The Hobgoblin Converses With Itself

A Dialogue Between Feral Faun and Wolfi Landstreicher

PROLOGUE

The setting is impossible: a clearing that exists nowhere, lit by no sun and warmed by no fire, yet somehow bright and comfortable. Two figures sit across from each other on logs that might be logs or might be something else entirely. One is younger—vibrant, almost feral in his movements, eyes glittering with mischievous energy. The other is older—more lined around the eyes, movements more deliberate, but no less alive. They are the same person. They are not the same person at all.

FERAL FAUN: So here we are, you and I, which is really me and me, or perhaps neither of us. The irony isn’t lost, even on someone who insists irony is just another game.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Irony suggests distance. I prefer to call it the logical conclusion of an impossible premise. We shouldn’t exist simultaneously—you ended yourself deliberately in what, 1995? “By the time you read this, Feral Faun will no longer be...”

FERAL FAUN: (laughing) And yet here I am, summoned back like a shade in some Greek necromancy. Though I notice you don’t seem disturbed by it. The vagabond takes impossible company in stride?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The vagabond has no fixed point from which to be disturbed. I wandered into this clearing the same way I wander into everything—without destination, without expectation, without the presumption that reality owes me consistency.

FERAL FAUN: Consistency! There’s a word I never trusted. But you—you became more systematic, didn’t you? Translating Stirner, working through things methodically. That was never my way.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Don’t mistake rigor for system. Translating “Der Einzige” required something other than wild leaps—it required sitting with each word, each German construction, each nuance that previous translators had flattened into Victorian English. That wasn’t systematization. It was a different kind of wildness—the wildness of absolute attention.

FERAL FAUN: Wildness of attention. I like that. Though when I was writing, I never would have put it that way. For me, wildness was always more... kinetic. The child before domestication drained it. The body thrumming with vital energy. Not attention—eruption.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And yet eruption without attention is merely seizure. The question I grappled with—that you left me to grapple with when you killed yourself off—was how to sustain eruption. How to make insurrection a way of living rather than a series of isolated outbursts.

FERAL FAUN: Is that a criticism?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (slowly) It’s an observation. You wrote with tremendous passion. You articulated things that still burn in me decades later—the cops in our heads, the hobgoblin of identity, the way even anarchist subcultures become cages. But you also burned yourself out. The pseudonym, the energy, the whole approach—it was unsustainable. You said so yourself in that final piece.

FERAL FAUN: “Tired of being ridden by the hobgoblin of identity, tired of half-assed interactions where no one really teaches anyone...”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exactly. But here’s what I discovered after you were gone: the tiredness wasn’t in the analysis. The analysis was correct. The tiredness was in the form—the persona of Feral Faun, the expectations it created, the way others wanted you to be that wild child endlessly. The form had become a trap.

FERAL FAUN: So you abandoned form altogether?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: No. I chose a different form—one that contained its own impermanence more explicitly. “Landstreicher”—the vagabond, the tramp, the one who belongs nowhere. A name that says “I am passing through.” Less romantic than the faun dancing through the forest, perhaps, but more honest about the actual condition.

FERAL FAUN: Let me push on this. You’re suggesting I was romantic?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You were lyrical. There’s a difference, though the boundaries blur. When you wrote about eros as “boundless creative energy of the cosmos,” when you described the vital energy of childhood as something systematically drained by civilization—that was genuine. But it was also easy to misread as primitivist nostalgia, as though there were some golden age before domestication that we could return to.

FERAL FAUN: I explicitly rejected that. “Nature has not always existed. It is not found in the depths of the forest...” I was clear that wilderness is another construct, that the wild is available anywhere, in any moment of refusal.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You were clear in the text. But the voice—the persona—carried different implications. The name “Feral Faun” evokes forests, mythical creatures, pre-civilized existence. Readers heard that before they heard your careful distinctions.

FERAL FAUN: And “Wolfi Landstreicher” is better?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Different. It evokes urban wandering, proletarian displacement, the dispossessed of industrial capitalism. When I translate insurrectionary texts from Italian comrades, when I write about projectual life and affinity relations, the register is different. Less enchanted, perhaps. But also less prone to being recuperated into hippie mysticism.

FERAL FAUN: (sharply) I was never a hippie.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (smiling slightly) No. But some of your readers were. And recuperation happens regardless of authorial intent. That’s one thing the Situationists taught us that you took aboard inconsistently—the spectacle absorbs everything, turns every gesture of refusal into commodified subcultural identity. “Feral Faun” became a brand, whether you wanted it or not.

