All Things Are Nothing to Me

by Jacob Blumenfeld

  Stirner would disagree with none of this—as long as one replaces spectacle with state. Of course, for Debord, spectacle does not refer to the state, but to the economy as a totality. The spectacle is the outcome and goal of the dominant mode of production (§6), the fulfilment of commodity fetishism (§36), money’s modern aspect (§49), the accumulation of capital to the point of becoming image (§34). Influenced by the Hegelian-Marxism of Lukács, Debord understands the capitalist economy in a very broad sense as a whole system of reified social relations that reproduces subjects, objects and their mediation through value in a particularly inverted manner.149 Consequently, the state does not bring about this process, but rather reflects it ideologically and reinforces it through law and violence. For Stirner, as for Hegel, the system of wage-labor and capital is but one sub-set of alienation within the overarching nest of the state. Although Debord and Marx reverse the polarity, even Debord recognizes that the spectacle “is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division.”150

  The justification of the modern state and economy are usually founded upon an argument about the “state of nature”, a mythical time of individualistic chaos and violence that humans had to leave in order to secure peace and stability. By leaving the state of nature behind, individuals gave up isolation for society, freedom for security. Yet to Stirner, and contrary to many caricatures about his “egoism”, society precedes individuals, binding them in all sorts of relations of dependency from birth onwards. For Stirner, “society is our state of nature.”151 To leave this “society” behind does not entail founding a new state or becoming a hermit, but rather forming a union of Is, organizing an association of free individuals, building the commune. The task, therefore, is not to form ties, but to break them, since the ties we have are mediated through the state and economy, and thus, are alienations of owned relations, not productions of self- or collective-determination. Breaking social ties allows us to associate ourselves freely and create new forms of intercourse. These new forms of interaction must remain dynamic, alive, attuned to the needs and wills of those who create them, lest they too become petrified—like parties, sects, or other rackets. As Stirner writes:

  The dissolution of society is intercourse or union. A society does assuredly arise by union too, but only as a fixed idea arises by thought, namely, by removing the energy of thought, thinking itself—this restless cancellation of all self-solidifying thoughts—from the thought. If a union has crystallized into a society, then it has ceased to be a unification; for unification is a ceaseless unifying; if it has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is—dead as union, it is the corpse of the union or unification, it is—society, community. A striking example of this kind is the party.152

  Unions or associations form the basis of intercourse, the movement of power between individuals, and the crafting of new individualities, or what Spinoza calls composites. According to the interpretation put forth here, it is justified to call the union of individuals an individual as well. This is Stirner’s ambivalence, which I think can only be resolved by seeing the individual through the Spinozist lens we articulated earlier —as a relation or ratio of power. As a relation of power, the individual is not defined by its parts, but by the unicity of its force. The parts are nothing to Spinoza, as property is nothing to Stirner. An individual’s ownness is woven from the composition of forces or union of uniques. Stirner lends credence to this interpretation in the following passage:

  And if I can use him, I doubtless come to an understanding and make myself at one with him, in order, by the agreement, to strengthen my power, and by combined force to accomplish more than individual force could effect. In this combination, I see nothing but a multiplication of my force, and I will keep it only so long as it is my multiplied force. But thus it is a—union.153

  To “make myself at one with him” is to form a joint body, a unique-of-many, an individual-of-individuals. Spinoza’s ontology grants individual status to such a “union of bodies” as composites. We get the core definition in Ethics, Book II, proposition 13:

  When a number of bodies, whether of the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie upon another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from the others by this union of bodies.154

  Insurrection

  The union creates itself as an individual in the same way that an owner appropriates its individuality. Three steps mark this process: education, secession and insurrection. Education is one way of unlearning fixed ideas, and disalienating oneself. Himself an educator, Stirner writes pedagogically, performatively. His prose provokes, parodies, and mocks the ruling ideas of the day. In so doing, he shows the reader how to do the same. Before writing Der Einzige, Stirner wrote a scathing critique of the education system of his time. In “The False Principle of Our Education” (1842), Stirner criticized the creation of “authoritarian” personalities and “submissive creatures”, a century before the Frankfurt School. Education should not seek to become “practical”, he claims, but free:

  But even practical education still stands far behind personal and free education, and gives the former the skill to fight through life, thus the latter provides the strength to strike the spark of life out of oneself; if the former prepares one to find oneself at home in a given world, so the latter teaches one to be at home with oneself. We are not yet everything when we move as useful members of society; we are much more able to perfect this only if we are free human beings, self-creating (creating ourselves) persons.155

