Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

Available from Underworld Amusements , and Nine-Banded Books.

Stand Alone is a mixed medium and format journal produced at irregular intervals. The focus is Egoism and the individuals associated with it. Produced by the Union Of Egoists with individual issues published by different sources.

Parents: What Are They Good For?

We are in the midst of a revolution of women. It is almost an accomplished fact. But in the great movements, economic and sexual, which are going on all over the world, there is one more revolution to be accomplished.

It is the revolt of the children against their parents. And that will be the most tremendous, the sublimest revolution of all.

It is time the truth was uttered about parents and their attitude toward those they bring into the world by an act of passion. It is time the mask of sentimental lies surrounding the sacredness of parents was slit into a thousand pieces and tossed back into the wardrobe-room of race-fakes.

Parents: What are they good for?

Let every man and woman look into the last recesses of his heart and answer that question fully.

Parents: What are they good for?

Let the squeezed, mutilated, shabby, humdrum, aching days of millions of youths and girls stand up and answer unashamedly.

Parents: What are they good for?

And billions of strangled, mutilated Minds and Passions and millions of shabby Days rise out of their tombs and answer: They should have been hanged before we grew into our sixth year.

Parents: Or the Mania for Mutilation. Millions of human beings might write a thesis with that for a title— a thesis that would make the horrors of a Dostoievsky seem merely a charivari.

Veiled beneath that vaunted sacred love of father and mother there lies a mania for mutilation which for pure diabolism is nowhere matched in nature.

Under the guise of a perpetual act of self-sacrifice the mother becomes the most incurable selfish being that nature has yet created. Motherhood is nature’s supreme diabolistic paradox.

It is always herself she fights for, and never for that child. It is always herself she dies for, and never for the sake of the child. Her love is the very frenzy and insanity of possession.

The father is greater than the mother, because his love-greed in regard to the offspring is not so cruel. Some father will even concede the right of a child to have opinions, ideas and sensations of its own. Motherhood can never ascend to that. It remains forever in the sties of self-worship.

Most children are born into a home. And by home I mean a death-cell. At the moment of birth the murderous machinations of the parents begin. Variation from the parent-type is the one thing to be [feared]. Hence the home. Hence the squirt-guns of [predictability], feigned godliness and prudery which begin their work on the sense and brain of the child just born. And when he first begins to smell it is the rotten stench of sanctity that greets his nostrils.

I accuse all parents of being liars every second in every hour in every day of their lives in the presence of their children.

I accuse every parent of a pantomime of hypocritical mummery from the day a child is born unto them.

I accuse every parent of conspiring against the unique vision and temperament that is born unto them.

I accuse every parent of spiritual, mental, physical murder in seeking to gag the soul of the new-born and to mould it in the image of one or both of them.

I accuse every parent of cowardice before the wide-open look of the child. They fake their personality from the very moment the child looks at them.

(No child ever knew its parents. No parent ever knew his or her child.)

I accuse parents of every physical and mental anguish that boys and girls suffer between the ages of thirteen and twenty.

(If parents only knew of the hate that enforced virgins feel for their parents, whose licentious and unrestrained practices in the marriage bond have obliterated their own early hatreds for their own parents.)

The home, the parent, must be protected at all costs!

Does a girl “go wrong” (that is, does she dare assert the rights of her womanhood and seek sanity away from the insane asylum for perverts called the respectable home?) The first thought in the minds of father and mother is the disgrace that will fall on THEM. A girl— a thing of flesh and blood— is being sacrificed to the Moloch of Respectability for the sake of the parents, those unrestrained and licentious parents, safe in the bosom of the marriage license!

The girl “went wrong”? No. The girl went right. Better one year of full surrender to love and passion and then death in the river than a life of respectable virginity and its inferno of agonies.

Does a boy “go wrong”? He gambles, he drinks, he seduces, he steals. Again the shriek through the cracking walls and falling roof of the House of Lies. “Our reputation! Our reputation! My God! Our reputation!”—that is the cry that mounts to the ironic tomcat squat on the tottering chimney.

No parent ever showed sufficient respect for the child. Love—yes. Respect—never. That is because the love of the parent is the veil of selfishness and egotism, and respect involves self-sacrifice, an abasement in their own eyes of their supreme importance, a division of power.

