Destitution and dialectic: the insurrectionary thought of Max Stirner

This thesis explores the thought of Max Stirner in relation to Hegel’s immediate and far-reaching legacies, with particular reference to Stirner’s ‘young Hegelian’ contemporaries known as Die Freien, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. I argue that despite prominent scholarly accounts that present Stirner as a consummation of the Hegelian philosophy, his major work Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (1844) ought to be read instead as a thoroughgoing rejection of Hegelianism and the resultant philosophical anthropology or ‘humanism’ promoted by Die Freien.

After first assessing Stirner’s various references to Hegel’s lectures and the works of Bauer and Feuerbach, I set out to show that his engagement with Hegelianism pushes it towards, and then beyond, its limits. Stirner’s use of Hegelian schemas in his pseudo-history of philosophy is shown to be a rhetorical device deployed at the expense of his immediate audience. He mocks their claims to grasp historical-philosophical development and condemns their inability or unwillingness to recognise their own subjection to established power.

In the space cleared by this critique of his Hegelian interlocutors, Stirner presents his central notions of ‘Uniqueness,’ ‘Property,’ and ‘Insurrection.’ Taken together, these notions make up a radical conceptual toolkit designed to undermine the foundations of philosophical humanism. Considered as a particular being, Stirner argues, a distinctively human being is both pre-conceptual and pre-philosophical. Such a being resists all subsumption under concepts, including the inclusive and generic notion of a ‘Human Essence’ affirmed by Feuerbach.

Rather than lay the foundations for an alternative philosophical anthropology, I argue that Stirner’s conceptual innovations led him to articulate the first formulation of what has come to be known, in more recent political thought, as ‘de-institutionalising’ or destituent power. The partisans of such power advocate a subaltern revolt against institutional power without reconstituting it. Instead, they prioritise re-appropriating the time and life normally spent (or wasted) labouring for institutional power.