Der Einzige Research Articles

THE SLOTHFUL PROTEST: ACEDIA IN TERÉZIA MORA'S DARIUS‐KOPP TRILOGY AND IRIS HANIKA'S DAS EIGENTLICHE

AbstractThis article examines how Terézia Mora's Darius‐Kopp trilogy (Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009), Das Ungeheuer (2013), Auf dem Seil (2018)) and Iris Hanika's novel Das Eigentliche (2010) use the early Christian motif of acedia to critique contemporary capitalism. It argues that in these works acedia, the originally theological discourse on the ‘sin of sloth’, articulates a form of passive protest against the conditions of working life and life more generally in ‘fast’ capitalism. Protest takes the form of exhaustion, boredom, and cumulative overwhelming, all of which are attributes of acedia. The article also considers how both authors experiment with signification, arguing that in so doing they expose what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘the inertia of the Real’: in the contemporary context, everyday digital technologies which remediate information. These aesthetic innovations, which emphasise the materiality of signification in the creaturely world of modern acedia, point to the frailty of contemporary capitalism and its uncertain future.

POST‐1989 GEOGRAPHIES IN TERÉZIA MORA'S DER EINZIGE MANN AUF DEM KONTINENT AND DAS UNGEHEUER

ABSTRACTBeginning around the year 2000, a number of German writers and film‐makers began to send their protagonists into Eastern Europe and beyond. Part of a much larger trend towards the transnational in German‐language literature, this development continues the ‘Eastern Turn’ of the 1990s but reverses the direction of movement. In this article I analyse three recent texts by the Hungarian‐born writer Terézia Mora as part of this, by now, multi‐directional ‘Eastern Turn’: her novels Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) and Das Ungeheuer (2013), and her ‘Frankfurter Poetik‐Vorlesungen’, a collection of five lectures assembled under the title Nicht sterben (2014). The novels, both of which chronicle migration from Eastern Europe to Germany as well as travel in the opposite direction and feature German as well as immigrant characters, present an astute critique of contemporary neoliberal economic conditions and practices that have an effect on all the main characters, albeit in very different ways. The lectures give insights into Mora's creative process and the importance of her deep cultural and historical connections to Eastern Europe. They also illustrate Mora's move beyond her own experience of migration toward broader fictional contexts. Taken together, the three texts suggest that traditional views of a Western centre and Eastern peripheries need to be revised in favour of models mindful of multi‐directional movement and the economies that drive it, and capable of mapping the geographies that emerge as a consequence.

The Time of Sloth in Terézia Mora’s Der Einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent

This article argues that Terézia Mora’s novel Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) presents us with an account of dysfunctional temporality in everyday lives under the social formation known as neoliberalism. Through the person and daily habits of main character, neoliberal sloth Darius Kopp, Mora shows how so-called fast capitalism in fact produces the time of sloth. Mora thus illuminates the context of stagnation and slowing growth of the industrialized West in the early twenty-first century, showing how this greater context puts pressure on individual lives.

Identität im Transit. Nicht-Orte und die Dissoziation des Subjekts in Terézia Moras Roman Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent

Abstract Referring to Marc Augé’s theory of non-places, the article shows how the protagonist of Terézia Mora’s second novel Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009) undergoes a process of dissociation when moving either in indistinguishable, non-identifiable non-places or in virtual worlds offered by the new media. These virtual worlds constitute transitory places which neither offer the protagonist any stability or fixed orientation points, nor do they place him in any permanent relationships. In addition, the article focuses on the metafictional level of the novel, where transitory movement through architextual system references plays a central role. The text, I would argue, creates an infinite movement by means of such system references, thus putting not only the protagonist, but also the text itself into a permanently oscillating transitional movement.

