatever one wants to call it, I am not limited by others, but find myself empowered by them, released from my own limitations. But this does not mean that our interactions are settled once and for all, fixed in a new organizational structure. On the contrary, any social form is but a means to develop the content of each individual, and if it becomes constraining, then it can be dissolved, and developed anew.

  Conjoining individuals together into a union concretely overcomes the loss of oneself in fixed ideas, alienated relations, property addictions, object fixations, and so on. By recognizing myself in the other and the other in myself, my capacity to consume that which consumes me grows infinitely. For Hegel, this is the meaning of true freedom in the state: “Only in this freedom is the will completely with itself [bei sich], because it has reference to nothing but itself, so that every relationship of dependence on something other than itself is thereby eliminated.”144 For Stirner, this is the power of unified ownness against the state:

  The difference between state and union is great enough. The former is an enemy and murderer of ownness, the latter a son and co-worker of it; the former a spirit that would be adored in spirit and in truth, the latter my work, my product; the state is the lord of my spirit, who demands faith and prescribes to me articles of faith, the creed of legality; it exerts moral influence, dominates my spirit, drives away my I to put itself in its place as ‘my true I’—in short, the state is sacred, and as against me, the individual human being, it is the true human being, the spirit, the ghost; but the union is my own creation, my creature, not sacred, not a spiritual power above my spirit, as little as any association of whatever sort.145

  Whereas a union is a product of ownness, the state is a producer of alienation. A union is my property, but I am the property of the state. If the state is sacred, then a union is its desecration. A union expands my I into a We; the state contracts my I into It.

  Given such bold and broad theses, Stirner’s characterization of the state cannot simply be identified with the political state. It is rather the entire sphere of politics itself, the realm which divides one against oneself, producing pseudo-divisions of public and private, male and female, citizen and alien, identity and activity, work and leisure, life and economy.146 Stirner’s concept of the “state” is thus perhaps closer to Guy Debord’s idea of “spectacle”—for spectacle describes a self-mediating totality of social alienation.

  Like Marx and Freud before him, Debord is a post-Feuerbachian thinker, and thus shares certain themes with Stirner as well. As Feuerbach appropriated and developed ideas from Hegel, so have Stirner, Marx, Freud and Debord appropriated, criticized and developed Feuerbach’s insights on alienation, inversion and projection in their own ways.

  According to Debord, spectacle n
ames the society in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”147 In Stirner’s framework, Debord is describing a social condition in which individuals can no longer act according to their ownness, but are constrained by the mediations of self-produced spirits, spooks and alienty. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord develops this concept dialectically through a series of theses on the commodity, alienation, time, space, history, ideology, and revolution. In the following excerpts, Debord presents spectacle as a form of generalized separation, a structure of alienation, and an ideological negation of life. In so doing, Debord aligns himself with Stirner in a ruthless critique of modern society:

  Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle… The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation… The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated — and precisely for that reason — this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation… The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.148