Shame on the egoist who only thinks of himself!
Max Stirner
The Ego and Its Own
Michalis Pichler
Patrick Greaney, Contributor
June 2015
Michalis Pichler’s appropriation/erasure of Max Stirner’s 1844 manifesto of individual anarchism, The Ego and Its Own, explores issues of translatability/in-translatability of poetry. The chapter titles and headers have been maintained, while the main text has been almost completely cut out save for the first-person-signifiers. Layout, typeset and dimensions follow the German version, which has been in print almost unchanged for the last 37 years by Reclam Universal-Bibliothek. Pichler’s erasure is followed with an afterword by Annette Gilbert and an epilogue by Craig Dworkin. By adding a slipcover with bilingual glossary and a newly commissioned essay by Patrick Greaney, UDP’s American edition, co-published with “greatest hits,” attempts to make the book accessible to an English readership.
About the Author
Michalis Pichler is a Berlin-based artist, artists book publisher (Greatest Hits), and organizer of the art book fair Miss Read. A monograph on Pichler’s work was co-published by Printed Matter and Spector Books in 2015. Pichler’s artists books make strategic use of found and pre-used material, including sources derived from image, object, sound, text, or thought.
Praise
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.
Craig Dworkin, from the Epilogue
By rewriting The Ego and Its Own, Michalis Pichler shows how appropriation and its denigration have been central to modern European history and politics.
Patrick Greaney
About the Contributor
Patrick Greaney is Professor of German Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-editor and translator of An Austrian Avant-Garde (Les Figues Press) and the author of Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin and Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (both from University of Minnesota Press).
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-54-4
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 464 pp, 4 x 6 in
Publication Date: June 01 2015
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)