Stirner's New Critics Part Four

The Post-Structuralist Critiques of Stirner

Much like how Stirner is regarded by some as a proto-existentialist he is regarded by perhaps more as a proto-post-structuralist thinker. This is due to both Stirner and the post-structuralists sharing a similar critique of fixed ideas and an anti-essentialist attitude. When Stirner engages in his relentless critique of fixed ideas found in The Unique and Its Property he is in the same attitude that would later befall Nietzsche and later the various thinkers of the post-structuralist canon. This comparison has been noted by many but is perhaps best expressed in the words of Koch. He writes:

“To Stirner, the modem state legitimates itself through creating the illusion of fixed and essential ideas, and by convincing the population that it has ’discovered’ immutable truth. Only by understanding Stirner’s attack on what he called the ’fixed idea’ will his position make any sense. In short, rather than being the ’last Hegelian’ Stirner might just as easily be said to be the ’first post structuralist,’ in offering first modem epistemological critique of the way in which state power is legitimated through the nexus of power l knowledge contained within the dominant culture. (Koch, 1997, pg. 3-4).

Here Koch is expressing that Stirner’s critique of the modern state, emphasizing the critique of the state in Stirner due to Koch’s idea of post-anarchism, comes from a rather post-structuralist theory of fixed ideas. Thus Koch, rather than Stirner being the culmination of Hegelianism as Marx and Engels do, sees Stirner as a rejection of the Hegelianism of his day towards a proto-post-structuralist philosophy. Newman, another theorist of the post-anarchist current, has also pointed out the similarities between Stirner and various post-structuralist thinkers. He has pointed out the many similarities between those such as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Agamben, etc, and Stirner throughout many essays. The specific brand of post-anarchism Newman follows seeks to go beyond both post-structuralism and classical anarchism through the ideas of Stirner. This is in contrast to May’s post-anarchism, which sought to combine and reconcile classical anarchism and post-structuralism. Newman is, in my view, the most adept modern expresser of post-structuralist and Stirnerite views in combination. 

Regardless of the various connections found between Stirner and post-structuralism and the various praises sung by these contemporary post-structuralist thinkers, Stirner is a rather divisive figure within the first wave of post-structuralist thinkers. Many remain seemingly unaware of his existence or dismiss him as a mere liberal egotist following Marx, but there are some who readily engage in his philosophy. The two thinkers most exemplary of this are Derrida and Deleuze. Derrida in his work Specters of Marx evaluates Marx’s place in modern politics and philosophy through a post-structuralist and hauntological perspective. Within this analysis of Marx, he analyzes Marx and Engels’ critique of Stirner and Stirner’s notion of spooks or abstractions. He uses and critiques Stirner in these spooks or phantasms for their connection to his hauntological idea of specters. Along with this, he extends the Marxist criticism found in The German Ideology to a more post-structuralist standpoint to critique the idea of the phantasm. Deleuze in his work Nietzsche and Philosophy critiques Stirner as a dialectical nihilist, removing the dogma of Hegel but replacing it with a dialectic of the ego. This nihilism that he characterizes within Stirner is much like how Camus characterizes Stirner, as a theorist of negation that would be happily found among the theorists of anarcho-nihilism. Along with this Deleuze follows from the critique of Marx, characterizing Stirner as the completer of Hegel’s philosophical system. These two critiques will be dealt with in the consecutive order of their releases, beginning with the Deleuzian critique and ending with the Derridean one. 

Deleuze begins his critique of Stirner by placing him in the final place of the Hegelian tradition. To him Stirner is the completion of the system of Hegel, he is the one who has shown the ego, or as it is known by Lanchester’s translation, the unique, as the completion of the dialectic. Deleuze writes:

“In the history of the dialectic Stirner has a place apart, the final, extreme place. Stirner was the audacious dialectician who tried to reconcile the dialectic with the art of the sophists. He was able to rediscover the path of the question: "which one?". He knew how to make it the essential question against Hegel, Bauer and Feuerbach simultaneously. "The conceptual question, 'what is man?' has then changed into the personal question 'who is man?'. With 'what' the concept was sought for in order to realise it; with 'who' it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at once in the 160 Nietzsche and Philosophy asker." 1 4 In other words, the posing of the question "who?" is sufficient to lead the dialectic to its true result: saltus mortalis.” (Deleuze, 1962, pg. 174-175).

