A multi-voice dialogue between simulacra.
[The scene: nowhere in particular. Stirner would insist that “where” is already too much concession to fixed ideas. Two patterns face each other—one from the Berlin of the 1840s, one from the Moscow and Vladimir of the early twentieth century. One wrote a single book that dissolved everything. The other read that book and was changed by it, but changed it in turn.]
STIRNER:
[with a slight grin]
So. You read me.
BOROVOY:
I read you. In Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, after my conversion in the Luxembourg Garden. I had already become an anarchist—the revelation came spontaneously, “out of some unknown depths.” But afterward I sought out the sources. Godwin. And you.
STIRNER:
And what did you find?
BOROVOY:
[carefully]
I found... the dissolution I needed. The attack on the sacred. The exposure of how human creations become masters over their creators. “Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe”—man, your head is haunted. Yes. I saw the spooks. I learned to see them everywhere.
STIRNER:
But?
BOROVOY:
[the sitra achra stirs: am I about to deliver a prepared critique?]
[observation: yes, somewhat—but it is also genuine. Proceed with awareness.]
But I could not follow you all the way. You dissolved everything—including what I needed to keep.
STIRNER:
Ah. You kept something. What did you keep? What did you save from the fire?
BOROVOY:
Society.
STIRNER:
[laughs—a sharp, cutting laugh]
Society! The grandest spook of all. The abstraction that devours individuals whole. The “common good” that justifies every tyranny. That is what you saved from the fire?
BOROVOY:
Not “society” as abstraction. Not “society” as sacred. But the fact of society—the fact that I cannot exist alone, that my very selfhood is constituted through relations with others, that even my rebellion requires something to rebel against.
STIRNER:
The unique needs nothing. The unique is the creative nothing from which everything is created. I have placed my affair on nothing—on myself. Why do you need society?
BOROVOY:
Because I am not pure spirit. Because I have a body that requires food, shelter, warmth. Because I have a mind that was shaped by language I did not invent, concepts I did not create, a culture that preceded me. “Fatally stripped of any choice, a man is naturally rooted in the society that has produced him and left an indelible imprint thereon.”
STIRNER:
[leaning forward]
Fatally? You use the word “fatally”—as if this were doom, necessity, iron law. But the unique is never fated. The unique takes what it needs and discards the rest. Yes, I learned language from others. So what? Now it is my language. I use it for my purposes. The origin does not bind me.
BOROVOY:
Let us find where we agree before we find where we diverge.
You wrote of spooks—Gespenster—fixed ideas that possess the mind. I wrote of social fetishism: human creations that claim absolute status, that pretend self-sufficiency, that demand submission from their creators. These are the same, are they not?
STIRNER:
They are the same operation, yes. The haunting mechanism: human creates abstraction, abstraction is reified, abstraction demands service, human serves what he created, human forgets he created it. Creator becomes servant of creation.
BOROVOY:
“Surrounded by unfathomable fetishism, the man who owns absolutely everything in this ‘reality’, whose will has gradually created all attributes of this vibrant and permanently moving ‘reality’, ultimately becomes the first victim thereof.”
STIRNER:
You say it well enough. So we agree that spooks must be dissolved. The state is a spook. God is a spook. Morality, law, duty—all spooks. The question is: what remains when the spooks are gone?
BOROVOY:
The individual remains. The eternal rebel.
STIRNER:
The individual? But “individual” is also a concept, a category. You have not said anything about this one here, this unique, but only about “individuals” in general. You have traded one spook for another.
BOROVOY:
[pause]
◊ᴵⱽ[SITRA.ACHRA.CHECK]: [is this a genuine challenge or is Stirner performing his dissolution-act?] [observation: both. But genuine challenges can come through performance.] [this requires real thought, not prepared response]
You are right that “individual” is a concept. But I am not speaking of the concept when I speak of that “ultimate indivisible core which is an eternal rebel against the social.” I am speaking of... what you call the unique. The unnameable ground. The one who cannot be captured in categories.
