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Title: Insurrection or Revolution?
Author: Saul Newman
Date: 2022-02-25
Language: en
Topics: egoism, ethics, insurrection, Max Stirner, revolution
Source: Retrieved 02/25/2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/56234

Saul Newman

Insurrection or Revolution?

At a time when the grand narrative of Revolution that we inherited from

modernity and the rationalist discourses of the Enlightenment has all

but broken down, what alternatives are there for conceptualising radical

transformation? Despite the lack of an organised revolutionary class or

movement, the left is at the same time unable to think beyond the idea

of revolutionary emancipation. This failure of the radical imagination

is perhaps the reason for the political deadlock the left finds itself

in today. Unable to effect any sort of meaningful change, the left

instead fights ‘culture wars’ and engages in identity politics against a

right that is much more adept at this game. The puritanical dogmatism

and religious zeal with which the endless debates over gender identity,

race, the inclusion of the marginalised and so on are conducted speaks

to a certain exhaustion of the radical political horizon. To found one’s

politics on the recognition of identities, on the one hand, and the

future promise of revolutionary salvation, on the other, is to fall into

the trap of state power. The state is fetishized either as the entity

that grants rights and legal status to minorities, or as the enemy that

must be captured in order for freedom to be realised — an illusion that

has only led to the creation of new states and new forms of despotism,

as the history of revolutions demonstrates.

Perhaps it is time to abandon the ‘spooks’ of identity and revolution

and to think of subjectivity and politics in a different way. It is here

that I suggest we turn to the nineteenth egoist anarchist philosopher

Max Stirner. In The Ego and Its Own [Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum]

published in 1844, Stirner proposed an alternative, ‘egoistic’ form of

political action that he termed the ‘Insurrection’ or ‘Uprising’

[Empörung] and which he contrasted with Revolution. While the Revolution

was a project aimed at the transformation of external social and

political relations, the insurrection was a transformation of the self.

It is a way for the individual to overcome his or her own voluntary

obedience to, and identification with, authority. As such, it does not

preclude broader social and political changes, but these are premised

upon this initial act of self-liberation — a change in the way we relate

to ourselves and to others. As Stirner says, the insurrection has as its

unavoidable consequence the transformation of circumstances, ‘yet does

not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves’. The

insurrection can therefore be seen as a form of radical

self-emancipation. It is not guided or determined by revolutionary

vanguards or parties, and it does not seek to capture and control state

power. Rather, it is radically anti-institutional: ‘The Revolution aimed

at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be

arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on

“institutions”’. The state is neither an instrument of social

transformation, nor even the main obstacle to individual freedom. The

insurrection refuses this sort of fetishization of state power. Rather,

the individual egoist should affirm him- or herself over the state; he

should no longer look to the state, either in veneration or in horror

(which are two sides of the same coin), but only to himself.

This unusual idea of insurrection is a key part of Stirner’s

philosophical and ethical project of egoism. For Stirner, in a world of

‘spooks’ or ideological abstractions and metaphysical ideals — humanity,

morality, freedom, rights, society, law and the state — which are a

hangover from religion and yet which continue to haunt us, the ego is

the only concrete reality, the only tangible thing. But what does

Stirner actually mean by the ego? It is a mistake to simply conflate

this with ‘the individual’, the figure of liberal and libertarian

discourse, as so often commentaries on Stirner have done. The ego is a

much more fluid concept that evades all such categorisations and ‘fixed

ideas’. As a matter of fact, we could say that the ego is a kind of

radical non-identity that cannot be pinned down to any form of

subjectivity or determined by any essential characteristics. The ego is

always changing, mutable, in flux — it is a process of self-becoming and

self-creation rather than a stable identity. As Stirner says, ‘no

concept expresses me, nothing that is designated my essence exhausts me;

they are only names’. Indeed, rather than an identity at all, the ego is

better thought of as a singularity. A more precise translation of the

ego (der Einzige) in Stirner would be the ‘Unique One’. The subject is

anarchic in an ontological sense — that is, without a stable foundation,

pre-determined set of interests or rational telos. The self refuses any

kind of ‘calling’ — whether that of freedom, morality, rationality, or

even the recognition of his own ‘inner self’. This is why Stirner’s

notion of egoism has no truck whatsoever with any kind of ‘identity

politics’ — whether of majorities or minorities, whether of the included

or the excluded — because the projection of an identity only confines

the unique one to a pre-determined idea that imposes certain norms of

behaviour and conduct, that requires living up to a certain ideal.

Identity politics is the attempt to compress the unique one into

fictional generalities that supposedly represent his essence but which

only mutilate his difference.

Stirner’s entire political, ethical, and philosophical project is to

free the unique one from obeisance to such abstractions. It is to

encourage us to view the world, and ourselves, from our own perspective

and to refuse to be enthralled to ‘fixed ideas’ and essentialist

concepts of all kinds, in other words, the ideas and ways of living that

we have simply inherited from tradition. In adopting the alternative

gaze of the Unique One, everything appears as radically undetermined.

The world opens up to us. The self becomes a blank canvas waiting to be

recreated.

This new way of approaching the world has important ethical and

political consequences. If the world becomes contingent and open ended,

this means that action can no longer be founded on absolute, universal

moral and rational criteria; we come to recognise that these are just as

illusory as the religious superstitions they replaced. However, in the

absence of these predetermined coordinates, we are forced to make

independent ethical decisions. If we no longer look to institutions like

the state or to commonalities like the nation, we have the means of

inventing our own autonomous forms of political organisation and

community (Stirner’s paradoxical notion of the ‘union of egoists’ is one

such possibility). We now no longer associate with others out of

obligation or compulsion, but because it brings us joy or enhances our

sense of self. If we find the language of rights and even freedom now

obscure and unsatisfactory, we can deploy an alternative language of

‘ownness’ which allows us to determine our own individual path of

freedom, as unique as the one who treads it.

The insurrection should therefore be seen as a kind of political and

ethical experimentation that proceeds from the self and its

possibilities. It is an invitation to practice new forms of

self-determined modes of interaction and association, new ways of being

that are indifferent to power. Anarchists have provided many such

examples of this, from everyday practices such as squatting to

occupations of public places and the conscious creation of alternative

communities. Central to such experiments is an insurrection in the

present moment, in the here and now, rather than pinning ones hopes on

the great revolutionary Event. Stirner teaches us that all politics is

micro-politics, that social and political change starts with changing

oneself and unbinding oneself from power and a transformation of one’s

ethical relations with others. As the German anarchist Gustav Landauer,

very much inspired by Stirner, once put it, ‘The state is a social

relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be

destroyed by people creating new social relationships, ie., by people

relating to one another differently.’