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

Max Stirner wrote in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845):

Wie bei den Griechen möchte man den Menschen jetzt zu einem zoon politikon machen, einem Staatsbürger oder politischen Menschen. So galt er lange Zeit als »Himmelsbürger«. Der Grieche wurde aber mit seinem Staate-zugleich entwürdigt, der Himmelsbürger wird es mit dem Himmel; Wir hingegen wollen nicht mit dem Volke, der Nation und Nationalität zugleich untergehen, wollen nicht bloss politische Menschen oder Politiker sein. »Volksbeglückung« strebt man seit der Revolution an, und indem man das Volk glücklich, gross u. dergl. macht, macht man Uns unglücklich: Volksglück ist — mein Unglück.

Steven T. Byington translated and interpreted this passage in The Ego and His Own (1907):

As with the Greeks, there is now a wish to make man a zoon politicon, a citizen of the State or political man. So he ranked for a long time as a “citizen of heaven.” But the Greek fell into ignominy along with his State, the citizen of heaven likewise falls with heaven; we, on the other hand, are not willing to go down along with the people, the nation and nationality, not willing to be merely political men or politicians. Since the Revolution they have striven to “make the people happy,” and in making the people happy, great, etc., they make Us unhappy: the people’s good hap is — my mishap.

Byington was able to convey the double-meaning of Stirner in “… the Greek fell into ignominy along with his State… ” because in English, State can refer both to “nation” and “nature.” Byington also conveyed the deliberate ambiguity of the capitalized “Us” in the final sentence: it is “us” the people they strive to make happy, and “Us” the Royal singular who are not made happy, both at the same time as a deliberate contradiction. But Byington scores a triple goal with closing alliteration. See the poetry of happy / unhappy (favorable / unfavorable mood), hap (circumstance) and mishap (accident).

You can learn more of Byington’s life and work in the most recent issue of Der Geist (2017), issue five.

I

Enrique Magon

Conditions would crush me,
Dull dunces would hush me,
If I were not I.
The world would enchain me,
Each fool would restrain me,
If I were not I.

Dear friends would ignore me
And blockheads would bore me
Until I should die;
But I know the rabble,
Their rant and their gabble,
And I am still I.

With punishments gloomy
They’d strive to undo me,
Because I am I.
I test them and try them
Then scorn and defy them,
For I must be I.

I cherish and love thee,
Think nothing above thee,
O glorious I!
Let others despise thee,
I honor and prize thee,
O infinite I!

L. A. Co. Jail, June 1st, 1916.

The Red Pill Cure For Nightmares

I had a dream the other night that filled my soul with glory—t’was such a dream that I can’t help but tell you folks the story.

I dreampt I lived in Crazy Land, where workin’ folks are donkeys, who dig and sweat to beat the band to feed a lot of monkeys.

They starve and freeze and have no fun, their youngsters have no pleasure, while all the monks live lives of ease, like gentle-monks of leisure.

And I was feelin’ awful glum—I dreampt I was a donkey, and life in Crazy Land is bum, unless you are a monkey—and I was wonderin’ what to do, and almost felt like croakin’, when a troop of lions came along a laughin’ and a jokin’.

“Come on!” they yelled, “come join the bunch, we’re goin’ to live in clover—we, too, were donkeys all our lives, but now the spell is over—we’ve found a little, round RED pill that beats your thoughts of dyin’ and every ass that takes this pill becomes a FREE RED LION!”

I swallowed one of those RED pills—I was no more a donkey-I was a LION who refused to work for any monkey!

Christmas

He was taken out and crucified by rulers and their priests;
His followers were burned at stakes and fed to hungry beasts;
His call to Peace and Brotherhood—all that the sad world needs
Was hidden from the workers in a pile of pagan creeds;
And the race plunged on in darkness, just as it had before,
And for nineteen hundred years has damned the earth with Hate and War.
A world of “Peace” and “Brotherhood,” where masters own the bread?
Christmas? Hell! What joke is this, in a land where Christ is dead?

The following poem by Jack Jones, founder of the Dil Pickle Club of Chicago, hangout for Malfew Seklew and publisher of Might is Right, appeared in the second issue of the Dil Pickler journal.

I GO

I go slowly
In a slow way,
My means being lowly.
I go unbidden,
Yea even forbidden.
I go to discover—
I know not.
But I go,
For only can I know
By going.

