How the Stirner Eats Gods
by Alejandro de Acosta
29
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
About his philosophical nickname
The author o the ne book
The Ego and its Own
was aman whose orehead sprouted a name:
Stirner
reers to hisgreat brow. There is something charming about the act thatthis book was signed with a pseudonym – this book that in-sists to the death on irreducible, irreparable uniqueness. Asi one’s proper name is never remarkable enough, and everyEgo requires the artice o a nickname to become a Uniquesignature.
Stirner
is his philosophical nickname, the signatureo an unknown visage
1
who dedicates his book to his sweet-heart, then passes it to us in all ambiguity and says:
use it.
About his allergy to the Cause
I have previously taken the liberty o calling Max Stirneran anarchist.
2
In the context o that discussion, as perhapswith most discussions o
The Ego and its Own
, I supposethat it worked. I do not doubt that he belongs to our ge-nealogy. In the long run, however – in the name o a trulyperspectival theory – I think one might understand Stirneras an anarchist and as something else as well. For there isno doubt that, or many, Anarchism is a Cause. What I haveto say here is a git to those who wish to betray that Cause.To put Stirner in dialogue with our present, we have toget past a certain caricature o his thought (a caricature orwhich he is partly responsible, due mostly to his excessiveprose style). Should you care to read the usually short sec-tion on Stirner to be ound in introductory books on anar-chism, you will nd more or less this: Stirner, writing be-ore Marx and Nietzsche, made a radical vindication o thereedom o the individual against all powers: the church,the state, all orms o authority. He did so in a way that wasinspiring or many but at the same time could go no artherthan a parodic exaggeration o liberal individualism. Whatyou get is a vague, almost mythical, image, o someone whois completely out or him- or hersel, and whose relationsto all others are conditional on their own benet. Benet isunderstood in a typical capitalist, economic way: propertyand individual sovereignty. In a way that simultaneouslyincludes and excludes Stirner’s aberrant claim to ownness,
1 It is additionally appropriate that there are no paintingsor photographs o Stirner. There is, o course, that delightully crudesketch made by Engels rom memory – nostalgic, perhaps, or thecompany o the Free.2 “Two Styles o Anti-Statist Subjectivity.”
this an imaginary that associatively gathers around it; it isdubbed “individualism.” Naturally, this image presupposesthe individual sel (as psyche and as body) as a metaphysi-cal given. Modern-day, ree-market libertarian, anarcho-capitalist types seem to be inspired directly or indirectly bythis caricature.Now, I would not say that there is nothing in Stirner thatopens onto such a caricature. Ater all, there are many cari-catures in
The Ego and its Own
. And to each Ego her Own!I I set it all aside, though, and try to summon or mysel hisintuition in all its vertiginous danger, it seems to me that hemust have had something rather dierent in mind than thestultiying conclusion that the greatest example o an egoistwould be something like a Wall Street banker. As i he orshe who is only out or themselves and wants to appropri-ate everything is exemplied by one o our great privatizers,those who attempt to turn as much o the world as possibleinto private property. O course those little men and womenare egoists. But so is everyone else: “Unconsciously and in-voluntarily we all strive towards ownness.” “All your doingsare
unconessed
, secret, covert, and concealed egoism.”
3
Yes,the real question is (and do please be kind enough to laughat this): who will
coness
? We need better examples, arstranger examples; we need to nally meet or at least envi-sion
conessed
egoists. We need, in all, another perspective.This second perspective sets out rom a considerationo the Ego as a kind o cipher or variable, something un-damentally unknown. The rst thing we know o it is itsallergy to any Cause that can be resolved into an Ism. Itscharacteristic activity—in Stirner’s time, in our own, per-haps or all time—is the
schism
in which one breaks withthe Cause. I will have to come back, and soon, to this in-adequately adequate denomination, Ego. For the momentlet us play a provisional dialectical game, and suppose thatEgo=
x
is dened in opposition to the Cause.Cause, or, in German,
Sache
: either has one o those amus-ingly long dictionary entries which might make us laugh atthe game o denition. Playing this game or a moment, wemight read under
Sache
thing, object, article, cause, action,legal case… and so we might learn what game Stirner wasplaying. These are all things that, though they may seem to
3
The Ego and its Own
, 316, 149. All other reerences inparentheses in the essay.
