There is one later follower—Nietzsche—who would be moved by similar ideas and would take a long time to express that violent opening imperative in a strategy. Having recognized the imaginary nature of every hypostasis, and the malevolent power of those fictions, instead of withdrawing into the barbarous silence of the “unnamable” and the “inexpressible” he would recognize figments (and therefore the hypostases), not only in every word and every action, but in every form and process of nature. And he would choose to deal with all figments as such, considering how they continually changed the terms of appearance, so that they would prevent it, however splendid and ocellated it may be, from being imperceptibly petrified into essence.

Over time, everything becomes part of the history of philosophy. In 1866, after twenty years of almost total obscurity, Stirner was named in two books that would long remain key references: Johann Edward Erdmann’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Outlines of the History of Philosophy) and Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism). Stirner’s new reputation would, indeed, be made from a passage in this latter “history.” The Ego and Its Own reemerges from the regenerative silence as a “notorious work.”⁵⁴⁵ But Lange had been impressed to some extent by Stirner, so he added the words that turned out to be crucial: “this book—the most extreme that we know of its kind.”⁵⁴⁶

The “magic of the extreme” (“the spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, this is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists—we are the most extreme …”) would work once again.⁵⁴⁷ In the summer of 1887, a young Scot, John Henry Mackay, would discover the name Stirner and that phrase for the first time while reading Lange’s work at the British Museum. He noted it down. When he read The Ego and Its Own a year later, it seemed to him that humanity had found its redeemer in Stirner. He soon set off on the trail of the prodigious and by then unknown author. Marx and Engels had constructed “Marxism” and the “Marxist” piece by piece (without failing, of course, to denigrate those terms later) whereas Stirner did not construct the “Stirnerian,” though he left some useful notions for his construction. He grew inexorably by himself: based on the model of the somewhat ridiculous and pompous Scot, he would be followed by countless others, from the workers of the black terror to the dandies of La Revue blanche. Mackay began work on his research for Stirner’s biography, mobilizing all the mighty forces of spiritual kitsch (“for this book is life itself”), which at that time was gaining heights never again achieved.⁵⁴⁸ Stirner sparked a further paradox. “Here we have Stirner’s book, excessively mature and extremely blasé product of a long evolution, without even a hint of naivety, last fragment of crumbling Hegelianism, which was buried by criticism and ridicule. And on the other hand, Mackay as Stirner’s biographer—boyish at heart, full of naivety, a fine, amiable soul, who has everything except a drop of humor and critical capacity.” The destroyer of the “Cause” was now becoming the noblest “Cause,” to be spread using every means: the object of sacrifice, of abnegation, of unswerving devotion.⁵⁴⁹ First Mackay and then the awkward clan of Stirnerians would be a living example of those “pious atheists” whom Stirner had ridiculed in his book.