Excerpts on Max Stirner
Note: The following consists of several excerpts about Max Stirner that appear in my book Post-Anarchism and Psychoanalysis: Seminars on Politics and Society (2023).
“[S]ome anarchists knew about the big secret. I admire them very much. Take Max Stirner who wrote that ‘revolutions aim at new arrangements, but insurrections lead us to no longer allow ourselves to be arranged by the social order.’ You know, when you look at the painting that Engels drew of the young Hegelians, stirner was always off to the side, at a distance from the world. Stirner wasn’t essentially aiming to provoke a master. He was confronting the world as such. His books and essays basically say the following: ‘I resolve to speak of revolutions without the need of a world.’ He finds himself, therefore, all alone. He is this void, this piece of waste. For example, how does Stirner open his famous book The Ego and Its Own? He writes: “All things are nothing to me.” He continues:
What is not supposed to be my thing! First and foremost, the Good thing, then God’s thing, the thing of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the thing of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally even the thing of Mind, and a thousand other things. Only my cause, my thing, is never to be my concern.
I take from this that there is a fundamental rejection of the world, of the entire field of ‘world.’ There is nothing left except the pure revolutionary impulse. He destroys all objects. This is how he put it in a small essay on art and religion: ‘art makes the Object, and religion lives only in its many ties to that Object.’ He continues to explain that he ‘clearly sets himself apart from both […]. Neither enmeshed with an Object, as religion, nor making one, as in art, but rather [he] places his pulverizing hand upon all the business of making Objects as well as the whole of objectivity itself, and so breathes the air of freedom.’ Finally, it is a rejection of the world, and hence, a rejection of himself as being represented in that world. He resists being an object of the world. So, where does that leave him? Precisely with the truth!
His solution was to produce a self-enclosed circuit of autistic jouissance. He is ‘nothing.’ Yet, when he says he is nothing, it is not as ‘lack,’ as something missing. He is not nothing in the sense of emptiness, as he puts it, but rather a creative nothing. He is this void of an anarchic jouissance which is overflowing, lawless, and enigmatic. The ‘nothing’ was an enigma and not an object. It gives us a reason to presume that there has always been something like a revolutionary impulse in the anarchist tradition. But these melancholics do not know how to live without a world. It was why so many melancholics of history left us too soon. Yet, there have been attempts to form a social bond, however paradoxical, from the melancholic position. Stirner spoke of the ‘union of egoists,’ but never gave it any meaning. A particularly good example comes from Sergey Nechayev, a young companion of Mikhail Bakunin. Nechayev claimed to have built a very large revolutionary secret society.
There is no evidence that he did do that. But his manifesto highlighted what was at stake.
The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.
The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.
And then he proceeded to discuss justifications for the murder of whole groups of society. But, more importantly, the revolutionary subject, he insisted, must be prepared to end his own life as a part of the revolutionary process. The revolution is a pure consequence, even if it means the loss of space of subjectivity.
*
What’s more is that [Antigone] confessed that it would be better for the world to focus on their own concerns. You will remember that this was also Stirner’s conviction: ‘what is not supposed to be my concern?’ Stirner, like Antigone, felt the demands of the world on his shoulders. Antigone likewise asked, why should these be her concerns? In the end, it is a similar question. The solution for both was simply to let them concern themselves with themselves, the world should concern itself with the world. It is a decoupling of the One from the world. Antigone and Stirner decoupled themselves from all of that, preferring to have no part for themselves in the world. The word we have for that process is foreclosure. It would have been different had the world determined them without them even realizing it, which presumes that there is a position of the subject within the totality of his or her signifying relations. In such circumstances, we could discuss ideas like the ‘sociological imagination’ or ‘ideological critique.’ This can only occur when one is inside of the world.
And Antigone had no intention to go inside of the world. She really preferred at all times to remain on the outside; outside of the walls of the city, outside of the world. In fact, this position ran in her family. It is the feminine way, and it is the melancholic way. If I am being honest with you, I believe that we are now in a feminine world. It means that the world has shifted into another register, and we have moved from the ‘All’ to that of the ‘Not-All’ as the governing function. The contemporary world is no longer one that would give rise to modern revolutionary aspirations. Rather, we are in a world of revolutionary impulses that are capable of outliving the subject, threatening the subject: it is a world of particular affirmations of jouissance. The problem is not therefore ‘how do we instigate a revolution?,’ ‘how can we overthrow the world of mastery?,’ but rather: ‘how can we sustain a space for ourselves in a world without burning ourselves alive?’ It is why I claim that the psychoanalyst is not exclusively a product of revolutionary aspirations nor of revolutionary impulses. The revolution that is at stake in the formation of a psychoanalyst is something different.