Change of Place, Space Perception and Topographic Discourse

Abstract The paper examines the view and representation of space in Terézia Mora’s prose, primarily based on her novel entitled The Only Man on the Continent (Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent). In the universe of the novel the perception of space basically determines the individual’s space of action and highly influences his self-image as well as his attitude toward alterity. The city not only functions as space, but also forms a multicultural medium which becomes itself the subject of reflection and metanarration. In the novel the anthropological places and non-places, in Augé’s sense, change their function and thus the borders of referential, mental and virtual worlds are blurred, the notion of space itself is revaluated. The protagonist is the Ulysses of our days; his journeys and adventures mainly take place in his imagination. In the virtual world he loses his sense of reality, which can also be perceived in the narrative procedures of the text: the novel is in fact the protagonist’s quest for identity, his endless monologue, which is interrupted by the omniscient narrator’s comments from time to time. In the meantime the evident intertextual context also gets shape: the text maintains an ironical intertextual connection with James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen ed. by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck (review)

Reviewed by: Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen ed. by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck Yvonne Franke Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen. Edited by Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck. Cologne: Böhlau, 2012. Pp. 376. Paper € 49.90. ISBN 978-3412207649. The expeditions to the North and South Poles a century ago may have ended the investigation of unknown territory. Yet, the legendary histories and stories of the heyday of European expansion still continue. In recent years, these stories have been the focus of numerous texts in German language, including literature and film. The authors who contributed to Hansjörg Bay and Wolfgang Struck's edited volume Literarische Entdeckungsreisen: Vorfahren—Nachfahrten—Revisionen investigate this reformulated interest in narratives about the past and discuss new literary and filmic adaptations from aesthetic, sociopolitical, and imaginative points of view. The volume's contributions look at the tension between fact and fiction, generic conventions, colonial appropriations, postcolonial revisions, and their consequences for poetics and literary theory. The nineteen articles are organized in four thematic sections. The first section, "Über die letzte Grenze," focuses on cartography and the topographic figure of border drawings and crossings that are always preceded by myths and imaginings. Thus, the exploration of the allegedly "weiße Flecken" inevitably has always been a "Relektüre" and belie any claim of true discoveries. Accordingly, Bettine Menke's contribution "Grenzüberschreitungen (in) der Schrift, Exterritorialität der Pole" shows how literary journeys are strongly intertwined with physical explorations. Literary polar expeditions ("nachfahrendes Schreiben") precede actual expeditions ("Nachfahrten," 75). Because the latter have already been "vorgeschrieben" (53) through literary investigations, each text follows in the footsteps of its literary precursors, which bespeaks to the [End Page 686] "Un-/Erreichbarkeit" of both the poles and the texts (77). Wolfgang Struck's article, "Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd oder Die melancholischen Entdeckungen des Films," revisits the "Cold Case" (29) of three lost Swedish North Pole scientists from 1897. Struck demonstrates how Jan Troell's feature film Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd (1982) revisits this case by employing the "Poetologie des Scheiterns" (37) that brings forth a contradistinction from the original photographic documents and questions the alleged completeness of cartography. The articles on August Petermann's "Theorie vom eisfreien Polarmeer" and a close reading of Christoph Ransmayr's novel Der fliegende Berg and its transgression of territorial and generic borders complete this section. Hansjörg Bay's essay "Literarische Landnahme? Um-Schreibung, Partizipation und Wiederholung in aktuellen Relektüren historischer 'Entdeckungsreisen'" opens the second section of the volume, "Vor-Schriften, Nachfahren und Relektüren." At first, Bay focuses on how the genre of travel writing contributed directly to heroism and colonialism by way of following specific conventions marked by ideological stand points. The article continues with his investigation of contemporary "Relektüren" of (hi)stories of both arctic and tropical expeditions that have been thriving since the 1990s: Sten Nadolny's Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, Christoph Ransmayr's Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Christof Hamann's Der Usambara, Ilija Trojanow's Der Weltensammler, and Thomas Stangl's Der einzige Ort. While Bay considers the North Pole texts from the 1980s as important predecessors for the current literary trend, he gives particular credit to the latter three, in which the colonial entanglements are conveyed through literature. Nevertheless, as he concludes, these recent texts participate in "eine[r] Art kolonialer Wiederholungszwang" (130), which adheres to the conventions of the genre. Bay convincingly demonstrates the usefulness of the ambiguous concept of "Relektüren" that lies at the heart of the entire anthology. The remaining articles in this part deal with nineteenth-century narrative strategies in rewritings of Le Vaillant, Christof Hamann's Usambara, Urs Widmer's Im Kongo, and Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de Violence. John Zilcosky's article "Unheimliche Begegnungen: Abenteuerliteratur, Psychoanalyse, Moderne" opens the anthology's third section on "Tropologien" that shifts the focus to tropical places and lets the geographical and rhetorical realms of the term interact with each other. Zilcosky analyzes examples of popular travel writing (Norbert Jacques' Heisses Land. Eine Reise nach Brasilien), seminal psychological and philosophical theories (Ernst Jentsch, Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud), and modern literature...