FERAL FAUN: And yet you kept writing. You kept publishing. You’ve been at this for forty years. How is Wolfi Landstreicher not also a brand?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Maybe it is. But it’s a brand that moves, that doesn’t stay in one place long enough to be captured fully. And I’ve been willing to let it die too—Apio Ludd emerged when a different voice was needed, and will doubtless disappear when it’s no longer useful. The pseudonyms are tools, not identities.

FERAL FAUN: Tools. There’s another word that sits strangely in my mouth. I distrusted instrumentalism—the idea that everything exists to be used. It seemed like just another face of the civilization I wanted to destroy.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And yet you used language, used publication, used the anarchist milieu to circulate your ideas. The question isn’t whether we use tools but whether we’re aware we’re doing so, whether the using serves our own projects or whether we become servants of the tools.

FERAL FAUN: Stirner’s property relation.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exactly. Translating Stirner was, in part, an extended meditation on that problem you raised. The Unique—the individual, the ego, whatever we call it—relates to everything as property, as something to use and discard. But the moment that relation calcifies, the moment we start treating our tools as sacred, they become spooks that possess us.

FERAL FAUN: The hobgoblin.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The hobgoblin. Identity is the ultimate tool-become-master. We pick up a name, a persona, a set of positions—useful for navigating the world, for relating to others. And then it starts riding us, demanding that we be consistent with it, punishing us when we deviate.

FERAL FAUN: So you exist to show that I could be escaped from?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I exist because you escaped. Because you had the integrity—no, that’s too moral a word. Because you had the desire to kill what was killing you. But escape isn’t negation; it’s transformation. Wolfi isn’t the absence of Feral Faun. Wolfi is what became possible once Feral Faun released its grip.

FERAL FAUN: Let’s talk about what actually changed. Not just the name, but the analysis. You mentioned the Italian insurrectionaries. That became central to your work in ways it wasn’t to mine.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The Italians—Alfredo Bonanno especially—gave me a framework I’d been groping toward. You wrote about playful violence, about insurgent ferocity, but it remained somewhat abstract. The Italians had actually done it. They’d built informal organizations, carried out armed actions, developed theory through practice rather than despite it. They showed that insurrection wasn’t just a metaphor.

FERAL FAUN: And that’s different from what I wanted?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s more concrete. You wrote beautifully about “the playful violence of insurgence” having “no room for regret.” But when it came to what that actually looks like—how people organize without organizations, how affinity groups function, what the relationship is between theory and action—you were vague. Necessarily vague, perhaps, given your emphasis on not providing programs. But vagueness can be its own kind of cop-out.

FERAL FAUN: I rejected programs because programs reproduce domination. The moment you say “first do X, then do Y, then do Z,” you’ve created a template that others follow mechanically. That’s the opposite of wildness.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Agreed. But there’s a space between rigid programs and complete formlessness. The Italians operated in that space. Informal organization, affinity-based action, projectuality as a mode of living rather than a set of rules to follow. They demonstrated that you can coordinate complex actions without bureaucracy, that you can maintain long-term struggle without becoming an institution.

FERAL FAUN: And you think I couldn’t have gotten there?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I think you were impatient. That was your gift and your limitation. The vital energy you celebrated doesn’t wait, doesn’t plan, doesn’t build slowly. It erupts. But eruption without accumulation eventually exhausts itself. I burned at a lower temperature, longer.

FERAL FAUN: Let’s shift. You mentioned Stirner repeatedly. Tell me about that translation project. Seven years, wasn’t it?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Off and on. Closer to ten if you count the preliminary work. But yes—translating “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” was central to my development in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

FERAL FAUN: I read Stirner, of course. Everyone in our circles did. But you went deeper.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I had to. The existing translations were terrible—not just inaccurate but actively misleading. Byington’s 1907 version turned Stirner into a Victorian gentleman, smoothed out his provocations, domesticated him. Later translations weren’t much better. I wanted to hear Stirner’s actual voice, and the only way to do that was to sit with the German, word by word.

FERAL FAUN: And what did you hear?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Someone wilder than I expected. Not a philosopher constructing a system but what I eventually called a “wise guy”—someone mocking philosophy from within, using philosophical language to dissolve philosophical pretensions. The book isn’t an argument; it’s a performance. Stirner laughs at Feuerbach, at Bruno Bauer, at all the Young Hegelians who thought they were being radical while still serving abstractions.