—Jack Jones.

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

In this poem by E. Armand, we see the very explicit language of Stirner/Egoism being used. It appeared as “Le vrai camarade” in Armand’s journal L’en dehors 7 no. 137 (début Juillet 1928): 5.

The True Camarade ¹⁾“Camarade” is not translated as “comrade” here purposefully, as the term itself may have a unique and nuanced meaning to Armand and his milieu that may be lost if translated to the common English equivalent

Worthy, you are far too dignified to bear the thought that someone might have given more than you have received—

or that the one who gives to you might suspect that they have received less than their contribution—

I know well that you will say, “Fair is fair…”—

and that you consider yourself “an egoist among the egoists”—

But egoist, you are much too egoist—

to admit that, being able to give pleasure to someone in your world —

you would refuse yourself the delight of doing so—

I am well aware that you speak constantly of “reciprocity”—

but you never believe you have paid enough for a smile, reimbursed a kind word, acquitted a sign of sympathy—

you are much to individual to accept that, in their relations with you, that one of your own should have reason to fear that they have not been paid in return—

You insist, to all who will listen, that you are only bound by the terms of the contract that you have concluded with one of your own—

but I have seen you, a thousand times, torment yourself, wrack your brain, asking yourself—

if you have exactly fulfilled your obligations —

“exactly”—

that is, exactly as intended by the one who had contracted with you—

at the moment when you signed it—

You are much too “unique,” too proud—

to not exhaust, to the utmost extreme—

the capacity to give, to make and to satisfy—

in order not to leave, hands empty and their desire unfulfilled, the one of your own who reached out to you—

imagining you rich in possibilities…

E. Armand.

Available from Underworld Amusements

This collection of poetry is culled from the three labor journals that Redbeard-inspired Wobbly activist Covington Hall edited from 1913 to 1916: The Lumberjack, The Voice of the People, and Rebellion.
Hall was known as one of the top poets of the labor movement in the Progressive Era, and he was an writer and teacher for many decades until his death in 1951. Being a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor organization known for pitched street fights and “direct action,” in Hall we find the greatest advocate of the Chicago social-Darwinist Ragnar Redbeard, and that infernal book Might is Right. A book that was highly critical of any paid labor, much less Union organizing. Hall looked past the conflicting parts to focus on the core message: the only foundation for right is the ability to enforce one’s will on others.
The poems contained within are from the pen of Hall, but also others that he found worthy to print in his own journals, including “Satanic Socialist” Henry M. Tichenor, author of The Sorceries and Scandals of Satan. They represent that curious melding of Might and Blasphemy and Labor in stirring, sometimes satirical ways. Featuring an introduction by editor-in-chief of UnionOfEgoists.com Kevin I. Slaugther.

Feel free to download and use:

The following review of Benjamin DeCasseres‘ The Shadow Eater was printed in The Nation, issue 116, no 3022, 1923. The entirety of The Shadow Eater is contained in IMP: The Poetry of Benjamin DeCasseres.

De Casseres, Anarch

The Shadow Eater. By Benjamin DeCasseres. American Library Service. $2.

NEARLY a score of years has passed since “The Shadow Eater” was first published and yet the author of these startling poems has remained practically unknown except in the journalistic milieu that he frequented. The critical scouts that should have been alert for the’ signs of new genius either ignored or were ignorant of the existence of Benjamin DeCasseres. Remy de Gourmont and James Huneker pointed the way to his door, but their voices were lost in the rumble of drums that heralded the constant arrivals on the literary scene of magnificoes of little talent. The drums are still rumbling and genius still starves for the appreciation that should attend it. Now that “The Shadow Eater” has been republished after the lapse of a number of years I, who have lately read these poems for the first time, wonder if it be possible for DeCasseres to receive his due from this generation. That a later one will hail him as a poet who spoke before his time I have -no doubt, but today he is doomed to obscurity for reasons that are patent to any one who brings an understanding sympathy to the reading of his strange poems.

