File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0406, message 34


From: swilbur-AT-wcnet.org
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] egoism / individualist -AT- thoughts and critique ?
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:35:47 US/Eastern


> Hi I am interested in resources on stirnerite egoism or 
> neitchian ( sorry spelling ) individualist anarchism / 
> or should i say critiques of it, in regard to compassion,
> friendship, responsibility and ideas of freedom. any
> links, would be appreciated, or if people want to discuss it, 
> then i'll try and keep up .

For original sources on egoism, there's a good deal of 
material at the Egoist Archive:

http://www.nonserviam.com/egoistarchive/

Badcock's "Slaves to Duty" and John Beverly Robinson's
"Egoism" are there, complete, plus lots of magazine
articles and debates. "Non Serviam" magazine is a good
source for more contemporary egoist material. 

It strikes me that there is nothing about egoism that
necessarily puts it at odds with compassion, friendship
or responsibility. Badcock first opposes love or desire 
to the "duty to obey," then goes on to show how various
other potentially positive feelings and expressions are
captured and neutralized by the sense of "duty." 

How egoism is manifested is going to depend a great deal
on how one understands the "ego." Those of us influenced
by poststructuralism are likely to reject the classical
formulations on the basic of more complex understandings
of how the "I" is constituted. With the distinctions
inside/outside, self/other, subject/object rather shaken,
the starker sorts of egoism seem hard to maintain. 

However, it *might* be the case that our awareness of the
"I" as precisely a *problem* makes something like egoism
interesting to us again. I have, for some time, been
reading Badcock, who i think is a very thorough egoist,
through the filters of derridean "responsibility." It 
would probably make at least as much sense to pursue a
transformation of egoism through the realm of Blanchot's
"neuter" or Nancy's conjoined "singular plural." 

I should be clear: my sense is that the emphasis on the
ego in late-19th century individualist circles was very
unfortunate, for a variety of reasons, not the least of 
which was the increased conflicts with collectivist 
anarchists and further splintering of the movement. The
tendency to treat the mutualists and individualists who
preceded Tucker as "heralds of philosophical egoism,"
as the recently-deceased James Martin did in his (very
thorough and interesting) "Men Against the State," seems
to me to cover over all sorts of very interesting questions
and problems raised along the way. It seems, at the very
least to go against the emphasis on the "individual" in
Warren and the "unique" in Stirner. 

-shawn

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