Shortly after concluding our seminar last week I reread an important passage from a pivotal text by Jacques-Alain Miller, titled “The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School.” I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. But a sentence jumped out at me. Maybe it’s better to say that it floated above the page like a bubble. I don’t have the quotation with me, but what I remember was that he pointed at Antigone’s ‘act.’ He reminded us that she was ultimately situated beyond the laws of the world. And then he claimed that at some point she must have met up with the object ‘cause’ of her desire, objet petit a. Beyond the world of mastery, she meets up with the truth, the hysteric’s truth; and, in that place, she would have found out that she was not-at-all made for the world. Or, rather, the world was not the place for her. Hence, in this case, Antigone, the ‘beautiful soul’ of Greek tragedy, who is also often thought to be the exemplary subject of hysteria, went beyond the bar of her truth.
[…]
There is a barrier between the objet petit a, which is in the position of unconscious truth, and the agent of her discourse, her own victimization, s-barred, $. So, for Antigone (it is a really technical point) the s-barred, $, meets up with the truth, objet petit a. It means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse is, in a word: the real, jouissance. We could write it out like this: $ →a. That makes it look a bit like the ‘matheme of fantasy,’ which, for Lacan, was $<>a. This is precisely what the hysteric would have surpassed in her act: the fantasy, which is a separation from the real of jouissance.
This traversal of the fundamental fantasy is, for many Lacanians, an important and revolutionary moment because it involves a transgression beyond the governing fantasmatic frame that sustains the position of the hysteric. There was even a time when psychoanalysts believed that this revolution would lead the hysteric toward the analyst’s position. Some people still believe that psychoanalyst’s believe this.
It is not my position.
A traversal of the fantasy is no guarantee that there is before you a psychoanalyst. A different revolution is at stake.
However, the point is that the hysteric’s crossing beyond the bar, into the position of her truth, implies a passage toward objet petit a. This could mean that it is a passage to the position of the real, that is, either as waste or as One, which means, as a bubble floating above the pages of the world. […] there is also a third term: the revolution of psychoanalysis, which is the revolution that makes One a psychoanalyst.
*
That’s nothing.
The void is something different, since it is not limited by its place.
Suppose for the moment that you expect to find Max Stirner in the world. Well, you won’t find him there, except as nothing, as missing from that world. He is not in the library of the world, he is not in the books, he is not on the pages of the books. That is why we can claim that Stirner is nothing within the world. Perhaps you expect to find Sergey Nechayev’s secret society or revolutionary ‘man’ in the world. Both are absent. So they are not in the place we might expect to know them to be found. It’s a surprise when that happens. As for the void, it is on the side of jouissance. It means that it is on the side of the revolutionary impulse not on the side of revolutionary desire. There is something in the concept of the nothing that nonetheless connects us to the void. Stirner wrote: “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, which means ‘lack,’ but the creative nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything [world].” Lacan actually said something very similar: “the nothing, a hole in the Real, from which the Signifier, creates the world.” And then Lacan added: “It is the place of deadly jouissance.” The void is on the side of this deadly jouissance, this revolutionary impulse. The revolutionary impulses are linked to the void, then; and, with thanks to ‘nothing,’ a ‘hole’ can be produced into that deadly jouissance.
[…] [W]e can say that the ‘nothing,’ as an object, produces a hole in the void of jouissance. The ‘nothing’ produces a ‘hole’ in the real, such that, as semblant, nothing functions as if it were a non-du-pere. Miller made this very clear for me: “the name-of-the-father is an instrument, a semblance. It is a signifier as a semblant that has the advantage of allowing us to find ourselves in relation to signifiers and signifieds.” So we can say that without the non-du-pere, there is no hole in the real, and hence, the void becomes limitless and revolutionary. We can therefore situate the place of Stirner’s ‘limitless creativity of jouissance,’ the jouissance out of which he as creator creates a world: it is the revolution of the One, the revolution of the Ego and Its Own, all alone.
It is a bit much for some of you to follow, but nothing stops us from going a bit further for today.
