Wolfi Landstreicher, the post-anarchist, wrote an article for The Anarchist Library. Its title is Nameless and its Subtitle is An Egoist Critique of Identity. The article is not long but Lardstreicher is a expert on and translator of works by max Stirner so anything he has to say about Stirner is must reading. I will quote from his article, and comment on them.
Wolfi writes: “Only when nothing is said about you and you are merely named, are you recognized as you. As soon as something is said about you, you are only recognized as that thing . . . –Max Stirner.”
My response. If one is an Aristotelian, when you name a person, you have identified who that person is a assigning to them a personalized name, a proper noun. To describe the essence of the person is to characterize him as what his essence is, or explained in words. This involves assigning to his nature and singular self, what are his characteristics defined in words, and if clearly described, and realistic about the person, that essential definition gives us knowledge about this person.
Stirner and Wolfi are saying just the opposite. To say something about someone, that we consider as linguistically capturing their essence is to say something false or misleading about them Only if we do not characterize them, have we then said who they really are, and this is the extreme nominalism that these two advocate. The world accepts the description of the person’s essence and that is socially accepted as capturing who the person ism but these two writers deny that, while I am optimistic that we can use clear and accurate description to characterize the essence of others, and that our labels and descriptions mostly define who and what they are.
Wolfi continues: “It’s amusing how often people confuse identity with individuality. Identity traces back to a Latin word meaning ‘sameness.’ And sameness implies the existence of something with which I can be the same.”
My response: These two posit that assigned identity is an alienating, enslaving, fictitious, captivating set of generalizations that make a person reduced to a ‘known or assigned” identity that tells us nothing about the Unique ego. The individuality or creative nothingness that typifies, exemplifies or reveals to the world the shifting, shape-changer nature of this illusive, creative individual is best understood—as well as that which, without essence or name—as a concrete, empirical singularity.
Wolfi does not like essential assignment of identity or named essential description of any individual because he fears this lived fiction and stereotype objectifies the private person so that he is the same as all other objectified, unwilling egoists, now stereotyped as linguistically characterized and identified persons.
Wolfi continues: “It is certainly possible to conceive of individuals as identical atoms bashing into each other—but even atoms only become identical when you or I conceive of them as atoms, giving them an identity. Atomization is a process that has its basis in the denial of my unique individuality, and identification plays a part in this process.
Stirner referred to you and I, i.e., to any individual in the flesh at this moment, as ‘the unique’ (der Einzige). In Stirner’s Critics, he explains that it is merely a name, nothing more. To speak, to write, he had to use a name. But, he wrote, ‘The unique . . . has no content; it is indeterminacy in itself . . .’ To give it content before I live out in my world, before you live it out in your world, is to give it an identity, a sameness, to destroy it as unique. To give a conceptual content to the unique is to make it an absurdity.”
My response: Wolfi is arguing that even atoms are singular and unique until a namer gives them identity or conceptual content; then they become something with an identity, a false assignation, one that the unique comes to accept but that does not define what the singular unique is.
I am no nominalist but my moderate epistemology makes me accept that Wolfi and Stirner serve a role in tempering our name-calling, identity-assigning and utilization of language as a rational animal to ascribe conceptual content to an individual. Indeed, if we do not do this, he will be a passion conformist nonentity running in the pack, walling in his hollow, lost, life of irrational experiencing, with no thought and language to give him concepts and ideals to serve so that his self-actualizing and increasingly self-identifying personhood become real and meaningful.
Wofli continues: “But even as a unique I am forced to contend with identity. There are the banalities of having to identify myself, for example, when entering a tavern, or when cashing a check, or when stopped by the cops. In every one of these instances, someone has been delegated a certain legal authority to make sure that I am the same as something required by their rules. Am I the same as someone old enough to drink? Am I the same as one authorized to cash a check? Am I the same as a person with no outstanding warrants? Each of these identities are concepts that I am supposed to live up to. And if I fail, I suffer the consequences. But, in fact, no one is ever the same as any of these things. Even if I can meet each of these challenges to get what I want (some drinks, some cash, some distance from the pigs), I am not any of these things. And those who impose these tests on me are my enemies in that they impose abstractions on my unique self, forcing a conformity to their rules and a social requirement for personal consistency. They seek to undermine my ownness and with it my uniqueness.”
My response: I am a quasi-anarchist that wants the willing egoist to practice his union-of-egoism canton existence as an individuators-anarchist supercitizen, a capitalist in a constitutional republic. The social contract that the supercitizen of the future inherits from the American founding fathers is a political arrangement that sets up the social contract with a rather useful social contract that allows for maximum ordered liberty within a federal structure of allied and social rules. There people will have to put up with some conformity to identities assigned them by authority figures, but we want law and order and cosmos not negative anarchy and lawlessness, with which would flourish if Wolfi was given free reign.