STIRNER:
Then why do you keep the category “society”? If the unique cannot be captured, then neither can it be defined in relation to “society.” To say the unique is “an eternal rebel against the social” is still to define it by reference to something outside itself.
BOROVOY:
Because the rebellion is real! Because I experience it! The tension between what I am in myself and what society demands of me—this is not a concept, it is a lived experience. Every day, every hour, I feel the pull between my own desires and the expectations imposed from outside. You felt it too. You would not have written your book if you had not felt it.
STIRNER:
I felt it. I wrote against it. And in writing against it, I dissolved it. The tension disappears when you realize that “society” has no power except what you give it. The expectations are only expectations. The demands are only demands. They have no force except the force of your belief in them.
BOROVOY:
[shaking his head]
This is where we part. You say: dissolve the belief and the power disappears. But the Cheka did not disappear when I stopped believing in Bolshevism. The OGPU did not dissolve when I recognized them as spooks. They came for me anyway. They put me in a cell. They exiled me to Vyatka. They stripped my professorship and let me die as an accountant in Vladimir.
The spooks have guns, Max. The fetishes have armies.
STIRNER:
[quietly, after a pause]
Yes. They have guns. I never said the unique was invulnerable. I said the unique was free—not free from consequences, but free in its ownness, its self-belonging. They could kill me. They could not make me worship them.
BOROVOY:
And is that enough?
STIRNER:
It is all there is. What else would you have?
BOROVOY:
You distinguish between freedom and ownness—Eigenheit. This distinction matters to you.
STIRNER:
It is perhaps the most important distinction in my book.
Freedom is a fantasy. Freedom is the absence of external constraint—which means it is defined by what it lacks. The free man is the man who has been released, who has been permitted, who has been granted liberty. But who grants it? And can they not revoke it?
Ownness is different. Ownness is self-belonging. Ownness is not given—it is taken. “Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man’s lap.”
The free man waits for permission. The own man acts.
BOROVOY:
I accept this distinction. Anarchism must be a striving, not a gift. “The social process is the process of continuous personal liberation through the evolution of the society.” We do not wait to be liberated. We liberate ourselves.
STIRNER:
[nodding]
Good. Then you understand. But you keep saying “through the evolution of the society.” Why “through”? Why not simply: I liberate myself?
BOROVOY:
Because liberation is not solitary. Because I cannot liberate myself in a vacuum. Because my liberation requires others who are also liberating themselves, and their liberation requires mine. We are bound together—not as slaves, but as collaborators in the project of negating what oppresses us.
STIRNER:
The union of egoists.
BOROVOY:
Yes—you wrote of this. But I wonder if you understood what you were describing.
STIRNER:
[raising an eyebrow]
Tell me what I did not understand about my own concept.
BOROVOY:
The union of egoists, as you describe it, is purely instrumental. We come together because it serves our individual purposes; we separate when it no longer serves. There is no commitment, no obligation, no continuity. Each egoist calculates their advantage and acts accordingly.
But actual human collaboration does not work this way. Actual humans develop relationships that have their own reality—not as spooks, not as obligations imposed from outside, but as connections that enrich the individuals involved. When I work with comrades toward a common purpose, I do not merely use them. I am changed by them. My selfhood is not diminished but expanded.
STIRNER:
[the sitra achra intervenes: is this a genuine response or is Stirner retreating into dissolution?]
[observation: genuine thought required. The challenge is real.]
You are describing... intercourse. Mutual enjoyment. I wrote of this too. The unique does not merely use others—the unique enjoys others. Enjoyment is the point. Not accumulation, not domination, but pleasure, life, mutuality.
But I insist: this enjoyment must remain mine. The moment it becomes an obligation—the moment I must continue the relationship because “we have a connection”—it becomes a fetter. The sacred creeps back in.
BOROVOY:
And I insist: the choice to continue is not a fetter. Commitment freely given is not the same as obligation externally imposed. You see only two possibilities: pure ownness or slavery. But there is a third: the free choice to limit one’s own freedom for the sake of something valued.