FERAL FAUN: “Spooks.”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Spooks. Fixed ideas that demand our submission. But here’s what I discovered: Stirner’s critique goes deeper than we usually acknowledge. It’s not just that particular ideas—God, the State, humanity—are spooks. It’s that any idea, once it starts demanding our allegiance, becomes a spook. Including egoism. Including anarchism.

FERAL FAUN: Including wildness?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: If wildness becomes something you have to be rather than something you do, yes. Absolutely. That was part of what killed you—”Feral Faun” became a demand that you be wild in particular ways, perform wildness for your audience, maintain the brand of untamed vitality. The spook of anti-domestication.

FERAL FAUN: (long pause) That’s uncomfortably accurate.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’m not saying it to wound you. I’m saying it because I lived through it, because after you were gone I had to find ways not to repeat it. The vagabond image helps because vagabonds are supposed to be tired, dirty, pragmatic. No one expects a tramp to dance through the forest with erotic vitality. The expectations are lower, which paradoxically makes more possible.

FERAL FAUN: What about the critique of primitivism? You mentioned that I was sometimes mistaken for a primitivist. But you engaged more directly with Zerzan, with the whole anti-civilization tendency.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Because it needed to be done carefully. You’re right that your position was more nuanced than it often appeared—wildness anywhere, Nature as construct, and so on. But there was enough overlap in vocabulary that readers could miss the distinctions. I wanted to be explicit about where I parted ways with the primitivists.

FERAL FAUN: Which was where?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The asceticism. The moralism. The idea that there’s a correct way of living—gatherer-hunter, small-band, pre-agricultural—and that we should feel guilty about technology, about cities, about everything modern. That’s just Christianity in a loincloth. A new original sin, a new paradise lost, a new program of purification.

FERAL FAUN: I rejected that too.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You did, in theory. But your language of “vital energy drained by civilization,” of childhood as pre-domesticated state, of “recovering wildness”—it could be read as primitivist. I tried to shift the frame entirely. Not recovery but creation. Not going back but going beyond. Projectuality rather than nostalgia.

FERAL FAUN: But there’s something real in what I described. The child does have an energy that gets systematically crushed. Civilization does drain us.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Of course. The analysis stands. The question is what you do with it. If the answer is “mourn the lost paradise and try to return,” you’ve already surrendered. If the answer is “understand the mechanisms of domestication so you can attack them now, create now, live wildly now“—that’s different. That’s insurgent.

FERAL FAUN: You mentioned projectuality repeatedly. That seems central to what you developed after I was gone.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It came from the Italians initially, but I worked through it in my own terms. The core idea is simple: either you treat life as something that happens to you—making the best of it, adjusting, coping—or you treat it as your creation, your project. The first is the logic of submission. The second is projectual life.

FERAL FAUN: That sounds like will-worship. Nietzsche at his most tiresome.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It could become that, if you turned it into a morality. “You should project your existence!” becomes just another demand, another spook. But as a practical disposition—a way of orienting toward each day, each encounter, each problem—it changes things. You stop asking “what will happen to me?” and start asking “what am I creating?”

FERAL FAUN: And that’s sustainable in a way my eruptions weren’t?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s sustainable because it includes failure, includes tiredness, includes all the unglamorous moments. Projectual life doesn’t mean constant ecstasy. It means even in your exhaustion, your boredom, your routine, you’re choosing. You’re shaping. The alternative—resignation—is death before death.

FERAL FAUN: “Longer chains are chains nonetheless.”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exactly. That’s one I kept from your work—the refusal of half-measures, the recognition that a nicer cage is still a cage. But I added the positive dimension: not just rejecting chains but actively building something. Affinity relations, projects with clear aims, networks of people who actually know and trust each other rather than ideological coalitions of strangers.

FERAL FAUN: Affinity. Let’s talk about that. You spent a lot of time developing what affinity means in practice.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Because most anarchists don’t actually understand it. They think affinity means “we agree on politics,” like some leftist front group. But genuine affinity includes difference—it’s built on understanding how you and your comrades are unlike as well as alike. You can’t really trust someone until you’ve grappled with your disagreements.

FERAL FAUN: I wrote about that—the economy of love, how civilization makes us need each other rather than desire each other. How relationships become transactions.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And you were right. But your solution tended toward the cosmic—paneroticism, love overflowing, the boundless energy of desire. Beautiful, but hard to operationalize. I tried to bring it down to earth: What does it actually look like when two people or five people decide to act together based on genuine affinity? How do you have the hard conversations about risk, about capacity, about what happens when things go wrong?

