But even then, Marx and Engels hadn’t included Russia in the calculation. To hold someone up to contempt as a narrow petty bourgeois and a raving intellectual pauper was not an effective argument in a place where, from the wreckage of all classes, the poisonous flower of the intelligentsia was beginning to bloom and the delirium readying itself to become eminently “practical.” From his shabby lodgings in Berlin, Stirner communicated directly with the Russian underground. The egoist was above all the man making his voice heard from underground. And if Stirner’s obsessive arguments produced the aphasia he desperately wanted, the voice of the underground has never stopped since: it has infused every discourse, tainted all serious argument, derided all status, chased history down every passageway. Stirner’s hidden face—that which Marx hadn’t wanted to recognize—would reemerge in Russia. The whole Hegelian panoply, the academic disputes, the pretense to expounding a “philosophy,” were no more than unwieldy, ostentatious papier-mâché castles—enough to stir the solitary laugh, like the shameful memories that Dostoyevsky would record through the Underground Man (a “collegiate assessor” by profession): the yellow stain on his trousers, his urge to jostle the arrogant officer on Nevsky Prospect, the dull faces of his former schoolmates. The Ego and Its Own would have found its epigraph in Dostoyevsky: “Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being overphilosophical; it’s the result of forty years underground.”

Marx was superstitiously clear-sighted in his fear of the power that comes from the loss of class, which clouds every shining ascent of the proletariat. Loss of class doesn’t mean moving from one class to another, but moving from one class, with all its customs and codes, to a place that wavers, that has no name, no identity, no affiliation, and is no longer inside society but against it. The individual, this refractory person of whose genealogy in the capital process Marx would give a brusque portrayal in his Grundrisse, nevertheless escaped his grasp as an empirical existence. That mental turmoil, unanchored from everything, was no longer a material that could be easily elaborated. At worst it could spawn the terrorist. What is more, he was the character who first engineered the separation from the most oppressive faith that Marx shared with his times (and with our times): the faith in Society. Back in Balzac’s time, we find many instances of deprivation and slow degradation in both the salons and the pantries of Paris. But loss of class never produces the “Russian effect.” Here the stately comédie still holds sway, involving a long-drawn-out sequence of degrees and half degrees by which one can rise or fall in status. The dark center is Vautrin, the eye of the criminal and policeman, who represents omnipotence from below. He alone can wear all masks with impunity, since he is the god who visits his victims incognito. All the others can wear many masks, in succession, but are each time pressed and drawn into the role of the moment. With Dostoyevsky, however, lines are absorbed into a gelatinous mass. Everything is unstable—and instability and abjection are bound by a secret pact. His characters tend to lose (or have already lost) their sense of attachment: to their family, to their class, but above all to society, as well as to their feelings, which they are ready to reverse at any moment, in a malevolent flash. They flow uncontained, and now almost with indifference: innocent yet depraved, compassionate in torture, their tears are followed by a wild mocking laugh.