59. EO, 305–306
60. EO, 143
61. For a contemporary critique of identity, alienation and the “self” along lines similar to Stirner, see the writings of the Invisible Committee, such as The Coming Insurrection (2009), To Our Friends (2014) and Now (2017).
62. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1992), as well as his early work, The Transcendence of the Ego (1957).
63. EO, 154
64. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic (1991), §96 addition
65. EO, 147
66. EO, 210
67. Heidegger, Being and Time (1996), §9
68. Ibid., §9
69. Ibid.
70. For a critique of authenticity in Heidegger, see Critchley, “Originary Inauthenticity” in: Critchley and Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008), 132–151. For a more unsympathetic critique, see Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (2003).
71. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005), 251
72. See Epictetus, The Handbook (Enchiridion), 11.
73. Foucault (2005), 252
74. EO, 148
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. EO, 151. Emphasis mine.
78. EO, 145
79. Stirner uses “grace” to describe the unowned relation between a spook and I. For example, “Right is above me, absolute, and exists in a higher being, as its grace flows to me: right is a gift of grace from the judge; power and might exist only in me, the powerful and mighty.” EO, 187
80. Mackay, 127
81. EO, 251
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. EO, 104. The following uncited quotes are all from this page.
85. EO, 105
86. Ibid.
87. EO, 152
88. EO, 163
89. EO, 135
90. Derrida in: Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003), 94
91. EO, 324
92. EO, 185
93. Ibid.
94. EO, 300
95. EO, 7
96. EO, 294
97. See Stirner’s Critics (2012), 58: “Only when nothing is said about you and you are merely named, are you recognized as you. As soon as something is said about you, you are only recognized as that thing (human, spirit, Christian, etc.). But the unique doesn’t say anything because it is merely a name: it says only that you are you and nothing but you, that you are a unique you, or rather your self. Therefore, you have no attribute, but with this you are at the same time without determination, vocation, laws, etc.”
98. Ibid., 54, 57
99. Ibid., 57
100. EO, 186
101. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969), 175. Final italics mine.
102. Ibid., 118
103. EO, 151
104. For more on Levinas and egoism, see Blumenfeld, “Egoism, Labour, and Possession.” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2014).
105. EO, 283
106. EO, 284
107. EO, 179
108. EO, 81
109. EO, 209
110. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 137
111. Derrida, Specters of Marx (1994), 132
112. EO 55, 204
113. EO, 145
114. EO, 179
115. EO, 198
116. EO, 299
117. EO, 209
118. EO, 312
119. EO, 312–313
120. See Bernd A. Laska, “Max Stirner, a durable dissident,” for instance.
121. Landauer, “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism” in: Landauer, Revolution and Other Writings (2010), 84–91
122. Ibid., 85
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., 87
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid., 88
128. Scholem (1965), 112–3. See also Dan (2006), 75; Schwartz (2004), 122–124.
129. See Scholem, 116–7: “But to bring about the tikkun and the corresponding state of the cosmos is precisely the aim of redemption. In redemption, everything is restored to its place by the secret magic of human acts, things are freed from their mixture and consequently, in the realms both of man and of nature, from their servitude to the demonic powers, which, once the light is removed from them, are reduced to deathly passivity. In a sense, the tikkun is not so much a restoration of Creation—which though planned was never fully carried out—as its first complete fulfillment.”
130. Ibid., 117
131. On “mystical anarchism”, see Critchley, Faith of the Faithless (2012).
132. EO, 209
133. Landauer, 88–89. Italics mine.
134. Ibid., 89
135. EO, 263
136. EO, 313
137. Landauer, 90. For a similar understanding of anarchy and communism, see Invisible Committee, “Spread anarchy, live communism” in Blumenfeld, Bottici, and Critchley, The Anarchist Turn (2013), 224–234.
138. See EO, 316.
139. See EO, 160–1: “If the state is a society of human beings, not a Union of Is, each of whom has only himself before his eyes, then it cannot last without morality, and must insist on morality.”
140. EO, 160
141. See Marx, MECW 28: 23, 132; MECW 29: 91–92, 94, 133, 210, 465, 468.
142. EO, 161
143. On Hegel’s concept of “being with oneself in another”, see Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (1990), 45–51; Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000), 19–25.
144. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991), §23
145. EO, 273
146. On the critique of politics, see Invisible Committee, Now (2017), 51–89; “Spread anarchy, live communism” in Blumenfeld, Bottici, Critchley (ed.) The Anarchist Turn (2013), 224–234.
147. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1995), §1
148. Ibid., §25, §32, §3, §215. It should be noted that the spectacle for Debord is not just a form of generalized separation, but of unity-in-separation. “The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world” (§7). Spectacle thus encompasses the “social organization of appearances” (§10), the integration of society through its disintegration. Thanks to EJ Russell for the tips here.
149. On Debord’s Hegelian-Marxism and his debt to Lukács, see Jappe (1999), Russell (2015), Bunyard (2018).
150. Debord (1995), §24
151. EO, 271
152. Ibid.
153. EO, 276. Italics mine.
154. Spinoza, Ethics (1994),126. Italics mine.
155. Stirner, “The False Principle of Our Education” (1842). The form of freedom which Stirner lauds here is self-emancipation, not negative freedom. It is thus closer to what he will eventually call ownness.
