On Desire and Consciousness: FRR Books Podcast the Stirner Series Episode IX

the i quit smoking blues

Listen Here: http://freeradicalradio.net/on-desire-and-consciousness-frr-books-podcas...

Listen Here: https://archive.org/details/FRRBStirner9

Here we are again, back on the boat discussing Stirner’s ideas. On my best days I view this project as an attempt to break from the ideological & eschatological thinking that hangs like a pall over anarchists and humans alike. It is difficult to discuss Stirner because most people haven’t read him and also because many believe that they know what is contained in this book from whatever they have read or heard other people say. We are not attempting to do the work for you, but rather to provide a companion with which to interact while reading Wolfi’s rewriting of Stirner’s book. As someone who reads all the time, it is frustrating to have few people to discuss the books with. It is frustrating because I believe reading to both an anti-social(while doing it) and social(it changes me and then I interact differently when socializing) activity. When I read a book that makes me question myself, my idea, my ideals, and what I hold closest, I am compelled to share this new version of my self with friends, fuck it, with strangers too. So here sits our version of sharing, our hope that in talking with each other we can better understand ours elves and how to relate to each other and further complicate our selves and relations to revel in pretending we can see and understand the chaos for just a little bit.

We Discuss:

- rydra introduces the episode incorrectly…sorry not sorry
- Keehar has a fucked taste palette caz England
- Suicide: can we dot it? Is it freedom knowing we can or is that just a cliche?
- Determinism, what is it good for? Absolutely something?
- Roland Barthes is a douchebag, but we discuss him anyways in terms of language
- Graham Harman and the Third Table are discussed, damn we are cutting deep, about thinkability
- Rydra takes Stirner to task for critiquing imagination, who the fuck did he think he was?! Everyone else disagrees
- We disagree on if the thinkable is a spook, this is why you came here right?
- Agency in dreaming, do we have any?
- criticism of criticism, this is what we do
- Nev gets fucking fired up!
- Angela Carter is always relevant and so is negating without affirming!
- Is it FRR if rydra doesn’t bring up Kundera? If Kundera falls in a forest, does anyone care besides rydra?

Sound and Audio Production by The Big Cat

Writing and Internet Slavery by rydra wrong

voiced by John, Nev, Keehar, Big Cat, rydra, and a friend

Music:

wipers- this time
napalm death- you suffer

There are 19 Comments

"reactionary" is a REACTIONARY word that anarchists apply to things that they don't like. No, you don't have to be an fascist in order to be an egoist, despite all the possible connections between egoism and capitalism. The whole point of stirner's writings is to show that you are already a half-egoist.

Of course I'm once again responding to a troll.

yes. but you responded to a different troll, than the one that made the comment you're referring to.

lmfao, now my post is just completely without conext. I still haven't figured out the spacially-oriented comment structure of this site completely

Comment structure here is sooooo non-intuitive, it requires an instruction diagram in the navigation column as an example.

Reactionary describes a right-wing socio-political orientation that fears change. Anarchists use it in a REACTIVE manner often, but it doesn't mean that one is themselves therefore an ideological reactionary.

And no, egoism and fascism are not the same thing, but it is worrisome that ideological reactionaries can hide behind egoist rhetoric and remain relatively secure.

if anyone hides behind a representation, then they are hiding in plain sight. what appears most visible is what is presented by the spectacle. worry not about the mask that the actors on the stage are wearing, nor about who's behind that mask, nor about what's your role in that play. worry instead about being at an appropriate distance from the theater while it's being imploded.

the troll issue is just inherent to the internet, i've done real life "trolling" a bunch of times and mostly didn't feel so great about it afterwards. Jordan Peterson can sit behind his wads of cash but i don't envy him. People who actually have studied stirner know that being a megalomaniac carries certain problems and burdens.

i was not alluding to that. i will explain everything to you in due time. at that moment, you better pay attention. the words will only resemble my intended message the first time around. with each repetition by its recuperators, in the stage of many screens, it will loose its meaning.

