“… we who do not think and talk aphoristically but live aphoristically; we who live aphorisménoi and segregati, as aphorisms in life, without association with men, having no share in their grief and their joy; we who are not consonants in the clamor of life but are solitary birds in the stillness of night.”
Stirner is one of many signs that point to the end of education. Cast out of the classroom into the Absolute Spirit, as the master Hegel had wished, he could acquire none of those quiet manners, none of those slight inflections of voice that had made civilization, and which in the end, out of discretion, claimed to be no more than minuscule remnants of Taste. For him, all that was left now was the obsessive rosary of the idea, or the roar, or aphasia, to which he eventually gave vent: the hammering of the silence (as in the brain) that yawns behind the emptied idea.
Stirner speaks continually of specters and ghosts. And, as he speaks, everything becomes caught up in that leaden spell that his shrill, insolent, relentless voice hoped to dissolve away—or to ridicule. But no one is more spectral than Stirner. It is easier to meet him among specters than among philosophers. As someone would inevitably observe, it must be supposed that Stirner is no subject for any respectable philosopher. If you touch his words, then wash your hands. Even the author’s name can hardly be taken seriously—it conjures the picture of a magician in top hat and cloak, rather than that of a dignified thinker. Stirner remains expunged from culture, despite the hundreds of books written about him.
Many recall Stirner only because Marx and Engels wrote so many vitriolic pages against him in The German Ideology—in rather the same way that Eugen Dühring is remembered most of all for Engels’s Anti-Dühring (though in that case it would be kinder to ignore both Dühring and the Anti-Dühring). Yet there are a few people who admire Stirner to such a point that they prefer not to admire others so as not to diminish him. They venerate the very man who wanted to destroy the sacred and to eliminate veneration—and at times they incline toward mild lunacy, or toward a cold fury. At any moment, in some part of the world, a small printing press is working away on a new edition of The Ego and Its Own. In the compartment of a railway carriage there’s always a dark figure with a cardboard suitcase in which you’d find a copy of The Ego, generally along with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The university ignores such matters. It forgets it was Stirner who disfigured it once and for all. It considers his work as a good subject for a dissertation. But to deal with Max Stirner in one of the countless histories of the Young Hegelians or of Anarchism is already an invitation to disregard his monstrosity. Stirner then becomes a “position,” albeit extreme, ultimate, in relation to something. Some readers have certainly been aware of that monstrosity, and have openly accepted or rejected it. But the nameless body of culture has failed to recognize it. Having reached a stage of its life in which (like everything else) it claims to be autonomous, it secretes from within itself a new substance and, soon after, a new figure: artificial barbarity, the artificial barbarian. Stirner proclaims them, he defines them. And immediately becomes spectral. Stirner’s presence is felt most intensely in two authors, Nietzsche and Marx, who remain silent about him or refer to him in texts they never published. Many of their words cannot be understood unless we read them as impatient, at times feverish, mutterings addressed to a ghost that haunts them—the ghost of Stirner. Marx and Nietzsche never had much to say directly to each other. Yet they give the impression of being two people who have never met, but who have had the same dream (or nightmare). And they are then compelled to conspire together at least in the desperate, loud, angry, circular conflict with each other’s ghost. That conflict chains them together like prisoners in the same jail. These first two conscious instigators of an “experimental philosophy” found one secret part of their thought in Stirner, but it is precisely that part whose consequences they didn’t wish to recognize. Throughout their life we can follow the stages of a patient effort to conceal this resemblance, in an attempt to escape from the dark silence of the man who had gone before them in committing the intoxicating betrayal of thought. Marx and Nietzsche’s audacity follows directly from that first and overwhelming audacity of Stirner. “It took an eiserne Stirne [an “iron brow,” once again in the sense of “audacity”] to write this book [The Ego and Its Own], and one might almost believe it was for this very reason that the author chose the name Stirner.”
Thought had long waited to debase itself. But someone sufficiently godless was needed to help it along. Someone who had “the taste and the genius for provocation,” like Saint Paul, Nietzsche, and Joseph de Maistre, but who dared take a step that had so far been avoided: to lump together metaphysics and mad ravings, and buckle them from one end to the other with an elegant clasp. The task fell to a teacher at Madame Gropius’s school for young girls from respectable families, who wrote in the Berlin gazettes in the years just before 1848 under the name Stirner.
Many later declared what many others had suspected, without daring to say it—that metaphysics consisted, generally speaking, of mad ravings. An idea that suited the coarseness of the times. More disarming was another idea, to which scarce attention was given: that mad ravings could be metaphysical. Stirner made a generous contribution to forever muddying the waters of thought. After him, the distinction between who is a philosopher and who is not would be a simple administrative consideration. Implicit in every phrase of Wittgenstein is a contempt for philosophy as a profession. Each morning, between five and eight, Valéry put down his thought experiments in dozens of notebooks but was careful not to mention them during the day in the salons, at the Académie, or dining out. Musil camouflaged himself among the scientists who, with a faint hint of a smile, frequented Diotima’s cocktails of the Spirit. Mad ravings now coated everyone with benevolence, harboring them in its deep crevices.
They said they were witnessing the advent of disenchantment. But for how many centuries (some even spoke of millennia) had such disenchanted continued to survive! And the world carried on: it remained enchanted. Stirner describes how a disenchanted being ought to live—and his irony stems from the observation that such a being does not exist. If it could exist, it would be classified by disappointed scientists as a survival from ancient times: mute, violent, unpredictable, protean. With no ascertainable identity. Unique.
The division of people between Platonists and Aristotelians can also be put in another way, using perhaps a more accurate distinction: people can be divided between those who think the world is governed by magic and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, many make the mistake of believing that magic is some practical illusion (though an interesting prelude to science). But Wittgenstein made it clear: the magic is not how the world is, but that it is.
Marx’s rancor toward the petty bourgeoisie stems from his tastes as a classicist. Forms, for him, could only be closed and clear cut. Profiles had to stand out against a bare and indifferent background. The aristocrat has such a profile, as does the bourgeois (so long as he keeps to the basic vices and virtues that define him)—and so too, finally, does the worker. But what lies between these forms is the most irredeemable evil. For Marx, the petty bourgeoisie are the Lumpen (“rags”) of the bourgeoisie. The Lumpen are evil itself. What worries him about them is a certain metamorphic and pliable character, the lack of a personal physiognomy, which enables them to become anything whatsoever, with no respect for the ranks endorsed by history. In those damp sands of spite, ambition, resentment, and delirium he could already see the birth of Bolshevism and Fascism. And this was fine for the Bolsheviks: the acid bath of the Cause would be enough to render them unrecognizable. The revolutionary, by definition, has no origins (“he doesn’t even have a name,” according to Nechayev’s Revolutionary Catechism): he has only a purpose. But it was the countless other proliferating Lumpen that frightened Marx and seemed beyond control, like migrating jellyfish. He recognized Stirner as the harbinger of that venomous array. Stirner’s individual provided the anthropological model, not for the petty bourgeois, as Marx and Engels would claim for reasons of tactical argument, but for something far more frightening: the model for the breakdown of the class system, the chaotic irruption that came, just before the final act, to destroy the sacred drama of history. This was the ultimate unforgivable sin—and is enough to explain the fury of the attack against Stirner.