Love is easier than respect and reaps a richer harvest of lies. To love a child involves no effort. To respect a child one must have ascended high in the scale of emotional and intellectual development.

The parent has no rights which the child is bound to respect. It is in the world without its own consent, bringing with it all the ills that flesh and mind are heir to.

Ancestors, environment, parents stand at the cradle like a menace of death. The social and economic systems under which a child is born have no rights which the child is bound to respect.

A mere flesh and blood asset of the parent and the blood sucking social and religious [society] which the child is shot— what should the [child re]spect? 

ITS OWN SOUL ONLY!

The revolution of the child! The new Children’s Crusade! This time they will march to rescue their own souls from the Unholy Sepulchre of their infidel parents.

Youths and maidens and children, you must soon write your Marseillaise, Stifled ones, strangled ones, mutilated ones, dutiful ones, suckled in the House of Fear and raised in the House of Craven Respectability or Leprous Poverty, the time approaches when each and every one must ask the heart:

My parents: What are they good for?

And your hearts will answer: Good for nothing until they are taught to respect, honor and obey us!

The following firecracker of a sketch was published in The Fra, Vol. 2 No. 6, (March 1914) on pages 182-183. The Fra: A Journal of Affirmation was published by Elbert Hubbard.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Available from: Underworld Amusements

Volume One
1. Exhibitionism: A New Theory of Evolution (1936)
2. The Individual Against Moloch (1936)
3. Black Suns (1936)
4. The Eternal Return (1936)
5. The Eighth Heaven (1936)
6. Jules DeGaultier & LaRochefoucauld (1936)
7. The Elect and the Damned (1936)
8. Saint Tantalus (1936)

Volume Two
9. The Adventures of an Exile (1936)
10. I Dance With Nietzsche (1936)
11. Broken Images (1936)
12. Raiders of the Absolute (1937)
13. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 1) (1937)
14. Spinoza Against the Rabbis (1937)
15. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 2) (1937)
16. Chiron the Centaur (1937)

Volume Three
17. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 3) (1937)
18. The Last Supper (1937)
19. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 4) (1937)
20. Sir Galahad: Knight of the Lidless Eye (1938)
21. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 5) (1938)
22. Saint Tantalus (Part 2) ([1938])
23. Fantasia Impromptu (Part 6) (1938)

BALZAC

By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES¹⁾This wonderful appreciation of Balzac originally appeared as a communication to the New York Sun, in which had been raging a literary battle as to the respective merits of Anthony Trollope and the master Frenchman. It is reprinted here because of its inspirational tone–its strength–its power of constructive analysis.–Editor

TO compare Trollope to Balzac is to compare the well-bred scenery of Prospect Park to the wild, almost blasphemous beauty of Yellowstone Park. Trollope is Philadelphia, Balzac is Paris. Trollope is a museum, Balzac is a Sphinx. Trollope is the Eden Musée, Balzac is Olympus. Trollope is an imaginative Pepys, Balzac is the Dante of intellect.

Like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Kant, Goethe, he was clumsy. He was too great for his medium of expression. He was a Titan piping on a reed. His mind apprehended the All in a glance, and he could only stammer when he would have fulminated. His brain was blockaded with ideas. A whirlwind of visions, emotions and prophetic dreams blew through his mind–and wrecked it. When he conceived a book he felt that a universe was bulging for birth in him. He was impatient. He could not, like De Maupassant and Flaubert, spend years building a bed for the perfect accouchement. He pitched his stuff out savagely, obliquely, helter skelter, for Debt and Death were at his heels. And that is what we call his “obscure style.”

Minds of the first order never seek for style. They are so overwhelmed by the vigor and vanity of their own natures and visions, are so completely mastered by their ideas that they smash all rules. In this class are the authors of the sacred books of the East, the Book of Job and “Don Quixote.” Rabelais, Shakespeare, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, Rodin, Walt Whitman, Blake, Gorky and Balzac–were they “stylists”? Who cares?