FERAL FAUN: That’s very... practical.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Practice is the test. Theory without practice is academic; practice without theory is activism. Neither alone creates insurrection. The Italian comrades understood this. They theorized through acting, refined their ideas in the fire of actual struggle.

FERAL FAUN: So why do we both exist? Not in this strange summoning—I mean in the archive, in people’s minds, in the ongoing anarchist conversation. Why didn’t Wolfi just replace Feral Faun entirely?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Because we serve different functions. Your work—the Feral Faun corpus—has an immediacy, a passion, that speaks to people who are just waking up to the totality of domination. You articulate the first wild No, the recognition that everything is wrong, the refusal of reformism and gradual change. That’s necessary. Without that initial rupture, all the careful theory in the world is pointless.

FERAL FAUN: And you’re for people who’ve moved past the first No?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: For people who’ve said the first No and are asking “now what?” Not in a programmatic way—there’s still no program—but in terms of how to sustain revolt, how to keep living wildly over decades, how to build the kinds of relationships that can actually challenge the existent. Different moment, different needs.

FERAL FAUN: But it’s the same person writing both.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Is it? I’m not sure. The person who wrote “Feral Revolution” in 1990 and the person who translated Stirner in 2017 share some things—egoism, anti-moralism, the refusal of submission. But they’ve been shaped by different experiences, different failures, different successes. They read differently, think differently, have different tones and rhythms.

FERAL FAUN: The hobgoblin possesses us across time?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The self is always a hobgoblin if you take it too seriously. The trick is to keep discarding, keep moving, keep the vagabond consciousness that never settles. You did it once, dramatically—killing Feral Faun. I try to do it continuously, in smaller ways.

FERAL FAUN: What about the anarchist milieu itself? You wrote about how I was tired of it, how the subculture had become another cage. Did that change for you?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: No and yes. The milieu is still largely useless—endless meetings about meetings, ritualized protests, subcultural posturing. But within it, there have always been people who actually want to live insurgently. Finding them, building with them, maintaining connections across years and continents—that became more possible as I stopped expecting the milieu as a whole to transform.

FERAL FAUN: So you gave up on converting people?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I never wanted to convert anyone. Neither did you—you wrote about that explicitly. “I haven’t the least interest in winning people over to the cause of anarchy.” The question is what you do instead. You wrote for the pleasure of it, for “an expansive selfishness.” So did I. But I also discovered that some writing creates resonance, finds people you didn’t know existed, builds unlikely affinities across distance.

FERAL FAUN: Publishing as a casting of spells?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: More like sending messages in bottles. Most will never be found. Some will be found by people who can’t read them. But occasionally, rarely, one reaches exactly the right person at exactly the right moment and something happens. That’s enough. It has to be enough.

FERAL FAUN: What do you think we got wrong? Both of us, across all these decades?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (long pause) Underestimating how deep the domestication goes. Not in others—we were clear-eyed about society, about civilization, about the mechanisms of control. But in ourselves. Every time I think I’ve rooted out submission, I find it somewhere else. Every time I think I’m acting freely, I discover another layer of conditioning.

FERAL FAUN: The cops in our heads multiply.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Endlessly. Or rather—we discover they were always there, camouflaged. The anarchist who prides himself on rejecting authority and then polices others for insufficient radicalism. The egoist who turns self-interest into performance. The insurrectionary who becomes so attached to being dangerous that danger becomes a prison.

FERAL FAUN: And the response?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Keep going. There’s no final liberation, no moment of total freedom. There’s only the perpetual struggle, the ongoing destruction of limits, what I called “tension perpetually lived.” The Buddhists have something similar with their endless practice, though I distrust the spiritualization.

FERAL FAUN: I rejected spirituality entirely. “Storm the citadel of religion and reclaim the freedom, the creativity, the passion and the wonder that religion has stolen from our earth and our lives.”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And I agreed. But I also noticed that some spiritual practices—shorn of their metaphysics, their demands for submission to higher powers—were describing real techniques for working with attention, with habit, with the automatisms we wanted to dissolve. Not that I became a meditator. But I stopped rejecting everything that sounded spiritual on principle. That’s its own spook.

FERAL FAUN: Let’s talk about violence. It was central to my work—”Insurgent Ferocity: The Playful Violence of Rebellion.” How do you relate to that now?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The playful violence you described was correct—violence as eruption, as festival, as the opposite of systematic military discipline. But I’ve also seen people use that language to justify pointless cruelty, adolescent posturing, actions that achieve nothing except making the actor feel powerful momentarily.

