The Universal Library of Appropriation In The Ego and Its Own, Michalis Pichler appropriates a philosophical text that is at once an outsider and part of the canon. Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1845) is “the anarchic product of an eccentric” and, at the same time, the “ultimate logical consequence of Hegel’s historical system,” as Karl Löwith puts it.[1] Pichler may have chosen to appropriate Stirner’s book because it is, above all else, a primer in appropriation. It offers lessons in how to make things, people, ideas, and even spirit and world history mine. For Stirner, this means using them up, incorporating them, all the while making sure they don’t get the upper hand. “If anything plants itself firmly in me and becomes indissoluble, I become its prisoner and servant, a possessed man,” Stirner warns.[2] In an essay from 1842, Stirner describes his desired form of appropriation as the development of “tact,” of “momentary knowledge that determines one’s action in the moment.” This “knowledge must become immaterial by sacrificing its mortal parts and becoming immortal, becoming will,” Stirner writes.[3] The Ego and Its Own is part of Stirner’s life project of dematerialization, another reason why Pichler, an avid appropriator of conceptual art, might have been drawn to the book. Pichler has followed Stirner’s advice to the letter: he makes The Ego and Its Own his, turning it into a work suspended between concrete poetry and conceptualism. By eliminating every word that is not a first person pronoun, Pichler reveals a galaxy of smaller texts within Stirner’s text, an immense collection of miniature syntactical, declensional dramas. Pichler’s book is best appreciated (that is: best appropriated) when read aloud. Its pages and spreads stage scenes in which I do something unnamed to me or for me, or in which something is done to me, in which reading slows down, speeds up, and stalls, and in which a clinamen always seems to interfere and add intrigue. There’s a “spook” that appears, and there are chapter titles like “Mein Verkehr” and “Mein Selbstgenuß,” “my intercourse” and “my self-pleasure.” This is not a book where nothing happens. In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books. - Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books” Pichler doesn’t just copy and alter The Ego and Its Own. He appropriates Stirner’s book in the edition published in 1968 by the Reclam publishing house in its Universal Library (Universal Bibliothek) series, which, if translated into Anglophone publishing terms, would be something like a combination of Penguin Classics, Dover Thrift Editions, and Signet Classics, packaged in a classic, uniform design. Many German readers first encounter Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and E.T.A. Hoffmann in the Universal Library’s compact, bright yellow format. And for many readers, the series’ anthologies of Expressionism, Zurich Dada, Berlin Dada, and concrete poetry offer the first encounter with the avant-garde. These associations create an affective, possessive, and maybe even nationalist relation to the Universal Library. For German readers, Pichler’s appropriation of the Universal Library is probably the most striking thing about this work. It is more interesting, funnier, and more transgressive than copying a nineteenth-century philosophical text. The Reclam publishing house was founded in 1828 in Leipzig, and the first volume in the Universal Library series appeared in 1867, which is when many German classics first entered the public domain. Reclam was already known for its inexpensive Shakespeare translations, and it soon became the dominant publisher of cheap editions of German classics. The yellow covers for texts in German, and the orange cover for bilingual versions of international classics, were first introduced in 1970. In his speech at the press’s centenary celebration, Thomas Mann makes some grand claims about the Universal Library’s influence on German culture: The Reclam library! It’s hard to imagine a German who hasn’t called on it for help, whose spiritual assets have no relation to its existence… One is very lucky to belong to a cultured, intelligent, civilized people that lives up to its destiny and masters it with a skillful hand. For a century now, the Reclam publishing house has played an honorable role in the education of our people, in raising its aptitude to the highest level.[4] In her 1942 book commemorating the 75th anniversary of the series, Annemarie Meiner echoes Mann: “The collection shows us what it means to serve the people and to be a part of the life of the people.” For Meiner, the Volk’s “spiritual force” was first awakened by Reclam and then flowed back into the series; “this is how the Universal Library fused with the German people.”[5] Meiner has to tread a fine line, heeding the Nazi imperative to praise creativity without devaluing Reclam’s expropriation of the classics. Since he came up with the idea of the Universal Library series, she compares Anton Philipp Reclam, the son of the press’s founder, to Gutenberg, but she also applauds the end of the copyright protection of German classics: “It’s hard to believe that it was just 75 years ago that those legal restrictions disappeared that separated our greatest German writers from their people.”