Stirner prepares for gratuitous terror on the basis of a solid Hegelian education; Maurice Barrès prepares to plunge into the wisdom of blood on the basis of the keenest dandyism. Paul Bourget regarded the young Barrès of Un Homme libre as a “delicate nihilist,” who possesses “all the aristocracies of nerves” and who derides the world, which has already reached the “puberty of silliness” (Huysmans). All that is left then is to breathe in the stench of cattle stalls, and ask for everything to “be part of the race again.” The intermediary will be a young tainted child, Bérénice. We are told that “she adopted as a doll a small gilded statue of Our Lady, whose stomach opened to reveal the Trinity.” People take hold of the past, of race, of blood, when the delicate nihilist’s ego has reached its weary end, when the experimentally produced barbarity needs an Order to cling to. (That Ego had taken form in the latter years of the nineteenth century, ready for the “boys of 1889.” Before then, there was a barely detectable trace of that aesthetic arrogance: after, it would disappear or would become mixed with many other tastes of the masses—but it had now lost its clandestine, isolated, and depraved quality).
One of the prime characteristics of The Ego and Its Own is its brutality. But a reasoned brutality, which is reached through education, indeed through the most ambitious pedagogical system the West has produced, the only one that could claim to absorb, incorporate and subsume everything, in its frenzy of Aufhebung. The teachers of Germanic idealism strove, working obscurely on the concept to cancel out anything immediate, conspicuous, fleeting, or violent that might emerge. Even Stirner’s enemies recognize that he had the malicious gift of consistency. It remained to be seen how the peak of culture would be viewed from the unknown land of artificial barbarity to which Stirner introduces us with the gentle smile of the teacher opening his classroom door, where Madame Gropius’s young girls are waiting.
Why still hang about among the sawdust and beer stains of Hippel’s tavern? There had been so many trials and tribulations since then, we might even have forgotten about it. But nothing can alter the fact that it was thanks to Stirner, a minor character, that culture’s protective shell—to use the jargon of the Absolute Spirit once again—was pierced for the first time. It was he who helped bring about that global and irrevocable loss of dignity that has become our foundation. From then on, even the most cultured discourse is pervaded by a certain barbarity: it is a new prerequisite of sensibility, of thought. It will be useful, then, to bring it back to light in its crudeness. Even before Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche (who were all basically respectable human beings, well-mannered, and well aware that they had to remain so, even if their “critique of the existent” might—must—end up undermining it), the world of today derives, without knowing it, from Stirner. And it couldn’t know it, not only since “there’s no certainty about the father,” but because all paternity has now to be considered spurious, and Stirner has only the obscure task of settling the matter, as befits a lowly clerk of Nothingness: “The civilized being of the big cities returns to the wild state—i.e., to the state of isolation, because the social mechanism enables him to forget the needs of the community and lose feelings of attachment between individuals, which at one time were constantly reawakened by need. All improvement in the social mechanism causes certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes to communal life to become useless.”
They expected him to arrive from the Eastern frontiers, with thin Mongol mustaches and a bone necklace, with furs smeared with marrow and blood: he appeared as a teacher at a boarding school for girls from well-to-do Berlin families, with a smart but well-worn jacket, oval spectacles, and a shy, scornful countenance. When his friends at Hippel’s tavern became too rowdy, he moved aside, to a corner of the table. As he wrote, in his musty lodgings, a screeching sound of overwrought nerves could be heard, verging on a howl. After the publication of The Ego and Its Own, Stirner’s life, in the same old Berlin that now even wanted to forget Hegel, is a simple humdrum and exotic fact, like that of Rimbaud at Harar. It would later transmigrate into its two final forms: the silence of Bartleby, and Traven’s The Death Ship.
The Big City must already be there before Stirner can be born. The ghost of the enemy of ghosts belongs not so much to Hippel’s tavern in Berlin, where Die Freien—the Free Ones—met, but to the underground of Petersburg, to the bowels of Paris, to the mountains of garbage in London, to the death ships that swallow up their paperless and nameless passengers in the port of Antwerp. Its meeting place is wherever you find the grim crowd of feverish autodidacts, ghost writers, people ready to do anything since they have nothing, disgraced bourgeois, penniless aristocrats, the damned of the earth, cast out of a savanna, out of the swamps or from the desert beneath the marble vaults of the polytechnics of another continent, the ever vaster crowd of those acquainted above all with public humiliation and solitary exaltation. On hotel registers Nietzsche always gave his occupation as “university professor,” though he no longer was, and every year he felt himself more clearly resembling those teeming wraiths. Among them he could even have found a role—he had already chosen one: that of the “respectable criminal.” He loathed that brash and raucous company, and yet he knew his books would at last find prehensile ears among them. He distanced himself from them in every way, exhausting every last virtue of good manners. But he could not ignore the innumerable signs of affinity. When Dostoyevsky wrote in his notebooks, with curiosity and disgust—alongside details of sums of money never received or already spent—that man no longer had a profile, he had already been surrounded for some while by a hostile throng of those presences in his room; indeed, he belonged to them and had betrayed them. He consummated his long betrayal in his novels, often riven by the convulsive hilarity of someone too close to what he is narrating, like a policeman reporting a killing in which he himself was implicated.
Stirner is the barbarian coming from a Germany still divided into small states, who bursts into the heart of the metaphysical empire. The same instruments that had helped Hegel to absorb every remnant of barbarity into the Spirit, now serve to dismantle the spirit, to uproot it from all terrain, to bore into the anthropological soil of the Enlightenment. The true “philosophy of the hammer,” which Nietzsche could never put into practice, since he was too hopelessly polite, is achieved in the short, punchy, aggressive phrases that make up The Ego and Its Own.
