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Title: My Iconoclastic Individualism
Author: Renzo Novatore
Date: 1920
Language: en
Topics: egoist, individualist, insurrectionist
Source: Retrieved on November  8, 2010 from https://sites.google.com/site/anarchyinitaly/renzo-novatore/my-iconoclastic-individualism

Renzo Novatore

My Iconoclastic Individualism

I have left the life of the plain forever. — Henrik Ibsen

1

Even the purest springs of Life and Thought that gush fresh and laughing

among the rocks of the highest mountains to quench the thirst of

Nature’s chosen ones, when discovered by the demagogic shepherds of the

hybrid bourgeois and proletarian flocks, quickly become fetid, filthy,

slimy pools. Now it is individualism’s turn! From the vulgar scab to the

idiotic and repulsive cop, from the miserable sell-out to the despicable

spy, from the cowardly slave afraid to fight to the repugnant and

tyrannical authority, all speak of individualism.

It is in fashion!

Scrawny pseudo-intellectuals of tubercular liberal conservatism, like

the chronic democratic syphilitics, and even the eunuchs of socialism

and the anemics of communism, all speak and pose as Individualists!

I understand that since Individualism is neither a school nor a party,

it cannot be “unique”, but it is truer still that Unique ones are

individualists. And I leap as a unique one onto the battlefield, draw my

sword and defend my personal ideas as an extreme individualist, as an

indisputable Unique one, since we can be as skeptical and indifferent,

ironic and sardonic as we desire and are able to be. But when we are

condemned to hear socialists more or less theorizing in order to

impudently and ignorantly state that there is no incompatibility between

Individualist and collectivist ideas, when we hear someone stupidly try

to make a titanic poet of heroic strength, a dominator of human, moral

and divine phantoms, who quivers and throbs, rejoices and expands

himself beyond the good and evil of Church and State, Peoples and

Humanity, in the strange flickering of a new blaze of unacknowledged

love, like Zarathustra’s lyrical creator, pass as a poor and vulgar

prophet of socialism, when we hear someone try to make an invincible and

unsurpassable iconoclast like Max Stirner out to be some tool for the

use of frantic proponents of communism, then we may certainly have an

ironic smirk on our lips. But then it is necessary to resolutely rise up

to defend ourselves and to attack, since anyone who feels that he is

truly individualist in principle, means and ends cannot tolerate being

at all confused with the unconscious mobs of a morbid, bleating flock.

2

Individualism, as I feel, understand and mean it, has neither socialism,

nor communism, nor humanity for an end. Individualism is its own end.

Minds atrophied by Spencer’s positivism still go on believing that they

are individualists without noticing that their venerated teacher is the

ultimate anti-individualist, since he is nothing more than a radical

monist, and, as such, the passionate lover of unity and the sworn enemy

of particularity. Like all more or less monistic scientists and

philosophers, he denies all distinctions, all differences. And he

sacrifices reality to affirm illusion. He strives to show reality as

illusion and illusion as reality. Since he isn’t able to understand the

varied, the particular, he sacrifices the one or the other on the altar

of the universal. Sure, he fights the state in the name of the

individual, but like every sociologist in this world, he comes back to

sacrifice under the tyranny of another free and perfect society, since

it is true that he fights against the state, but he fights against it

only because the state as it is doesn’t function as he would like.

But not because he has understood the anti-collectivist, anti-social

singularities capable of higher activities of the spirit, of emotion and

of heroic and uninhibited strength. He hates the state, but does not

penetrate or understand the mysterious, aristocratic, vagabond, rebel

individual!

And from this point of view, I don’t know why that flabby charlatan,

that failed anthropologist, bloated more and more with the sociology of

Darwin, Comte, Spencer and Marx, who has spread filth over the giants of

Art and Thought like Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, Wilde, Zola, Huysman,

Verlaine, Mallarmé, etc., that charlatan called Max Nordau; I repeat, I

cannot explain to myself why he hasn’t also been called an

Individualist... since, like Spencer, Nordau also fights the state...

3

Giovanni Papini said this about Spencer: “As a scientist, he bowed

before facts, as a metaphysician, before the unknowable, as moralist,

before the immutable fact of natural laws. His philosophy is made up of

fear, ignorance and obedience: great virtues in the presence of Christ,

but tremendous vices for one who wants the supremacy of the individual.

He was neither more nor less than a counterfeiter of individualism.” And

though I am not at all a Papinian, in this case, I am in complete

agreement with him.

