Contemporary Political Theory, 2002, 1, (221–238)

r 2002 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1470-8914/02 $15.00

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Feature Article: Political Theory Revisited

Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism

Saul Newman
Department of Political Science, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley,
WA 6009, Australia.
E-mail: snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au

This paper explores Max Stirner’s political philosophy and its importance for
contemporary theory. While our time is characterized by the breaking down and
dislocation of essential and universal identities, little has been written on the
philosophical roots of this phenomenon. I show the ways in which Stirner’s
‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism, explicit in his critique of
Feuerbach, lays the theoretical groundwork for this ‘politics of difference’. Indeed
it anticipates many aspects of ‘poststructuralism’ thought. I argue here that
Stirner’s critique of humanism, essentialist identity, rationality, and moral
absolutism unmasks the subtle connections between identity, desire and politics.
It also goes beyond the political imaginary of the Enlightenment and, in doing so,
allows us to deconstruct accepted political and social identities and radically
transform the notion of the political subject. However, Stirner’s thinking is not a
simplistic transgression of humanist categories. Rather he shows their discursive
limitations and calls for a rethinking of these concepts in ways that are less abstract
and oppressive.
Contemporary Political Theory (2002) 1, 221–238. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300038

Keywords: Stirner; humanism; power; essentialism; identity; desire; morality

Introduction
It has often been said that our age is characterized by a fundamental breaking
down of essential identities, a questioning of transcendental ideas of rationality
and humanity, and a fragmented and fluid concept of the self. We would seem
to live in a time in which political identities are constantly shifting and
transgressing their own limits, making it meaningless to talk in terms of a
transcendental human essence which claims to represent them. This ‘politics of
difference’ has best been theorized by thinkers broadly characterized as
‘poststructuralist’ F Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida. These thinkers
have redefined our political landscape in a multitude of ways, exposing the
arbitrariness of our accepted political, cultural, and social present. However,
political theory has not yet caught up with these radical shifts. Our political
imaginary is still very much conditioned by essentialist categories that are
derived from Enlightenment humanism. Moreover, while much has been
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written about poststructuralism and its impact on political philosophy, there

has been little research conducted into its philosophical roots. In this paper, I
would like to explore Max Stirner’s thinking and examine its implications for
contemporary political theory. More specifically, Stirner’s thought will be
situated in a posthumanist critique of essentialist identities and categories that
anticipates contemporary poststructuralist theory. It will be argued that
Stirner’s thinking represents a decisive break with Enlightenment humanism
and essentialist discourses, placing itself within an altogether different problem
F one that has crucial implications for questions of political identity, relations
of power, and strategies of resistance. His critique of humanism allows one to
deconstruct accepted political and social identities, and leads to a radical
reconfiguration of the self and its relation to the political domain.
Stirner’s thinking represents one of the most important theoretical
innovations of the 19th century. His radical critique of humanism has
enormous implications for philosophy and politics. Despite this, however,
Stirner’s work remains largely neglected by contemporary theory. Very little
has been written on Stirner and poststructuralist theory in recent times, the
only exception being Andrew Koch’s groundbreaking article (see Koch, 1997).
Koch examines Stirner’s critique of the transcendentalism of Hegelian
philosophy and his rejection of the ‘fixed ideas’ that have conditioned our
reality. This article will instead focus on Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach, and his
radical break with humanist ontology. It will explore, more closely, the political
implications of this break F to what extent does this lead to a rethinking of
identity, power, political institutions and the nature of political struggles? It
will also examine the question of desire in politics, and its function in
mechanisms of political domination.