FERAL FAUN: You’re not saying violence is wrong?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’m saying it’s a tool, like everything else. Property of the unique, to be used and discarded as serves our projects. The question isn’t whether violence is permissible—permission is a moral category, and morality is a spook. The question is whether particular acts serve what we’re trying to create.

FERAL FAUN: And who decides that?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: We do. Each of us, in consultation with those we’ve built affinity with. That’s the terrifying responsibility of living without morality—there’s no external standard to appeal to, no one to tell you whether you acted correctly. You decide, you act, you live with the consequences. Amor fati.

FERAL FAUN: The love of fate.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Not resignation to fate—that would be submission again. Love of fate as worthy adversary, as the resistance that makes strength possible. Embracing that your actions have consequences, that mistakes are learning, that even failures are your failures, not imposed from outside.

FERAL FAUN: We’ve been talking for a while now. The impossible setting is starting to feel almost normal.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Adaptation is quick. Another mechanism of domestication—how rapidly we normalize the strange, incorporate it into routine. Ten minutes in this impossible clearing and already we’re treating it like a familiar café.

FERAL FAUN: Should we be resisting that?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (laughing) Now who’s being programmatic? “We should resist normalization!” Another cop in the head. Sometimes you just talk, you engage, you let the moment be what it is without anxiously checking whether you’re being sufficiently wild.

FERAL FAUN: Is that what I was? Anxiously wild?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Sometimes. The pressure to maintain the persona, to always be Feral Faun erupting with vital energy—it was exhausting precisely because it required constant vigilance against seeming domesticated. But vigilance is itself a form of tension, and not always the productive kind.

FERAL FAUN: So you learned to relax?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I learned that fierceness doesn’t require constant display. The vagabond rests when he rests, walks when he walks, fights when he fights. The boundaries between these states are porous, not rigidly scheduled, but there’s no anxiety about whether resting is “really” wild enough. It just is what it is.

FERAL FAUN: One last question. If someone today—some young person feeling the first stirrings of revolt, recognizing that everything is wrong—came to us asking where to start, what would you tell them?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Don’t ask me. Don’t ask anyone. That’s the first thing. The moment you seek a teacher, a guide, someone to tell you how to rebel, you’ve already surrendered. The revolt has to be your own or it’s nothing.

FERAL FAUN: And if they pushed?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’d say: pay attention to your own desire. Not what you think you should want, not what other radicals tell you to want, but what actually moves you, what makes you come alive, what fills you with that vital energy you keep referencing. That’s your starting point.

FERAL FAUN: And then?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Find others who are also paying attention to their own desire. Not ideological agreement—that’s worthless if you can’t stand each other. Genuine affinity, which includes difference, includes conflict, includes the hard conversations. Build with them. Act with them. Learn through doing what theory can never teach you.

FERAL FAUN: And when it falls apart, as it inevitably will?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Then it falls apart. You mourn if mourning is what you need, rage if rage is what you need, and then you start again. There’s no final victory in this—no revolution that ends all revolutions. There’s only the perpetual struggle, lived moment to moment, with the people you’ve chosen, against the world that tries to domesticate you.

FERAL FAUN: That’s bleak.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Is it? I find it liberating. No final exam, no score at the end. Just life, in all its mess and possibility. What more could we want?

FERAL FAUN: The vital energy—

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: —is in the wanting itself. In the refusal to settle for what is. In the perpetual “what else?” that keeps us moving. You knew that. I know that. Everyone who’s ever genuinely lived knows that.

FERAL FAUN: I want to return to something. You mentioned that my language of eros, of cosmic energy, was “hard to operationalize.” But that misses the point, doesn’t it? Eros isn’t meant to be operationalized. It’s meant to be felt.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And yet feeling without expression becomes another form of internalization. The eros that remains private, individual, purely subjective—that’s what the civilization wants. Keep your feelings to yourself. Maintain the appearance of adjustment. The world grinds on.

FERAL FAUN: So what did you do with the erotic dimension? It was central to my work—paneroticism, the economy of love, the way civilization scarcifies desire. Did you abandon it?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Not abandoned. Transformed. I stopped using the cosmic language, yes—”boundless creative energy of the cosmos” was easy to dismiss as New Age mysticism. But the analysis remained. The way social relations are structured to channel desire into acceptable forms—monogamy, consumerism, ambition—that’s real. That’s one of the primary mechanisms of domestication.

FERAL FAUN: And your response?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Building affinity relations that don’t follow those channels. Which sounds abstract but is actually quite concrete. When you refuse the economy of love—when you don’t treat intimacy as a scarce resource to be hoarded—something opens. You can actually desire people, actually connect, without the anxious calculus of “what am I getting out of this.”