Stirner’s egoist rejects every kind of dependence: but all dependence is a root, whether earthly or celestial. Stirner’s egoist is the rootless man who for the first time recognizes himself as such. He wanders the city as a perfect outsider to everything and everyone. The words that invade his mind, the desires that assail him—he regards everything as an object to use or discard, his is simply the gesture of taking or distancing himself. He is the man from underground who pillages metaphysics.
Stirner has left us no moving letters from Schulpforta asking for Schumann scores, nor could he have done. In him, there is something physiologically tainted and corrupt when it comes to culture, something that poisons him from the start.
Stirner’s premise: the process of secularization is unable to wear down or indeed cancel out the sacred, as it professes. It shifts it, nothing else. And the power that the sacred assumes is all the more devastating and unconstrained since it no longer has a name, nor can it be recognized for what it is.
What has Stirner not yet been forgiven for? Not so much for the many blatantly criminal declarations sprinkled like Far Western spices into his neo-Hegelian cuisine. Not so much for the figures of the “egoist” and “ownness,” so incongruous and irreducible to any practical reasonableness. But, for example, for a quickfire phrase (“Our atheists are pious people”) that sums up a demonstration that nobody has been able to refute. Stirner described our world, scourged by criticism that is “restlessly pressing forward” toward total clarity of thought, as a deeply sanctimonious world. What is more sanctimonious, indeed, than a healthy layman, so conceited and credulous in his principles? And those proud atheists, all convinced that a supreme mystic like Giordano Bruno was one of them? The Church, which burned him, knew much better what it was dealing with. They, on the other hand, even erected a monument to him, as if he were the Unknown Soldier. And Enlightened thinkers? If they really do exist, they should first of all stop believing in Enlightenment. These are the new “pious people,” whose sanctimony is not even protected by the mediation of ceremony, by the arcane pragmatism of a church. Rather than being governed by a sacrament, they let themselves be possessed by capital letters: Society, Humanity, Mankind, the Species—these were the nineteenth-century favorites that still plague the present day, though many others have been added. They don’t know on what assumptions they act, and they don’t like it when quizzed by some irreverent sophist. If they are forced to reveal them, they offer a most paltry vision. Scraps of banality, reels of Commonplaces form the core of their Principles and Values. Better that they cover them with their superstitious practices. Which are not always murderous—at times they have a certain stolid meekness.
Halfway between the oppressed masses and the oppressing masses, Stirner anticipates Lautréamont’s scurrilous words on poetry that “must be made by all, not by one.” But he applies them to philosophy. We are inundated in The Ego and Its Own by ideas that had long despaired of ever finding a place in a book. Brutish thoughts. This infringement of etiquette is an unexpected effect of democratic rule. Lautréamont the chronicler would explain it like this: “Doubt has always existed in a minority. In this century it is in the majority. We inhale the violation of duty through the pores.” Doubt stabs every thought that raises its head. But its blade will allow its victims an easy resurrection. Those thoughts will soon reappear: as opinions.
In what respect do Marx and Engels mislead, when discussing Stirner? In more or less every respect. In a book like The Ego and Its Own, where paradox is the purpose of the text, where everything is incoherent and wanders away from every path it takes, it is easy to pretend not to notice that the incoherence, the paradoxes, and the deviation were not accidental, but were the very aim of the discourse; it is easy to refuse to see that this raving is no more than the final step toward silence—and the destruction job is complete. At that point it is perfectly easy to say that The Ego and Its Own is incoherent, paradoxical, deviant, and delirious. This, of course, could be said in just two or three pages. And the fact that Marx and Engels repeat it for more than three hundred pages is at least evidence of their ill-will. Evidence also of their foresight. Now united by the Sacred Bond of the Cause, they could hardly avoid denouncing the book which, more than any other, mocks the Cause, the Bond, and above all the Sanctity of the Cause and the Bond. Supposing (though not accepting for one moment) that the force of their “criticism” had already managed to dispel any sacred aura, this didn’t mean that Marx and Engels were prepared to reveal it exoterically. The working class needed its own holy icons, the Cause would be guarantor of decency, of ordered and industrious lives, dedicated above all to increasing abnegation in the struggle and conflict with the Enemy. In no circumstances should it be revealed that Free Thought—a way of being that seemed purged at last of all chimeras—was the true church mouse of modern times. Stirner’s prussic acid, even the smallest dose of it, would have been enough to produce an irreversible spasm on the mighty body of the Worker, a sad anthropological figment on which Marx and Engels sought to build their own practices, before being replaced by fervent “engineers of the human soul.” In the leaden prose of Stirner’s book, in its obsessive repetitions and its indecorous arguments, Marx-Engels, who now sought to speak to the whole mass of proletariats, saw before their eyes another terrible mass—not that mass of Pellizza da Volpedo’s workers, marching proudly to be shot down by mustachioed officials, but an infernal, shapeless, ragged, incorrigible collection of vagabonds, incapable of class loyalty, rootless from the womb, violent, inarticulate, irreverent enemies of labor and learning, that mass which the newspapers described with a shiver of dismay as the “dregs of society.” It was the underground emerging into the open, and the “reserve army” of shadows threatened to strangle the proletariat before the proletariat managed to strangle the bourgeoisie.
The accursed scission, that Trennung which had already tormented Lessing’s Masons, thus penetrated the immaculate stronghold of the proletariat: seemingly crossed by a barely visible crack, a malignant line that swallowed up anyone who strayed from the right course. The damned of the earth would reemerge from that disguised chasm years later: they now formed a limitless network, equal only to the network that capital was casting over the planet. Having hidden like mice from every dependable census, they held the most elusive and corrosive weapon: silent rejection, repudiation of society in whatever form. Marx and Engels’s secret concern, in their practical action, was not so much the bourgeoisie, this devious class which, from the outset, had proved that it was just as eager to destroy itself as capable of recovering. It was the Lumpenproletariat, these dregs of all classes, this “apotheosis of rootlessness” that was likely to do something no less damaging than the various, predictable, defenses of class interests. The Lumpen threatened the very system of historical class succession, that salvific system on which was based the acceptance of present torture and of the radiant future. If the proletariat were not the ultimate class, were not the final class, the class that would make human destiny become weltgeschichtlich, that would have given it a global dimension, if the proletariat within it struggled to distinguish itself from another proletariat, that of the Lumpen, then the whole system seemed under threat, the pattern of historical Providence no longer converged toward one final point, but was itself in danger of becoming swallowed up by the regressus in infinitum of relentless dissociation.
