Why still hang about among the sawdust and beer stains of Hippel’s tavern? There had been so many trials and tribulations since then, we might even have forgotten about it. But nothing can alter the fact that it was thanks to Stirner, a minor character, that culture’s protective shell—to use the jargon of the Absolute Spirit once again—was pierced for the first time. It was he who helped bring about that global and irrevocable loss of dignity that has become our foundation. From then on, even the most cultured discourse is pervaded by a certain barbarity: it is a new prerequisite of sensibility, of thought. It will be useful, then, to bring it back to light in its crudeness. Even before Marx, Freud, or Nietzsche (who were all basically respectable human beings, well-mannered, and well aware that they had to remain so, even if their “critique of the existent” might—must—end up undermining it), the world of today derives, without knowing it, from Stirner. And it couldn’t know it, not only since “there’s no certainty about the father,” but because all paternity has now to be considered spurious, and Stirner has only the obscure task of settling the matter, as befits a lowly clerk of Nothingness: “The civilized being of the big cities returns to the wild state—i.e., to the state of isolation, because the social mechanism enables him to forget the needs of the community and lose feelings of attachment between individuals, which at one time were constantly reawakened by need.⁵³⁴ All improvement in the social mechanism causes certain acts, certain ways of feeling, certain attitudes to communal life to become useless.”

They expected him to arrive from the Eastern frontiers, with thin Mongol mustaches and a bone necklace, with furs smeared with marrow and blood: he appeared as a teacher at a boarding school for girls from well-to-do Berlin families, with a smart but well-worn jacket, oval spectacles, and a shy, scornful countenance. When his friends at Hippel’s tavern became too rowdy, he moved aside, to a corner of the table. As he wrote, in his musty lodgings, a screeching sound of overwrought nerves could be heard, verging on a howl. After the publication of The Ego and Its Own, Stirner’s life, in the same old Berlin that now even wanted to forget Hegel, is a simple humdrum and exotic fact, like that of Rimbaud at Harar. It would later transmigrate into its two final forms: the silence of Bartleby, and Traven’s The Death Ship.