[6] Although genius should be valued above all else, the access to literature shouldn’t be hampered by laws that protect writers’ intellectual property. But some copyright protections would be helpful, she says, when it’s a matter of shielding great geniuses from lesser beings’ parasitic copies. Meiner mentions the Japanese Iwanami-Bunko classics series, an imitation of the UB series that doesn’t seem to bother her very much. She does, however, seem disturbed by the existence of the Prague-based Jewish Universal Library, which published Jewish classics in German from 1895 to 1905: The pinnacle of unabashed imitation can be seen in the Jewish Universal Library. A cursory glance at one of its volumes would lead one to believe it to be a Reclam Universal Library book. It’s the same format, the same reddish cover, the same layout of the title. If there were such a thing as the legal protection of a book format, of a book’s design, then…the whole series would have to be called an act of downright theft (or plagiarism)… The existence of this series in German shows that the Jews, in a blatant act of fraud, tried to hijack the great attractive force of the Reclam series.[7] Meiner draws here on a long history of associating Jews and imitation, whose locus classicus might be Wagner’s “Jewishness in Music.” The Jewish version of the Universal Library seems particularly egregious to her because of Reclam’s fusion with the German people. The Jews appropriated something that is Germany’s “own,” something that belonged to Germans in an intimate way, and this seems even worse to Meiner than another kind of appropriation: the distribution of Allied anti-Nazi propaganda in false Reclam covers, which Meiner calls an “outrageous abuse of the trust that readers everywhere have in the Universal Library.”[8] The new art knows that books exist as objects in an exterior reality, subject to concrete conditions of perception, existence, exchange, consumption, use, etc. - Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books” Pichler’s book appropriates Reclam and its history, focusing on this format and series that might otherwise appear to be a neutral container for the presentation of texts. The book that Pichler appropriates has a history, which includes a particular relation to appropriation. It’s not as if Pichler appropriates an object that, in itself, is unsullied by copying, stealing, plagiarizing. Stirner’s book is about appropriation. Meiner’s history makes clear the importance of appropriation in Reclam’s history: the Universal Library owes its very existence to appropriation, and its founders and historians have been watchful, tallying up the good and bad appropriations of the national, racial institution that they guard. It seems urgent to Meiner to determine the place of appropriation in the political history of a series that has, according to her, formed the German people. “We cannot precisely say what is not appropriation,” Pichler writes. It is, he continues, “impossible to draw a categorical line. Appropriation is practiced everywhere and all the time, even by people who have never heard the word.”[9] In The Ego and Its Own, Pichler uses the Universal Library to show how universal appropriation is, and he does so by simply copying its existing format. After all, Pichler might say, there’s no need to pretend to create ex nihilo when the world is already full of books and book formats, more or less interesting, more or less laden with aesthetic and political potential, all of them waiting to be appropriated and to be made fruitful in new ways. [1] Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 103. [2] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, ed. David Leopold, trans. Steven Byington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 127. [3] Max Stirner, “Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung oder: Der Humanismus und Realismus,” in Hans G Helms, ed., Max Stirner: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum und andere Schriften (Munich: Hanser, 1968), 7-23, 20. [4] Thomas Mann, “Hundert Jahre Reclam: Festrede gehalten bei dem Festakt anlässlich der Hundert-Jahr-Feier des Verlages Philipp Reclam jun. am 1. Oktober 1928,” in Mann, Zwei Festreden (Leipzig: Reclam, 1957), 39-55, 52 and 55. [5] Annemarie Meiner, Reclam: Eine Geschichte der Universal-Bibliothek zu ihrem 75-jährigen Bestehen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1942), 4. [6] Ibid., 25, 6. [7] Ibid., 266. [8] Ibid., 253. Another account of these anti-Nazi Reclam appropriations can be found in Dietrich Bode, Reclam: Daten, Bilder und Dokumente zur Verlagsgeschichte, 1828-2003 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 111-112. [9] Michalis Pichler, “Appropriation,” curatorial statement on Printed Matter website, online at https://printedmatter.org/tables/130, accessed at March 15, 2015. Greaney, Patrick, "The Universal Library of Appropriation," in Michalis Pichler, The Ego and Its Own (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), backcover and inside slipcover.