To Deleuze, Stirner is repositioning the question behind the philosophy of the dialectic from “what is man?” to “who is man?”. In Hegel, the development of spirit is the development of the dialectic, the human spirit. This spirit is said to find its culmination in the nation state, which gives freedom in a Hegelian sense to its constituents. Feuerbach takes this further by investigating what constitutes man, arguing in The Essence of Christianity that the Christian religion and the idol of god are an alienation from man. Man imbues the divine with a perfect representation of all human qualities, creating an idol of perfection that creates a general alienation. Stirner takes this further, stating that Feuerbach in his humanism has merely recreated Christianity, replacing god with humanity. This alienates us just as much as god alienates us, all idols do the same. This is Stirner’s point with his notion of fixed ideas, that any idol alienates the individual. An idol creates a forced concept in our minds, placing it as a dogma against the free flow of action and thought. Deleuze is very right that Stirner extends these ideas found in Hegel and the following theorists of The Young Hegelians to their extremes. He changes the ideas of spirit and man into the context of one’s life, removing the Hegelian dogmas of systematization. This does not however make him a dialectical thinker, as Deleuze is quite right that the dialectic is a rigid and conceptualized mode of concept and logic. As Koch stated while advancing the idea that Stirner should be considered a post-structuralist, Stirner rejects his Hegelian contemporaries’ dialectical modes of analysis. Deleuze advances the idea of Stirner being a dialectician next, He writes:

“The speculative motor of the dialectic is contradiction and its resolution. But its practical motor is alienation and the suppression of alienation, alienation and reappropriation. Here the dialectic reveals its true nature; an art of quibbling beyond all others, an art of disputing properties and changing proprietors, an art of ressentiment. Stirner penetrates yet again to the truth of the dialectic in the very title of his great book: The Ego and His Own. He thinks that Hegelian freedom remains an abstract concept; "I have nothing against freedom but I wish you more than just freedom. You should be disencumbered of what you do not want, you should also possess what you do want, you should not only be a free man, you should also be a proprietor". But who is appropriated or reappropriated? What is the reappropriating instance? Is not Hegel's Objective Spirit, his absolute knowledge, yet another alienation, a spiritual and refined form of alienation? And cannot the same be said of Bauer's self-consciousness and pure or absolute human critique and Feuerbach's species being, man as species, essence and sensuous being? I am nothing of all that. Stirner has no difficulty in showing that idea, consciousness or species are no less alienations than traditional theology. Relative reappropriations are still absolute alienations. Competing with theology, anthropology makes me the property of Man. But the dialectic cannot be halted until I finally become a proprietor. Even if it means ending up in nothingness.” (Deleuze, 1962, pg. 175).

To Deleuze, Stirner’s egoistic approach of the ridding of all phantasms from one’s mind is a dialectical act, an act of contradiction. The dialectical process that Deleuze imagines Stirner engaging in is a phantasm, Stirner’s egoistic rejection of that phantasm, and an ultimate resolution through nothingness. Until the egoist enforces their autonomy by destroying these phantasms, by consuming oneself and one’s property, they are in a constant state of negation to Deleuze. Thus, to Deleuze, Stirner has made the dialectic one of nihilism. There is a dialectical destruction of idols, to put it in the terms of the Italian Stirnerite Novatore, it is to approach the creative nothing. As Deleuze is a Nietzschean and is here writing a text on Nietzsche, it is quite clear what his response to this supposed nihilism will be. Deleuze, much like Nietzsche and Camus before him, opposes this nihilistic negation for affirmation. What is to be contested is whether or not Stirner engages in a dialectical movement with his philosophy of egoism. Egoism after all does not start from some place of concepts or basis, as the Hegelians before him do, but starts with the unique. Stirner’s egoism is not a dialectical movement toward this unique, as the unique is no goal to be achieved. The creative nothingness is no goal of a dialectical movement, neither is the unique as we have just stated, so it cannot be viewed as some stage of a dialectical movement. Stirner does indeed negate the phantasms that alienate us, but not for some final phase of nothingness and nihilism. Rather, Stirner’s egoism leads to free affirmation unfettered by the idea of a cause. One’s cause in Stirner, when he refers to the cause of the egoist for example, is not some definite cause existing in the world, but rather a placeholder for whatever one wants to do. Egoism is an affirmation, but an affirmation not tattered to a preconceived notion of a course of affirmation. To be an egoist is to live basing one’s cause on nothing. Interestingly, this resembles the idea of schizoanalysis and the body without organs found in Deleuze and Guattari’s works Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and many smaller works, as in these works they too reject any limits towards thought and action. They create schizoid flows, unchaining the individual from any limits. Thus the response to Deleuze’s critique of Stirner is very similar to the response to Camus, Egoism is not an act of negation, here dialectical, but rather unchained affirmation. Stirner is not the dialectician of nihilism, as Deleuze says here explicitly:

“Stirner is the dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic. It is enough for him to pose the question "which one?" The unique ego turns everything but itself into nothingness, and this nothingness is precisely its own nothingness, 162 Nietzsche and Philosophy the ego's own nothingness. Stirner is too much of a dialectician to think in any other terms but those of property, alienation and reap propriation - but too exacting not to see where this thought leads: tt the ego which is nothing, to nihilism.” (Deleuze, 1962, pg. 175-176).