Deus absconditus and the infinite God of the Romantics : Chateaubriand, Schleiermacher and Hölderlin

This article aims at presenting an overall image of the Romantic Christianity, of its expectations, promises and differences to the dogmatic norm as shown in Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme as well as in Schleiermacher’s Reden über die Religion and Hölderlin’s Christological hymns (Der Einzige and Patmos). Despite their evident apologetic intent, the three Romantic figures confirm the paradigm shift of the 1760s in Western Europe through a secularized interpretation of the Christian God and religion : in their works, the ethical and aesthetical approach to Christianity as well as their preference for the Christ viator largely indicate the interiorisation of the absolute and the ‘humanization of the theological speech’ (K. Barth) in late Enlightenment and early 19th century spiritualité.

Max Stirner’s Critiques of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Very early on, the works and ideas of the French socialist P.J.-Proudhon were discussed in the circle of the German young Hegelians. Also, Max Stimer mentioned him several times in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. His critique of Proudhon’s thoughts is very important for his own définition and confrontation with the concept of property. The article analyses the different levels of his examination with this concept.

Von einer poetik der drastik zum entwurf eines »Realismus der Globalisierung« am Beispiel der Romane von Terézia Mora

In light of this (not so) new century, there is good reason to consider the rise of a »realism of globalization«. As the former leading agent of modelling alternative worlds, the tradition of the realistic novel has long lost ground against the dominance of new, »visual novels« (i.e. The Wire) with their own approach towards realistic aesthetics. What is the role that literature can play in this transformative, mediatic field? Which originality can it claim? The objective of this (two part) study is to respond to these concerns by example. The case is made for two novels, Alle Tage (2004) and Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (2009), by the German-Hungarian writer Terezia Mora, which might function as a showcase for the ways in which contemporary fiction responds to and contributes in shaping the discourse of globalization. The first part of this study is presented hereby.

Ghostly Business: Place, Space, and Gender in Christian Petzold’s Yella

In the wake of 09/11, the bursting of the “dot.com bubble” and the ensuing collapse of the “Neuer Markt” – mere precursors of today’s global financial meltdown – fuelled economic insecurities in the German-speaking countries. Much of the postmillennial aesthetic production demonstrates how painfully aware German-speaking artists are of the “flip side” of global capitalism, echoing Heiner Muller’s assessment that the phantom of a free market society finally replaced the ghost of communism (Muller 233). The toll that uncanny economic dealings inflict upon fragile individuals became a topic on the German stage (Rolf Hochhuth, McKinsey kommt, 2003; Moritz Rinke, Cafe Umberto, 2005), in prose fiction (Rainer Merkel, Das Jahr der Wunder, 2001; Kathrin Roggla, wir schlafen nicht, 2003; Johannes Ullmaier, ed. Schicht! Arbeitsreportagen fur die Endzeit, 2007; and most recently Terezia Mora, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent, 2009), as well as film (Lichter, dir. Hans-Christian Schmid, 2003; Import/Export, dir. Ulrich Seidl, 2007). These and other narratives suggest that globalized, postnational societies governed by neoliberalism increasingly turn the flexible, cooperative, and efficient individuals living in them (cf. Sennett) into zombie-like creatures disenfranchised from themselves and their environment. This ghostliness shapes notions of subjectivity and identity constructions. Christian Petzold’s filmic work is a notable example for the connection between the economic woes of our time and a curious surge of the ghost motif in contemporary culture. Petzold is also the most prominent representative of the “seismographic, minimalist, existentialist” cinema (Suchsland) commonly referred to as “Berlin School,” a brand of films “devoted to the real as well as to realism, of a rare formal rigour and a stubborn tenderness” (Moller). By rendering visible aspects of social reality that are all too often absent from the consciousness of citizens in postwall Germany, filmmakers of its first generation, such as Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec, analyze the present of a country that still struggles with finding its “true” identity six decades after the end of World War II and two decades after unification (Abel, “Intensifying Life”).