Michalis Pichler’s The Ego and Its Own takes ownership of Max Stirner’s philosophical incantation of the same name originally published in 1844. Appearing four years before the Communist Manifesto, Stirner’s text aimed at “not an overthrow of an established order but . . . elevation above it” (Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907). Both books are split into two parts: part 1, entitled “Man,” considers the ways in which an individual defines her or his substance, be it citizenship (“Political Liberalism”), labor (“Social Liberalism”), or critical activity (“Humane Liberalism”); part 2, entitled “I,” is beholden to Stirner’s directions for self-mastery and the way that one might make “things, people, ideas, even spirit and world history mine” (Patrick Greaney, “The Universal Library of Appropriation”; slipcase essay from Pichler’s The Ego and Its Own; emphasis in original). At its core, Stirner’s manifesto revolves around appropriation (ibid.), which Pichler takes one step further by reducing Stirner’s 412-page volume to the German first-person pronouns only, including any punctuation that comes directly before or after them. Pichler revitalizes The Ego and Its Own by simplifying, sifting through Stirner’s original to consider the alteration of text over time and the momentary irrationality of language. The Ego and Its Own is accompanied by three contextual essays—Greaney’s “The Universal Library of Appropriation,” Annette Gilbert’s afterword and Craig Dworkin’s epilogue each provide insight into the several versions of appropriation that Stirner’s text has already undergone. The book was banned shortly after its publication in the mid-nineteenth century, fell into oblivion, was re-published between 1893 and 1922, then again in 1968. Despite revolutionary gusto in each respective era, the publishers were roused to share Stirner’s words more out of fear than sheer adoration. The version published in 1893 by Paul Lauterbach was censored and framed by a scathing preface, while Hans Helms’s 1968 version cut the text nearly in half. Helms even compared Stirner’s vision to Adolf Hitler’s in Mein Kampf, claiming Stirner’s words were a variation of “the same fascistic demons” (Gilbert, afterword, 444). Striving to make a classic out of controversy, in 1972, Reclam Publishing House released the original text in its entirety as part of their Universal Library series. According to Greaney, this series centered on reawakening obscure German writers, paying close attention to a “funnier, more transgressive” attitude and accessibility. Rather than physically distort Stirner’s text, the series strove to reframe the work as one that was educational and intellectual rather than instructional. Pichler adjusts Reclam’s wholesale version of the text, maintaining the typeface, jacket design, and spacing, and erasing (nearly) everything that does not fit his grammatical parameters. Pichler’s engagement is courageous in its attempt to reframe the text without emotionally censoring the intention of the text. The essence of Stirner’s theory is inviting: “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I own the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything” (quoted in Greaney, “The Universal Library of Appropriation”). Why, in fact, did The Ego and Its Own notoriously frighten Stirner’s peers and subsequent philosophers? What Pichler calls the “Bible of egoism” supports a life dictated by “momentary knowledge” rather than attachment of any kind: “Good Cause . . . God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice . . . the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland . . . even the cause of mind, and a thousand other causes” (Gilbert, afterword, 442). Lifting these shackles has an obvious link to anarchy, which may be what his editors were so fearful of in the subsequent generations in which his text reemerged. Pickler’s text renders this selfish nebula of existence with clarity. Stirner’s critics have historically had to alter his text in order to poke holes in the force field he weaves with “simple tautology” (ibid.) around his radical theory—Pichler dissolves it with tact. Pichler’s mechanical disrobing of Stirner’s text captures the absurdity of his proclamations without tempering the text. Although his musing is not preserved with a majority of the text missing, Pichler exacerbates Stirner’s egoism. Stirner is transformed into a toddler recounting a fairy tale: he hits the landmarks of the narrative and illuminates the fruitless obsession with self-fulfillment. The ebb and flow of pronouns fabricates the cadence of Stirner’s theory, as his interludes, his comparisons, and his demands