Max Stirner as Haunted

I have several versions of Max Stirner’s The Ego and his Own. The first version I encountered by chance in the summer of 2001 from a second-hand bookseller in Brooklyn. I remember: the bookseller was lounging against his brown “station-wagon”, and the books were stacked upon each other, supported by a table. I read while I walked. The version, deathly black, was marketed in the “Roots of the Right” series, edited by George Steiner. Given Stirner’s central thesis was autonomy from the state, the association with the rightwing politics seemed an oddity. In addition to the standard Cambridge edition, the other version of this booI bought subsequently, translated as The Ego and its Own, is unabridged, and the black cover is replaced by a nice Max Ernst (who was openly fond of Stirner) style etching.


The strangeness of Stirner was immediate as I worked though the book: it read like an unhomely Hegel, adopting broadly the same structure as Hegel’s Phenomenology but radically inverting the content. If the ghost of Hegel was present in Stirner, then Stirner’s haunto-analytical work on his master generated its own “spooks.” Spooks, this is the term Stirner applies to the disruption of the ego project, made evident by certain meta-narratological myths which bind the human to a specious freedom. Stirner’s dialectical account of the emergence of “the moderns” in the first section of the book concludes with the image of possession and spirits.


The figure of the spirit becomes the target of Stirner’s attack on Christian timidity and its concept of the self as dualistic: “The distinction between you is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your identity in two and exalt your ‘proper self,’ the self, to be ruler of the paltrier remainder…” (Stirner, 1993, p. 30). Stirner’s attempt to exorcise the Christian self exposes the “creative nothingness” which forms spirit. This influence on Sartre’s conception of bad-faith is already implicated, in that the nothingness of self forgoes a tension between a constructed presence, delimited and defined, and the essential contingency beneath that construction. Yet the simply recognition of this spirit which “dwells in heaven and dwells in us” does not eliminate its presence. Instead, it gives rise to its possession.


“Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself ‘walks,’ it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world is ‘empty’, is ‘naught,’ is only glamorous ‘semblance’; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a spirit” (Ibid., p. 35)

Stirner’s attack on the Epicurean model of atoms in the void pushes matter toward the threshold of animation: “Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for ‘deliverance’” (Ibid.). The elevation of humanism to a false Gnosticism prepares the ground for the human’s own self-estrangement, since “in everything sacred there lies something ‘uncanny’ strange” (Ibid.). The undomesticated aspect of the uncanny means that the human is haunted by something other than itself “dwelling” inside – Stirner’s “gruesome spook.” A strange kind of “divine spark” which the ego apparently conceals: a thought New Ageism has manipulated as much as ideological dogmatism posit in order to bind the collective to a deliberately evasive cause. Stirner’s unmasking of this submission to the “essential” is central to his philosophy, applicable to Kant as it is to Hegel, but with particular vehemence reserved for Christianity. Thus, the concealment of emptiness and radical contingency is fortified by the Christian declaration of presence; a presence rendered the Dark Night of the Soul as God flees into the elsewhere. True existence, existence beyond appearances: “its realm is a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts” (Ibid., p. 40). The Christian emerges as a victim of this haunting, haunted, so assumes St. John of the Cross, by a memory which fails to be actualized. Now, fallen beneath the threshold of divinity, reduced to an unfulfilled martyrdom:


Today, the strangeness of Stirner is marked by his absence, a concealment only ruptured by a few select moments of incidental referencing. Marx, in spite (or because of) the resistance he felt toward Stirner, felt compelled to exorcise Stirner at lengths in The German Ideology. Stirner haunted Marx, as Stirner was haunted by Hegel. Today, post-structuralism carries a tacit debt to Stirner, in that his spectre looms in the critique of normativity, inherited from Nietzsche’s unrecognized assimilation of Stirner. The disembodied transmission of Stirner is apt: the raising up to the status of idol would have discredited his philosophy by enforcing a fixed presence upon Stirner, so erasing what is unique to his philosophy: it’s refusal to be domesticated.