Miller discussed the void and nothing in relation to hysteria. His claim was that in hysteria there is ‘a passage from void to nothing.’ I really like this expression. It highlights the point that hysteria is also a defense against the real. But Miller did not claim that the passage from ‘void to nothing’ in hysteria is a transgression because that would imply that one goes in the opposite direction: from ‘nothing to void,’ that is, from semblant to real. Put another way, it would imply that one moves beyond the limits of the world of mastery.
It’s a key difference.
Hysteria is a defense against the real. So, it is a solution against the revolution of the One.
*
I would say that it is only by permitting yourself to be a dupe, by believing in the semblant, or in what Stirner named a ‘spook,’ that you are capable of producing a hole in jouissance.
*
Psychoanalysts have a different orientation to the group, a position closer to Max Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ but not reducible to it. It is close also to the anarchist logic of the ‘affinity group.’ Except Lacan called his ‘affinity group’ a ‘cartel.’ However, there are key differences between an ‘affinity group’ and a ‘cartel.’
The ‘cartel’ does not pretend to eradicate the place of power. Rather, it effects a separation of knowledge and power. We can see this clearly in the function of the ‘plus one’ in the psychoanalytic cartel. The ‘plus one’ is not a place of representation. Quite the opposite. The ‘plus one’ of the psychoanalytic ‘cartel’ is a place of ‘hystericization,’ a place that functions to disrupt the group effects that lead us toward either ‘hierarchy’ or else ‘fraternity.’ This is how I read the cartel as a group. The cartel, which is an ‘organ’ of the psychoanalytic School,’ was capable of producing what anarchists have never been capable of producing: a group that is anti-authoritarian, anti-representation, but also anti-fraternity, and yet, for all that, without killing the world or the space that would house the loneliness of the subject. The cartel is an answer to the question: ‘how can we live with the consequences of the revolutionary impulses’ without in the process producing a device that would bury the subject in his or her own revolutionary impulses. In any case, there is more to say about these ‘newest social movements,’ which are not at all the stuff of psychoanalytic ‘groups.’
*
And it is why Max Stirner’s proposal, which he called the ‘union of egoists,’ has been an extremely important intervention within the history of anarchism. You’ll find that even Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were surprised by his intervention. I happen to like surprises. Stirner offered a fundamental challenge not only to the communist tradition but also to the anarchist tradition. And not everybody likes surprises, so the anarchists still do not know what to do about Stirner: they call him an ‘individualist anarchist.’ It’s not a charitable designation because there is in fact nothing more in-dividual than a singularity, a fraternity … a social bond or group. It is clear that Stirner did not offer us a blueprint for the ‘union of egoists.’ It is a point that commentators on his work never fail to mention. He offered a concept, but he left it empty. The union of egoists is an empty space reserved for a social link still possible after the annihilation of the world.
That’s already quite a bit, though, because it implies that he emptied the social bond of its fraternal relations, thereby insisting that each member pursue their own singular cause, unshackled from oppressive hierarchies and moralistic fraternities. Allan Antliff, a friend of mine, reminded me not so long ago that Stirner’s ‘union of egoists’ was supposed to be made up of insurrectionaries or insurgents who ‘no longer let themselves be arranged by the world.’ It could mean that they fundamentally refuse the determinations of their world: a refusal of surprises. It is a foreclosure of the world, a rejection of any constitution. That makes it quite a bit different from the social order proposed by Sergei Nacheyev in his “Catechisms of a Revolutionary,” which established precisely that: a constitution for the union of egoists, point by point, as a condition of membership into his secret society. Now, here is the big secret: it has been said that his fraternity had no members except for himself. It was a fraternity, but a strange one because its constitution had only one function: to empty out all of the meaning that makes up a world. The revolutionary is a doomed man: he has no religion, identity, name, friends, morality, father, … nothing. Ultimately, he is without a world. His only cause is ‘revolution,’ which means, finally: his revolutionary impulses. His conviction is certainly a stubborn one.
It is interesting to think about all of this in relation to a passage that I’ve extracted from Jacques-Alain Miller’s “Turin Theory of the Subject of the School,” which I will read now:
Lacan returns each one to his loneliness as a subject, to the relation that each one has with the master-signifier of the Ideal beneath which he places himself. In the very moment when Lacan institutes a collective formation, his first words are to dissociate, and bring forward subjective loneliness.
It was the same with Stirner’s ‘union of egoists,’ because the aim was to dissociate from fixed ideas, from what Stirner called ‘spooks,’ which, for him, structured the entire world. Hence, Stirner’s first suggestion, when instituting a social link, was to dissociate. It was therefore a principle of dissolution.
