#1 20-03-2025 16:14

  

1993 – About Max Stirner

< as in the French text there are some grammatical liberties >

It is the epoch when adolescence, more and more precocious, enters publicity organized in gangs. It is the epoch when the number of individuals on the planet has gone, in one hundred and fifty years, from one to five billion. It is the epoch when bourgeois egalitarian democracy has suppressed heroes and conquerors. It is the epoch when to avoid being degraded in image, it is necessary to enter the clandestinity of anonymity. It is the epoch when history is called into question by the inability to set it in motion. Never before has the individual found itself in front of such a dilemma: its immediate glory, celebrity, is the contrary and the impossibility of true, historical glory; never before has the individual found itself so excluded from its own history.

Conversely, the dominant ideology, after a sterile struggle between "individualism" and "collectivism," long undecided on the class front, has proclaimed the triumph of the individual. Individualism has vanquished everywhere, among the managers of the State as among those of the commodity or in the ex-working class. The egalitarian liberalism born of the bourgeois counter-revolution and the most radical subjectivism born of the negation of culture, and of the defeat of the revolution in 1921, have found themselves united in the promotion of the individual, which is now extended to the insignificant, to animals, to commodities themselves. Thus, while everywhere it compresses, it shrinks, it annihilates, it separates, and it flattens the individual in its representation, everywhere modern communication proclaims, supports, manifests, constructs and communicates on this individual become monstrous.

This tearing apart of the concept, triumphant at the moment when it is negated, is a source of doubt and confusion. The Bibliothèque des Emeutes is thus brought close to ultra-individualist tendencies, notably neostirnerian. Indeed, no longer satisfied with the divisions of humanity as they seem to accomplish on theoretical grounds now refuted, we reject as much the dominant divisions based on the need to procreate (race, ethnicity, nation) as those based on the need for food ("social" classes), and the resulting indeterminacy resembles, but only resembles in the course of our observation, an acceptance of individualism; as, to the temporary benefit of this indeterminacy, we think that the debate still belongs to all those who take part, and the revolt to those who actually revolt, we have some jealousy in defending the respect of each of these; but as these are very rare in the world, their individuality counts all the more for us, and we support its most extensive freedom, especially as we ourselves are first of all a very small number of associated individuals; so, our association supports a certain number of principles identical to those of ultra-individualism. Egoism: if each one knew to rely on oneself and oneself alone, if each one knew that responsibility is entirely its, it would at least suppress hypocrisy, which is an impediment, and a great number of forms of submission to be found in every hierarchies; a solidarity based on egoism, which is therefore outside of morality and guilt; complete access to all decisions for each individual, and a form of delegation where the mandated is only the executor of the mandatary who alone retains all power, arbitrary and discretionary, over the mandate: mode of functioning and decision-making that we call democracy; a pre-eminence given to personal enjoyment, unfortunately more theoretical than practical, although this pre-eminence does not take precedence over everything; and therefore, what seems to us today the broadest individual freedom that it is possible to conceive. All the excesses, oddities, moods, irrationalities, inventions coming from an individual seem to us possible bases of the debate that we intend to promote.

However, we submit this general tolerance to this particular intolerance: that these non-conforming expressions are in coherence with the already existing foundations of our theoretical work or demonstrate their incoherence, in other words, that they concretely tend to realize this missing debate. Similarly, in no way do we accord the primacy of the individual over the history of genus, so much the evidence of current history of genus already ridicules such a claim. The individual does not count in history as an individual. Our epoch has very largely finished disarming the individual in the face of society and genus, through the spectacular magic of alienation, whose domination now reveals its essence in grandiose forms. If it is the human individual who produces alienation at the base (of the brain and the heart), it is precisely what escapes the individual, like the backfiring gas escapes the moped. Alienation has become the generic manifestation of the individual and the manifestation of gender within the individual. It is to this paroxysm of history that we are confronted, here and now.

Max Stirner published in 1844 his major work, The Unique and Its Property. His point of view is simple: Me. His application, more brilliant than rigorous, is very radical. Nothing surpasses Me. Stirner undertakes a sort of inventory of all the abstract concepts that oblige the individual, persiflates and criticizes their domination over Me, and reverses the relationship by submitting them to Me. God, the state, society, love, humanness, freedom, truth, etc. are only means of enslaving the individual by an idea, that however it created, but which surpasses it and thus escapes its property. What is the property of the individual? It is everything that it masters, everything that its proper strength can attain. Thus, for example, the truth, as long as it is an external commandment to which one believes, is only an additional pledge of my submission, whereas my truth is my property, pledge of my freedom, which extends, for its part, as far as I can, or want, or desire. Or free thought: it is, for Stirner, the thought free of the individual, which submits it, and which is opposed to the thought mastered by the individual, to which the individual assigns the limits of freedom, because the individual is not only thought. The goal? It is personal enjoyment. Society is the original state of men, from which gradually the individual extracts, forms, and profiles. The first objection that came to the minds of its critics, that Me, the Unique, is a new abstract concept that would simply replace the others, is rejected by Stirner: the Unique is precisely unique, it is the concept to which one cannot give determination, content, because it is deprived of generality. This first limitation means that neither Stirner, nor Mackay, who brought Stirner out of oblivion a hundred years ago, nor the neostirnerians of L’Unique et son ombre speak of themselves, as if speaking were already a generalization, as if speaking of oneself were already giving a content, a determination, as if the property of the individual excluded its expression. Thus, in the review of the latter, a very boring praise of love via Plato, Breton, Freud, whom more or less conformity to the theory of love that the author assumes Stirner to have is painfully measured, glosses over what would be much more interesting, the author's personal experience of love, and its theory from its own unicity; especially since love is precisely one of the rare activities for which no general theory seems so far to conform to particular experience, which predisposes it to be examined from Stirner's angle of view. But love, precisely, is not the least ambiguity in Stirner's work. In Some Provisional Remarks Concerning the State Founded on Love, he opposes with the utmost clarity the egoist, whom he approves, and the lover: "The lover is completely different. Egoism does not change man, love transforms him. ‘Since he loves, he has become a completely different person,’ as the saying goes. This is because, as a lover, he really does something of himself, he destroys in himself everything that contradicts the beloved; consenting, and with abandon, he lets himself be determined and, transformed by the pressure of love, he conforms to the other." With regard to the neostirnerians, this clearly means that Stirner is opposed to love, contrary, it seems, to what they have understood of it. In The Unique, on the contrary, he implies that love can be a slavery, and so what, if it is out of egoism?