*lose*

nooOOOoooo i am the ghoOOooost of DebooOOord's paaAsssts, my woooOOooords are loooOOooosing meaAaaniiiIIiiiing

*Whispers* Mommy dearest, can I have some of your opioid suppositries, there is a spook sharing this bed with us.

Stirner really is made more for unelective anarchy without the ist/ism. He mentions anarchy along with selfhood and lawlessness which is preferable terrain for the egoist as opposed to the law order and limited freedom of liberalism.

Again the term anarch is the better term an extended Stirnerian theoretical language. Anarchism was made by political economic ideologues. The Stirnerian can still have a relationship with anarchism but a substructural one that is compatible but parallel to it. The fact that the crapformist crapflame type anarchism is so prevalent shows that there is something in the structure of anarchism that brings that out to the point that a post-left break off from elective anarchism is needed. Anarch after anarchist anarchy after anarchism.

and I'm still not really sure of what the writer's motivations are. I'm pretty sure the writer of this critique is a rascist because they wrote this:

"He believes it is both true that caucasians are superior to other races and is rightly so. "

So the person who wrote the critique that stirner's beliefs are rascist, and that he's right in believing this? This would make the writer of this a rascist. I think this critique was written more out of resentment than a curiosity about max stirner or an honest refutation of what he claimed. I'm sure that a lot of anarchists during this time period were also rascist, and I don't care because I don't look at dead people who wrote books as having some sacred knowledge that needs to be transmitted to me. I also know that modern anarchists have a lot of short-sighted prejudice towards things that they don't fully understand. One time i was talking to an anarchist about stirner, then she said "i don't care about what dead white men had to say"...before invoking kropotkin in our conversation...

"In fact he’s just talking about Africa because and how Hegel did."

That's a lot of the point in stirner's writing, is that he's trying to debunk his long time philosophical teacher Hegel. He is using a Hegelian dialectical style, this is no secret. This is also an illuminating point when understanding stirner's "rascist prose". Having read the entire book it was mostly not about mongoloids and negroids etc.

I'm not sure as to why some anarchists get hung up in the idea that people have praised stirner's work overall, and harbor a resentment towards his body of ideas. Maybe because it's a refutation of righteous causes? When I read i generally do a combination of looking for gems for my own enjoyment or use, or I don't read it. I don't really care about how "right" an author is in what they say. I didn't agree with every single thing that stirner said in "the unique and its property". I didn't look at his writing about the different "races" as being divorced from whatever discussion they were having at the time.

One thing that I will say is that I don't completely agree with wolfi's analysis that stirner was not a philosopher. The text was written in a philosophical manner, and it came through stirner's philosophizing, so i consider him just as much of a philosopher as he was an anti-philosopher.

yeah, and the last chapter starts on page 88, that's just bad taste

is the first couple of paragraphs are not at all at odds with what stirner was saying:

"One important starting point is that we cannot be more free by having fewer connections or fewer responsibilities."

striner actually wrote in the writings of "stirner's critics" that getting outside of yourself to free yourself would also be in the benefit of egoism...however, the author of this booklet is saying something much more absolutist above. In reality, it all depends on the context and the situation. Sometimes severing connections is very liberating, for example, a dickhead boss, shitty and demanding families, etc. Sometimes it's best not to burn bridges as well and try to improve the shitty connections you already have in a selfless way.

According to the writer of the anti-stirner text, severing connections CANNOT liberate us! Looks like the oppressed need to ad to their shitty repertoire of servitude and altruism rather than grow an increased trust of one's own desires and egoism...another critique of the last chapter is vague spewing of the concepts of "interdepence", "freedom", "domination" without explaining what they mean. TLDR all of it.

This is just more in the line of that whole Spinoza "entanglement" hogwash, commune-ist backlash against egoist resurgence. Their camp is not nearly as good at hit-pieces tho.

Good point about Stirner and philosophy. I to disagree with Landstreicher and McQuinn on that issue. He’s not a formal philosopher but certainly not anti. I actually think philosophy for all its problems is a vastly preferable orientation to politics.

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