Today, there are those who put the "rights of the individual" in the service of the market to justify exploitation once again. What these employees of opposed rackets didn't and don't want to see is that the authentic places in which to look for the expression of Stirnerian thought are the barricades of the revolutionary festival, or the walls of whichever May; in short, there where the ethic and practice of sacrifice have ended along with all rights over individuals; there where the conditions are created for the most radical manifestation of egoism: "the sweet forgetfulness of oneself", in other words, the overabundance of life that wants a world to which to give the gift of one's excesses.
We truly hold to ourselves when we refuse any external and imposed cause and when we stop calculating ourselves: is there any more subversive discourse in a world dominated by authority and the market? Today, the "individual" is a lump produced by the disciplinary–political, economic and psychological–practices of society, a subject of the state and capital. Defending this "individual" means defending this world.
Not so for the unique one of whom Stirner speaks. Uniqueness can only be affirmed on the ruins of the state and of every society that subordinates singular individuals to the extorted and overturned product of their relationships. What are money, merchandise and hierarchy if not sacred powers that continue to be revered because they prevent us from seeing who created them? Economy is a vast liturgy that puts faithful carriers of merchandise, not unique individuals, in relationship. In this sense, today Stirner's critique would not go unnoticed, but would rather be clarified (with regard to money and value, and with regard to the social foundations of individual autonomy). All that is not our property is our enemy–so Stirner said. All that we don't live directly–thoughts, actions and relationships–gets transformed into ideology, sacrifice, exploitation. The authenticity of life is revolt, insurrection, a ceaseless rising up of singular individuals against the heaven of their creations that have become autonomous and hostile. If revolt gives us ownership of ourselves, we are self-owners above all when we can appropriate others as unique ones, not as objects. But in this society, where individuals are held together in their isolation, all that is left to us is to "do wrong or to suffer it", to exploit or be exploited. So mutuality, which tolerates neither privileges nor rights, presupposes "a vast operation of urgent demolition" (Georges Darien). And still.