Between Part and Whole: Benjamin and the Single Trait

This text, which is part of a project, ‘Toward a Politics and Poetics of Singularity’, explores the implications of a phrase used more or less simultaneously, although independently, by Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, ‘the single trait’ (der einzige Zug). In his 1962 lectures on the problem of identification, Jacques Lacan focused on this phrase in Freud in order to exemplify the difference between the subject and the signifier. The use of the phrase by Benjamin in his essay on ‘Destiny and Character’ inflects the discussion toward questions of ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, and thereby links the singularity of the signifying process to literary and theatrical forms.

Max Stirner, Hegel and the Young Hegelians: A reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time.

Sacher‐Masoch's Utopian Peripheries

Das Wesen Osterreichs ist nicht Zentrum, sondern Peripherie. -Joseph Roth Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the controversial Austrian author of Venus im Pelz (1870) and countless other erotic novellas, is little known for his political utopianism. I seek to read Sacher-Masoch not only as a writer with a distinctive Utopian vision of a multi-cultural, property-free, communal Empire, in contrast to the Habsburg state's self-serving image as a politically stable Central European country, but also as a writer, focused on the Austrian Empire's ethnic diversity and gender conflicts. As Sacher-Masoch foresees it, the German language would serve as a common denominator to allow the various Habsburg nations to communicate with each other more effectively. Accordingly, much of his work espouses a paradoxical Germanlanguage Pan-Slavism, when he writes: Wir werden das Oesterreicherthum vertreten als eine politische Nationalitat, in der sich die naturlichen Nationalitaten, jede im vollen Genuse ihrer Rechte und Freiheiten, vereinen lassen. (Sacher-Masoch: Materialien 337) Despite the controversial political implications of his Germanic Pan-Slavism, his exciting, page-turning novellas, set at the colonial borders of the Hapsburg Empire, have usually been read in the context of sexual transgressions and dominating female figures, of which Venus im Pelz is merely the most prominent example. More recently, Barbara Hyams, Michael Gratzke, Barbara Mennel and others have explored the relationship of Sacher-Masoch's sexual politics and his political aesthetics in their groundbreaking works.1 However, his radically Utopian political program is less often considered: for instance, Albrecht Koschorke argues in his influential literary biography Sacher-Masoch: Die Inszenierung einer Perversion (1988) that the most truthful revelation of Sacher-Masoch's determinism lies in the nihilism, asceticism and renunciation of his protagonists. Koschorke brings in a verdict of depravity when he writes: Unversehens geht der Impetus einer grundsatzlichen Gesellschaftskritik in Demonstration einer sundenfallmasgen Anlage der Welt und der Menschen unter. Schon der Titel Das Vermachtnis Kains verleiht der diagnostizierten Schlechtigkeit eine religiose Weihe. (55) And shortly before in the same context: Wenn auch die Weltanschauung, die Sacher-Masoch skizziert, manches zu seiner Zeit ausnehmend Fortschrittliche weitertragt, wenn sich dort Spuren von Stirners Der Einzige und sein Eigentum mit Ideen eines slawischen Urkommunismus-man hat hierin eine Geistesverwandtschaft mit Tolstoi sehen wollen-kreuzen, so bleibt der Grad der intellektuellen Durchdringung der plakativ aufgezeigten Miftstande doch aufterordentlich gering. (54) Hence, Koschorke sees Sacher-Masoch's social criticism and political convictions as no more than ornamentation adorning the insidious aestheticism of cruelty in his gory stories. This has been addressed by literary scholars such as JohnNoyes (1994), Michael O'Pecko (1994) and Kai Kauffmann (2001). Their research has shown, for example, that Sacher-Masoch's politics are always coextensive with private, and particularly, sexual power relations (Noyes, Historical Perspective 16). A reading of his seminal novellas reveals that Sacher-Masoch's playful imagination posits an enactment of gender reversals and sexual negotiation that allows the author and his readership to explore the boundaries of permissiveness within the societal order at the borders of the Habsburg Empire. Whereas his masochistic protagonists seek to obtain pleasure by disavowing and suspending reality, his empathie description of multiethnic society in Galicia portrays the sadistic institutional power tormenting peasants and minorities such as Jews. The suspension in fantasy allows Sacher-Masoch not only to invert sexual power relationships, but also to stylize the periphery as a repository of deeply held fears of emasculation. …