This, then, was the threat signaled by Stirner, but it could not be named, since the mere fact of recognizing it extended its existence. And so Marx and Engels never declare that they are fighting Stirner for these reasons. They try, instead, to drive him back among the innocuous band of Berlin philosophers and even want to pass him off, against all the evidence, as “the weakest and most ignorant member” of “his whole philosophical fraternity.” References to the question of the Lumpen, even in The German Ideology, are brief and curt, but all the more significant: “He is consistent also in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper. Compare Sismondi, Wade, etc. ‘Stirner’ and his fraternity, for example, can in the eyes of the proletarians, in certain circumstances, count as paupers but never as proletarians.” The proletarian therefore epitomizes the smugness of poverty, and would never invite a pauper into his home. The reasons for this real class hatred are obscure: Marx and Engels tell us only that the “ruined proletarian” has no more “energy.” Sufficient motive—one might think—for the proletarians who are not yet ruined to trample him down. But can it be true that the “ruined proletarian” has no more energy? Or might it be a much more insidious energy, an energy that no longer allows itself to be channeled? Better to ignore the question and move on—this is the tactic chosen by Marx and Engels. It is true, even later, that the attacks on the Lumpen were violent, but they were always incidental and occasional. It hadn’t to be too apparent that (for Marx and Engels) the ultimate criterion for humanity was its availability to be organized. But their habitual contempt remained. It is enough to see with what sense of proud repugnance even Rosa Luxemburg would warn her comrades years later: “On the other hand the working class is the last class of bourgeois society that comes on the scene with revolutionary aims, and there is no question of it being overwhelmed by an even more radical social level, that goes beyond the aims consciously established by the proletariat. The only social level below the proletariat, the level of disinherited social parasites, such as prostitutes, delinquents by profession, and every species of obscure and casual existences is not a revolutionary but, on the contrary, a counterrevolutionary factor.” And Lenin with characteristic nonchalance would consider the consequences of that hatred, to shore up the barrier against the recurring tide of anarchism: “Anarchism is a product of desperation. It is the psychology of an intellectual who has gone off the rails or of a representative of the Lumpenproletariat, not of a proletarian.” Thus it was made clear, once and for all, what was to be the correct psychology of the proletarian, and of the intellectual who doesn’t go off the rails.
But even then, Marx and Engels hadn’t included Russia in the calculation. To hold someone up to contempt as a narrow petty bourgeois and a raving intellectual pauper was not an effective argument in a place where, from the wreckage of all classes, the poisonous flower of the intelligentsia was beginning to bloom and the delirium readying itself to become eminently “practical.” From his shabby lodgings in Berlin, Stirner communicated directly with the Russian underground. The egoist was above all the man making his voice heard from underground. And if Stirner’s obsessive arguments produced the aphasia he desperately wanted, the voice of the underground has never stopped since: it has infused every discourse, tainted all serious argument, derided all status, chased history down every passageway. Stirner’s hidden face—that which Marx hadn’t wanted to recognize—would reemerge in Russia. The whole Hegelian panoply, the academic disputes, the pretense to expounding a “philosophy,” were no more than unwieldy, ostentatious papier-mâché castles—enough to stir the solitary laugh, like the shameful memories that Dostoyevsky would record through the Underground Man (a “collegiate assessor” by profession): the yellow stain on his trousers, his urge to jostle the arrogant officer on Nevsky Prospect, the dull faces of his former schoolmates. The Ego and Its Own would have found its epigraph in Dostoyevsky: “Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being overphilosophical; it’s the result of forty years underground.”
Marx was superstitiously clear-sighted in his fear of the power that comes from the loss of class, which clouds every shining ascent of the proletariat. Loss of class doesn’t mean moving from one class to another, but moving from one class, with all its customs and codes, to a place that wavers, that has no name, no identity, no affiliation, and is no longer inside society but against it. The individual, this refractory person of whose genealogy in the capital process Marx would give a brusque portrayal in his Grundrisse, nevertheless escaped his grasp as an empirical existence. That mental turmoil, unanchored from everything, was no longer a material that could be easily elaborated. At worst it could spawn the terrorist. What is more, he was the character who first engineered the separation from the most oppressive faith that Marx shared with his times (and with our times): the faith in Society. Back in Balzac’s time, we find many instances of deprivation and slow degradation in both the salons and the pantries of Paris. But loss of class never produces the “Russian effect.” Here the stately comédie still holds sway, involving a long-drawn-out sequence of degrees and half degrees by which one can rise or fall in status. The dark center is Vautrin, the eye of the criminal and policeman, who represents omnipotence from below. He alone can wear all masks with impunity, since he is the god who visits his victims incognito. All the others can wear many masks, in succession, but are each time pressed and drawn into the role of the moment. With Dostoyevsky, however, lines are absorbed into a gelatinous mass. Everything is unstable—and instability and abjection are bound by a secret pact. His characters tend to lose (or have already lost) their sense of attachment: to their family, to their class, but above all to society, as well as to their feelings, which they are ready to reverse at any moment, in a malevolent flash. They flow uncontained, and now almost with indifference: innocent yet depraved, compassionate in torture, their tears are followed by a wild mocking laugh.
The Ego and Its Own was on young Dostoyevsky’s bookshelves. And the book passed around the Petrashevsky Circle, the perversely innocent group of subversives that would be broken up at gunpoint by the officers of Nicholas I, before being lost among the “houses of the dead.” In Dostoyevsky’s relationship to Stirner we find something far more serious than a mere legacy of ideas: the anthropological monstrum presented by Stirner will live on in Dostoyevsky’s novels. The Ego and Its Own infuses a violent reagent into psychology: something that causes a detachment from all that is put forward as Law: above all, identity, the system of equivalences—and gradually everything as far as roles, class conventions, established feelings. In Dostoyevsky’s novels there is a similar disruption among all that is human, the breath of whim, a turbid fluctuation between characters, an impossibility of tracing clearly defined lines. The mind escapes from every cleft in the form of a cloud and envelops the city. The being that Stirner calls the ego is primarily a shapeless hollow: Dostoyevsky evokes from that hollow a multitude of faces: the underground man, who in his rightful anonymity incorporates to a certain extent all of them, but also Raskolnikov, Kirillov, Ivan.
Dostoyevsky lives underground in the same way that Zarathustra lives in his mountain cave. But he’ll invite no “superior men” there. Instead, he waits for Stirner’s Unmensch, for all that shuns the domesticated canon of the human, which the humanist torturers, upholders of “science and good sense,” try to impose on humanity in the belief they are doing it good. From there his calm and devastating questions ring out: “But what makes you so sure not only that man can, but that he must be transformed?”; “Might it then be possible that man doesn’t like well-being?”
