The Infinitesimal Gesture: Concerning the Semiotic Ontology in Max Stirner’s Der Einzige
In the murky waters of 19th-century radical philosophy, figures such as Hegel and Feuerbach towered with their grand systems and theological critiques. But on a contorted and relatively neglected tributary of this intellectual river, Max Stirner—pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt—constructed something far more elusive: an anarchic ontology founded not upon universals, but upon nothingness, figuration, and a kind of linguistic nihilism. In Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), commonly rendered in English as The Ego and Its Own, Stirner attempts to obliterate all ideal structures—State, Morality, Humanity, even God—as “spooks” (Spuk), creations of language and collective illusion. While much ink has justly been spilled on his concept of the ‘Egoist’ and his demolition of sacred abstractions, I wish here to explore a subtle but crucial detail: the ontological significance of the semiotic gesture in Stirner’s conception of ‘Eigenheit’—translated variously as ‘ownness’ or ‘property.’
This notion of Eigenheit is neither the Lockean possession of labor nor the Marxian complaint of alienation—it is, rather, a kind of phenomenological possession of self, stripped of all symbolic and legal weight. What renders it truly problematic, and thus philosophically fertile, is that it can only be expressed through language, which Stirner himself holds to be part of the ideological machinery he resists. This results in a deep paradox: Stirner’s conception of Eigenheit is ontologically prior to language, yet can only be invoked through signs already colonized by ideology. Thus, in his discourse, Eigenheit becomes a semiotic gesture—neither fully embedded in symbolic order, nor utterly beyond it. It is this liminal status that we shall investigate.
Let us begin with the example where Stirner contrasts the ‘unique one’ (der Einzige) with the Christian conception of the soul. “I am not Nothing in the sense of emptiness,” he writes, “but the creative Nothing, the Nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”¹ This nothingness is productive, not passive—an affirmation of its own singularity in perpetual negation. In a word, Stirner posits subjectivity as a kind of voided center that only exists by virtue of disassociating from all social signification. But this act of de-signification, of stripping bare the self from all predicates, unintentionally invokes a gesture: the movement whereby the subject signifies its own negativity as freedom. Here, we glimpse an unconscious gesture in Stirner’s thought—a kind of deconstructive loop in which negation becomes an act, and this act becomes the sole ground for subjectivity.
Jean-Luc Nancy, though unaware of Stirner for the most part, points in The Inoperative Community to a similar phenomenon: that community cannot ground itself in essences but only in the sharing of finitude, in gestures of partial presence.² Stirner’s Eigenheit similarly does not bloom from any ontic soil; it is constituted in the very act of destroying such groundings. It is, as it were, not a possession but a moment of expropriation—a seizure made possible only through the performative denial of all fixed categories.
A key passage illustrates the paradox further: “Truths are material, like this breastpin, this hair ribbon. They are wares, like tobacco or coffee, and their value depends on demand.”³ Here Stirner collapses epistemology into commodification and commodification into semiotics. Truths, which would seemingly belong to the realm of abstraction and disinterested rationality, are equated with objects, but not as ontological entities—instead, they function as signs in a shared conventional system of exchange. This indicates that Eigenheit must withstand not only concepts, but the very machinery of signification that sells these concepts as wares. Thus, for Stirner, to reclaim the self is to refuse one’s insertion into language’s economy.
But what then is the status of a word like “Eigenheit”? How can Stirner speak it at all? He does so only via continual qualification, metaphor, and practical contradiction. Eigenheit, like the unique one, resists predication. We never get a concrete definition; instead, we are offered images, movements, even grammatical refusals—linguistic acts that perform the very unsaying they gesture toward. Thus, Eigenheit becomes not a noun but a verb in disguise: to Eigen, to own in a non-proprietary fashion, to claim without inscription in law or concept.
This recalls the peculiar grammar of Heidegger’s later philosophy, which turns nouns into verbs—“the clearing clears,” “language speaks”—and it is no accident. Both Heidegger and Stirner intuit the failure of metaphysical language to capture the openness of being, though their orientations diverge widely. Still, Stirner’s innovation is the more radical in linguistic terms: for he seeks not merely to allow being to reveal itself, but to manifest the void that makes revelation in language possible—a kind of linguistic abyss or anti-logos preceding propositional order. Hence, the semiotic gesture: the expressive act that marks the absence of the signifier within signification.
Therein lies the latent terror in Stirner’s philosophy. If our most intimate possession, our ‘ownness’, precludes the very language we use to affirm it, we are stranded in a gesture that both affirms and evaporates. Language itself becomes a hauntological field—populated by specters that Stirner proclaims must be exorcised, yet required for any proclamation. Thus, the unique one is a rhetorical event, not a metaphysical object. The self, as Stirner understands it, is always at risk of becoming a ‘spook’ the moment it is uttered.
One might object that this makes Stirner’s position incoherent—a self-enclosing contradiction. But to read him this way is to apply the logic of system to one who proudly rejects all systems. Rather, the contradiction is his method: a negative dialectic of sorts, preceding Adorno, in which destabilization is not a failure but emancipation. Stirner refuses to give us a model of the egoist; instead, by making such modeling impossible, he forces us to inhabit the gesture of Eigenheit as a ceaseless negation of the collectively signified.
An intriguing comparison could be drawn with Zen kōans, where linguistic absurdity flattens the symbolic mind and opens space for insight. Stirner, unwittingly perhaps, performs a similar linguistic sabotage. Eigenheit, in being stated, is emptied; but in that emptying, the performative act of self-claiming occurs. Thus, the subject’s ontology is not founded on being, but on becoming-through-negation—a muted metaphysical scream against the grammar of the sacred.
It is only through attention to this subtle yet seismic detail—the semiotic gesture embedded deep in the articulation of Eigenheit—that Stirner’s philosophy reveals its strange proximity to both poststructuralist and mystical currents, against the grain of its 19th-century context. He is often dismissed as a hyper-individualistic eccentric or a pre-Nietzschean curiosity, but such reduction misses the radicality of his linguistic maneuver. In naming nothingness his own, Stirner simultaneously performs the fiction of ownership and deconstructs it—leaving us with neither concept nor thing, but the gesturing act of thought itself, flickering in the abyss of names.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, semiotics, ontology, Stirner, radical individualism, performativity, hauntology
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¹ Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1844), 7.
² Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25.
³ Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 179.