Imagination in German Romanticism: Re-Thinking the Self and Its Environment by Jeanne RiouMusic and Literature in German Romanticism by Siobhán Donovan, Robin Elliott

MLR, I0I.4, 2006 I I71 into the volcano and the renewal of the polis as corresponding modes for seizing the favourable moment. At the beginning of Chapter 7Honold shows how Holderlin, in the hymn-draft 'Wie wenn der Landmann', uses an ancient topos to establish a con nection between nature and history. He argues that Empedocles achieves Napoleonic greatness in his capacity as 'Religionsstifter' (p. 354). In particular, the philosopher is presented as 'Inaugurator einer neuen Kalenderordnung' (p. 390) because he exhorts the citizens of Agrigentum 'den Gottern der Natur ein Fest zu bringen' and thus echoes the revolutionary festivals in France (p. 364). The long concluding chapter considers the great elegies as Holderlin's effort to reconcile divine and human time through ritual and celebration, as in 'Brod und Wein' (p. 396). Honold identifies the 'Friedensfiirst' of 'Friedensfeier' with Napoleon and the festival itself with the various festivals of revolutionary France; at the same time, he argues for the 'synoptic quality' of the poem, which combines antiquity and Christianity in its 'syncretistic rituals and festivals' (pp. 447-48). In conclusion, he discusses 'Der Einzige' as a 'coda' that recapitulates all the various themes of his book: a remembrance of the 'naturzyklische[] Grundlagen des Gotterkosmos und der Kalenderordnung' (p. 463). At times, to be sure, Honold pursues his thesis a bit too single-mindedly, as in his almost routine identification of H6lderlin's many 'Feste' with French revolutionary celebrations, and his Procrustean bed causes him to ignore aspects of poems taken as a whole, especially the longer elegies and hymns. His search for the esoteric sometimes leads him to overlook the obvious. Is not Gibbon as powerful an example of the theme of decline and fall asVolney's Les Ruines (I79 )? Surely Goethe's Werther provided an obvious model for the seasonal symbolism of Hyperion. The contrast of past and present that dominates Goethe's 'Euphrosyne' and Schiller's 'Der Spaziergang' both thematically and structurally lay nearer at hand than the festivals of Eleusis when Holderlin was seeking temporal patterns for his own elegies (see my The Classical German Elegy I795-I9 50 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I980)). Could such a time-conscious poet asHolderlin have ignored the fiercely debated controversy be tween the Neunundneunziger and the Nullisten regarding the proper date for the new century, which intrigued not only Goethe and Schiller but all the Romantics? (See Die deutschen Sdkulardichtungen an der Wende des i8. und I9g.Yahrhunderts, ed. by August Sauer (Berlin: Behr, I90I).) Such considerations would have strengthened Honold's central argument without leading him as far afield as do some of his often distracting excursuses. Finally, when did German publishers start omitting indexes from these dense Habilitationsschriften? In sum, however, Honold's rich and provocative project lends substantial body to the generally familiar framework of Holderlin's obsession with time, astronomy, and the French Revolution. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY THEODOREZIOLKOWSKI Imagination in German Romanticism: Re-thinking the Self and its Environment. By JEANNERiou. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2004. 262 pp. ?30; $50.95. ISBN o-8204-7198-4. Music and Literature inGerman Romanticism. Ed. by SIOBHANDONOVAN and ROBIN ELLIOTT. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. 233 pp. $75; /50. ISBN i 57II3-258-9. These two fine volumes on key aspects of German Romanticism not only demonstrate the necessity of pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to this period of German litera ture and culture; they also provide examples of the respective virtues (and hazards) of a scholarly monograph and a collection of essays by experts from different fields. I I72 Reviews Jeanne Riou undertakes the ambitious task of situating the role of the imagination inGerman Romanticism within the context of shifting paradigms in science and phi losophy since the Renaissance. Until that time, she argues in her introduction, the notion of human beings as microcosms linked them with the natural world, whose four elements provided the bases for the theory of humoral pathology inmedicine. With Descartes, the human mind isno longer connected to themechanical operations of the body, and it becomes the task of thinkers from Leibniz to Schelling to recon ceive the relationship of body, mind, and soul to one another and to the surrounding world. After tracing...