Having reached Russia, having cast off his Hegelian cloak, Stirner could hardly resist a discussion “about sodden snow.” The tone of the underground man comes from the sarcasm that the first readers of The Ego and Its Own in Berlin hadn’t even noticed, so little had they understood the facts of life, and here it culminates: “We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.” The style has become more insinuating, but we immediately recognize the voice of the ego. Here, too, as in Stirner, we are invaded by an element of constructed brutality, an unnatural immediacy, that is directed against l’homme de la nature et de la vérité (who is l’homme dans toute la vérité de la nature at the Beginning of Rousseau’s Confessions). The underground man is in fact a product of alchemy, “not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort”: But the artifice makes him even more violent, since he is more civilized (“The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely nothing more”), it takes away that inborn stupidity of men who “persuade themselves, more quickly and easily than other people do, that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity.” While he tosses and turns in his fetid clothes, the Underground Man, a perfect Western creation, still has the vice of epistemology: with a diamond chip he cruelly engraves the diaphanous matter of thoughts. He discovers that he is the subject of the rootlessness, Shestov’s bespočvennost’ (Bodenlosigkeit, déracinement in Boris de Schloezer’s French translation), and he protests: “Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from?” Like Stirner, the Underground Man has “founded his cause on nothing”—and there is a shrillness even in his voice.
Behind the spite, the insults, the silences, we find that Marx and Stirner share a fundamental experience that affects their lives: the spiritization of the world. They were two young Germans, petty bourgeois with a natural tendency to degenerate into Lumpen—Stirner twice in prison for debt, Marx arrested in London on suspicion of theft on his way to pawn his wife’s silver that bore the Argyll family crest. Both looked about them and saw a sarabande of ghosts. It was a time when the encroachments of philosophy (now called “critique” for reasons of secular decency), not to mention covetous science, were driving away shadows, hypostases, ideas, symbols, auras, categories, emblems from the world, dissolving them in crude daylight on the dissecting table; it was a time when the bourgeoisie were congratulating themselves that the Spirit was moving ever further away and was, in any event, becoming increasingly superfluous, so that it had to be invoked only at the unveiling of monuments, whereas machines were incessantly humming everywhere, except for backward Germany, and, since Geschichte (History) had become Weltgeschichte (World History), their blind movements, together with the rises and falls of the Stock Exchange, could determine the extinction of distant populations, whereas total disenchantment glided across the earth and stumbled over aureoles in the mud at crossroads; it was a time when the big body of the nineteenth century unknowingly performed its ruthless experiment upon itself, and was nonetheless convinced it was doing something quite different (and above all “shedding light”). In common with their time, Marx and Stirner shared the conviction that ghosts were a sign of evil (Guénon noted the regrettable coincidence by which spiritualism began to spread like an epidemic in the United States in 1848, a necessary counterbalance to the European barricades, which were in turn a quiet signal that a new character, Chaos, was emerging onstage at the Court of History). Their gaze settled on those specters, and was caught. But they resisted—and they scorned those around them who carried on in ignorance, convinced they were now living in an empty world. “Hypostases non fingo!” Max Stirner declared, obsessively, from his desk at the school for young girls, as a whirl of categories pressed him to the wall. To this declaration—far more radical and effective than the earlier one pronounced by Newton—Marx replied with a shrug of the shoulders (“Huh! To imagine that thought determines reality, when it is reality that determines thought!” with the whole rosary of concomitant chiasmata), and he points his finger at concrete elements—account books, offices, warehouses, working hours, excise duties, gold, debentures, marauding ships. But it’s a sham rejection: Marx’s most rigorous application of Stirner’s attack on hypostases comes a few years later, in the first book of Das Kapital. Stirner’s words, which Marx himself had dismissed with rough impatience, would be tried out in those pages. Once reality has been stripped of every metaphysical veil and reduced to the bare production-circulation-consumer process, from which all other processes are derived and on which they model themselves, according to the axioms set out by Engels, then at that very moment the great dance of ghosts would begin—the great transformation of Geist into Poltergeist, which would grip hold of wardrobes and chairs, women, tablecloths, and all would become possessed. Stirner’s only immediate continuator, the only faithful follower who has rigorously applied to concrete reality what the master had foreseen too generically, is therefore Marx in his Grundrisse and Das Kapital.
There is one later follower—Nietzsche—who would be moved by similar ideas and would take a long time to express that violent opening imperative in a strategy. Having recognized the imaginary nature of every hypostasis, and the malevolent power of those fictions, instead of withdrawing into the barbarous silence of the “unnamable” and the “inexpressible” he would recognize figments (and therefore the hypostases), not only in every word and every action, but in every form and process of nature. And he would choose to deal with all figments as such, considering how they continually changed the terms of appearance, so that they would prevent it, however splendid and ocellated it may be, from being imperceptibly petrified into essence.
Over time, everything becomes part of the history of philosophy. In 1866, after twenty years of almost total obscurity, Stirner was named in two books that would long remain key references: Johann Edward Erdmann’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Outlines of the History of Philosophy) and Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). Stirner’s new reputation would, indeed, be made from a passage in this latter “history.” The Ego and Its Own reemerges from the regenerative silence as a “notorious work.” But Lange had been impressed to some extent by Stirner, so he added the words that turned out to be crucial: “this book—the most extreme that we know of its kind.”
The “magic of the extreme” (“the spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, this is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists—we are the most extreme…”) would work once again. In the summer of 1887, a young Scot, John Henry Mackay, would discover the name Stirner and that phrase for the first time while reading Lange’s work at the British Museum. He noted it down. When he read The Ego and Its Own a year later, it seemed to him that humanity had found its redeemer in Stirner. He soon set off on the trail of the prodigious and by then unknown author. Marx and Engels had constructed “Marxism” and the “Marxist” piece by piece (without failing, of course, to denigrate those terms later) whereas Stirner did not construct the “Stirnerian,” though he left some useful notions for his construction. He grew inexorably by himself: based on the model of the somewhat ridiculous and pompous Scot, he would be followed by countless others, from the workers of the black terror to the dandies of La Revue blanche. Mackay began work on his research for Stirner’s biography, mobilizing all the mighty forces of spiritual kitsch (“for this book is life itself”), which at that time was gaining heights never again achieved. Stirner sparked a further paradox. “Here we have Stirner’s book, excessively mature and extremely blasé product of a long evolution, without even a hint of naivety, last fragment of crumbling Hegelianism, which was buried by criticism and ridicule. And on the other hand, Mackay as Stirner’s biographer—boyish at heart, full of naivety, a fine, amiable soul, who has everything except a drop of humor and critical capacity.” The destroyer of the “Cause” was now becoming the noblest “Cause,” to be spread using every means: the object of sacrifice, of abnegation, of unswerving devotion. First Mackay and then the awkward clan of Stirnerians would be a living example of those “pious atheists” whom Stirner had ridiculed in his book.