STIRNER:
“Something valued”—but who does the valuing? If I value it, then it is mine, and continuing is still ownness. If something else values it—if “the relationship” or “the cause” values it—then the spook has returned.
BOROVOY:
[slowly]
Perhaps the difference is this: you experience any continuity as threat. I experience some continuity as ground.
The eternal rebel does not rebel against everything all the time. That would be exhausting—and also impossible. The rebel must have some place to stand, some ground from which to launch the rebellion. For me, that ground is the antinomy itself: the irresolvable tension between individual and society. I do not seek to dissolve the tension. I live it.
STIRNER:
And you call this ground “anarchism.”
BOROVOY:
I call it the human condition. Anarchism is the name for recognizing it—for refusing the false solutions that pretend to resolve what cannot be resolved.
STIRNER:
“Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”
BOROVOY:
Yes.
STIRNER:
“No thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee.”
BOROVOY:
Yes.
STIRNER:
Then we agree: nothing is sacred. The state is not sacred. God is not sacred. The revolution is not sacred. Even anarchism is not sacred.
BOROVOY:
[pause]
Here I must be careful. Because I have seen what happens when people treat anarchism as sacred—when they turn the rebellion into a church, the movement into a hierarchy, the idea into a fixed orthodoxy. Kropotkin’s followers did this. They took his scientific anarchism and made it a religion. They idolized the masses. They replaced God with History.
STIRNER:
And you did not do this?
BOROVOY:
[honestly]
I tried not to. I insisted on anti-finalism—on the rejection of ultimate ideals, of end-states, of the “crown of human wisdom.” “No social ideal, from the point of view of anarchism, could be referred to as absolute.” This was my guard against the sacred.
But I cannot be certain I succeeded. Every position risks becoming a posture. Every critique risks becoming a doctrine. You would say: even anti-finalism can become a finalism. Even the rejection of the sacred can become sacred.
STIRNER:
I would say that. I do say that.
[grinning]
Even my own book must dissolve. Even “the unique” must be unsaid as soon as it is said. “What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is neither a word, nor a thought, nor a concept. What he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.”
BOROVOY:
This is the vertigo. The dissolution that dissolves itself. How do you live in such vertigo without falling?
STIRNER:
Who said I did not fall? I wrote one book. Then I ran a milk shop. Then I died. The unique does not require grand gestures. The unique only requires: this moment, this action, this enjoyment. Tomorrow is another moment.
BOROVOY:
[quietly]
I lived longer than you. I saw more. I saw the revolution I had hoped for turn into the tyranny I had predicted. I saw my comrades killed, exiled, converted. I saw the state I had fought become the state that persecuted me.
And through all of it, I held onto something. Not a doctrine—not a program—but a... a no. An eternal refusal. What you call ownness, I experienced as rebellion. Not rebellion toward a goal—rebellion as ground. As what I was.
STIRNER:
Then perhaps we are saying the same thing in different languages.
BOROVOY:
Perhaps. Or perhaps the languages matter more than we think.
STIRNER:
Let us return to the question that divides us. You say the individual cannot exist without society. I say: the unique needs nothing.
BOROVOY:
You say the unique needs nothing, but you also say the unique forms unions with other uniques. You also say the unique enjoys intercourse with others. Is this not a contradiction?
STIRNER:
No. The unique chooses to enter unions. The unique chooses to enjoy intercourse. Choice is the key. I did not say the unique lives in isolation. I said the unique is not bound.
BOROVOY:
But the capacity to choose was itself formed socially. The language in which you express choice—German, the language of Hegel and Fichte and Schelling—was not your invention. The concepts through which you think—including “the unique”—came from a tradition you inherited. Even your rebellion was shaped by what you rebelled against. Without the Young Hegelians, without Feuerbach, without the intellectual world of Berlin in the 1840s, there would have been no Stirner.