156. Ibid.
157. EO, 61
158. EO, 192
159. Agamben, The Coming Community (1993), 86
160. Badiou, Being and Event (2005), 109
161. Agamben, 86
162. EO, 279
All Things are Nothing to Me: Stirner, Marx and Communism
Why still read Max Stirner today?
Because now that we live at the end of history, it might do us some good to look at a few of the first ideas that pointed beyond it. In the 1840s, Germany was teeming with philosophical critiques of bourgeois society, while France was burgeoning with practical revolts against it. It was Stirner’s genius to attack the left Hegelian critics of religion, politics and society for remaining trapped within the liberal ideology of their day, and for basing their political positions on nothing more than secularized Christian values, separate from any relation to the material concerns of individuals. And it was Marx’s brilliance to embed Stirner’s critique of ideology within a historical analysis of class antagonisms and social relations of production.
It is commonplace that Marx developed the materialist conception of history in The German Ideology around 1845. But how did he do so? Although Marx already had a sophisticated philosophical
account of alienation and private property, it was not until he responded to Stirner’s 1844 Der Einzige und sein Eigentum that his philosophical-political critique became thoroughly historical. If reading Stirner gave Marx and Engels the impetus for a historical materialist critique, then what else can it give us today? Is there a way to read Stirner with fresh eyes, as Engels first did when he wrote to Marx after reading it that, “clearly Stirner is the most talented, independent and hardworking of the ‘Free’, but for all that he tumbles out of idealistic into materialistic abstraction and ends up in limbo.”1
What is this limbo into which Stirner falls? It is surely the ambiguous zone between idealism and materialism, between the heaven of thought and hell of labor. Stirner may have escaped the idealist presuppositions of Hegelian philosophy, according to Engels, but he has not moved beyond idealistic targets. In other words, although Stirner starts with real individuals, he only confronts idealistic phantasms, or in Engels’s terms, “materialistic abstractions”. Stirner’s anti-ideological struggle consists in demystifying abstractions and criticizing fetishes such as God, Man, State, Society, Morality, Justice, Labor, Equality, Freedom, Love, and Revolution. In one of his more spectacular moments, Stirner names his burden as “storming heaven”, a task only completed with the “real, complete downfall of heaven.”2 Even Satan was too narrow, for he focused solely on Earth. Stirner eventually called this method desecration. Engels again: “This egoism is taken to such a pitch, it is so absurd and at the same time so self-aware, that it cannot maintain itself even for an instant in its one-sidedness, but must immediately change into communism. In the first place, it is a simple matter to prove to Stirner that his egoistic man is bound to become communist out of sheer egoism. That’s the way to answer the fellow.”3
Thus, Marx and Engels responded to Stirner in the massive section of The German Ideology called “Saint Max”. They do not criticize Stirner’s “egoism” for being the opposite of communism, as many people think, but rather they show that egoism must immediately “change into communism”, that “egoistic man” is bound to become “communist” out of egoism alone. But not only this. Engels admits that, “we must also adopt such truth as there is in the principle. And it is certainly true that we must first make a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything to further it––and hence that in this sense, irrespective of any eventual material aspirations, we are communists out of egoism also.”4 Not only does egoism lead to communism, but egoism is the first cause of communism, its ground and foundation, that which motivates individuals to become communists before anything else. Engels emphasizes this to Marx: “We must take our departure from the I, the empirical, flesh-and-blood individual.”5 Perhaps the following passage from Stirner convinced Engels to begin with the needs of the individual, instead of some cause outside it:
People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to the human because I am—human. This is the Christian magic circle. Fichte’s I too is the same essence outside me, for everyone is I; and, if only this I has rights, then it is ‘the I’, I am not it. But I am not an I along with other Is, but the sole I: I am unique. Hence my needs too are unique, and my actions; in short, everything about me is unique. And it is only as this unique I that I take everything for my own, as I set myself to work, and develop myself, only as this. I do not develop human beings, nor as a human being, but, as I, I develop—myself. This is the meaning of the—unique one [Einzigen].6
Reading Stirner caused Engels to rethink the primary motivation for communism, “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”7 No communist movement can ever succeed unless it’s rooted in the base egoism of individuals seeking a better life for themselves. In other words, if the first cause of communism is myself, the will to better my own conditions and live without alienation, exploitation, and dead time, then out of this sheer egoism alone, I will be forced to become a communist. For how else will I transform my own individual situation of misery without confronting the social conditions that produce it? Hence, in order to become “the unique” agent of our own lives that Stirner demands, we must unite with others to abolish the conditions that constrain us. For Stirner, these self-produced yet alien conditions rule our conceptual and material existence; both forms of domination must be attacked. For Marx and Engels, however, while it is essential to challenge the ideological mystifications of our suffering, the unfreedom of our daily lives will only end with the end of the specific economic system that reproduces it.
