Many recall Stirner only because Marx and Engels wrote so many vitriolic pages against him in The German Ideology—in rather the same way that Eugen Dühring is remembered most of all for Engels’s Anti-Dühring (though in that case it would be kinder to ignore both Dühring and the Anti-Dühring). Yet there are a few people who admire Stirner to such a point that they prefer not to admire others so as not to diminish him. They venerate the very man who wanted to destroy the sacred and to eliminate veneration—and at times they incline toward mild lunacy, or toward a cold fury. At any moment, in some part of the world, a small printing press is working away on a new edition of The Ego and Its Own. In the compartment of a railway carriage there’s always a dark figure with a cardboard suitcase in which you’d find a copy of The Ego, generally along with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The university ignores such matters. It forgets it was Stirner who disfigured it once and for all. It considers his work as a good subject for a dissertation. But to deal with Max Stirner in one of the countless histories of the Young Hegelians or of Anarchism is already an invitation to disregard his monstrosity. Stirner then becomes a “position,” albeit extreme, ultimate, in relation to something. Some readers have certainly been aware of that monstrosity, and have openly accepted or rejected it. But the nameless body of culture has failed to recognize it. Having reached a stage of its life in which (like everything else) it claims to be autonomous, it secretes from within itself a new substance and, soon after, a new figure: artificial barbarity, the artificial barbarian. Stirner proclaims them, he defines them. And immediately becomes spectral. Stirner’s presence is felt most intensely in two authors, Nietzsche and Marx, who remain silent about him or refer to him in texts they never published. Many of their words cannot be understood unless we read them as impatient, at times feverish, mutterings addressed to a ghost that haunts them—the ghost of Stirner. Marx and Nietzsche never had much to say directly to each other. Yet they give the impression of being two people who have never met, but who have had the same dream (or nightmare). And they are then compelled to conspire together at least in the desperate, loud, angry, circular conflict with each other’s ghost. That conflict chains them together like prisoners in the same jail. These first two conscious instigators of an “experimental philosophy” found one secret part of their thought in Stirner, but it is precisely that part whose consequences they didn’t wish to recognize. Throughout their life we can follow the stages of a patient effort to conceal this resemblance, in an attempt to escape from the dark silence of the man who had gone before them in committing the intoxicating betrayal of thought. Marx and Nietzsche’s audacity follows directly from that first and overwhelming audacity of Stirner. “It took an eiserne Stirne [an “iron brow,” once again in the sense of “audacity”] to write this book [The Ego and Its Own], and one might almost believe it was for this very reason that the author chose the name Stirner.”⁵²⁷