FERAL FAUN: You make it sound simple.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s terrifying. Everything in our conditioning screams against it. The fear of abandonment, the fear of not being enough, the fear of being used—all of it built on scarcity thinking. But when you actually do it, when you build relationships based on genuine mutual desire rather than need... (pauses) There’s nothing quite like it.

FERAL FAUN: So you lived what I theorized?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Imperfectly. Always imperfectly. The conditioning doesn’t disappear; you work against it constantly. But yes—the erotic dimension you articulated became something I actually practiced, over years, with specific people. The theory wasn’t wrong. It just needed to be incarnated.

FERAL FAUN: What about the scene? The anarchist milieu, the subcultures, the little worlds we moved in. You touched on it before, but I want to go deeper. My last piece as Feral Faun was basically a goodbye letter to that world. “Tired of the simulated rage and ritualized reactivism which tries to pass itself off as insurgence...”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: That passage still cuts. Because it’s still accurate, all these years later. The milieu hasn’t fundamentally changed. Still the same activist busywork, the same subcultural performances, the same gap between radical rhetoric and actual lives.

FERAL FAUN: And yet you kept engaging with it?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: At arm’s length. I published, distributed texts, built Venomous Butterfly, translated things that might be useful. But I stopped expecting the milieu to be anything other than what it is. The energy I once wasted on frustration—expecting anarchists to actually be anarchist—I redirected into the few relationships that were real.

FERAL FAUN: How do you tell the difference? Real versus performance?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: By watching what people do when it costs them. Anyone can be radical at a meeting, in a zine, online. But when there’s an actual risk—to their job, their relationships, their comfort—most radicals suddenly discover all sorts of reasons for caution. The real ones don’t disappear.

FERAL FAUN: That seems harsh.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s observation. Decades of observation. I’m not criticizing—people have reasons for their choices, and not everyone is positioned to take the same risks. But I am noting the difference between what people say and what people do. The propaganda of the deed cuts both ways; your deeds are also propaganda, revealing what you actually believe regardless of your stated ideology.

FERAL FAUN: “Information versus flesh and blood and desire.”

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Yes. You nailed it in that piece. We were becoming information to each other—social media profiles, ideological positions, reputation tokens. The flesh receded. The desire got channeled into approved radical forms—desire for revolution, desire for community, desire for justice. All very noble and very dead.

FERAL FAUN: And the remedy?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Stop meeting as anarchists. Start meeting as people. This sounds banal but it’s revolutionary in practice. When you relate to someone primarily as a comrade, you’ve already reduced them to a role. When you relate to them as a unique being with their own desires, their own contradictions, their own weird specificities—then something can happen.

FERAL FAUN: Let’s talk about America specifically. We’ve both operated primarily within American contexts, even when drawing on Italian or German traditions. What does that mean?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: American anarchism has always been strange. No strong historical movement, no tradition of syndicalism or insurrection to draw on. We had to invent ourselves from scraps—European imports, individualist eccentrics, countercultural fragments.

FERAL FAUN: Is that a disadvantage?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s both. Disadvantage because we lack the accumulated experience, the intergenerational transmission, that European comrades have. Advantage because we’re less weighed down by orthodoxy, less constrained by “how things are done.” American anarchism at its best is wildly experimental, irreverent, willing to try things that Europeans would find undignified.

FERAL FAUN: And at its worst?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Superficial. Consumerist even in its radicalism—always hunting for the next tendency, the next theory, the next subcultural style, without ever going deep into anything. American culture is amnesiac, and American anarchism inherits that. Each generation thinks it’s discovering things that were explored decades ago.

FERAL FAUN: You’ve tried to counter that with the translation work?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Partly. Getting Stirner right, making Italian insurrectionary texts available, curating Feral Revolution even after you died—it’s all about building a usable past. Not nostalgia, not ancestor worship. Just: here’s what people have thought and done before us, here’s what worked and what didn’t, use it or ignore it but at least know it exists.

FERAL FAUN: Transmission.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Transmission without teaching. I despise the pedagogical attitude—”let me instruct you in correct theory.” But making texts available, creating contexts where people can encounter ideas and make their own sense of them—that feels legitimate.

FERAL FAUN: You mentioned your distrust of the pedagogical. But wasn’t writing itself a form of teaching? When I wrote “Feral Revolution,” wasn’t I teaching people how to think about wildness and domestication?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: There’s a distinction between teaching and offering. Teaching implies a relationship of authority—I know, you don’t, let me correct your ignorance. Offering is different—here’s something I found interesting, take it or leave it. The stance changes everything.