This is the first great limit in Stirner, which degrades his work into pure vanity. For, if one can be a slave by egoism, each individual lives according to the precepts of Stirner. All right, I believe in Society, Truth, God, Humanness, Freedom, etc. But it is by pure egoism! Indeed, on the one hand Stirner reproaches this world for the trial of egoism, on the other he repeats that deep down everyone is egoist. This trial is therefore part of egoism. The hypocrisy of this trial, to the extent that Stirner rejects any moral impediment, is only an expression of my egoism, can affirm any hypocrite. If egoism is at the bottom of each one of us, if slavery, even to love, is egoism, then this whole world, even in its most dizzying sacrifices, is egoist. This whole world is therefore according to the wishes of Stirner. It is only a new version of Leibniz’s best of all worlds, unless, more simply, it smells of hoax, or more seriously of sophism.

In truth, in his attempt to place himself at the center, but above the world, Stirner commits two errors of manipulation. The first is that this posthegelian thinks curiously that thought can only be a thought in a head, so nothing. This misunderstanding of alienation, very much in vogue among nineteenth century materialists, is still current today, and not only among executives. Thought, in a head, is not nothing. And the fact that a thought leaves a head to become other is verified notably in what Stirner mainly criticizes, the abstraction that puts it above us to enslave us, a very common figure of alienation. Similarly, Stirner, in postulating society as initial, from which the individual separates by taking form, does not explain how and why this initial abstraction was constituted, nor in what way Hegel's theory of progression towards origin is therefore false. He does not explain any more by what aberration non-egoist hypocrites believe in humanness, in God, in love, in truth, all things to be realized. Truth, in particular, escapes him in the sense that to make something true is to realize it, which contains the difference between existence and reality. An idea is only true when realized, even if it exists. Communism or the individual, for example, are far from being realized, and therefore true. It is this fundamental misunderstanding of thought that allows Stirner to place Me not only at the center of totality, but in totality itself. The beyond of Me exists (the same cannot yet be said of thought), it is alienation.

The second erroneous presupposition seems very much of the epoch then opened, since it is found in Marx, and in the whole materialism. Stirner, like the materialists with the atom, finds in the individual the smallest indivisible part, and it is from it, quite logically, that he constructs all the rest, finding it simply scandalous and ridiculous that parts of this rest have emancipated themselves to the point of substituting themselves for the indivisible essence that is the individual. This positivist will to build on a solid positive, a kind of fundamental unity, however, requires the operation that justifies all of Stirner's work: it is necessary to purge the individual of everything that is not the individual within the individual. Also, the thought of the genus, of God, of the state, etc., must be rigorously denounced, separated, rejected from the individual, before it reappropriates what suits its personal enjoyment. But me, I do not agree with the division of Stirner: this external thought that is in me, it is also me. The me augmented with the genus is not what I aim to separate, but on the contrary to unite, in a relationship that my life and my relationship to other lives determine. In other words: me, a particular individual, is not separated from what is foreign to it. On the contrary, what is foreign attracts me, as if my realization found its truth only there. And far from admitting Stirner's Unique as an indivisible part, I claim that this Unique is itself equally divisible. The only thing that is no longer divisible in itself is that which is finished. If therefore Stirner's Unique were indivisible, it would be because it is finished.

Stirner can therefore only deny that humanity has a goal, that me as an individual pursue a generic goal, outside of my will, as it reveals itself to my consciousness, which consequently orients my will. Stirner can therefore only deny history, or reduce it to its perpetually completed representation: that singular past which is the movement from the general to the particular, from society to the individual. His goal is the same as Sade's: personal enjoyment. But the difference between the two is that in Stirner, personal enjoyment is subject to Me, whereas in Sade, Me, I am subject to personal enjoyment. We are by the way very grateful to Sade for having spoken of personal enjoyment, we regret that Stirner did not speak of his personal enjoyment, nor of Sade, whom we assume he knew. But once again, to speak of it is to negate it. That is why, in terms of goal, I go further: it is necessary to terminate by the end.

(Bibliothèque des Emeutes, 1993)

  

Re : 1993 – About Max Stirner

cette traduction peut être comparée, discutée et amendée ici :
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVFEYBTIsNBuXfcs5IMWPgyYSfIFnV2RstYOIu0suqo/edit