The seizure of divinity by man, this act of good administration demanded by the times, would bring great surprises when it came to taking stock. The inventory included not only Goodness and Power, virtues that pleased everyone, but certain characteristics that were somewhat antiquated, though impressive all the same. Ego sum qui sum were the first words of the divine, which now had to find a new place. Feuerbach wouldn’t have dared to venture this far, nor would he have known how; but it was precisely from this point, with morbid consequentiality, that Stirner set out. The whole of The Ego and Its Own is above all an immense tautology and indeed an absurd aberration: a tautology built using all the tools of dialectics, as a correct transposition of the biblical pronouncement to the European adult of the nineteenth century. And here again one finds confirmation of a certain ineptitude among progressive minds: those who spoke out against religion were all convinced that religion was a collection of Virtues which should now be assembled in a public park. They of all people had failed to recognize the obvious: that religion contains within itself inexhaustible reserves of ambiguity and atrocity, more than enough to chip away the secular narrow-mindedness of professors, engineers, lawyers, and servants of the State who wanted to usurp it. And this is indeed what happened. Madmen would be born—ineffable, unspeakable, unique, from the prodigious power caged in larval bodies, shaken with torment. Teratology had become tautology, with a feeling of exhilaration.

Why is the “egoist” unique? Many of Stirner’s readers have interpreted the term in the psychological sense: whether scorning or extolling it, they have imagined it was supposed to affirm the value of a self. But above all the self of the egoist exists only as a negative and destructive power. On this point Stirner cut his links with earlier idealism no less distinctly than Marx. “When Fichte says, ‘The ego is all,’ this seems to harmonize perfectly with my thesis.⁵⁵⁷ But it is not that the ego is all, but the ego destroys all, and only the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the finite ego is really I. Fichte speaks of the ‘absolute’ ego, but I speak of me, the transitory ego.” Stirner’s ego is the negation that produces and abolishes, in an extremely rapid alternation, tending toward an impossible simultaneity. Anyone searching in Stirner for the reaffirmed substantiality of a subject will find instead an empty and silent cavity. So why then “egoist”? Instead of the Universal Man and Feuerbach’s omnilateral man (then transmitted to Marx, and from there across the whole of history), Stirner wanted to construct in the egoist a hybrid monster that would evoke the disturbing image of fairy tales. The egoist, extrapolated from the pauper by a process that uses everything and allows only that which is usable, is the delirium of a substitution of the pauper to the process that has made him such. But it’s a pure substitution: the subject is changed but the operation is unaffected. The egoist will also use everything and will substitute everything. But he will not manage to substitute his own figure, his compulsion to act in the same way as the process whose place he has taken. Likewise the principle of substitution cannot be exchanged with another principle. There is something at the very center of the despotic system of substitution that escapes it: the egoist (the pauper-despot) who is now identified with the process itself. The process is irreplaceable, in the same way that the egoist is irreplaceable. The system of exchange eventually clashes with itself as subject—and as a subject that is unexchangeable, unique, immeasurable. This wonderfully productive paradox is the motor that whirrs continually in our ears.