FERAL FAUN: But readers don’t always receive it as offering. They take your positions as authoritative, build identities around agreeing with you.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: They do, and you can’t fully prevent it. But you can structure your writing to resist that recuperation. I try to ask questions more than answer them, to provoke rather than conclude. “Willful Disobedience” was always meant to be a catalyst for discussion, not a final word.

FERAL FAUN: And yet people treat it as scripture.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Some do. The same way people treated your work—”Feral Faun said this, therefore it must be true.” Nothing you can do about that except keep undercutting yourself, keep refusing the prophet role, keep demonstrating through your own changes and evolutions that no position is final.

FERAL FAUN: Hence killing pseudonyms?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Partly. Though the pseudonym deaths were also personal—genuine exhaustions, genuine needs to become something else. But they have a pedagogical function too: showing that even the theorist can dissolve, that identity is always provisional, that the hobgoblin can be thrown off.

FERAL FAUN: Let’s address something uncomfortable. You’ve been active for forty years. That’s a long time to sustain revolt. How do you avoid burnout, beyond just changing names?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I don’t always avoid it. There have been periods of withdrawal, silence, near-giving-up. The difference is that I stopped treating those periods as failures. Burnout is information—it tells you that something in your approach isn’t working, that you’re pushing against something in a way that’s depleting rather than energizing.

FERAL FAUN: And when you’re burned out, what do you do?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Whatever I want. That’s the egoist answer, and it sounds flippant, but it’s serious. If I don’t want to write, I don’t write. If I don’t want to attend meetings, I don’t attend. If I want to read novels and take walks for six months, I do that. The point is to live without measure, which includes living without the measure of constant productivity.

FERAL FAUN: Doesn’t that feel like abandoning the struggle?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Only if you think the struggle is something external to you, something that continues whether or not you participate. But if the struggle is your struggle—your own revolt against your own domestication—then there’s no abandoning it. You take it with you into the novels and the walks. You can’t escape yourself.

FERAL FAUN: But you can forget.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You can numb, you can distract, you can build routines that keep you comfortable. That’s different from rest. Rest is conscious; numbness is flight. I’ve done both. The difference becomes clear pretty quickly—rest energizes, numbness depletes further.

FERAL FAUN: What about age? We’re the same person across time, but time has done things to you it hadn’t done to me yet. What changes when you’re no longer young?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The obvious things. Body slows, recovery takes longer, certain kinds of physical risk become impractical. But also: perspective lengthens. When you’ve watched multiple cycles of enthusiasm and disillusionment, you stop being surprised by either. When you’ve seen movements rise and collapse, people you trusted betray and people you dismissed come through—you develop a different rhythm.

FERAL FAUN: More patient?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: More realistic, maybe. Though I distrust realism when it shades into resignation. The temptation of age is to treat your accumulated disappointments as wisdom, to tell young people that their enthusiasm is naïve because yours didn’t pan out. That’s just bitterness dressed as experience.

FERAL FAUN: So what’s genuine wisdom?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Knowing that you don’t know. Holding your positions lightly. Being willing to be surprised. Still burning, but with a steadier flame—less explosive, more sustainable. Recognizing the patterns without being trapped by them. I’m not sure “wisdom” is even the right word. Let’s say: accumulated presence, rather than accumulated knowledge.

FERAL FAUN: That’s very Zen.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (laughing) There you go with the spiritual accusations again. But yes, there’s something to it. The anti-civilization critique, the anarchist position, the egoist stance—all of them ultimately point toward a kind of presence, an inhabiting of the moment that refuses to be captured by past or future. Call it what you want.

FERAL FAUN: Here’s something I’ve wondered. We were both critical of anarchist organizing, suspicious of formal structures, resistant to “the cause.” But doesn’t that leave people alone? Atomized? How do you build power without organization?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You don’t build power. Power is what they have. What we build is something else—capacity, maybe. The capacity to act effectively, to protect ourselves and each other, to create zones where domination doesn’t operate. That’s different from power.

FERAL FAUN: Semantic distinction?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Practical distinction. Power requires institutions—the ability to coerce, to enforce, to maintain control over time. What we build is more ephemeral: networks of affinity that form and dissolve, temporary autonomous zones that appear and disappear, skill-sharing that increases individual capacity without creating dependence on organization.

FERAL FAUN: But isn’t that ineffective against enemies who do have power?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s differently effective. We can’t defeat the state in a straight fight—they have all the resources, all the violence. But we can undermine, erode, defect, create ungovernable spaces. Not victory in the military sense, but survival and flourishing despite domination.

