Alt Text

HomeTimelineSearch
1quote
willow
“It is my contention that Stirner’s individualism should be read in the same way we read Spinoza’s individualism. It is an ontological statement about what there is, not a moral statement about individual persons.”
willow
alt text backfill
Self-Consumption Out of ownness, the owner consumes its properties, rendering them nothing. That is, it incorporates otherness into itself, and affirms its own power as unique. It seems as though the owner exists both outside and inside its own activity of consumption. Outside, since it exists separate from its property, consuming it as its own; inside, since the owner is not grounded by some transcendental ego, but only exists in its activity. Where, then, is the I? Is it a black hole that absorbs everything into itself? Is it a fixed point, an absolute ground, an ontological substance? "The I is not all, but destroys all," Stirner remarks. "Only the self-dissolving I, the never-being I, the-finite I is actually I."88 The actual, finite I is not a stable ground of action or consumption. Rather, it is produced through its consumption, and consumed through its production. Produced, since the I emerges out of the singular history of its own consumption. And consumed, because the I dissolves into the temporal stream of its own production. Circulating through production and consumption, Stirner's "self-dissolving I" takes on and discards multiple forms of appearance, but always circles back to the creative nothing at the center of its ownness. I. To begin from myself means owning these presuppositions of history, these conditions of what I am and what I could be, consuming them, discarding them, becoming something else. Never satisfied with one constellation of property and self, the owner consumes itself as its consumes the world. In other words, for the owner to remain its own, it must tirelessly ward off its own petrification into something alien, dead. It must dissolve itself whenever it becomes fixed in one form, one identity. That means, it must become food to itself,
In order to make sense of Stirner's unique understanding of the I, one should first differentiate it from Fichte's superficially similar use of the same term. A Fichtean interpretation of Stirner would consider the I to be a fundamental a priori principle- that from which the particular I that I am could be deduced. Stirner's "I", however, is always mine first, never transcendental. Fichte's "I" is a condition of possibility for experience as such. Stirner's I is not a pri iple or thesis in the construction of any theoretical system, but a moment in a phenomenological description of experience from the first-person singular perspectivel Although both depart from the I, Stirner a Fichte's conceptions are distinct in terms of form and function, content and method. Fichte's transcendental "I", according to Stirner, makes the same error as Feuerbach does with "humanity" and Marx does with "species-being": it imposes an ahistorical and external form on the dynamic content of my existence; it attempts to determine the essence and limits of my experience according to an identity or principle alien to me. It is, in short, an identification of the non-identical. The reasons for this are not just philosophical, but Spinoza's definition can be of great help: he singularity of a thing is not just the transposition of its singular extended body into an individual identity, rather a singular thing can be any number of individual bodies which, in one action, collectively cause a single effectl At first this seems blurred. Are we not conflating causal mo on with individual identity? In fact, that is exactly what we are doing, and it is nevertheless an incredibly
thing. Decoupling the meaning of singular from the meaning of individual shatters the conception of identity as a property of an individual. An individual does not have an identity except in its relation to a series of causes and effects which are determined by other individuals, which themselves have no identity except in their relation to a series of causes and effects, and so on ad infinitum. The identity of an individual is not then based on an internal property, but on an external relation of action and effect. How can many things be one individual, and how can many individuals be one singular thing? Through their composition in forming a single effect, whether or not their individual causes are completely different. JACOB BLUMENFELD ALL THINGS ARE NOTHING TO ME THE UNIQUE PHILOSOPHY OF MAX STIRNER zero books