Engels and Marx were not the first to point out that Stirner’s egoist must also be communist. Feuerbach made this same claim in his 1845 reply to Stirner: “To be an individual is certainly, of course, to be an ‘Egoist,’ but it is also at the same time and indeed unintentionally to be a ‘communist.’”8 Feuerbach did not mean this politically, however, but philosophically, insofar as any I is only an I in relation to others. This is a simple Hegelian point, and Stirner himself agrees. In his reply to Feuerbach, he notes that “it does not occur to him [Stirner] to deny that the ‘individual’ is ‘communist.’”9 Any individual, to Stirner, is of course social, communal, relational; it is all those things—and more. The unique participates fully in life, with others, freely and joyfully, and yet it is not exhausted by its relations with others. What the unique excludes in its exclusivity is only alienty, fixity, sacredness, disinterestedness, the uninteresting.10 An anti-social, narcissistic I is possible, but pathetic, for “this would be someone who does not know and relish all the joys that come from participation with others, i.e., from thinking of others as well, someone who lacks countless pleasures—thus a poor sort.”11
Stirner not only provoked quite the spirited response in his contemporaries, but also long after. His influence can be seen in Friedrich Nietzsche, Emma Goldman, Dora Marsden, Jules Bonnot, Renzo Novatore, Carl Schmitt, Edmund Husserl, Gustav Landauer, Wilhelm Reich, Victor Serge, Marcel Duchamp, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Camus and Raoul Vaneigem. If nothing else, reading Stirner has historically proven time and again to reawaken the spirit of revolt that animates the radical critique of everyday life. This revolt is not grounded in some external social cause or political ideal, but first of all in the relationship to one’s own life.
Another reason to read Stirner today is to see the parallels and problems in certain tendencies of contemporary critical thought. The movement from left-Hegelians through Stirner to Marx could shed some light on the dynamic of left-wing critique today. The young Hegelians, the “Free”, criticized bourgeois society for not living up to its ideal of humanity, of failing to bring justice, equality, and freedom to all who live within the modern state. They criticized governments, advocated for “social justice”, wrote in newspapers and signed petitions. Are they not the cell-form of the modern activist today, the social justice warrior who endlessly searches for the latest ideal to foreground the hypocrisy of bad individuals and states? Both advocate for “people power”, for self-managed “free states”, for the triumph of a secular humanity against the backwardness of religion. Against this, Stirner attacks the normative foundations upon which such critiques stand, that is, ideas of mankind, law, justice, equality, society and freedom. He claims that these criteria are nothing but reified abstractions of alienated relations which obfuscate one’s own condition. In effect, they turn the ideal itself into the foundation of the real.
Stirner’s anti-moral, anti-state, and anti-work critique ends up defending insurrection against revolution, for whereas “the revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged.”12 Perhaps this is the original template for the contemporary radical critique of liberal activism. Stirner’s heirs cut through the abstractions that litter the field of possibilities for the future, spooks such as “participatory economics”, “social justice”, “democratic socialism”, or “self-management.” Stirner sees no hope outside the negation of
the present, the consumption of all things into nothing for me, the dissolution and reabsorption of everything separate from individuals. Only by patiently attending to each particular abstraction and pulling at its roots can something like another future be possible. For Stirner, the roots of our abstract domination lie in our false idols of god and state, hierarchy and government, work and society. In a quite Stirnerist moment, Marx claims that if anything remains separate from individuals, then alienation has not been overcome, and communism is still not achieved:
Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing human beings, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.13
Under the power of “united individuals”, communism creates a reality in which nothing should “exist independently of individuals”. Communism for Marx is thus not so different from egoism for Stirner, since both seek to wrest control of individual life from domination by real abstractions. For Marx, these abstractions are rooted in the economic relations of production, and hence should be strategically confronted in that sphere. For Stirner, they are everywhere, and so can be attacked anywhere one finds them.
Marx thus did not ignore Stirner’s intervention and return to the framework of the young Hegelians. Rather, he sought to materially ground the source of the abstractions that Stirner criticizes. One by one, Marx located the material social relations that gave birth to the dominant ideologies of the day. Stirner traces modern liberal ideas back to their reliance on some alienated concept of god, state, or humanity, and then utterly desecrates it, advocating for crime, the inhuman, secession. Marx, on the other hand, situates Stirner’s critique of abstract domination within the orbit of private property, capital, and class struggle. Equality, property, freedom and justice for Marx are all historically specific conceptions that emerge from the material relations amongst human beings in capitalist society. To Marx, these ideal abstractions reflect the real abstraction of capital, the objective form of alienated human activity generated in modern societies based on the production of commodities for exchange. According to Marx, the historical dynamic of capital subsumes the content of human activity under the specific form of labor directed towards value, in turn inverting the subject and object of history.14 Albeit confusedly, Stirner grasped the abstract form of domination that inverts subjective agency in capitalist society, and he sought to reappropriate it for himself. He wanted to break with the objective and subjective mediations of bourgeois society, everything that reduces individuals to social functions, perceptible attributes, or normative values. However, it can be argued that Stirner conflated the form of abstract domination with its content. Nevertheless, Stirner was the first and most radical author to pose the problem of how an individual can break with the totalizing social synthesis of modernity.
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