Abstract
Political theory is haunted. Max Stirner is prepared to dispel and exorcise the monsters, specters, demons, ghosts, and phantasms, rational or otherwise, that stalk its pages, inhabit its subjects, and foreclose human potentiality. To read Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, Marx (and Engels) reading of Stirner in The German Ideology, and Derrida’s readings of both these texts in his Specters of Marx is to explore the problematic that the attempt to read the “real” literally gives rise to. It is also to read a tale of hauntings, obsessions, accusations; a battle to reclaim the real against the illusory. Stirner, haunted by illusory forms of authority, the “superior specters” haunting brains and bodies that are simultaneously embodied yet fantastic and spectral, writes an “ego-logical” critique where, in a radically defined “real,” the sole source of authority is an inarticulable profoundly creative “I”; and Marx, through two-thirds of The German Ideology rewrites this “undisguised ghost story,” attempts to exorcise Stirner’s specters in order to reclaim the really real.1 As for Derrida …? At stake in this part of the book are both the possibility and the politics of a post-representational epistemology. There are nevertheless potential dangers in such a project that working through Stirner helps to illuminate. In this chapter, I argue that Stirner aims to perform, through his egological critique, a post-representational renaming of the world. His endeavor is significant and important, and the politics of “insurrection” provocative and necessary. Nevertheless, Stirner’s post-representational renaming of the world is dissociated from a transformative praxis just at the moment when the politics of insurrection seems to demand such a thing (which is not to say, as I shall argue, that he cannot help me figure out “strategies of resistance”).2
Prisons are built with the stones of Law,
Brothels with the bricks of Religion.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 8, Proverbs of Hell
The “true world”—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bons sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols
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Notes
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works Vols. I, III, V (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p.130. Hereafter cited as MEGA, volume number and page reference.
Roy Bhasker draws distinctions between the empirical, the actual, and the real, “where the latter is conceived as a stratified structure of powers manifested in sequences of events (the actual) which may or may not be experienced by human subjects (the empirical).” Cited in Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p.40. His point, expressed by Callinicos, is that Marx’s materialism does not rely on the real as self-presence. As I argue later on, language and consciousness preclude this.
MEGA, I, p.491, emphasis mine. This is taken from Marx’s doctoral dissertation, completed in 1839. The excerpt continues, “That is the carnival of philosophy, whether it disguises itself as a dog like the Cynic, in priestly vestments like the Alexandrian, or in fragrant spring array like the Epicurean. It is essential that philosophy should wear character masks” (emphasis mine). Despite Althusser’s rather disparaging dismissal of the dissertation in his For Marx as “still the work of a student” in his own thesis that Marx was “never strictly speaking a Hegelian,” I still find this a fascinating and incredibly suggestive passage suggesting not simply the extent to which the real is in need of being made intelligible, but also on the ambiguous and equivocal relation between truth, knowledge, and action (bearing in mind the epistemological implications of the phrase—the real): see For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), p.35. For an opposing view to Althusser’s, which reads the dissertation in ironical terms as an attempt to work out how to break from the philosophical past “when that past includes a series of attempts to break from the past,” see John Evan Seery ‘Deviations: On the Difference Between Marx and Marxist Theorists’, in, History of Political Thought 9/2 (Summer 1988), pp.301–325.
See, e.g., on utopian and scientific socialism, Zygmunt Bauman Socialism: The Active Utopia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976),
Lawrence Wilde Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988), and essays by
Kellner and Longxi in, Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, ed. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenburg (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.51.
Richard Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in, Deconstruction and Pragmatism ed. Chantal Mouffe (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p.45. Rorty does not follow through on his provocative epistemological insights in this critique of deconstruction. See my introduction, where through Barthes, I suggest textuality is an epistemological proposition, and thus related to questions of authority and intelligibility; and thus to reading practices (not, as Rorty implies, through the choices of particular novels to read).
See the Symposium in Radical Philosophy 75 (January/February 1996), articles by Kate Soper “The Limits of Hauntology,” pp.26–31, and Alex Callinicos “Messianic Ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx,” pp.37–41, for examples of the elision of Marx and “politics proper.” (Some of these pieces express a “proprietorial” claim on Marx, without the ironic self-awareness exhibited by a similar expression of possessiveness by Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak’s “Ghostwriting” in Diacritics 25/2 (Summer 1995), pp.65–84).
L.S. Stepelvich, “Max Stirner as Hegelian,” in, Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985), pp.597–614, 597.
See Kathy E. Ferguson, “Saint Max Revisited: A Reconsideration of Max Stirner,” in, Idealistic Studie 12/3 (1982), pp.276–292, and Stepelvich, “Max Stirner as Hegelian.” As I argue, it would be difficult to show Stirner justifying the upholding of the institution of private property, capitalism, or, indeed, any other institution.
David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969), p.130.
David McLellan, “Marx and the Missing Link,” in, Encounter 35 (November 1970), pp.35–45, and
Nancy Love, Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 1998), p.22.
N. Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” in, Demythologizing Marxism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969). Seery’s argument, however, does not preclude Lobkowicz’s: Seery simply suggests the fictive nature of the break, stresses the political and politicized function of “historical materialism” rather than its supposed epistemic or ontological status (which can be de-politicizing).
For a much wider reading and historical analysis than I have space for, see, e.g., Louis Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966); Lobkowicz, Demythologizing Marxism;
George Lichtheim, From Hegel to Marx and Other Essays (London: Orbac and Chamber, 1971);
Ronald K.W. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London: Oxford University Press, 1971);
John Carrol, Break-Out from Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974);
Margaret Rose, Reading the Young Marx and Engels: Poetry, Parody, and the Censor (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978);
Z. Jindŗich, The Logic of Marx, trans. Terrell Carver (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980);
James D. White, Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). The importance of this debate in my context is that it is precisely a debate over the location of “the real,” and the function of philosophy.
We came across the term “inaugural” in the excursus on Kant, where I read Kant’s categorical imperative as inaugural rather than representative. The difference here is that Stirner would explicitly invite this reading in an anti-Kantian maneuver. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.5.
Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in New Left Review 209 (1995), pp.75–109, 101.
P. Thomas, “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,” in, Political Theory 3/2 (May 1975), pp.159–179, 169; Ferguson, “St. Max Revisited,” pp.282–283.
Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983), p.154.
Andrzej Warminski, “Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life,” in, Hegel After Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p.32.
See Terrell Carver’s insistence on Marx as a political writer: The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
See, Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Christopher Voparil, “The Problem with Getting It Right: Richard Rorty and the Politics of Antirepresentationalism,” in, Philosophy and Social Criticism 30/2 (2004), pp.221–246, 222.
Simon Critchley, “On Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in, Philosophy and Social Criticism 23/1 (1995), pp.1–30, 5–6.
John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp.119–120.
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp.6, 25.
Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p.79.
Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1993), p.194.
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© 2005 Susan McManus
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McManus, S. (2005). Stirner (with Marx and Derrida): Neither Material nor Utopian?. In: Fictive Theories. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976802_5
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