4

E. Zoccoli is an intellectual of the greatest range with a deep

knowledge of anarchist thought, but he declares himself to be a

pathetic, moral bourgeois. In his colossal study, Anarchy, after railing

— though calmly and with some reason — against the greatest agitators of

anarchist thought, from Stirner to Tucker, Proudhon to Bakunin, he feels

sorry for Kropotkin because he finds that this anarchist was not able to

develop a new rigorously scientific and sociological anarchism as he

allowed himself to call all the mad delinquents of extreme anarchism, or

Individualism, back to the sane currents of a viscous positivistic,

scientifically materialist and humanist, semi-Spencerian system, since

this famous science is what finally discovered the nullity of the

individual “before the limitless immensity...”. And for the positivist,

humanist, communist, scientific Kropotkin it also seems that man is “a

small being with ridiculous pretenses” and amen! Anyone who concentrates

on sociology can’t be anything but a scientist of collectivity who

forgets the individual in order to seek Humanity and raise the Imperial

Throne at whose feet the I must renounce itself and kneel down with deep

emotion.

And when all anarchists have this sublime concept of life, E. Zoccoli

will also be happy and content, since by taking on the seraphic pose of

a prophet who tells men: “I have come to offer you the possibility of a

new life!”, he turns to us and says: “May anarchists return to (legal)

right and may right expect them, quick to extend its safeguards to them

as well...”

But what is right?

We say with Stirner:

“Right is the spirit of society. If Society has a will, this will is

simplt Right: Society exists only through Right. But as it endures only

exercising a sovereignty over individuals right is its sovereign will.

Aristotle says justice is the fruit of society.”

But “all existing right is — foreign law [Right]; some one makes me out

to be right, ‘does right by me’. But should I therefore be in the right

if all the world made me out so? And yet what else is the right that I

obtain in the state, in society, but a right of those foreign to me?

When a blockhead makes me out in the right, I grow distrustful of my

rightness; I don’t like to receive it from him. But, even when a wise

man makes me out in the right, I nevertheless am not in the right on

that account. Whether I am in the right is completely independent of the

fool’s making out and the wise man’s”. Now we add to this definition of

the Right that this wild, invincible German gave us, the famous aphorism

of Protagoras: “The man is the measure of all things”, and then we can

go to war against all external right, all external justice, since

“justice is the fruit of society”.

5

I know! I know and understand: my ideas — which are not new — might

wound the overly sensitive hearts of modern humanists, who proliferate

in great abundance among subversives, and of romantic dreamers of a

radiant, redeemed and perfect humanity, dancing in an enchanted realm of

general, collective happiness to the music of a magic flute of endless

peace and universal brotherhood. But anyone who chases phantoms wanders

far from the truth, and then it is known that the first to be burnt in

the flames of my corroding thought was my inner being, my true self! Now

within the burning blaze of my Ideas, I also become a flame, and I burn,

I scorch, I corrode...

Only those who enjoy contemplating seething volcanoes that launch

sinister, exploding lava from their fiery wombs toward the stars, later

letting them fall into the Void or among Dead Cities of cowardly men, my

carrion brothers, making them run in frantic flight out from their moldy

wall-papered shacks, hellholes of rancid, old ideals, should approach

me.

I think, I know, that as long as there are men, there will be societies,

since this putrid civilization with its industries and mechanical

progress has already brought us to the point where it is not even

possible to turn back to the enviable age of the caves and divine mates

who raised and defended those born of their free and instinctive love

like tawny, catlike Lionesses, inhabiting magnificent, fragrant, green

and wild forests. But still I know and I think with equal certainty that

every form of society — precisely because it is a society — will, for

its own good, want to humiliate the individual. Even communism that — as

its theorists tell us — is the most humanly perfect form of society

would only be able to recognize one of its more or less active, more or

less esteemed members in me. I can never be as worthy through communism

as I will be as myself, fully my own, as a Unique one and, therefore,

incomprehensible to the collectivity. But that within me which is most

incomprehensible, most mysterious and enigmatic to the collectivity is

precisely my most precious treasure, my dearest good, since it is my

deepest intimacy which I alone can explain and love, since I alone

understand it.

