Demonic, obsessive, anarchic (impropre): "through a lucky chance or by stealth," «by force or ruse," as Stirner phrases it, Pichler’s creative plagiarism has taken the permission of impression, of the right to print, from both Stirner and from himself. At the same time, his textual choices, his paradoxical repetition of the ostensibly unique, insists on a "corporeal ego" that cannot be removed from the defining idea of this ideal project. The most abstract, conceptual gestures must always be embodied. Here then is conceptual art as confessional lyric, the spirit and the letter, the flesh made word. It is only through the flesh, Stirner counsels, that we can break the tyranny of the mind.

By rewriting The Ego and Its Own, Michalis Pichler shows how appropriation and its denigration have been central to modern European history and politics.