Ownness and the Alien. If this awkward couple is to remain in existence, an appropriate solution will be that of divorcing one term (the second, the bad one) in favor of the other. And this is what Marx intended when identifying Communism with the “destruction of alienness”—“with the communistic regulation of production and, implicit in this, the destruction of alienness …” But the method seems suspicious from the very beginning.⁵⁵⁸ Too much love for Society, impertinent avatāra of the Whole. Stirner, who was likewise inclined to paranoia and brutality, though of a crude and garish kind, saw that among all historical figures only God (and the despot who models himself on Him) was able to blur the distinctions between ownness and alien. All is alien to him because it is not God; all is ownness to him because God is “all in all.”⁵⁵⁹ Why not apply the same criterion to that unanchored, roaming ego that had no wish to occupy its place in Hegel’s architecture? Like God, this ego would have been the supreme egoist, the only egoist who can make both meanings of Sache (“thing” and “cause”) coincide with everything, thereby overcoming the common limitations of the egoist, who knows how to operate only in his own domain. But, having undergone such a contortion of meaning, whoever would now have considered ownness and alienness, except as something remembered from the desks of a Berlin lecture hall? Heading now, instead, toward an assimilation to the most prostituted being (“l’être le plus prostitué”), which is God, the being par excellence (“l’être par excellence”), who never tires, out of love, of going out of himself (“sortir de soi”) and can only go out into himself.⁵⁶⁰ Marx also foresees this possibility: “Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities.⁵⁶¹ More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use.” Stirner develops this notion to an extreme: we use everything as our own and are used in everything by everyone. Coexistence of maximum ownership (everything is our material) and maximum alienness (we are the material used by everyone) but intertwined in universal prostitution, many steps beyond Sade, still encumbered by certain feudal memories of sovereignty. In the good old days of Kant it could still be decided by law what belonged to a person and what didn’t, but now everything is both at the same time—above all the ego, which claims to have everything at its disposal, and who is at the disposal of all.

The blind rage that Marx hurls upon the Lumpen is followed by the rage he displays toward unproductive workers. Maintaining with paleo-bourgeois zeal the distinction posited by Adam Smith, Marx includes in it the whole “rabble,” “from whore to pope.”⁵⁶² And in the Grundrisse—the work that prepares the grave for the whole mighty conception of productive labor, insofar as it speculates upon the phase that we are approaching today, in which the productive worker ends up being transformed into “an overseer and regulator of the production process itself”—the unerring faith in the metaphysical structure of production (far more than to its historical manifestation) would drive Marx to evident bombast in defending the distinction between Smith and those servile economists who want to convince the bourgeois “that it is productive labor when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his [cock], because for example the latter activity will make his blockhead clearer the next day in the office.”^{563, 564} Marx is concerned not just with a technical distinction, which is helpful in highlighting the specific nature of salaried work (a “form … which has replaced the very earth as the ground on which society stands”).⁵⁶⁵ More important, for him, is to identify with the process of capital in the treacherous hostility to unproductive powers, which embody the immeasurable: the sacrament, pleasure, sovereignty. And here, in the silent simultaneous monologue of their notebooks, Baudelaire replies: while Marx had lowered sacrament to the level of prostitution, Baudelaire invokes prostitution as a sacrament: “L’amour, c’est le goût de la prostitution” (Love is a passion for prostitution).⁵⁶⁶