MAX STIRNER 1806 — 1856 — 2006

Although one of the fathers of the anarchistic movement Max Stirner has been quickly forgotten. He has always been an outsider. The main work of the philosopher who was bom in 1806 is Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (in English: The Ego and Its/ His Own). This is often referred to as his only work, and apart from a number of minor compilations that is correct. Many other philosophers were inspired by Stirner's work, although almost nobody admitted to be influenced by him. Often misinterpreted as an anarchistic philosophy, it is today's task to put Stirners work into proper perspective. It is more appropriate to see it as a form of nihilism, rather than anarchism. When the book was released in 1845 it was seen as belonging to the same tradition as Protagoras and the sophists. Its main goal was to break the restricting ties of abstract terms like humankind, and open a view on the single person, the Stirner assumed that the world is not the result of an autopoietic act, but that the ego created itself from non-being. However, in Stirner's nihilism the ego is still regarded as non-being because of human mortality and the ego's inclusion in the circle of becoming and decay. In Stimer's view God and the ego are distinguished only by the finitude of the ego. He maintained that things like God are holy only because the ego elevated them to a divine status. If an ego accepted its finitude and let go of holy things, life would find its goals by itself. Furthermore, Max Stirner maintains that the state is the annihilator of liberty, because it forces the many egos to become a single humankind. Nonetheless, he did not call for a revolution he was not for revolution, since he held the view that the state would collapse by itself, if all the egos would come to agree with Stirner's view. Instead some egos should form voluntary associations by pursuing the same goals for a certain time. These associations would cease to exist once the goals were no longer shared.

A Left-Hegelian Anarchism

INTRODUCTION It is a commonplace to observe that the left-Hegelian Max Stirner (1806-56) is little-known.gure in the history of political and philosophical thought. However, that obscurity should not be exaggerated. The author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (a work known in English as The Ego and Its Own) is not only familiar to certain rather specialised and largely academic circles-those with an interest in Hegelianism, for example, or in the early intellectual development of Karl Marx (1818-83)-he is also, and more widely, known as a member of, and in.uence upon, the anarchist tradition. Stirner's best-known work is often excerpted in anthologies of anarchist writings, and his name is regularly included as part of the modern pantheon in historically orientated surveys of anarchist thought.

