The Big City must already be there before Stirner can be born. The ghost of the enemy of ghosts belongs not so much to Hippel’s tavern in Berlin, where Die Freien—the Free Ones—met, but to the underground of Petersburg, to the bowels of Paris, to the mountains of garbage in London, to the death ships that swallow up their paperless and nameless passengers in the port of Antwerp. Its meeting place is wherever you find the grim crowd of feverish autodidacts, ghost writers, people ready to do anything since they have nothing, disgraced bourgeois, penniless aristocrats, the damned of the earth, cast out of a savanna, out of the swamps or from the desert beneath the marble vaults of the polytechnics of another continent, the ever vaster crowd of those acquainted above all with public humiliation and solitary exaltation. On hotel registers Nietzsche always gave his occupation as “university professor,” though he no longer was, and every year he felt himself more clearly resembling those teeming wraiths. Among them he could even have found a role—he had already chosen one: that of the “respectable criminal.” He loathed that brash and raucous company, and yet he knew his books would at last find prehensile ears among them. He distanced himself from them in every way, exhausting every last virtue of good manners. But he could not ignore the innumerable signs of affinity. When Dostoyevsky wrote in his notebooks, with curiosity and disgust—alongside details of sums of money never received or already spent—that man no longer had a profile, he had already been surrounded for some while by a hostile throng of those presences in his room; indeed, he belonged to them and had betrayed them. He consummated his long betrayal in his novels, often riven by the convulsive hilarity of someone too close to what he is narrating, like a policeman reporting a killing in which he himself was implicated.

Stirner is the barbarian coming from a Germany still divided into small states, who bursts into the heart of the metaphysical empire. The same instruments that had helped Hegel to absorb every remnant of barbarity into the Spirit, now serve to dismantle the spirit, to uproot it from all terrain, to bore into the anthropological soil of the Enlightenment. The true “philosophy of the hammer,” which Nietzsche could never put into practice, since he was too hopelessly polite, is achieved in the short, punchy, aggressive phrases that make up The Ego and Its Own.

Stirner’s egoist rejects every kind of dependence: but all dependence is a root, whether earthly or celestial. Stirner’s egoist is the rootless man who for the first time recognizes himself as such. He wanders the city as a perfect outsider to everything and everyone. The words that invade his mind, the desires that assail him—he regards everything as an object to use or discard, his is simply the gesture of taking or distancing himself. He is the man from underground who pillages metaphysics.

Stirner has left us no moving letters from Schulpforta asking for Schumann scores, nor could he have done. In him, there is something physiologically tainted and corrupt when it comes to culture, something that poisons him from the start.