During the course of his mission, Mackay soon noticed something strange. He had published an announcement asking anyone who had had dealings with Stirner to contact him. Hardly any response. His leads vanished the moment they appeared. The information he received related to people who had died, those who had moved elsewhere, to files lost. Raising his head with puzzled dignity, Mackay wondered: “Must such a great life not also have been rich in exterior, great events?” Well, yes. While Stirner’s specter seems to have canceled every possible record of his life, not even a portrait (other than the sketch by his enemy Engels) and barely a signature, what little remains emerges in a clear and unambiguous light: that of drab penury, an anonymous and humiliating life that takes up just a line or two in the municipal records and the school archives. That was all, indeed, that Mackay could find.
His biographical researches went on for years. Only in 1898 did Mackay publish his Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Max Stirner: His Life and Work) in Berlin—so far, the only biography. In the meantime a “Stirner affair”—a venomous sequel of the “Nietzsche affair”—had blown up. And as Nietzsche’s sister was nursing him at Weimar, allowing only a few select visitors to see him sitting glassy-eyed in his armchair, wrapped in a long thick white gown, likewise the pathetic Mackay wanted to be the First Apostle of Stirner. But arguments over precedence arise in every sect. Mackay was upset when the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann claimed it was he who had been the “rediscoverer” of Stirner through what he had written in Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) of 1869, and Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness) of 1879, though it was clear that Hartmann was elevating Stirner only to diminish Nietzsche. He was also upset by Paul Lauterbach’s preface to the edition of The Ego and Its Own published by Reclam (from 1893 onward) in the Universal-Bibliothek series at just a few pfennigs, which marks Stirner’s triumphal return among those authors who were required reading.
Lauterback’s scholarly gesture of comparing Stirner with those writers with whom he seemed to have an “affinity” was regarded by Mackay as an act of lèse-majesté, for it had to be acknowledged, prior to all else, that Stirner’s book was the gospel. Fortunately, there were now “individualist anarchists,” and Mackay’s friend Benjamin Tucker in the United States who had invented this term for the joy of all future historians of ideas. Stirner’s legacy, Mackay warned, rested in their “faithful and strong hands,” rather like the way in which Marx and Engels entrusted their legacy to a proletariat whom they urged to be blunt and sincere.
As for Nietzsche himself, though Mackay granted him a certain respect, he felt it rather wrong that Nietzsche’s success had swept the rediscovery of Stirner along with it. How anyone could compare this “muddled spirit, who is repeatedly self-contradictory, almost helplessly tumbling from truth to error, with the deep clear, calm, and superior genius of Stirner,” argued Mackay, “is an absurdity not worth serious refutation.” With his adjectives loaded with good and dull-witted intentions, Mackay built up a portrait of the Great Unknown Man. The more empty and insignificant his research into Stirner the person, the more enthusiastically he outlined a picture devoid of any reference to any provable reality—he had already piled up ex-votos around the miraculous image of the first completely ungodly human in history. In keeping with his character, and to make sure that “these exterior traces of his great life would not be wiped out,” Mackay soon concerned himself with memorials. In May 1892, with the support of Hans von Bülow, the only person who had known both Stirner and Nietzsche, he had a plaque put on the front of the house in Philippstrasse where Stirner had died. Inscribed on a slab of granite bought cheaply because it had an almost imperceptible crack, were the words: “In / this house / during his last days lived / Max Stirner / (Dr. Caspar Schmidt 1806–1856) / creator of the immortal work: / The Ego and Its Own / 1845.” During his research, Mackay discovered that Stirner had never obtained the title of doctor of philosophy—nor indeed that of high school teacher. On his tomb, all that was inscribed were the words Max Stirner. The subscription for the plaque and the tombstone raised 438 marks, though they had cost 469.
Ida Overbeck: “Once, when my husband was out, Nietzsche stayed talking with me for a while and told me of two strange fellows he was interested in at that moment, with whom he felt he had an affinity. Whenever he recognized certain inner connections, he was always lively and happy. Sometime later he found a book by Klinger in our house. My husband had not found Stirner in the library. ‘Oh,’ said Nietzsche, ‘I was wrong about Klinger. He was a Philistine, I feel no affinity at all with him; but Stirner, with him yes.’ Meanwhile an air of solemnity passed across his face. And as I, all tense, watched his expression, it changed again, he made a gesture with his hand as if to dispel, to drive something away, and he sighed: ‘Now I’ve said it, and I didn’t mean to. Forget everything. They’ll talk of plagiarism. But you won’t, I know.’”
Why does thought need hypostases? Because it knows it has powers that leap over it. Hypostasis is an act of homage that thought offers to the realm of the imagination. Those allegorical figures, with their somber empty stare, statues that mark out the boundary of the intellect, are the last heirs of the angels and great creatures of the zodiac, which at one time plundered thought relentlessly. They still stand in a circle among wild grass, and everyone will soon forget they had a purpose: why, indeed, should thought remain closed inside a boundary? The unstoppable linear movement draws it in a straight line toward an unknown that is supposedly of the same nature as the known. The statues are forgotten, become covered in moss, before some nameless vandal knocks their heads off. Water lilies float silently in the pond at the center of the park. Hidden beneath the trickle of water is an obscure life that will soon bring death to the master of the garden.
Paradoxes: for everything to be a process, everything had to become a thing. (“Thing” is that which is available; “process” is a power capable of making anything whatsoever available.) And, for everything to become a thing, everything has to be definable, circumscribable, and separable from everything else.
Thing: is that which can be managed, which has a distinct outline, which is separate from the rest. The mechanism for the formation of hypostases is that which allows such an explanation, and fixing, of mental clouds. But hypostases were assigned a surplus of power over the subject, which made them unavailable for use but, instead capable of using their subjects. It was therefore a question of erasing the memory of that power, and reason once again was zealous. After all, its own life was at stake, or rather its tranquillity. Making fun of angels, over centuries of aggressive science, served this purpose above all.
