Behind the spite, the insults, the silences, we find that Marx and Stirner share a fundamental experience that affects their lives: the spiritization of the world. They were two young Germans, petty bourgeois with a natural tendency to degenerate into Lumpen—Stirner twice in prison for debt, Marx arrested in London on suspicion of theft on his way to pawn his wife’s silver that bore the Argyll family crest. Both looked about them and saw a sarabande of ghosts. It was a time when the encroachments of philosophy (now called “critique” for reasons of secular decency), not to mention covetous science, were driving away shadows, hypostases, ideas, symbols, auras, categories, emblems from the world, dissolving them in crude daylight on the dissecting table; it was a time when the bourgeoisie were congratulating themselves that the Spirit was moving ever further away and was, in any event, becoming increasingly superfluous, so that it had to be invoked only at the unveiling of monuments, whereas machines were incessantly humming everywhere, except for backward Germany, and, since Geschichte (History) had become Weltgeschichte (World History), their blind movements, together with the rises and falls of the Stock Exchange, could determine the extinction of distant populations, whereas total disenchantment glided across the earth and stumbled over aureoles in the mud at crossroads; it was a time when the big body of the nineteenth century unknowingly performed its ruthless experiment upon itself, and was nonetheless convinced it was doing something quite different (and above all “shedding light”). In common with their time, Marx and Stirner shared the conviction that ghosts were a sign of evil (Guénon noted the regrettable coincidence by which spiritualism began to spread like an epidemic in the United States in 1848, a necessary counterbalance to the European barricades, which were in turn a quiet signal that a new character, Chaos, was emerging onstage at the Court of History). Their gaze settled on those specters, and was caught. But they resisted—and they scorned those around them who carried on in ignorance, convinced they were now living in an empty world. “Hypostases non fingo!” Max Stirner declared, obsessively, from his desk at the school for young girls, as a whirl of categories pressed him to the wall. To this declaration—far more radical and effective than the earlier one pronounced by Newton—Marx replied with a shrug of the shoulders (“Huh! To imagine that thought determines reality, when it is reality that determines thought!” with the whole rosary of concomitant chiasmata), and he points his finger at concrete elements—account books, offices, warehouses, working hours, excise duties, gold, debentures, marauding ships. But it’s a sham rejection: Marx’s most rigorous application of Stirner’s attack on hypostases comes a few years later, in the first book of Das Kapital. Stirner’s words, which Marx himself had dismissed with rough impatience, would be tried out in those pages. Once reality has been stripped of every metaphysical veil and reduced to the bare production-circulation-consumer process, from which all other processes are derived and on which they model themselves, according to the axioms set out by Engels, then at that very moment the great dance of ghosts would begin—the great transformation of Geist into Poltergeist, which would grip hold of wardrobes and chairs, women, tablecloths, and all would become possessed. Stirner’s only immediate continuator, the only faithful follower who has rigorously applied to concrete reality what the master had foreseen too generically, is therefore Marx in his Grundrisse and Das Kapital.