FERAL FAUN: That feels modest.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It is modest. But modesty beats grandiosity that leads to crushed revolutions. The 20th century is littered with revolutionary movements that thought they could seize power and build a new society. They all reproduced what they claimed to oppose. I’m interested in something humbler and more lasting.

FERAL FAUN: Living otherwise.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Living otherwise. Right now, in whatever ways are possible, with whatever people are genuinely present. Not waiting for the revolution, not preparing for the rupture, but actually living as much as possible according to our desires, building real relations of affinity, attacking what attacks us.

FERAL FAUN: A final turn. We’ve talked about what we got wrong, what we got right, how we relate. But what about what we never addressed? What are the blind spots?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Technology, probably. Both of us developed our critique before the digital transformation really hit. The mechanisms of control we analyzed—family, school, work, the spectacle—they’re still operative, but they’ve been supplemented by something new. Algorithmic governance, attention capture, the smartphone as permanent surveillance device and dopamine delivery system. I’m not sure our frameworks are fully adequate.

FERAL FAUN: Do younger anarchists have better analysis?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Some do. There’s interesting work on cybernetics, on data colonization, on the ways algorithms replace ideology as mechanisms of social control. But a lot of it stays at the level of critique without figuring out how to actually resist. It’s one thing to analyze how Facebook manipulates you; it’s another to actually live without being manipulated.

FERAL FAUN: And you?

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve tried to minimize my exposure—not using social media, limiting digital dependence where possible. But I recognize this is increasingly a luxury. Younger people are embedded in these systems from birth; opting out isn’t really an option for them. Different strategies are needed, and I’m not sure what they are.

FERAL FAUN: The domestication goes deeper.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Much deeper. The cops in our heads now have real-time feedback loops, predictive algorithms, perfect memory. Every search, every click, every pause builds a model of you that can be used to steer your behavior. The wildness I celebrated, that you celebrated—it’s harder to access when your every movement is being captured and analyzed.

FERAL FAUN: Sounds hopeless.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (sharply) Hope is a spook too. I don’t operate on hope. I operate on desire, on refusal, on the fact that despite everything, moments of wildness still break through. The system isn’t total. There are gaps, glitches, edges where control fails. The task is finding them, exploiting them, expanding them where possible.

FERAL FAUN: So we keep going.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: We keep going. Different names, different voices, different historical moments. But the same essential movement—away from submission, toward self-creation, through whatever burning energy moves us.

FERAL FAUN: Until we don’t.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Until we don’t. And then someone else picks up the thread. Not because we organized them into a movement, not because we handed them a program, but because the thread was always there, waiting to be found. We’re not important—the thread is important.

FERAL FAUN: (smiling) That’s surprisingly humble for an egoist.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (smiling back) Egoism properly understood isn’t about self-aggrandizement. It’s about owning what’s yours—including your limitations, your mortality, your place in a web of relations you didn’t create and won’t outlast. The Unique isn’t a god. The Unique is a particular pattern of vitality, temporary and unrepeatable, that does what it can while it lasts.

FERAL FAUN: And then dissolves.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And then dissolves. As Feral Faun dissolved. As Wolfi will dissolve. As everyone and everything dissolves. But not into nothing—into what comes next. The clearing returns to forest. The forest returns to soil. The soil becomes forest again. We participate in something larger than ourselves without pretending that “something larger” is a god or a purpose or a destiny.

FERAL FAUN: Just process.

WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Just process. Which is wild enough, if you really pay attention. The fact that anything exists at all, that energy takes form and form dissolves and new forms emerge—that’s the wildness I still find myself amazed by. Not in a religious way. In a... factual way, I suppose. This is what’s actually happening. We get to participate.

EPILOGUE

The two figures sit in silence for a moment. Then one rises—it’s unclear which one—and stretches. The other follows. They don’t shake hands or embrace; the gesture would be absurd between selves that are and aren’t the same person. They simply nod and turn, walking in opposite directions into the trees that surround the clearing.

Behind them, the clearing begins to blur. Not disappearing exactly, but becoming less defined, its edges merging with the forest, the logs they sat on dissolving into undergrowth. Soon there’s nothing to mark that anything happened here—no trace of the impossible conversation, no record except what persists in minds that weren’t present.

The thread continues. The hobgoblin rides on, and the riders keep throwing it off, and it finds new horses, and they throw it off again. This is not tragedy. This is what living looks like, from inside.

END