“[The spirit] dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its ‘dwelling,’ and if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.” The prosaic nature of this move corresponds with Stirner’s constantly derisive tone: to place the sublime in immediate contact not so much with the lowest but with the mediocre, with that tired daily ordinariness that ought now to take up all heaven and hell. And so, by giving Feuerbach a slight twist, Stirner turns the whole scene around: no longer the barrack-room speculation, but an unprecedented anthropological idea that defies all classification. At last we encounter something new in the table of variants in which the relationship between sacred and profane is usually inscribed: one of the opposing terms—the profane—demands to invite a caravan of gypsies laden with trinkets into its Biedermeier apartments for the sole reason that one of them claims to be a distant relative. There’s a Feydeau farce in the making here, and Stirner is aware of it. And so he presents such a momentous event as a time of family confusion on the arrival of guests more numerous and irksome than expected. But this scene of domestic comedy is portentous nonetheless: the sacred demands a place to go, its miasmal and penetrating power can be confronted only by those who know how to contain it (with objects, supports, buildings, rituals, formulas). Nothing in the bourgeois intérieur is suited to such a task: the ornaments glare, the lids of ornamental boxes open, the curtains quiver, the wallpaper puckers, the tablecloths crepitate. The Guest passes through, leaves his marks, goes off toward the attic, turns into Odradek. From that moment, in the eyes of the child who would be Walter Benjamin, every object in the room becomes a totem. Hold your ear close, and you can still hear the sound of the Guest passing through. The walls are tattooed.
“What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? Are we that which is in us?” The blaring trumpets of Humanity were then announcing continual conquests. Everything was being stored up, and the individual contemplated the increase in his possessions with satisfaction. But who was taking over what? And what was the difference between taking over a category of thought and possessing a credit document? Possession seemed like a first step toward appropriation, which in turn could be regarded as total when it absorbed the entity appropriated without residue: ablatio omnis alteritatis et differentiae (the removal of all differences and otherness), in the words of Nicholas Cusanus. But he was referring to the godlike soul, which is equated to the divine. Whereas here it was a question of equation to something that was extraneous by definition. And yet, even without allowing for the involvement of the divine, which always complicates matters terribly, and also leaving out all secular possession, appropriation nevertheless encounters various difficulties.
Our own body is itself extraneous to us: we can use it, or we can be mysteriously overwhelmed by it—yet we treat it as a multiplicity of extraneous entities. And the mind: can it not perhaps see itself as another thing? Indeed, isn’t this its ineluctable characteristic? What else is that glorious notion of “self-awareness” to which the Spirit aspired, if not the total expansion of such capacity?
Let us take yet another step back: what is ownness? The answer to this question inevitably reveals all the ambitions, all the intentions concealed in thought. We open the Upaniṣads (though no one in Stirner’s time was aware that Schopenhauer had just begun to read them). In the three words of tat tvam asi (“this you are”), ownness declares itself as the discovery of identification: extraneousness is one of the countless fruits of nonknowledge, which prevents the circulation of ownness in the Self. And that Self is everything. Yet nonknowledge remains that which is immediately our own. Paradoxes of a thought teeming with gods. Now, the emancipated reason of Feuerbach had only just appropriated the gods, and moreover in the euphemistic form of the “divine.” It is clear that Feuerbach’s subject had different aims from the subject of the Upaniṣads, with which in any case he was unfamiliar. What ownness was he seeking, then? For Feuerbach, a model of Man that was full of good sentiments and virtues. But Feuerbach is used here as a pretext, and it is certainly not in his moderate reasoning that we will find the answer of a godless age. Reasoning with no premises—every premise is extraneous—has fixed it into the area of inquiry in which it develops its greatest force: that of mathematical logic. Own is a term that belongs to a formalized theory. A formalized theory is a sequence of transparent statements, in the sense that each statement in the sequence is defined in all its elements and can be traced back, through rules of deduction, to a minimum number of initial statements (axioms). The formal system is a multiplicity where everything can only belong. But we know from Gödel’s theorem that for formal theories of some interest (including arithmetic) there is no effective procedure that makes it possible to decide whether a statement belongs to the same theory.
Thought without premises thus encounters insurmountable difficulty in the process of appropriation. And the theorem that reveals it is perhaps the thought from which that thought hangs by imperceptible threads. But it is not certain that the construction of the formal system is directed primarily toward appropriating logical consistency. Even thought from which the gods are absent has its paradoxes. Indeed, what is immediately striking about the formal system is its power. Arithmetic, which is the formal system on which Gödel demonstrated his theorem, cannot affirm its own consistency. But arithmetic is effective. And a formal system that works is also a machine that produces and amplifies power. Let us return to the construction of the formal system: what are its characteristics in relation to the rest of the world of propositions? First, the absence of premises: the formal system regards everything outside it as equal to zero. Second, it is arbitrary: any statement can be taken as a first proposition of a theory in a formalized system, provided that every constituent element is defined without a remainder. (In reality, there is always a remainder: the proposition a = b is formed by the signs a, =, and b: “In the beginning was the sign,” said Hilbert, and the phrase—inadvertently?—pointed to the fact that arbitrary choice can make everything transparent, but not itself.) The reduction of the surrounding context to zero and the arbitrary manner of setting the signs of the propositions in the formal system are two procedures of enormous power. Their application is not limited to the ambit in which such procedures appear in their pure form, which is the logico-mathematical sphere. Without the subject knowing it, these procedures act in all areas where thought has no premises. They act in their least pure, and of course their least consistent, forms: each time they are always more or less subtle or elaborate simulations of formal systems. But their purpose is not consistency, which moreover the formal system is unable to possess internally. These simulations aim at power—and they achieve it. Often to an extent that goes far beyond what is expected (precisely because they are simulations, therefore their elements are mixed with empirical data, they are not transparent—even if it is pretended they are, so long as the simulation holds). The formal system can be an impressive system of control, even though, inevitably, at a certain point in its development, it encounters an element that is entirely uncontrollable. But the hope is that such an element doesn’t cause too much practical disturbance. Arithmetic has indeed continued to make its contribution after Gödel’s theorem. In simulated formal systems, uncontrollability appears in forms that are clearly much more drastic, even in terms of pure functioning. But the intoxication of power, up to that moment, is immense. In such intoxication, thought without premises finds its formulation in what is its own. Own is that which belongs to the area in which a form of power can be exerted. The power is gauged in terms of capacity to control. Control is produced by simulating pure formal systems, or by mixing simulations with pure formal systems. But are we ourselves the formal systems that act within us?
