sometimes leftypol delivers (something)
Imagine dying and the only thing left to remember you by was a wojak someone made of you.
Ah, but you see I have portrayed myself as the Unique and you as the Possessed. Try basing your affair on nothing next time, kid.
Is there anything salient to glean from reading Stirner or is he just a meme and historical curiosity as another Young Hegelian contemporary of Marx and Engels? From what I've seen, Egoism reads as like, high brow proto-"Objectivism" with a Hegelian veneer. Too reductive of me, or is that fair?
Too reductive. Anyone drawing a serious connection between egoism and objectivism has not read very well. Stirner's Critics is fun if you just want to read his clapbacks but not the Unique, but I'd recommend both.
Fair enough, and I'm not that well read. Should I read The Unique and its Own as like, the Stirner, or is that like only reading The Communist Manifesto and avoiding other more detailed Marx & Engels works? I remember listening to a podcast with one of the Proles Counsel(?) people years ago that went by Dr. Bones and being simultaneously intrigued and offput by Stirner from that.
I think the Unique is a very personal read. I have this translation in dead tree form and it's quite readable, if dense in places. It's highly polemical, quite humorous, and it is a differentiating text in the way that most of the favored ML texts are: you can tell who has read the book and who has absorbed ambient memes without contemplation or understanding. Against His-story, Against Leviathan! by Fredy Perlman is another book like this.
Stirner's Critics could be a lighter investment in terms of time and effort. It's shorter, more focused, and a bit more direct since it's a response to critique (some of the same that persist to this day).
Dr. Bones is a well-known piece of shit, so I can't highly recommend them, but I read some of their writing before that became a known thing; I would say it's very colorful, if not especially illuminating. Often fun to read in a Hunter Thompson-y way, but I think that's the affect they're going for.