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
30
be objects o the subject that I am, are eminently marks orsigns o my subordination to a greater subject. We knowthat it is a subject because that is how it appears in ourspeech. It is greater than me inasmuch as it is imagined astranscendent or eternal. It seems to constitute me in medi-ate relation to things and actions, by means o constitutingme in immediate relation to itsel, to its Cause.I will rehearse the enumeration o causes in the delightulopening rant o the book, entitled “All Things are Nothingto Me.” Stirner opens
The Ego and its Own
in the rst per-son: “What is not supposed to be my concern!” (5). Whatollows is a list o Causes that I am asked to accept as myown: the Cause o God, the Cause o Humanity, the Causeo the State, etc, etc. In each case I am asked to identiywith a Cause alien to my interest. The terms o this oerare hardly delicate. Stirner observes: what we can say aboutGod is that God is God’s main concern. What we can sayabout Humanity is that Humanity is Humanity’s main con-cern. What we can say about the State is that the State isthe State’s main concern. But inexplicably I nd mysel inthis statement: “I mysel am my concern” (7). My Causewill be my own. I note with interest that Stirner gives
noexplanation
as to how he or any o us might come to makesuch a claim. Now please read those statements again andobserve or yoursel. The relation o
being its own main con-cern
is said o an entity that is totally hypothetical. Moreprecisely: imaginary. Stirner never gives us any reason tobelieve that there is God or Humanity beyond the quasi-existence that constellations o xed ideas in the imagina-tion might be said to have. As or the State, according to adenition that ought to be amiliar to anarchists, it can beclearly shown to be the modes o behavior o those wholive in accord with that prooundly inadequate constella-tion o ideas, that Cause.
4
So, through a more circuitousroute, the same dierence. None. A paradoxical question: i all o these Causes-Subjects are imaginary, am
I
imaginary? What was I beore this constitutive event, beore this pro-cess began? What am I once I break with the Cause? Was Iever, can I ever be again, its orphan and its atheist?
5
4 I am alluding, o course, to Landauer’s amous descrip-tion: “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between humanbeings, a mode o human behavior; we destroy it by contractingother relationships, by behaving dierently.” Cited in Buber,
Paths inUtopia
, 46. Goldman and many others have given similar accounts.
In the sacred and sacricial logic o every Cause exceptperhaps my own, the imaginary greater subject (God, Hu-manity, the State, etc, etc.), the one that denes me, orciblyconstitutes me in mediate relation, not only to things and ac-tions, but above all to mysel. One could say, as Debord did,that its operation is separation, the introduction o a “scis-sion within human beings.”
6
But that cannot be the wholestory. I agree with Stirner that there is no Man: Humanityis another Cause. Scission or separation within what, then? Just this cipher we call the Ego, this variable that names notgeneric humanity but individual human bodies. Individu-als? Humans? I will come back to individuals and humans.
The imagination does not speak.
Someone
has spoken. Heor she is a representative o the Cause, or wants you to thinkso. He does not speak in his own name. She says she speaksor the Cause. He shares, without invitation, his imagina-tion. She insists that you accept her git o words, sometimeseven o organs.
7
As David Hume once put it: “In vain, bypompous phrase and passionate expression, each recom-mends his own pursuit, and invites the credulous hearers toan imitation o his lie and manners.”
8
Someone
says (usuallyrepeats) to you that you must take this Cause as your own;that without it, your lie is meaningless. “Every man musthave something that is more to him than himsel” (254).Stirner implies that, in such moments, you might accept,even embrace, the possibility o meaninglessness. He doesnot assume that, now that the God Cause, the State Cause,etc, etc, is no longer my own, I immediately know what Iam doing, or what to do next. To assume my Cause as myown does not mean that I know what I am or what I want todo.
9
I can say that I will make my Cause my own, but I maynot know what that means. I might trip up in my imagi-nary sel-constitution. Not knowing is not only possible butprobable. Someone sure o the next step has probably justswitched Causes. Sometimes that is called progress.
5 As has been said o a person ree o myth, or o the un-conscious. Deleuze and Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus
, 58.6
Society o the Spectacle
, § 20, translation modied.Debord’s concept o spectacle useully illustrates the social machinesthrough which such imaginary subjects come to appear real.7 The idea o a git o organs was suggested in a dierentcontext by Jean-François Lyotard. I am thinking o all o the non-verbal ways in which we are invited or seduced to join a Cause.8 “The Platonist,” 92.9 The event o breaking with the Cause is not itsel a Cause;however, it is common enough that instances o such breaks areeventually memorialized as part o a new Cause.
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