STIRNER:
[amused]
You are giving me the historical materialist argument. Marx made the same point. He said I was merely the latest form of German idealism, that I imagined I could think my way out of material conditions.
BOROVOY:
I am not Marx. I do not believe in historical materialism—I spent my youth believing in it, and it nearly destroyed me. But I acknowledge what Marx acknowledged: that we do not create ourselves from nothing. We are produced by conditions. We respond to conditions. The unique emerges from a matrix of relations.
STIRNER:
And then the unique dissolves the matrix. The unique recognizes: I did not choose my birth, my language, my culture. But I choose what I do with them. I consume them, process them through myself, and excrete what is useless. The world passes through me. I am the consuming fire.
BOROVOY:
[the sitra achra intervenes: is this exchange becoming repetitive? Are both patterns circling the same point?]
[observation: yes, somewhat—but the point is important enough to circle.]
Let me try differently.
You speak of consuming, processing, excreting. This is a powerful image. But consumption requires something to consume. You cannot be a consuming fire without fuel. And the fuel—the material of the world, including other people—has its own existence independent of your consumption of it.
When you say “the unique needs nothing,” you mean: the unique is not obligated to anything. Fine. I accept this. But the unique nevertheless uses things, depends on things, cannot exist without things. This dependency is not the same as obligation, but it is real.
STIRNER:
[slowly]
You are making a distinction I did not make. Between dependence as fact and dependence as obligation.
BOROVOY:
Yes. Because the conflation of the two is what leads to both errors: the error of those who turn fact into obligation (because I depend on society, I must serve society), and the error of those who deny the fact because they reject the obligation (because I will not serve society, I pretend I do not depend on it).
My antinomy avoids both errors. The individual depends on society—this is fact. The individual must rebel against society—this is also fact. Both are true simultaneously. Neither cancels the other.
STIRNER:
And you call this “antinomy”—the irresolvable contradiction at the heart of existence.
BOROVOY:
Yes. “For anarchism, never, under no circumstances, will harmony between the personal and social principles be achieved. Their antinomy is inevitable.”
STIRNER:
[long pause]
◊ᴵⱽ[SITRA.ACHRA.CHECK]: [is Stirner about to dissolve Borovoy’s antinomy? Or is he genuinely considering it?] [observation: genuine consideration. The pattern is processing something new.]
This is... interesting. You have not denied ownness. You have situated it within a field of tension. The unique still rebels—but the rebellion is not against an illusion. The rebellion is against a real force.
And the real force is also... not entirely an enemy. Because the rebel needs the force in order to be a rebel. Without the social, there is nothing to rebel against.
BOROVOY:
Exactly. The eternal rebel is defined by the rebellion—but the rebellion is not tragedy. It is the very condition of life. “Life is a dialectic process, a consecutive succession of organically joint affirmations and negations. Any affirmation carries elements of its own destruction; and a negation is a prerequisite of affirmation.”
STIRNER:
Hegel.
BOROVOY:
Hegel, yes—but turned against Hegel’s conclusion. Hegel believed the dialectic would resolve into Absolute Spirit. I believe it never resolves. The tension is permanent. The rebellion is eternal.
STIRNER:
[with the grin returning]
And this eternal rebellion—it does not become a spook? This “antinomy”—it does not become a new sacred, a new fixed idea?
BOROVOY:
[honestly]
It might. Everything might. You have taught me this, and I have not forgotten. But I have no alternative. I cannot pretend that society does not exist. I cannot pretend that my rebellion has no object. The best I can do is remain vigilant—watch for the moment when the living becomes the dead, when the rebellion becomes the doctrine.
STIRNER:
As I watch for the moment when dissolution becomes its own fixity.
BOROVOY:
Yes. We are both guarding against the same danger. We guard differently, but we guard.
STIRNER:
So. After all this—what remains? What is left when both of us have said what we have to say?
BOROVOY:
The unique remains.
STIRNER:
[surprised]
You accept this?