  Prefiguring his notion of the unique, Stirner concludes that only the self-dissolution of fixed and frozen knowledge can give birth to a free personality: “Knowledge must die in order to be resurrected as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.”156 In Der Einzige, he reiterates this point by describing the necessity for self-education, education as liberation into ownness, noting that “our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out.”157

  Secession is the movement by which one subtracts from the bonds of the state. “All states, constitutions, churches, have sunk by the secession of individuals.”158 This is not protest or revolution, but the refusal to even engage: disengagement, withdrawal, strike, evasion. Secession occurs when individuals block the reproduction of everyday life. Unions, associations, and communes are formed from seceded individuals, those who do not seek to form a new state or society, but to coexist together in dissolution. Giorgio Agamben, in The Coming Community of 1990, makes no progress from Stirner when he writes about the politics to come: “What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.”159 He bases this claim on Alain Badiou’s argument in Being and Event concerning the real foundation of the state. There, Badiou argues that “the State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather the un-binding, which it prohibits.”160 Or, in Agamben’s words, it is founded upon dissolution.161

  Stirner’s idea of secession or exit goes further than Agamben’s “co-belonging without representation” and Badiou’s “un-binding.” For Stirner, one dissolves the relation to the state by entering into a union, association or commune. The union is an instrument to be used, owned; it is nothing beyond the use one makes of it. If one must be faithful to the union at all costs, then the function of the union has been displaced by the principle of state. The union is not a pool into which all seceded individuals gather. There is no single union, only a plurality of free as
sociations, unions of unions which can even act as a single force when working in concert. But the logic of secession or exit functions there too. Secession is not only valid in relation to the state, but to what one exits into as well. Secession works all the way down, and everything one unbinds into can itself be unbound. If not, then the state has trickled-down as well. This absolute logic of secession, of seceding from the seceded, is central to owning oneself and the union. Just as no property that I cannot destroy can ever be my own, no union that cannot be dissolved will ever be our own. If a union of Is or association of individuals cannot dissolve itself, then it has hardened beyond its purpose into something alien, dead. Neither should my representation of myself nor my stagnant union dominate my restless activity of consumption and destruction of property. When I become a fixed idea to myself, alien to my own activity, or when my association becomes an empty shell of interaction, just another form of work, then there is no need to keep on being who I think I am or to keep on uniting with others in this particular way. There is no need to retain members in this kind of union. There is no reason to remain fixated on a former shade of oneself. Just get rid of yourself, Stirner says, and make a new one.

  If the state is founded upon prohibiting the un-binding of singularities, the dissolution of unions, and the secession of individuals, then the collapse of the state lies in liberating these activities. To Stirner, this means insurrection. In his most infamous passage, Stirner distinguishes between revolution and insurrection, favoring the latter as the proper vehicle of radical ownness:

  Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from human beings’ discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’ It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay. Now, as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political or social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose and deed.162

  This unarmed rising-up seeks no predetermined arrangements or political institutions except the ones formed by individuals themselves together in struggle. It is the associating of free individuals, the uniting of a union, the expropriating of property—for ourselves, from ourselves. The conditions for revolt may be there already, hidden in the material relations of society, but the deed itself is free, one’s own, groundless. It follows the dynamic of self-activity—as Stirner described the goal of true, free education. No longer letting ourselves be arranged means taking responsibility for our submission, and acting against it, with or without others, not because of some cause or principle, but from our own discontent. Not in the name of humanity, justice, or freedom, but in the name of nothing. For Stirner, insurrection cannot be limited to an event in time. It rather germinates in the uniqueness and ownness of an individual life, and breaks the monotony of time. When insurrection takes place at the social level of union or intercourse, only the scale of individuality shifts. But from the perspective of the unique, scale is irrelevant; the individual—as I or we—can always revolt. There is no need to wait for an event, the insurrection can begin.

  Notes

  1. EO, 290

  2. EO, 135

  3. EO, 163–4

  4. Stirner distances himself explicitly from Fichte at EO 163, 267, 318. Although Stirner’s finite I and Fichte’s transcendental I are incompatible, Fichte also has a separate account of the practical, finite I. It can be found in his Foundations of Natural Right of 1796/7. Fichte’s argument is based on a transcendental deduction of the concept of right for a rational free being. It would thus also be roundly rejected by Stirner.

  5. This case was convincingly made by Lawrence S. Stepelevich in his article, “Max Stirner as Hegelian” (1985). See page 605. For a contrary view, see De Ridder (2008).

  6. For more on Absolute Knowing in Hegel, see Blumenfeld, “The Abolition of Time in Hegel’s Absolute Knowing (and its relation to Marx),” Idealistic Studies, 2014.