Balzac was a seer. His eye pierced ail the veils of matter. He was the biographer of the human soul; he tops Shakespeare and Molière. He wrote the history of the Second Empire, but it might have been the chronicle of any other period in the world’s history. Under the tatters of Time he saw the eternal Man; he ripped from out its network of circumstance and convention the quivering race instincts and held them naked and bloody above his head. He plunged his finger through the tissues of flesh and muscle, through the thin mask that civilized man wears, and touched firmly the impelling secret motive. Holding his finger firmly on the secret spot while his subject screamed in shame and humiliation, Balzac turned an ironic and triumphant grin on the spectators.

The “Comédie Humaine” is Balzac’s answer to the Sphinx’s question, “Unriddle me existence.” And his answer was another riddle. At bottom Balzac was a Hindu of the eider age. The great sin of man is Ego, the self, the individualized, differentiated I. The soul of man, to Balzac, was an inferno of lusts, a city of sadic visions. Man is an inutile appanage of an aimless, protean Force. And man only rises to greatness when he looks at us through the mask of a Vautrin. For in this world, according to Balzac, the Will to grandeur and the Will to goodness are at everlasting war.

To Balzac the world had been invented so that he could analyze it; good and evil were only points of orientation, alternate coigns of vantage from which he, reporter for the gods, could watch the fray. Vautrin is Balzac, from one point of view. Good and evil existed because the gods needed sport. Or, as Heine said, because the Aristophanes of the heavens was in need of mirth.

Balzac’s mind was a huge piece of the universal Mind, in which we exist merely as infusoria. His brain was not a mind, it was a breeding place. He accouched his characters, whereas Trollope only created his. The germ of every variety of human being existed in the mind of Balzac. Like Goethe and Shakespeare, he was an encloser of all species, ideas and methods. He gave birth to such vital beings because he was giving birth to particles of himself. That is the supreme mystery of genius.
Balzac’s imagination was eucharistic. He lived the life of the race vicariously. A vision as profound as Sophocles, the godlike apprehension of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, a power of co-ordination as great as Beethoven and Herbert Spencer, the titanic vigor of a Goethe and a Walt Whitman, and the superb unarithmetical mockery of an Aristophanes and an Ibsen–he, too, was a Cosmos.

Available from: Underworld Amusements

This booklet serves as a polemic for individualism by way of introduction to Georges Palante. Through a series of quotations and from the Frenchman, followed by his own explication, DeCasseres expounds on his own ideas.

This essay is the first featured in The Individual Against Moloch (1936), the second installment of “The DeCasseres Books.” In 1936 Benjamin DeCasseres took it upon himself to try to publish as much of his own work as he could, printing through “Blackstone Publishers.” In the following three years he published 23 booklets.

“Individualism is not an object of proselytism. It has value in its own eyes only as a personal sensation of life.”
The real Individualist is thus an Epicurean. He lives for experiences. He reacts to each experience differently. No Individualist seeks to make any one else an Individualist. He aims at the unique. He loves the unique in others. “He who calls himself a Whitmanite has not understood me,” said Walt Whitman.
The Individualist is a disciple of his own moods, his own sensations, his own emotions and instincts. His life is an adventure in psychological vistas, in comic and dramatic situations of which he himself is always the hero.
To the Individualist life is a series of experiences, not a programme. The only discipline that he willingly assents to is self-imposed. He absorbs whatever he needs, and always stands at a distance from his environment and “the times.”

The newest issue of Der Geist, the journal of historical Egoism, is here. Rare and unpublished works from the first century of egoism-the philosophy of Max Stirner.

from: Underworld Amusements or from Amazon.com: US | MX | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT

This issue of Der Geist includes rare reprints of egoist history. These include blow-by-blow accounts of Dora Marsden in her street-fighting phase, lost transcriptions of J. William Lloyd saved from the darkness by individualist feminist Wendy McElroy, the philosophical and physical wanderings of the laughing philosopher Malfew Seklew, and more. This issue of Der Geist also includes original inquiries into egoist history. These include a history of the Radical Book Shop of Chicago, and the heretofore undocumented bands of iron that link the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblys”) and Ragnar Redbeard’s book Might is Right.

Sections:

1. Dora Marsden
2. J. William Lloyd
3. Malfew Seklew
4. Laurance Labadie
5. Max Stirner
6. Free Spirits
7. Ragnar Redbeard