Okay, I’ve lost my thread.
You know, it has been a month or two since this lecture series ended, and here we are again. As Lacan put it: encore! You should think of today’s lecture as an encore! It would seem that I’ve only reestablished the series, returned to the same place, perpetuating the repetition. But I am not offering you four lectures. I’m offering three, … plus one. I thereby isolate this final lecture from the series, and I take it all by itself, alone. This stubborn one should therefore receive more serious attention. As you know, Stirner was also a very serious thinker, which is why, perhaps, he was given the nickname “Stirner.” Okay: I’ve asked my friend, Roman Aslamov, to speak for 2–3 minutes about Stirner. I’ve asked him for an important reason which he will not perhaps realize today. But, anyway, hopefully he can quickly, in 2–3 minutes, tell us what he believes to be Stirner’s significance, and, moreover, what we should know about Stirner’s reading of the young Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach. After he speaks, for 2 minutes, we will return to our thread and try to bring the lecture to a conclusion.
[Roman Speaks]
Ah! Perhaps Stirner discovered something that we’ve been overlooking, namely a repetition that was occurring within the history of ideas. It is a question — one perhaps we could pursue another day — of the difference between dialectics and repetition. In any case, a repetition, and he underlined it in the dialectical philosophy of the Left Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach. Within Ludwig Feuerbach’s dialectical work there was nonetheless a repetition. Stirner was very clear about it when he wrote:
What [Feuerbach] took from God has been superadded to Man, and the power of humanity grew greater in proportion to the degree of piety that was lost: ‘Man’ is the God of today, and fear of Man has taken the place of the old fear of God.
It was perhaps by underlining this repetition that was at stake in the dialectic that he was able to move from repetition to fixation. Stirner isolated something outside of the ‘dialectics of desire’ which can be found inside of the ‘repetition compulsion,’ which was, to put it in Freudian terms: a fixation. I quote Alexander Stevens concerning this repetition compulsion: “it is repetition compulsion that, according to Freud, puts us on the trail of the death drive on the basis of the repetition of the traumatic element.” What Stirner demonstrated was that Feuerbach only exchanged a religious conception of ‘God,’ which pre-existed his work, for a humanistic conception of ‘Man.’ In fact, it’s not exactly progress. It returns us back to the same place, and that’s what makes it revolutionary: ‘Man’ increases the potency of the ‘place of power,’ but it does not evacuate it — clear it — of jouissance. Not only does the ‘place of power’ remain intact but its function improves, it becomes more cunning. The situation becomes worse with the category of ‘man.’ So we move from God, the father, to man, or men, the brothers.
Today’s social movements effectuate a similar effect: through cancellation, do they not place the ‘un-human’ outside of their social bond, to further consolidate the internal consistency of their own group: ‘moralistic human.’ Eric Laurent, in his short piece “Racism 2.0,” reminds us that, I quote him: “[w]hen Lacan constructed the logic of the social bond, he does not begin with the [vertical] identification with the leader.” He continues by claiming that the logic proceeds in the following way:
1. “A man knows what is not a man.
2. Men recognize themselves among themselves.
3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.”
In other words, it begins from segregation: isolation from the ‘hole’ that one confronts in the place of the Other. In any case, Stirner located within this repetition an enigmatic and stubborn point of fixation. He was that stubborn fixation within the Hegelian movement. If, for example, God’s cause is his own, a country’s cause is its own, and so on, then each presents an ‘auto-erotic’ fixation. Stirner saw singularities, ‘islands of jouissance,’ of self-enclosure and self-interest. And he resolved to dissociate against the fixed ideas, spooks, and so on. In the end, the problem with Stirner is that he simply has nothing to believe in. He gives up on all fictions: fiction not fixation. There is a deflation of desire. He retains the fixation but dismisses all fictions. Unfortunately, he did not have a ‘plus one.’
As for me, I believe in psychoanalysis. And it was anarchism and my revolutionary aspirations that led me to it. So, I brought myself, and now all of you, to the end. What you do beyond the end is up to you. To go to the end, I would claim that the cartel is a type of post- anarchist politics. So, what can I still say about anarchism, after the end? It might surprise you to learn that post-anarchism persists when you go to the end. But it is up to each of you, one by one, all alone, to find your way with it. I hope that you will make something of what I’ve presented in these four lectures. But I hope you do it in your own way.
I’ll stop here.