  7. Hegel, Phenomenology (1977), §799. Translation modified.

  8. Stepelevich (1985), 606–7

  9. EO, 66

  10. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 159

  11. EO, 162

  12. EO, 124

  13. EO, 275

  14. See EO, 11, Stirner’s epigraph to Part One of Der Einzige: “‘Man is to man the supreme being’, says Feuerbach. ‘Man has just been discovered,’ says Bruno Bauer. Then let us take a more careful look at this supreme being and this new discovery.”

  15. EO, 164

  16. EO, 201

  17. EO, 192

  18. EO, 133

  19. For instance, see Strawson, Individuals (1959).

  20. Hobbes, Leviathan (1994), Part I, Chapter IV, “Of Speech,” 17

  21. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1975), Book III, Chapter III, “Of general terms,” 409

  22. Borges, Collected Fictions (1998), 137. Trans modified.

  23. Leibniz (1969), 128

  24. Spinoza, Ethics (1994), part I, proposition 8, scholium II, 89; part I, proposition 10, scholium, 91

  25. Ibid., part I, proposition 15, scholium IV, 96

  26. Ibid., part II, definition 7, 116

  27. EO, 58

  28. EO, 156

  29. EO, 227. Stirner uses both the German words Gewalt and Macht, which have a range of meanings not conveyed by the English language. Gewalt can be power, force, violence, or even authority; Macht can be power, might, rule, strength.

  30. EO, 228

  31. EO, 227

  32. EO, 166

  33. EO, 187

  34. See Jensen (2006), Brobjer (2003).

  35. Many of the first critical writings on Nietzsche in the early 20th century dealt with Stirner side by side. For example, see Albert Lévy, Stirner et Nietzsche (1904).

  36. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1980), 55

  37. EO, 283

  38. Nietzsche (1980), 64

  39. See Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968), Book Three, Part III, Chapter 2: “The Individual.”

  40. Ibid., 200 (#373)

  41. Ibid., 403 (#767)

  42. Ibid., 403 (#768)

  43. See Acosta, “How the Stirner Eats Gods” (2009).

  44. Nietzsche (1968), 199 (#370)

  45. Ibid., 411–412 (#784)

  46. Proudhon, What is Property? (1970), 42

  47. Ibid., 43

  48. EO, 223

  49. Ibid. This sentence is preceded by the following: “Proudhon (Weitling too) thinks he is telling the worst about property when he calls it theft (vol). Completely ignoring the embarrassing question of what well-founded objection could be made against theft, we only ask: Is the concept ‘theft’ at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept of ‘property’? How can one steal if property does not already exist? What belongs to no one cannot be stolen; one does not steal the water that is drawn from the sea.”

  50. EO, 222

  51. Ibid.

  52. To be fair, Proudhon, does not only say “property is theft.” He makes several other arguments concerning the antinomies of property. Without going into it, the core paradoxes can be written as such: property is theft, property is freedom, property is necessary, property is impossible. See Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, ed. McKay (2011).

  53. EO, 224

&n
bsp; 54. EO, 245. For more on the logic of occupation, see Blumenfeld, “Occupation and Revolution” in: Blumenfeld, Bottici, and Critchley, The Anarchist Turn (2013), 235–245.

  55. Property can be taken by another only if it is rivalrous, meaning that one person’s use of it is mutually exclusive with someone else’s use of it. Nonrivalrous property, on the other hand, has no such scarce quality, and can be shared equally by all. An example of rivalrous property is food, whereas an example of nonrivalrous property is radio frequency. If I eat an apple, you cannot eat the same one I just ate; but if you are listening to a radio station, I can listen to the same one without a problem. Stirner does not explicitly mention this distinction, but he accounts for it later with his theory of the “union of Is”, in which all can benefit from the same property without diminishing it.

  56. EO, 128

  57. For the classic analysis of fixation as a pathology of ego development, see Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (2000). Freud’s concept of “Besetzung”, which is etymologically close to Stirner’s own terminology of possession and occupation, was iconically translated with the neologism “cathexis” by James Strachey. Freud, in fact, was influenced by Eduard von Hartmann’s classic work of 1869 entitled Philosophy of the Unconscious, which had nine editions by 1882 (and, as already noted, was important for Nietzsche’s own development). In that book, von Hartmann wrote that Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum is a book that no one interested in practical philosophy should leave unread. See Hartmann (1931).

  58. On the destruction of property as proof of ownership, see Kaspar, “We Demand Nothing” (2009). See also Stirner’s defense of vandalism: “Is the vandal who destroys artworks for which he feels nothing more egoistic than the art connoisseur who treats the same works with great love and care because he has a feeling and interest for them?” Stirner’s Critics (2012), 81