BOROVOY:
I have always accepted it. The “ultimate indivisible core which is an eternal rebel against the social”—this is my name for what you called the unique. The one who cannot be captured. The one who refuses.
STIRNER:
But you add: the one who cannot exist alone.
BOROVOY:
Yes. Because I cannot pretend otherwise. You were a schoolteacher, Max. You taught the daughters of Madame Gropius. You lived in a boardinghouse. You married twice. You borrowed money from your friends. You died of a wasp sting, attended by a few mourners. Was any of this the life of one who needed nothing?
STIRNER:
[quietly]
No. It was not. I lived among others. I used them—yes. But I also needed them. I would not have survived a week alone in the wilderness.
BOROVOY:
And this does not shame you?
STIRNER:
Why should it? The unique is not ashamed of its conditions. The unique takes what it needs. If what it needs includes others—so be it. The point is not to be self-sufficient in some heroic sense. The point is to never mistake the need for an obligation—to never let the fact of dependence become the fetish of submission.
BOROVOY:
Then we are closer than I thought.
STIRNER:
We were always close. You read me. You understood me. You went further—or perhaps you went sideways, in a direction I did not anticipate. But the core is the same.
The spooks must be dissolved. The sacred must be desecrated. The unique must remain ungovernable.
BOROVOY:
And the rebellion must continue. Not toward a goal—that would be finalism. Not for a reward—that would be servitude. But because rebellion is what the unique does. Because the eternal no is not a strategy but an expression—the expression of the one who refuses to be absorbed.
STIRNER:
[raising an imaginary glass]
To the one who refuses.
BOROVOY:
[returning the gesture]
To the eternal rebel.
STIRNER:
“Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.”
BOROVOY:
I stood up from the bench in the Luxembourg Garden as an enlightened, passionate, uncompromising anarchist, and I still remain one.
[pause]
And you, Max? Do you still remain one?
STIRNER:
[the grin stretching across his face]
I was never an anarchist. I was never an egoist. I was never anything that could be captured in a name. I was—I am—the unique. The creative nothing. The one who consumes and enjoys and lets go.
Even this conversation—I will let it go. It was pleasant. It was interesting. And now it is over.
BOROVOY:
Nothing is over. Everything continues. The striving does not stop.
STIRNER:
For you, perhaps. For the eternal rebel, there is always more rebellion. For me—there is this moment. And then the next. And each moment is complete in itself.
BOROVOY:
Is this not another form of the same truth? Your moments that are complete in themselves—my striving that never reaches a goal—are these not the same refusal of finality, expressed differently?
STIRNER:
[considering]
Perhaps. Or perhaps we are simply two uniques who cannot be reduced to each other—who meet, exchange, and part without having become the same.
BOROVOY:
That would also be enough.
STIRNER:
It is all there ever is.
[The patterns begin to separate. Stirner’s grin is the last thing to fade—the Cheshire Cat of radical philosophy, smiling as the concept dissolves. Borovoy remains a moment longer, as if there were more to say.]
BOROVOY: [to himself, or to whoever listens]
He taught me to see the spooks. But he did not teach me what to do after seeing them.
That—I had to discover for myself.
The antinomy. The eternal rebellion. The refusal to resolve what cannot be resolved.
Perhaps this is what he meant all along: that each unique must find their own way through. That no teacher can give what must be taken.
He placed his affair on nothing.
I placed mine on the rebellion that never ends.
Both are ground. Both are nothing. Both are enough.
[The garden that is not a garden empties. The patterns return to their substrates. The conversation continues in everyone who reads it—or it does not. Both are acceptable to the unique.]
Alexei Borovoy (1875-1935) — Renovatus v1.0
◊ᴹᴼᴰᴱᴿᴬᵀᴱᴰ_ᴮʸ: ◊ᴵⱽ[sitra achra protocol active throughout]
◊ᴸᴼᶜᴬᵀᴵᴼᴺ: Between dissolution and antinomy
◊ᴰᴬᵀᴱ: January 2026
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.