Wolfi continues: “In addition, every ruling social order is to set up only to process in terms of categorical identities: race, gender, nationality, sexuality, etc. Though these are fictions, they affect people physically and mentally. These categories have served as justifications for enslaving , individuals, excluding individuals, placing restrictions on individuals, beating and killing individuals, etc., ad nauseam. It makes sense that those that have experienced abuse based on categorical identities would unite to fight against this abuse and those that carried it out. What doesn’t make sense to me is that most of those who unite for this purpose don’t base their unity on their shared desire for to eradicate the abuse, but rather on the categorical identity that served to justify this abuse. In other words, they choose to unite not as enemies of an order they aim to destroy, but as victims of an order from which they want recognition and justice. A social order can only recognize categories, not unique individuals. Justice can only deal with what is measured and weighed, i.e., what can be compared and equated. Identity, sameness, belonging to a group, different ways of expressing the requirement for social recognition and justice. I, as a egoist aware of my uniqueness, respond differently, as an enemy, aiming to destroy categorical identity and those who benefit from it immediately as I experience them here and now. If I unite with others, they will be those whose aims and powers enhance my own. Nor identity politics, but the destruction of identity and politics, in favor of myself and my associations. But I am not a moralist. I may well find uses for identity in some sense, even while recognizing that it is always a lie. In fact, I use identity, whenever I say ‘I.’ In this word, I identify myself here and now, my immediate concrete self, with my concept of myself in the past. As unique (i.e., as I exist concretely here and now), I am not the same as that, but I choose to unite myself with that, even to the extent of identifying with it, because it gives me a significant power in in relating with my world and with interacting with others, just as identifying others with past forms of these others, that I have encountered enhances that power. So here, identity can become my tool. However, here as well, I am not talking about categorical identity, but about personal identity, equations that I make for myself, knowing full well that they are nothing more than conceptual tools for m use, for enhancing my self-enjoyment. If I take them to be myself, I am deluding myself.”
My response: Personal identities are objective and useful for the individual, but categorical identities drive one into the hand of a master, a collectivist with his group identity, and that is a way of being lost as a person. Wolfi interprets Stirners emphasis on singularity, anarchism and subjective egoism and his faithfulness to Stirner’s emphases is whole, complete and accurate.
Wolfi continues: “Recently, I have come across communiques from individuals (apparently acting in small groups) who describe themselves as individualist-nihilists and egoist-nihilists, laying claims to various attacks against the existing order. Anyone who rebels and attacks the ruling order for themselves is certainly my comrade. I feel a kinship with her even if I don’t agree with all of his decisions about how he goes about her action. But I wonder why someone that is acting for himself, from his own life, feels the need claim to her action at all, let alone by using a group name, creating a group identity. If I choose to attack the ruling order or to act against the law in any other way, the choice springs from the immediacy of my life here and now, and I owe no one an explanation. Nor do I need the inspiration other actions to move me. It is my own life and my own opportunities that move me. It is true that a rebellious act may move the rebel with passion, so she wants to express her rage and joy.
Then he might write claim tohis act, but there is no need to do so and a great deal of wisdom in not doing so. But what I question most in this is that the individuals who claim an act in this way are taking on an identity. This is why they have to name themselves (and as beautiful and poetic as some of these names are, they remain labels for an identity). The signed communique replaces the immediate fleeting meaning of the action for the unique individuals who carried it out with a permanent meaning intended to explain the action to an audience. With permanent meanings become permanent identities and the unique individuals disappear into this crystallized form. A unique individual, acting for herself, is nameless. She is nameless, because her existence is too immediate and fleeting for any name that is not completely empty of meaning or thought to express him. If he chooses to act, it makes sense for him to act anonymously as well. It isn’t difficult to figure out how the individual, acting from his uniqueness, has no need to identify with his action, she was completely within that action as the moment that she did it. In any case, the full implications of claiming one’s acts should be a matter of ongoing debate without taking away from the solidarity and kinship one feels with those who in their rebellion make different choices.
My response: I can see where Stirner, if he lived now and MacQuinn (Jason) and Wolfi would clash with the anarchists, egoists and revolutionaries that favored collective concepts, collective cause and identify their personal rebellion with the identities assumed by other radicals. Wolfi does an eloquent job laying out how the singular rebel would act, and it it right from Stirner’s view of the world.
Wolfi concludes: “Identity is about defining who you are. As I said, there are moments when playing with such definitions may make sense (or give pleasure). But these definitions, these identities can never be me. They can, however, become prisons locking me into a cell of a role or set of roles. And if I am not to be a slave, I have to reject these roles, except as occasional masks I may don when it serves my interests. Of course, when I do not conform to roles, I become unpredictable. I become fleeting. I become unintelligible to institutions and to those with institutional ways of viewing their worlds. Stirner says, in Stirner’s Critics, that he ‘names the unique and says at the same time that ‘names don’t name it’ . . . ‘ Precisely as an unique individual I am nameless, precisely as such I have no identity. I am simply myself here and now.”
My response_ I understand what Stirner and Wofi are advocating, but I am still a dogmatic epistemologist: we see the world as it is, for the most part, and our language grows out of our consciousness and the two correspond together so as the given becomes conceptualized with names capturing the natures of these entities and people, that is of knowledge about the world and its people and creature, and we have truth and knowledge.
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