Paradoxes: for everything to be a process, everything had to become a thing. (“Thing” is that which is available; “process” is a power capable of making anything whatsoever available.) And, for everything to become a thing, everything has to be definable, circumscribable, and separable from everything else.

Thing: is that which can be managed, which has a distinct outline, which is separate from the rest. The mechanism for the formation of hypostases is that which allows such an explanation, and fixing, of mental clouds. But hypostases were assigned a surplus of power over the subject, which made them unavailable for use but, instead capable of using their subjects. It was therefore a question of erasing the memory of that power, and reason once again was zealous. After all, its own life was at stake, or rather its tranquillity. Making fun of angels, over centuries of aggressive science, served this purpose above all.

“[The spirit] dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its ‘dwelling,’ and if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.”⁵⁵⁵ The prosaic nature of this move corresponds with Stirner’s constantly derisive tone: to place the sublime in immediate contact not so much with the lowest but with the mediocre, with that tired daily ordinariness that ought now to take up all heaven and hell. And so, by giving Feuerbach a slight twist, Stirner turns the whole scene around: no longer the barrack-room speculation, but an unprecedented anthropological idea that defies all classification. At last we encounter something new in the table of variants in which the relationship between sacred and profane is usually inscribed: one of the opposing terms—the profane—demands to invite a caravan of gypsies laden with trinkets into its Biedermeier apartments for the sole reason that one of them claims to be a distant relative. There’s a Feydeau farce in the making here, and Stirner is aware of it. And so he presents such a momentous event as a time of family confusion on the arrival of guests more numerous and irksome than expected. But this scene of domestic comedy is portentous nonetheless: the sacred demands a place to go, its miasmal and penetrating power can be confronted only by those who know how to contain it (with objects, supports, buildings, rituals, formulas). Nothing in the bourgeois intérieur is suited to such a task: the ornaments glare, the lids of ornamental boxes open, the curtains quiver, the wallpaper puckers, the tablecloths crepitate. The Guest passes through, leaves his marks, goes off toward the attic, turns into Odradek. From that moment, in the eyes of the child who would be Walter Benjamin, every object in the room becomes a totem. Hold your ear close, and you can still hear the sound of the Guest passing through. The walls are tattooed.

“What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? Are we that which is in us?” The blaring trumpets of Humanity were then announcing continual conquests.⁵⁵⁶ Everything was being stored up, and the individual contemplated the increase in his possessions with satisfaction. But who was taking over what? And what was the difference between taking over a category of thought and possessing a credit document? Possession seemed like a first step toward appropriation, which in turn could be regarded as total when it absorbed the entity appropriated without residue: ablatio omnis alteritatis et differentiae (the removal of all differences and otherness), in the words of Nicholas Cusanus. But he was referring to the godlike soul, which is equated to the divine. Whereas here it was a question of equation to something that was extraneous by definition. And yet, even without allowing for the involvement of the divine, which always complicates matters terribly, and also leaving out all secular possession, appropriation nevertheless encounters various difficulties.