Lórinc Szabó and Max Stirner

A decisive paradigmatic change in the poetry of Lorinc Szabo in 1927–1928 seems to be synchronous with a comparable alteration in world literature: a shift from classical modernity to hermetism, abstract objectivism, consciousness lyric and a new subjectivism, trends which anticipated present day styles and have survived in neoavant-gardist and poststructuralist poetics. By this move his poetic practice transcended the phase represented by Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Mihaly Babits and paralleled poetic events then unseen or unforeseen by Lorinc Szabo. These included transmutations in the work of contemporary poets, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Attila Jozsef. The novelty was not thematic but modal: a new discourse, a change from the homogeneous to the dialogical conception of the poem. In Lorinc Szabo's vision of personality the voice of the actorincludes the voice of the rebellious individualof traditional poetry (with a sociological view, a pragmatical-pedagogical motivation and a psychological quest for truth) counterpoised by the voice of the spectatorexhibiting the stable laws of the universe (passing a logical judgment). It was a radical novelty in his poetry that the distinction and distance of the ego and the world ceased to be a precondition of aesthetic formation and were replaced by the polyphonic utterance of a You and the World, which living in, and at the same time distanced from, the ego enter into a dialogue in their poetic quiddity. The idea of “one justice” informing world history gave way to a demand for the “one's justice.” Lorinc Szabo's sense of contradiction between the ego and history was reinforced by his study of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner. In the light of this work he reconsidered the ideas of religion, fatherland, freedom, love, justice, and liberalism and came to confront all of the bonds of the individual personality and collective action. The poetic adaptation of Stirner's ideas presents a peculiar case of intertextuality: it encourages the poem's train of thought, tunes its mode of discourse, integrates textually in the course and rhetoric of creation, and occasionally informs the poems in their entirety (as a rule those of the highest poetic rank).

A Philosopher for Today?: Max Stirner's Egoistical Nihilism

I believe that the underlying philosophy of our culture has become nihilistic. If we pursue the implications of nihilism to their ultimate conclusions, where do we arrive? Very few have dared to do this: Max Stirner, who published a book on this theme in 1845, was one who dared. If we turn back to him we can see that he is the unacknowledged prophet of today’s fashionable culture.The ultimate problems posed by nihilism are examined in a book on this German philosopher, by Dr. R. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner, (Hull University Press, 1971). Stirner grew out of the neo-Hegelian movement, and published his one important work in 1945: Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum— ‘The Unique One and His Property’.Stirner belonged to movements which Marx rejected as ‘intellectual nihilists’. Following the nihilist logic to its ultimate implications, he denied God and Christian values, the State’s authority, and all traditional morality.But he went still further, and denied all ethical obligations. In the face of nothingness he embraced nothingness, and he sought no commitment or ultimate responsibility, to man or the universe. ‘What is the commonweal to me?’ All that he was left with was— self. The self and the world were ultimately Nothing—but the Unique One ‘makes Nothing his cause’.

Karl Marx and Max Stirner

EW PERSONS FAMILIAR with the writings of Marx would deny the importance of The Gernan Ideology; yet its belated publication and translation has long had the effect of obscuring most of its contents.! It has rarely been read in its entirety; the long section Marx devoted to a phrase-by-phrase dissection of Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, in particular, has been almost completely ignored.2 Because Roy Pascal's translation of The German Ideology omitted Marx's attack on Stirner, even though this section (Sankt Max) comprises fully threequarters of the book Marx wrote, the erroneous belief seems to have grown up, even among Marxologists, that Sankt Max is irrelevant or unimportant. This belief is not supported by an examination of its text. Sankt Max is anything but peripheral to the argument of the rest of The German Ideology, a work whose most important themes are fully developed only in Sankt Max. Without an understanding of Stirner, the significance of The Gernan Ideology cannot be fully grasped. Most commentators, regarding Stirner as unworthy of attention, have failed to notice that the Left-Hegelians themselves had a far higher opinion of him.3 Marx, for his part, considered Stirner's book to be the consummation of Young-Hegelian thought, embodying and exemplifying its worst features to the point of caricature. It is surprising, therefore, that Sankt Max has been subjected to no critical analysis, when it is known to be the longest