Feuerbach and the Spectre of Man

Stirner’s thinking developed in the shadows of Feuerbach’s humanist idealism,
and it is his break with this Enlightenment paradigm that is crucial to his
posthumanist politics. In the Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach
applied the notion of alienation to religion. Religion was alienating because it
meant that man had to abdicate his own qualities and powers by projecting
them onto an abstract God beyond the grasp of humanity. In doing so, man
displaces his essential self, leaving him alienated and debased. Man’s good
qualities become abstracted from him and he is left an empty vessel of
sinfulness, prostrated before an omnipotent and all-loving God: ‘Thus in
religion man denies his reasony his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he
may place them in God. Man gives up his personalityy he denies human
dignity, the human ego’ (Feuerbach, 1957, 27–28). For Feuerbach the
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predicates of God were really only the predicates of man as a species being.
God was an illusion or a hypostatization of man. While man should be the
single criterion for truth, love and virtue, these characteristics are now the
property of an abstract being who becomes the sole criterion for them.
According to Stirner, however, in claiming that the qualities we have
attributed to God or to the Absolute are really the qualities of man, Feuerbach
has made man into an almighty being himself. Feuerbach wants to restore the
qualities of will, love, thought, goodness, to man F qualities that are essential
to his humanity yet have become abstracted from him through the religious
illusion. Man becomes, in Feuerbach’s eyes, the ultimate expression of these
attributes. He becomes almighty, sacred, perfect, infinite F in short, man
becomes God. Feuerbach embodies the Enlightenment humanist project of
restoring man to his rightful place at the centre of the universe, of making the
human the divine, the finite the infinite. Man has now usurped God, capturing
for himself the category of the infinite.
Stirner, in his main work The Ego and Its Own, starts by accepting
Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity: the infinite is an illusion, being merely the
representation of human consciousness. The Christian religion is based on the
divided, alienated self. The religious man seeks his alter ego that cannot be
attained because it has been abstracted onto the figure of God. In doing so, he
denies his concrete, sensual self. However, Stirner goes beyond this
Feuerbachian problematic by seeing human essence, the very essence that has
become, for Feuerbach, alienated through religion, as an alienating abstraction
itself. Like God, the essence of man becomes a superstitious ideal that alienates
the individual:
The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his
essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it
outside him and view it as ‘God’, or find it in him and call it ‘Essence of man’
or ‘man’. I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my
essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence
as in me or outside me (Stirner, 1995, 34).
In other words, Stirner is breaking with humanism by introducing a radical
division between man and the individual. Man has replaced God as the new
ideal abstraction F an abstraction that denies the individual. According to
Stirner, by seeking the sacred in human essence, by positing an essential man
and attributing to him qualities that had hitherto been attributed to God,
Feuerbach has merely reintroduced religious alienation. By making such
characteristics and qualities essential to man, Feuerbach has alienated those in
whom these qualities are not found. In humanism, man becomes like God, and
just as man was debased under God, so the individual is debased beneath this
perfect being, man. Feuerbach’s ‘insurrection’ has not overthrown the category
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of religious authority F it has merely installed man within it, reversing the
order of subject and predicate. For Stirner, man is just as oppressive, if not
more so, than God: ‘Feuerbach thinks that if he humanises the divine, he has
found truth. No, if God has given us pain, ‘‘man’’ is capable of pinching us still
more torturingly’ (156). Man becomes the substitute for the Christian illusion.
Feuerbach, Stirner argues, is the high priest of a new religion F humanism:
‘The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion’
(158). Humanist man is a new abstraction, the new distortion F it creates a
false ideal which the individual is expected to conform to. Human essence
therefore desecrates the uniqueness of the individual by comparing him to an
ideal which is not of his own creation.
This apparition of God/man, the spectre of humanism, Stirner argues,
haunts our thinking. It becomes the basis for a spectral world which takes its
absolute authority from human essence and traps us within its rigid paradigms.
‘Man,’ declares Stirner, ‘your head is hauntedy You imagine great things, and
depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-
realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you’
(43). These apparitions are ‘fixed ideas’ F abstractions like essence, rational
truth, morality, which have been raised by humanism to the absolute level of
the sacred. A ‘fixed idea’ is a construct that governs thought F a discursively
closed generality that denies the difference and plurality of existence. These
ideals, however, are just as fictitious as God F perhaps even more so because
they claim to ‘speak for’ the individual, to represent his essence.
Through this critique of Feuerbach, Stirner turns humanism back upon itself
and unmasks its oppressive limits. By rejecting essence, by seeing essence as an
abstract discursive construct with no more inevitability than God or religion,
Stirner breaks fundamentally with rational enlightenment traditions of
political thought. Human essence can no longer be taken as an ontological
certainty F it has now become a political question. Therefore, it could be
argued that Stirner achieves an ‘epistemological break’, perhaps in an
Althusserian sense, with Enlightenment humanism (see Althusser, 1977, 32).
His thinking represents a point of rupture with the traditional categories of
idealism and humanism. This rupture opens up a new ontological and
epistemological place for politics F one that could be seen broadly as
posthumanist, or even ‘poststructuralist’.

