Queer Anarcho-Communism: An Atemporal Approach





Hello readers of The Creative Nothing. 

This work [view the full paper hereis an exploration in several sections. The dichotomy in this paper should reflect what I have written on before in my capstone, which is a response to Saul Newman's 2003 paper on Deleuze and Stirner, where he shows that the unique functions very similarly as Deleuze's notion of sense. It is a pure multiplicity on which one cannot place fixed ideas, fixed ideas which would be synonymous with the Deleuzian notion of representation. So sense produces representation, or conscious phenomena and memories, the same way that Stirner's creative nothing creates everything. 

To me, there are ways to read Stirner which function almost like ways of activating glitches in a video game. Not everyone takes such a post-modern, Deleuzian reading of Stirner. The creative nothing cannot be spoken of in Stirner's philosophy because it is not words, and Deleuze's sense is likewise not a linguistic pattern, but for Deleuze and Guattari we can talk about sense and we can in a way talk about the creative nothing. Sense is part of immemorial time, which is something that is not a memory, but is the possible and actual collapsing in the virtual, which is everything that has already happened, happening again as new. 

Sense for Deleuze and Stirner is a lot like the Neo-Platonic one, which produces the forms. But the forms are not an image or picture, like one cannot picture and represent in consciousness what the unconscious is, the forms are nowhere, and they are contextual, and their source, the creative nothing, is not any individual form but is responsible for all of the forms.Stirner says at the end of The Unique and its Property that the unique is not in world history, but like Freud's unconscious is outside of time, as Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle

“As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are 'necessary forms of thought. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves 'timeless’.” 

This often neglected connection between the unconscious, and things outside of time like Baeden's notion of queerness as avoiding the capture, often escape any discourse in anarchist theory. But I thought it would be incumbent upon me, as someone who sees these sorts of "glitches" in philosophy, to exacerbate them, and bring together these theoretical concepts into a political theory. 

How does one capture something as dynamic as the freedom and ultimate political realism, where the most powerful are able to get what they want, with a world in which everyone can be an "overman" in the Nietzschean sense, and have ownness? Stirner is against communism, but it is a communist attitude which I think works with the notion of the union of egoists, as I did not mention in the paper, because my argument does not rest on whether or not the union of egoists is a good basis of communism, which I think that it is. 

Unlike other authors like Nick Heath, whose book The Idea I have begun recently, I do not reject Stirner in favor of others - neither Fredy Perlman in favor of Emma Goldman, or Stirner in favor of either of those. It is clear from reading through histories of anarchism like Zoe Baker's Means and Ends, that anarchism means vastly different things to different people, and I hope to show how looking at the anarchist tradition, through the lens of continental philosophy, and anarchist theory, can show how developing a new world is a lot like a Zarathustrian dance. The Zarathustrian dance is free from ressentiment, the painful memory that the fixed idea inflicts, Nietzsche literally uses the word "idee fixee" in The Geneology of Morals. Nietzsche's philosophy is a philosophy of sense, and it is through knowing sense through Perlman's notion of masks and armors, that I psychoanalyze society from a primitivist perspective that views the society we live in as a sort of undead super-organism that captures our potentiality. 

The instant is called a queer thing in The Parmenides; queerness is the freedom of the radical Platonic instant, which is the moment in between motion and rest which is outside of time, which allows for change. Many of these authors mentioned in the paper come from Little Black Cart, which was a place that carried Max Stirner's works for a while. Their library has been influential to me, and I am a slow reader and continue to inch my way through what I have in my library. I am humbled by the knowledge of people I meet all the time, my searching is ongoing, and nothing is ever complete.