Stirner, Nietzsche, and the Critique of Truth

Stirner, Nietzsche, and the Critique of Truth* JEFFREY BERGNER To GAIN FREEDOM FROM INTELLECTUAL RESTRAINT has long been a theme of German thought. In his essay "What is Enlightenment7" Immanuel Kant defines enlightenment as "man's release from his self-incurred tutelage.''x As he states later in the same essay, Kant was primarily concerned with self-incurred tutelage with respect to religious matters, as the arts and sciences seemed to him relatively more free.2 Yet less than fifteen years later the romantic movement, as exemplified particularly in the work of Friedrieh Schlegel, revolted against what was felt to be a limiting standard in the arts. Classical canons of objectivity were no longer thought able to subsume the wealth of human experience and creativity; a Kunst des Unendlichen was to replace a Kunst der Begrenzung. s Romantic thought sought generally to complement the passive or analytic conception of being with the free play of the imagination as a creative factor. The motif of overcoming intellectual restriction continued throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, manifesting itself in travels to broaden intellectual and artistic sensibilities, in frequent condemnation of narrow-minded and dogmatic German "philistinism," and perhaps most clearly in the apotheosis of Hegelian philosophy in Berlin. This paper takes up the theme with respect to a figure of the 1840's---the socalled philosopher of the ego, Max Stirner. Stirner, born in Bayreuth in 1806, was one of a group of "young Hegelians" known as "Die Freien" which frequented Hippel's restaurant in Berlin in the early 1840's. In this atmosphere germinated the ideas which formed the basis of his principal work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844). In Der Einzige Stirner offers a critique of intellectual confinement and fixity which reaches almost claustrophobic proportions. Stirner's critique is no doubt important in considering nihilism and some elements of existentialist thought, as R. W. K. Paterson has recently demonstrated;4 yet the importance of Der Einzige lies no less in the fact that it characterizes a major shift in the grounds of the consideration of intellectual confinement, a shift which later became fully * This paper is partially indebted to several suggestions of Walter Kaufmann. : Immanuel Kant, "What is EnlightenmentT" in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Lewis White Beck, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc, 1959), p. 85. Ibld., p. 91. s Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Schiller and the Genesis of German Romanticism" in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1948), calls this thesis the "generating and generic element in the Romantic doctrine" (p. 220). 4 R. W. K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (Oxford, 1971). [523] 524 H/STORY OF PHILOSOPHY apparent in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. For Stirner advances the idea that mind, endeavoring as it does to free itself from superstition, error, partiality, and limitation in Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Bauer, may by this very process be chaining the self in a complete and thorough manner. Freedom of the mind, in short, is not freedom of the self. Hence, Stirner develops the theme so important to Nietzsche: that thinking and the goal of thought--truth--are to be judged as an enterprise, are to be put in the service of life, as it were. This paper has three concerns, the first of which is to present the core of Stirner's work from which the critique of truth emerges-----~e role of "fixed ideas" in human affairs. Secondly, in light of the doctrine of "fixed ideas," it will be argued that Stirner's most thoroughgoing application of "fixed ideas"--the critique of truth has been obscured by Stirner's interpreters. Three somewhat diverse interpretations will be considered briefly in documenting this systematic misinterpretation . FinaUy, Stirner's views on truth will be considered in some detail, particularly in so far as they relate his work to Nietzsche's. It is with the parallels to Nietzsehe's critique of truth, especially as expressed in On the Genealogy of Morals (HI, #24), that the last section deals. II Der Einzige und sein Eigentum offers in a sense a macrointellectual history of the West. Stirner sets the German intellectual of...