Introduction: Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts

Abstract

In 1844, Max Stirner, a little-known figure in German philosophical circles at that time, presented to the world a nuclear bomb in the form of a book. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own) was described as the ‘most revolutionary book ever written’.¹ It is certainly the most dangerous. In marking a break with all established categories and traditions of thought — Hegelianism, humanism, rationalism — and in demolishing our most deeply entrenched notions of morality, subjectivity, humanity and society, Stirner takes a wrecking ball to the philosophical architecture of our Western tradition, leaving only ruins in his path. All our beliefs are dismissed by Stirner as so many ideological abstractions, ‘spooks’, ‘fixed ideas’: our faith in rationality is shown to be no less superstitious than faith in the most obfuscating of religions; Man is simply God reinvented; secular institutions and discourses are alive with spectres of Christianity; universalism is spoken from a particular position of power. Stirner tears up the paving stones of our world, revealing the abyss of nothingness that lies beneath. ‘All things are nothing to me’, he declares. All that is left standing after this frenzy of destruction is the Ego — the only reality — smiling at us enigmatically, like Stirner himself, across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to our present day.