Their spirit is anarchical, but of an anarchy that transcends the breaking of the tablets of man’s petty fashioning and would assault the enthroned Life Force itself. It beats savagely against the walls of its prison, not for freedom’s sake, but because it would know—and destroy—that which lies beyond them. To those who serenely await a supernal answer to the great riddle as well as to those who anoint their uneasy souls “with the unguent of philosophers or theologians the poetry of Benjamin DeCasseres will always be anathema. No larks sing their “God’s-in-His-Heaven” songs in these pages. Daffodils may nod in sun-bright rows but DeCasseres stands lost in contemplation before the gibbet that rises black and stark against the moon. The unearthly secret of life glows through these poems, but to the poet it lies hidden behind its blinding radiance. He grapples with that mystery of the spirit that pushed up cursing man from the primordial ooze and yet throughout the struggle he knows the futility of his soul-wearying efforts. But Caliban some day will stand before Prospero and of this meeting DeCasseres sings.

The weird beauty of these chants of a soul that still feels the pangs of its own birth can not he limned in other words than those which it utters in its own proud torment. Lack of space prevents me from quoting in full the significant poem, The Vision Malefic.

“My soul is a tarn as black and motionless as the night above
In which whirl forever and ever the pallid balls of light that are my sickly dreams.
I am weaving a shroud for the God whom I hate—
I have defied Him and cursed Him, and here is His winding-sheet.
I am lodged in my sins, and my soul is lean of its lusts.”

These swift-running, rhymeless lines, with their varying yet certain rhythm, like the heat of the sea on a long, curving shore, made their appearance some time before the vers libre craze swept our smaller poets beyond their depth. This fact would be more significant had not Walt Whitman broken the set forms of poetry several generations behind DeCasseres. Whitman’s influence was not lost on DeCasseres, but it betrays itself in the fashioning of some of his lines more than in their content.

The fierce individualism of DeCasseres, however, makes it impossible for him to employ very long any medium that is not shaped by his own passion. For this reason he occupies a niche that is all his own and asks space to stand from no other man. Formal criticism would demand a label for that niche by which the poet could be read into his proper place in the ranks of his contemporaries and his predecessors, but DeCasseres defies such evaluation, for he belongs to no school nor does he proselyte for any cult that is greater than his own individuality. His genius may owe much to those before him who strode in the vanguard of the rebels, yet it has come to its full flower only in himself. It is a bloom of exotic richness that time will not cause to droop and perish.

Howard Irving Young

Aside from a map of the Black Hills region, Ambrose Bierce (1842 – 1914) had yet to publish a book under his own name when the following poem appeared in Liberty Volume 5 Number 25, whole number 129 (July 21, 1888). Liberty was the work of Benjamin R. Tucker (1854 – 1939), who in 1907 would publish the first English-language edition of The Ego and His Own. – Trevor Blake

“The Man Born Blind”
Ambrose Bierce

A man born blind received his sight
By a painful operation;
And these are things he saw in the light
Of an infant observation.

He saw a merchant, good and wise.
And greatly, too, respected,
Who looked, to those imperfect eyes,
Like a swindler undetected.

He saw a patriot address
A noisy public meeting.
And said: ‘Why, that’s a calf, I guess,
That for the teat is bleating.’

A doctor stood beside a bed
And shook his summit sadly.
‘O see that foul assassin!’ said
The man who saw so badly.

He saw a lawyer pleading for
A thief whom they’d been jailing,
And said: ‘That’s an accomplice, or
My sight again is failing.’

Upon the Bench a Justice sat,
With nothing to restrain him;
”Tis strange,’ said the observer, ‘that
They ventured to unchain him.’

With theologic works supplied,
He saw a solemn preacher;
‘A burglar with his kit,’ he cried,
‘To rob a fellow creature.’

A bluff old farmer next he saw
Sell produce in a village,
And said: ‘What, what! is there no law
To punish men for pillage?’

A dame, tall, fair and stately, passed,
Who many charms united;
He thanked his stars his lot was cast
Where sepulchers were whited.

He saw a soldier stiff and stern,
‘Full of strange oaths’ and toddy;
But was unable to discern
A wound upon his body.

Ten square leagues of rolling ground
To one great man belonging,
Looked like one little grassy mound
With worms beneath it thronging.

A palace’s well-carven stones,
Where Dives dwelt contented,
Seemed built throughout of human bones
With human blood cemented.

He watched the yellow shining thread
A silk-worm was a-spinning;
‘That creature’s coining gold.’ he said,
‘To pay some girl for sinning.’

His eyes were so untrained and dim
All politics, religions,
Arts, sciences, appeared to him
But modes of plucking pigeons.

And so he drew his final breath,
And thought he saw with sorrow
Some persons weeping for his death
Who’d be all smiles to-morrow.