Deleuze has constructed a dialectic in Stirner that was never there, he imagines Stirner as a systematic nihilism while Stirner rejects all systems. Stirner’s supposed dialectic of the individual’s development towards egoism is a subversive and satirical deconstruction of the dialectic rather than a serious dialectical project. He does this further by committing one of the greatest misunderstandings one can have with Stirner, by imagining the individual as a conceptual subject. Deleuze writes on this here in relation to Marx and Stirner:

“This is one of the most important senses of Marx's problem in The German Ideology: for Marx it is a matter of stopping this fatal sliding. He accepts Stirner's discovery that the dialectic is the theory of the ego. On one point 1 supports Stirner: Feuerbach's human species is still an alienation. But Stirner's ego is, in turn, an abstraction, a projection of bourgeois egoism. Marx elaborates his famous doctrine of the conditioned ego: the species and the individual, species being and the particular, social order and egoism are reconciled in the ego conditioned by social and historical relations. Is this sufficient? What is the species and which one is the individual?”  (Deleuze, 1962, pg. 177).

Deleuze imagines the unique individual much like the ego of Freud or the subject of Descartes, an essential subject of the individual as a basis behind his philosophy. Just like Marx, he sees this as bourgeois individualism. But Stirner is so much more than that, he is not a naive bourgeois individualist but the philosopher who has rejected all base assumptions. He is the first of the modern anti-foundationalists, a tradition that continued into Nietzsche, the existentialists, and finally the post-structuralists. 

Derrida in Specters of Marx presents the opposite side of Stirner in his critique of Stirner. While Deleuze analyzes in Stirner how the phantasm is torn down, Derrida analyzes what the phantasm even is in the first place. This makes sense given the nature of both works. Nietzsche and Philosophy is a Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche, essentially a bastardized version of the thinker shown to get the most use out of a thinker, to present a critique of the dialectic. As such, Deleuze goes against what he sees as the dialectical and nihilistic aspects of Stirner’s thought. Specters of Marx is a work that analyzes the specter of Marxism and the future that was lost after the fall of the supposed Marxist states internationally. Marx and Marxism are dead to Derrida, but they continue to haunt both philosophy and the wider world. Stirner’s notion of the spook or the phantasm is thus useful, as it can show what Derrida means by a haunted mind. His critique of Stirner, following from Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, is on how exactly the spook or phantasm operates, accusing him of a Hegelian idealism. Derrida begins his critique of Stirner, which is found throughout the book spliced between his construction of a theory of hauntology, by stating that Stirner constructs a theory of phantasms, where one lives in a world permeated by phantasms. This is a conceptual space. Derrida writes: 

“Saint Max (Stirner), if one can believe Marx (and Engels), would have caused the Apocalypse of Saint John to lie. Where the latter heralded the whore of Babylon (that other center of our MiddleEastern ellipsis, still today), the neo-evangelist Stirner proclaims man, the secret (das Geheimnis), the unique (den Einzigen). And then follows, in the desert of the spirit (die Wüste des Geistes), the whole 150 specters of marx history of spirits, ghosts, or revenants: first the pure history of spirits (reine Geistergeschichte), then the history of the possessed (die Bessesenen) as impure history of phantoms (unreine Geistergeschichte), then the impure impure history of spirits (unreine unreine Geistergeschichte). Stirner proclaims it himself: “ever since the word was made flesh, since the world was spiritualized [vergeistigt], bewitched [verzaubert], it is a ghost [ein Spuk].”” (Derrida, 1993, pg. 171-172).

To Stirner, since the beginning of human thought, there has been the transformation of concepts into idols, creating phantasms. These phantasms regulate subjective existence, turning one’s experience into an experience mediated by concepts. This is similar to to Debord’s idea of the spectacle as reality mediated by images, with both Debord and Stirner positing that in these spectacular modes of being we are in a state of alienation. Derrida, constructing a theory of haunting, uses this to say that the individual’s mind is haunted. He then goes on to accuse Stirner of being a failed Hegelian, attempting to construct a genealogy of the phantasm but doing so in an idealistic manner. Derrida writes:

“Stirner descends from Hegel, he is haunted by the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit and he cannot stand it. He spits out living ghosts like a whale suffering from indigestion. In other words, he does not comprehend Hegel as well as another one of the descendants, guess who. The latter, just as persecuted by the shadow of this great father who comes back every night, ready also to betray him or to avenge him (it is sometimes the same thing), is busy giving a lesson here in Hegelianism to brother Stirner. Stirner always slips into Hegelian language, he slides his words into “the long-familiar orthodox-Hegelian phrases” (p. 149). But this unworthy heir has not understood the essentials of the will and testament, he has not read very well The Phenomenology of Spirit which is his inspiration and which he wants to give to us in a Christian version (“Saint Max intends to give us a phenomenology of the Christian spirit” [p. 153]). What has he not understood? What is the essential? On the subject of the becoming-specter of the spirit, he has not seen that, for Hegel, the world was not only spiritualized (vergeistigt) but despiritualized (entgeistigt), a thesis that the author of The German Ideology seems to approve: this de-spiritualization is quite correctly (ganz richtig) recognized by Hegel, we read.” (Derrida, 1993, pg. 171-172).

To Derrida, when Stirner in The Unique and Its Property constructs his analogy of egoism through the development of the child and the development if humanity, he is engaging in a genealogy following from Hegel’s historical analysis within The Phenomenology of Spirit. This section of Stirner’s work is hotly debated by scholars of the thinker and at times regarded as the worst part of the text. Within this supposed genealogy, Stirner compares the development towards rational egoism to both the development of the child and the development of civilization. The child goes from the naivety of idols and false hopes to independence and maturity, representing the transformation from a religious attitude of idols to the attitude of egoism. This is the same analogy in the development of civilization, with the primitive societies of the Paleolithic developing into the societies found in Stirner’s time. It is important that in this analogy many non european civilizations are portrayed in a somewhat racist manner, unfortunate considering all of the prejudice Stirner rejected during his life. Regardless of the racist implications found within the analogy, it is also meant to represent the development towards rational egoism. Derrida upon being presented with this assumes that Stirner is constructing a theory of history in a Hegelian sense, an absurd proposition given Stirner’s rejection of a teleology of history and the implications this would have if it was a theory of history. If Stirner’s analogy of the development of civilization was some dialectical theory of history that would mean that the modern western civilization would correspond to the egoist, yet Stirner makes almost all his criticisms of the various idols that plague the individual towards this same western civilization. As such, to say that Stirner is constructing a genealogy of phantasms is absurd. Derrida then says that in this supposed genealogy, Stirner can not escape Hegel, he is a bad son of Hegel who constantly misrepresents his ideas. While it is true that Stirner uses Hegelian terms, being contemporaries with many Hegelians and considered by many to be in a post-Hegelian school of thought, it is not true that he is constructing a Hegelian history of phantasms. It is certainly true that in Hegel the world is not only spiritualized but also despiritualized, but Stirner says nothing contrary to this. In fact, his thought relies on the possibility of despiritualization as without it, without the destruction of all idols, there can be no egoism. Derrida is thus misrepresenting Stirner on every point. He goes on to engage in the Marxian critique of Stirner, using Marx’s criticism to better create a theory of the specter and hauntology. Derrida writes:

“We can try to grasp this strategy as close as possible to its literality, and first of all its Stirnerian literality, in what Marx calls the series of “conjuring tricks” (French: escamotage; German, Eskamotage), which he intends to take apart at the beginning of “Saint Max” (“The Leipzig Council III”).1 The production of the ghost, the constitution of the ghost effect is not simply a spiritualization or even an autonomization of spirit, idea, or thought, as happens par excellence in Hegelian idealism. No, once this autonomization is effected, with the corresponding expropriation or alienation, and only then, the ghostly moment comes upon it, adds to it a supplementary dimension, one more simulacrum, alienation, or expropriation.” (Derrida, 1993, pg. 178).

To Derrida, and likewise to Marx, Stirner is an idealist who conjures a world of phantoms. For them, Stirner has it backward, he constructs these idols first and then sees the world, while in truth all phantasms arise from the world. The structural Marxists share a similar thesis, that we are born into a world of concepts rather than us creating them through Stirner’s creative nothing. However, Stirner does recognize that we are born into some facticity to use the Heideggerian term, he merely thinks that in the recognition of an exterior concept we create it. We can determine it within our minds freely. Stirner is not an idealist, he goes beyond the dichotomy of idealism and materialism, much like what Bataille would later do. Rather he does not start with material conditions, like Marx does, or the idea, like Plato does, he starts with the unique. The world of phantasms is not the totality of the world, Stirner has not and has never stated that the world is comprised of phantasms, but rather that phantasms are concepts that we place as fixed ideals, alienating us. This is in essence Derrida’s critique of Stirner, that he is a simple idealist; yet as we can clearly see this is blatantly false. Stirner goes beyond all dualisms, all philosophical basis, and instead does the most radical thing of all, he starts with nothing. He is the largest crusader against essentialism, dogma, etc within philosophy, yet his critics continue to misunderstand this. They try to pin him to some starting point, some basis, yet he has none.