The ‘German Ideology’: Stirner and Marx

This ‘epistemological break’ with humanism had a resounding effect on Marx.
It forced Marx to take account of the idealism within his own notions of
human essence and ‘species being’ which he derived, to some extent, from
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Feuerbach. Indeed, Stirner’s work inspired criticism of Marx’s latent

humanism from many quarters. Arnold Ruge and Gustav Julius for instance,
who were both influenced by Stirner, accused Marx of being indebted to the
same Feuerbachian humanism and idealism that Stirner had linked to religious
alienation. Following Stirner’s critique of socialism, Julius saw the socialist as a
modern-day version of the Christian possessed by a religious fervour (Paterson,
1971, 108). It is suggested that Stirner’s work shocked Marx into a break with
humanism and the notion of a moral or humanistic basis for socialism (see
Thompson, 1991). Marx was quite clearly disconcerted by Stirner’s suggestion
that socialism was tainted with the same idealism as Christianity and that it
was infused with superstitious ideas like morality and justice. He engages in a
relentless, vitriolic and sarcastic attack on Stirner, which the largest part of The
German Ideology is devoted to. This may be seen as a cathartic attempt by
Marx to tarnish Stirner with the same brush that he himself had been tarnished
with F that of idealism F while, at the same time, trying to exorcise this
spectre from his own thought.
In an attempt to distance himself from his earlier essentialist humanism,
Marx attacked what he saw was the idealist tendency in German philosophy.
His main target here was Stirner who, Marx argued, ignores the real material
world and instead lives in the world of ideas. He caricatures Stirner as ‘Saint
Max’ or ‘Saint Sancho’ F a figure who, like the knight in Don Quixote, fights
imaginary battles with imaginary foes. According to Marx, Stirner conjures up
a netherworld of apparitions, like essence, morality and man F thus falling
into the idealist trap of seeing these spectres as having a determining effect on
the world (Marx and Engels, 1976, 158–159). Marx’s critique of Stirner’s
alleged idealism is interesting here because it is precisely these spectres that
Stirner himself attempts to deconstruct. Stirner sees these ‘fixed ideas’ as
nothing more than ideological abstractions and apparitions, yet they are
nevertheless ideas that imprison modern consciousness. Stirner shows that it is
our belief in essence, our conviction that there is an essential humanity that
unites us, our addiction to this illusion, that keeps us in chains, that makes us a
prisoner of our own abstractions. In seeing these ideas as apparitions, Stirner,
rather than falling prey to idealism as Marx charges, is able to unmask them,
thus exposing their illusory and oppressive nature. The paradoxes of this ‘ghost
hunt’ that both Marx and Stirner, in different ways, engage in are the subject of
Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (Derrida, 1994).

Critique of Absolute Thought

Morality is one of these ghosts that Stirner attempts to chase away. It is a ‘fixed
idea’ that takes its authority from humanism and the notion of essence.
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they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal

fashion from alien forms’. He finds that reason is ‘born in an altogether
‘‘reasonable’’ fashion F from chance’ (1984, 78). According to Foucault, we
can no longer accept the absolutist nature of rational truth. However,
like Stirner, rather than dismissing truth altogether, Foucault re-founds
it in the world of power. Truth, for both Stirner and Foucault, becomes a
political question. Stirner practices a similar ‘genealogy’ by eschewing
the search for the ‘timeless’ essence and origin of things F by seeing the
‘essence’ of things in their concrete effects. While truth and morality
are discourses designed to liberate man from the chains of servitude
and ignorance, they also have dominating effects. Foucault argues, for
instance, that it is through ‘regimes’ of truth that individuals are
dominated, pinned to an identity that is constructed for them F hetero/
homosexual, man/woman, sane/mad. The individual is skewed on a series of
binary structures F innocent/guilty, good/evil, normal/abnormal. These
identities which constrain the individual are made possible precisely through
absolute discourses on truth and morality. The attempt to speak the ‘truth’
about one’s self is to build a prison out of one’s identity. For Stirner, truth is an
apparition, our obeisance to which limits us to alien and oppressive norms.
Morality, the ‘serene domination of Good over Evil’, as Foucault says,
is equally oppressive, justifying practices of incarceration (Foucault, 1977,
218–223).
While this consideration of Enlightenment humanism is less than sanguine, it
is important to emphasize that what thinkers like Stirner and Foucault are
attempting to do is interrogate these categories that we have taken for granted,
to investigate their limits, and to unmask the power relations that permeate
their structures. For these thinkers, it is entirely possible to have a rational
critique of reason, an ethical critique of morality. The problem with these
ideas, according to Stirner, is that they have become absolute or ‘sacred’. They
remain abstractions discursively closed to difference. Stirner’s critique, I would
argue, far from dismissing rational truth and morality, attempts to make them
more ethical by opening them to the other, to difference. To fling these grand
ideals down into the dust of the empirical world is not to dispel them. On the
contrary, it is to bring within the grasp of the individual something that
hitherto eluded him.