are slyly established. Dense areas of pronouns render an imagined climax of an argument. Like external noises that penetrate sleep and manifest in dreams, the tone of Stirner’s vision emerges without the link to reality. Ich mich (I myself) appears often as a compound, leaving the reader to speculate whether it is declarative, defensive, or a determination of responsibility. Stirner demands his disciples offer more of themselves (meiner) yet specifies actions for “my sake” (Meinetwillen) and “on my account” (Meinetwegen) rarely, often in italics or flanked by an unwieldy quotation that counterfeits the sentiment. Pichler’s use of punctuation parallels Stirner’s support of a life devoid of the structures that traditionally sculpt one’s concept of self. As the punctuation is stripped of its function, the fact that the reader is missing something that renders conclusions incomplete and impossible is accentuated. There are twenty-one completely blank pages where the ego sinks into oblivion. This absence of narrative and interference with Stirner’s text crafts a score of words and sounds that resembles concrete poetry. Pupils widen as Ich (I) jumps off the page like popping corn. Mir (me, to me, myself), Mich (me, myself), and Mein/e/n/m (my) jumble into the percussion of a human beatbox or middle-school tongue twister. Reading begins to take unnatural forms—a sparse page forms a diagonal path, and denser pages cause the reader to cherry-pick italics or odd punctuation. This intuitive reading pairs well with the irrationality of a text grounded only in its reference to the self. Pichler must have chuckled when three Mir outlined an isosceles triangle pointing toward the reader with a blank opposing page (51), or when a quotation beginning and ending with Ich similarly generated a triangle pointing skyward or forward depending on one’s point of view (91). Despite these poetic and even magical compositions, Pichler’s arrangements emerge from the kind of robotic manipulation that Stirner himself would have demanded of his disciples. Stirner’s desire to dissolve all attachments was intended to endow his followers with personal ownership: the purging of values and morals, of history and preference, would substantiate conceptual and physical property. These individuals supported nothing but expected everything. Like the text, they exist solely in conversation with themselves in a vacuum of Stirner’s construction. In Stirner’s time, just prior to the March Revolution of 1848, there was a demand for human rights in the wake of feudal traditions and corrupt government in the Germanic states. Stirner’s battle cry was confrontation fueled by zombies—people who had nothing to live for yet sought the booty of battle. Stirner wants his disciples to deny history and live as detached entities while taking over the world. Emphasizing apathy and isolation, Pichler’s self-obsessed text reveals the ways in which Stirner’s principles deconstruct and restrict communication. In doing so, Pichler reminds the reader of the speed with which doctrine transforms into drivel, and how a snowballing sermon can be devoid of all relevance when it confronts reality. Lynn Maliszewski, independent scholar for CAA reviews CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2015.145 Please send comments about this review to editor.caareviews@collegeart.org.

All Things Are Nothing To Me . . . . . . . 3 Contents First Part: Man I. A Human Life . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 II. Men of the Old Time and the New . . . 15 1. The Ancients . . . . . . . . . . . 16 2. The Moderns . . . . . . . . . . . 26 §1. The Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . 29 §2. The Possessed . . . . . . . . . 36 §3. The Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . 71 3. The Free . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 §1. Political Liberalism . . . . . . . . 107 §2. Social Liberalism . . . . . . . . . 127 §3. Humane Liberalism. . . . . . . . 136 Second Part: I I. Ownness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 II. The Owner . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 1. My Power . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 2. My Intercourse . . . . . . . . . . . 231 3. My Self-Enjoyment . . . . . . . . . 358 III. The Unique One . . . . . . . . . . 407 Appendix Ich hab’ Mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt . . . 415 All Things Are Nothing To Me . . . . . . 419 Nachwort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 Wie so bettelhaft wenig ist Uns verblieben . 457 How beggarly little is left us . . . . . . . 459 Inhalt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461