Things and Stuff on Top of My Head

In Stirner’s ego and in Levinas’s alter I find alike a respect for─even awe before─the finite human body. The flesh and mind of the self are the measure of all, attests Stirner, taking the corporeal perspective of the ego-in-its-life-world; the body and face of the other are absolute mystery, attests Levinas, taking the corporeal perspective of one life-world vis-à-vis another. For Stirner and for Levinas, the mystery of the consciousness behind the face, as with the uniqueness of creativity within ego, situates body beyond conceptualization and transcendent of doctrine, beyond culture and transcendent of history. Equally, ignorance plays a central role. For Levinas, respect for otherness is based on ignorance more than on knowledge: the relevance of ignorance is that it undermines not only myth and the conceptual and cultural but also the possibility of having other than an intimation of the absolute plurality of existence. For Stirner, respect for self is based on a recognition of how foreign the rest of the world is, how ignorant of ego: the ignorance is absolute and determines the irrelevancy, both ontological and moral, of otherness to self. The image of anthropology as a study of the effects that human beings as individual, energetic things-in-the-world have on one another finds echoes in them both: it is the energy of ego vis-à-vis alter and the energy of alter vis-à-vis ego.

Nevertheless, no one is born alone, and society is a human being's original state. The project is for the individual to keep his "ownness" from societal control: not to lose oneself in the depth of objects, in what has been declared fundamental by prior human judgement: sacred specters! The difficulty is that "the confusion of concepts marches ever forwards" (Stirner 2005: 96). Even liberalism exhibits a zealotry with regard to its own ruling concepts─"human," "science," "mind," "reason,"─such that the democratic state comes to be reified according to a common norm of good citizenship. Even liberal "freedom" is a collectivity over against the individual, who is liable to become dishonored before its sanctity. Even "human rights" are further foreign law: ego's "rightness" is not something another can make out─however good his or her intentions. For ego is always more than any particular historical conceptualization: "Those are all ideas, but you are corporeal" (Stirner 2005: 126). Ego is real and of itself "a world's history" (Stirner 2005: 365). Concepts, ideas, and principles are creatures ego can create. But one does not allow them to appear fixed and to hold dominion, nor to run away from us as if their own flesh, nor to become reversed as if our idols. Concepts become "higher powers" and sovereign only to the extent that ego disrespects itself and abases itself before them. The genius of ego, it's creativity, is rightly to transcend all normativity. One might enter into contract with concept and norm but never to the extent that one misrecognizes one's ownness. One puts language to use, as one's own property─and does not allow the usage of another to threaten or become despotic. For Stirner, the conceptual cannot know ego, and even one's own past linguistic creation should not stand in the way of what one's genius deems true and necessary in the present.

If feminism were misandry, then polyandry would be misandry, too; whereas it could at best be only exploitative of men. If that is true, then feminism is nothing more than a concern about human equality. And it shouldn’t be less.

Even though the design and management of the built environment may not be conductive of such associations, the very performance of people having to reside in the midst of others at close proximity─and where interactions among coresidents are not necessary─still requires that residents actively not pay attention to one another. It requires a habitual keeping away of the concretization of any persistent desires to substantiate and multiply intersections. So a kind of void is created by the combination of the virtual space of potentiated associations and the space formed by the efforts to make those associations improbable. This void is an undomesticated no-man's-land potentially subject to arbitrary actions and displays of power. If the spaces between residents are shaped through the warding off of the possibility of heterogeneous and unpredictable associations and come to be marked by the absence of potential transactions, then there are spaces that remain largely unoccupied.

人類学における研究のモードは十数年で外見的には大きく変わる。現在、大きな注目を集めているのは、過去の人類学を認識論的であるとの理由から批判する「存在論的転回」（ontological turn）であり、新しいスターの誕生とともに、九〇年代の論述のスタイルは廃れ、七〇年代のスターたちがリバイバルをとげた［Henare et al. 2007; Holbraad and Pedersen 2009参照］。ただし、モードの変化に敏感なのは一部の人類者［ママ］である。新しいファッションを身にまとうことはできるが、多くの人類学者は、流行をさほど気にすることなく、あるいは、どのようなモードが良いのか不定見なままに研究を続けている。