It would be enough, for example, if I said to communism: “it is to do

nothing that the elect exist” as Oscar Wilde said, to see me driven out

from the holy supper of the new Gods like a leprous Siberian! And yet

one who had the urgent need to live his life in the highly and sublimely

intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of Thought and contemplation could

not give anything materially or morally useful and good to the

community, because what he could give would be incomprehensible, and

therefore noxious and unacceptable, since he could only give a strange

doctrine supporting the joy of living in contemplative laziness. But in

a communist society — as in any other society where it would be even

worse — such a doctrine could have the effect of corruption among the

phalanx of those that must produce for collective and social maintenance

and balance. No! Every form of society is the product of the majority.

For great Geniuses and for great lawbreakers, there is no place within

the triumphant mediocrity that dominates and commands.

6

Someone will raise the objection to me that in this vermillion Dawn,

this noble eve of armies and war, where the vibrant and fateful notes of

the great twilight of the old Gods already echoes resoundingly, while on

the horizon, the golden rays of a smiling future are already rising, it

is not good to bring certain intimate and delinquent thoughts into the

light of the sun. It is an old and stupid story! I am twenty-eight years

old, for fifteen years I have been active in the libertarian camp and I

live anarchistically, and I am told the same things, the very same

things all the time:

“For the love of harmony...”

“For the love of getting the word out...”

“For the next redemptive Social Revolution...”

“For...” but why go on!

Enough! I cannot remain silent!

“If I were to keep a still unpublished manuscript locked up in my

drawer, the manuscript of a most beautiful work that would give the

reader thrills of unknown pleasure and would uncover unknown worlds; if

I were certain that men would grow pale with fear over these pages, and

then slowly wander through deserted pathways with eyes fiercely dilated

in the void, and later would cynically seek death when madness didn’t

run to meet them with its sinister laughter like the roaring of winds

and its grim drumming of invisible fingers on their devastated brains;

if I were certain that women would smile obscenely and lie down with

skirts lifted on the edge of footpaths, awaiting any male, and that

males would suddenly throw themselves upon them lacerating vulva and

throat with their teeth; if intoxicated, hungry mobs were to chase down

the few elusive men with knives and there was death between being and

being perpetuating their deep hatred; if the peace of an hour,

tranquility of the spirit, love, loyalty, friendship would have to

disappear from the face of the earth, and turbulence, restlessness,

hatred, deception, hostility, madness, darkness and death would have to

reign in their place forever; if a most beautiful book that I wrote,

still unpublished and locked in my drawer, would have to do all this, I

would publish that book and have no peace until it was published.”

So Persio Falchi wrote in Forca a couple of years ago to express his

concept of the Freedom of Art, and so I repeat now in Iconoclasta! to

express my conception of Freedom of Thought.

It is an absolute and urgent need of mine to launch into the darkness

the stormy and sinister light of my thoughts and the incredulous and

mocking sneer of my rare ideas that want to freely wander, proud and

magnificent, displaying their vigorous and uninhibited nakedness, going

through the world in search of virile embraces. No one could be more

revolutionary than I am, but this is precisely why I want to throw the

corroding mercury of my thoughts into the midst of the senile impotence

of the eunuchs of Human Thought. One cannot be half a revolutionary and

one cannot half-think. It is necessary to be like Ibsen, revolutionary

in the most complete and radical sense of the word. And I feel that I am

such!

7

History, materialism, monism, positivism and all the other isms of this

world are old and rusty swords which are of no use to me and don’t

concern me. My principle is life and my end is death. I want to live my

life intensely so that I can embrace my death tragically.

You are waiting for the revolution! Very well! My own began along time

ago! When you are ready — God, what an endless wait! — it won’t nauseate

me to go along the road awhile with you!

But when you stop, I will continue on my mad and triumphant march toward

the great and sublime conquest of Nothing!

Every society you build will have its fringes, and on the fringes of

every society, heroic and restless vagabonds will wander, with their

wild and virgin thoughts, only able to live by preparing ever new and

terrible outbreaks of rebellion!

I shall be among them!

And after me, as before me, there will always be those who tell human

beings:

“So turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols: discover what

is hidden within you, bring it to the light; reveal yourself!”

Because everyone that searches his inner being and draws out what is

mysteriously hidden there, is a shadow eclipsing every form of Society

that exists beneath the rays of the Sun!

All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of Vagabonds, Unique

ones, Unapproachable ones, rulers over the ideal, and Conquerors of

Nothing advance without inhibitions. So, come on, Iconoclasts, forward!

“Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!”

Arcola, January 1920