The seizure of divinity by man, this act of good administration demanded by the times, would bring great surprises when it came to taking stock. The inventory included not only Goodness and Power, virtues that pleased everyone, but certain characteristics that were somewhat antiquated, though impressive all the same. Ego sum qui sum were the first words of the divine, which now had to find a new place. Feuerbach wouldn’t have dared to venture this far, nor would he have known how; but it was precisely from this point, with morbid consequentiality, that Stirner set out. The whole of The Ego and Its Own is above all an immense tautology and indeed an absurd aberration: a tautology built using all the tools of dialectics, as a correct transposition of the biblical pronouncement to the European adult of the nineteenth century. And here again one finds confirmation of a certain ineptitude among progressive minds: those who spoke out against religion were all convinced that religion was a collection of Virtues which should now be assembled in a public park. They of all people had failed to recognize the obvious: that religion contains within itself inexhaustible reserves of ambiguity and atrocity, more than enough to chip away the secular narrow-mindedness of professors, engineers, lawyers, and servants of the State who wanted to usurp it. And this is indeed what happened. Madmen would be born—ineffable, unspeakable, unique, from the prodigious power caged in larval bodies, shaken with torment. Teratology had become tautology, with a feeling of exhilaration.
Why is the “egoist” unique? Many of Stirner’s readers have interpreted the term in the psychological sense: whether scorning or extolling it, they have imagined it was supposed to affirm the value of a self. But above all the self of the egoist exists only as a negative and destructive power. On this point Stirner cut his links with earlier idealism no less distinctly than Marx. “When Fichte says, ‘The ego is all,’ this seems to harmonize perfectly with my thesis. But it is not that the ego is all, but the ego destroys all, and only the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the finite ego is really I. Fichte speaks of the ‘absolute’ ego, but I speak of me, the transitory ego.” Stirner’s ego is the negation that produces and abolishes, in an extremely rapid alternation, tending toward an impossible simultaneity. Anyone searching in Stirner for the reaffirmed substantiality of a subject will find instead an empty and silent cavity. So why then “egoist”? Instead of the Universal Man and Feuerbach’s omnilateral man (then transmitted to Marx, and from there across the whole of history), Stirner wanted to construct in the egoist a hybrid monster that would evoke the disturbing image of fairy tales. The egoist, extrapolated from the pauper by a process that uses everything and allows only that which is usable, is the delirium of a substitution of the pauper to the process that has made him such. But it’s a pure substitution: the subject is changed but the operation is unaffected. The egoist will also use everything and will substitute everything. But he will not manage to substitute his own figure, his compulsion to act in the same way as the process whose place he has taken. Likewise the principle of substitution cannot be exchanged with another principle. There is something at the very center of the despotic system of substitution that escapes it: the egoist (the pauper-despot) who is now identified with the process itself. The process is irreplaceable, in the same way that the egoist is irreplaceable. The system of exchange eventually clashes with itself as subject—and as a subject that is unexchangeable, unique, immeasurable. This wonderfully productive paradox is the motor that whirrs continually in our ears.
Ownness and the Alien. If this awkward couple is to remain in existence, an appropriate solution will be that of divorcing one term (the second, the bad one) in favor of the other. And this is what Marx intended when identifying Communism with the “destruction of alienness”—“with the communistic regulation of production and, implicit in this, the destruction of alienness…” But the method seems suspicious from the very beginning. Too much love for Society, impertinent avatāra of the Whole. Stirner, who was likewise inclined to paranoia and brutality, though of a crude and garish kind, saw that among all historical figures only God (and the despot who models himself on Him) was able to blur the distinctions between ownness and alien. All is alien to him because it is not God; all is ownness to him because God is “all in all.” Why not apply the same criterion to that unanchored, roaming ego that had no wish to occupy its place in Hegel’s architecture? Like God, this ego would have been the supreme egoist, the only egoist who can make both meanings of Sache (“thing” and “cause”) coincide with everything, thereby overcoming the common limitations of the egoist, who knows how to operate only in his own domain. But, having undergone such a contortion of meaning, whoever would now have considered ownness and alienness, except as something remembered from the desks of a Berlin lecture hall? Heading now, instead, toward an assimilation to the most prostituted being (“l’être le plus prostitué”), which is God, the being par excellence (“l’être par excellence”), who never tires, out of love, of going out of himself (“sortir de soi”) and can only go out into himself. Marx also foresees this possibility: “Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use.” Stirner develops this notion to an extreme: we use everything as our own and are used in everything by everyone. Coexistence of maximum ownership (everything is our material) and maximum alienness (we are the material used by everyone) but intertwined in universal prostitution, many steps beyond Sade, still encumbered by certain feudal memories of sovereignty. In the good old days of Kant it could still be decided by law what belonged to a person and what didn’t, but now everything is both at the same time—above all the ego, which claims to have everything at its disposal, and who is at the disposal of all.
The blind rage that Marx hurls upon the Lumpen is followed by the rage he displays toward unproductive workers. Maintaining with paleo-bourgeois zeal the distinction posited by Adam Smith, Marx includes in it the whole “rabble,” “from whore to pope.” And in the Grundrisse—the work that prepares the grave for the whole mighty conception of productive labor, insofar as it speculates upon the phase that we are approaching today, in which the productive worker ends up being transformed into “an overseer and regulator of the production process itself”—the unerring faith in the metaphysical structure of production (far more than to its historical manifestation) would drive Marx to evident bombast in defending the distinction between Smith and those servile economists who want to convince the bourgeois “that it is productive labor when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his [cock], because for example the latter activity will make his blockhead clearer the next day in the office.” Marx is concerned not just with a technical distinction, which is helpful in highlighting the specific nature of salaried work (a “form … which has replaced the very earth as the ground on which society stands”). More important, for him, is to identify with the process of capital in the treacherous hostility to unproductive powers, which embody the immeasurable: the sacrament, pleasure, sovereignty. And here, in the silent simultaneous monologue of their notebooks, Baudelaire replies: while Marx had lowered sacrament to the level of prostitution, Baudelaire invokes prostitution as a sacrament: “L’amour, c’est le goût de la prostitution” (Love is a passion for prostitution).
Whore-Pope-Lumpen: this is the Trinity of prostitution that Baudelaire was also identifying (his Fusées are datable to the years 1855–1862; Marx’s Grundrisse to 1857–1858). In their supremacy, all are vicars of God: “l’être le plus prostitué, c’est l’être par excellence, c’est Dieu”; “The being most prostituted is the being par excellence, it is God.” Having only one area of manifestation, they do not achieve that global and perpetual prostitution which is the sign of divinity. Whether the Lumpen then appear as paupers, as dandies, or as poets makes little difference. They are, in any case, beings with no dignity (if anything, they have majesty). What takes away their dignity is their very admission of contact with something extra-social and self-sufficient, truly nefarious: pleasure, the invisible, the gratuitousness of art. (The writer is a member of the Lumpen as soon as he talks about art for art’s sake: an insolent response, in cracked falsetto, to his loss of status: he no longer has a purpose at Court, so he rejects all purpose.)