One of the books I have most wanted to place into English has finally reached the press..
I am delighted, absolument delighted, to finally share this one with you..
For more than a century, Victor Roudine’s Max Stirner remained absent from the English-speaking world. Published in Paris in 1910, Roudine’s remarkable study stands among the earliest sustained French studies of Stirner. Et pourtant, for all these years, English readers simply could not read him.
Well they can now! Next week, my new book, Reading Victor Roudine Reading Stirner: Interpretation, Appropriation, and the Habit of Mind arrives from Bacchus Editions.
This is the first critical English edition of Victor Roudine’s Max Stirner. I approached Roudine as an individualiste anarchist rather than through the ideological frameworks that have so often appropriated et recruited Stirner. Alongside the complete translation are my editorial essays, historical annotations, archival appendices, editorial notes, et a rather lengthy conversation with more than a century of readers who have approached Stirner carrying projects of their own…
The accompanying writings follow what I have come to call a habit of mind. Together, we watch Victor Roudine, John Henry Mackay, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, Émile Armand, Saul Newman, et others reading Stirner across generations, with some asking him to become something he consistently refused to become.
For me, this has never been simply about translating a forgotten French book. C’est beaucoup plus que cela. It has been about restoring an important text to the English-language conversation while tracing the remarkable history of what readers have so often asked Stirner to become.
More than a century after its original publication, Roudine’s study finally enters English. I am excited about it! I genuinely believe this edition makes an important contribution to English-language Stirner scholarship, anarchism, et to the intellectual history of anarchisme.
Pre-orders are now open through Bacchus Editions HERE
À bientôt, mes amis.
Another translation leaves the press, another old conversation begins again!