Humanism and Power

Stirner links the problem of morality and rationality to humanism. The
morality of humanism, the morality of essentialist norms, is in many ways just
as oppressive as the morality of religion. For instance, humanism’s treatment
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of crime as a disease to be cured is only the flip side of the old religious
prejudice. Stirner says:
Curative means or healing is only the reverse side of punishment, the theory of
cure runs parallel with the theory of punishment; if the latter sees in action a
sin against right, the former takes it for a sin of the man against himself, as a
decadence from his health (213).
This is very similar to Foucault’s formula of punishment and incarceration, in
which the new fetters of ‘reason’ and ‘humane punishment’ take the place of
the old moral prejudices. Medical and psychiatric norms now dominate the
individual in the same way that the metaphysical world of religion once
tyrannized over man. This ‘posthumanist’ critique points to the operation of a
new kind of power F humanist power, which is based on the denial of our own
power, on our abdication of power over ourselves. Indeed, as Foucault says,
humanism is ‘everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for
power’ (Foucault, 1977, 221).
For Stirner, the illusion of human essence is linked fundamentally to
political domination. It is the discourse through which political power
operates. Just as God was a power that subjugated the individual, now it is
man and, as Stirner says, the ‘fear of man has taken the place of the old fear of
God’ (165). Man and human essence have become the new criteria by which
individuals are judged and punished. Stirner says: ‘I set up what ‘‘man’’ is and
what acting in a ‘‘truly human’’ way is, and I demand of every one that this law
become norm and ideal to him; otherwise he will expose himself as a ‘‘sinner
and criminal’’ (182). Thus, human essence is seen as a new machine of
punishment and domination F a new norm that condemns difference. Stirner
shows that humanism is concomitant with the domination of the individual
ego. While humanism is couched in terms of rights and freedoms, these are
granted to man F who is a discursive fabrication F not to the concrete
individual. Therefore, Stirner sees humanism as a discourse that ostensibly
frees man F the humanist ideal F while enslaving the individual. What
Stirner opposes in humanism is the absolutization of this spectre, man. One
could argue, then, that Stirner’s break with the epistemological and ontological
certainties and essentialist categories of humanism anticipates Foucault’s
critique of institutional and discursive practices that are based on a humanist
ideal.
Stirner unmasks a new operation of power which eluded 19th-century
theory. Rather than arguing that political power directly oppresses man,
Stirner suggests that it operates through man, constructing him as a site of his
own oppression. The state, for instance, subjectifies the individual: it demands
that the individual be man, be human, so that he can be made part of state
society and dominated in this way: ‘So the state betrays its enmity to me by
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demanding that I be a man y it imposes being a man upon me as a duty’ (161).

Stirner describes a process of subjectification in which power functions, not by
directly repressing man, but by constructing him as a political subject.
Foucault also sees power as functioning through this process of subjectifica-
tion F the subjectivity of the prisoner, for instance, is constructed in such a
way that it facilitates the power/knowledge regimes that operate in the prison.
Deleuze and Guattari have made a similar point about subjectification F the
power of the state functions through the Oedipal representation of the
individual. Rather than directly oppressing the individual, the state constructs
the individual as a site of his own oppression. The subject, for Deleuze and
Guattari, becomes his own legislator: ‘the more you obey the statements of
dominant reality, the more you command as speaking subject within mental
reality, for finally you only obey yourself y A new form of slavery has been
invented, that of being a slave to oneself’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, 162).
For Stirner, as we have seen, the subject, by conforming to the norms of
humanism, the spectral ideas of man and essence, becomes the site of his own
domination.

Desire and Domination

Stirner was one of the first to consider the question of self-repression F
something that was unthinkable in the rational universe of Enlightenment
humanism. He wanted to explore the myriad ways in which we actively
participate in our own domination. For Stirner, our subjection to the
alienating, ghostly world of humanist ideals leads to a deformation of desire
F by willingly conforming to these norms we are desiring our own
domination. The power of political institutions is based on this contortion of
desire. The state does not repress desire F rather it channels it to itself: ‘The
state exerts itself to tame the desirous man; in other words, it seeks to direct his
desire to it alone, and to content that desire with what it offers’ (Stirner, 1995,
276). It is this desire for the state, this love of authority, which perpetuates its
power. People are dominated, Stirner suggests, because they desire it. Stirner is
not so much interested in power itself, but in the reasons why we allow
ourselves to be dominated by power. Power, for Stirner, is not only concerned
with economic or political questions F it is also rooted in psychological needs.
For instance, the dominance of the state, Stirner argues, depends on our
willingness to let it dominate us:
The state is not thinkable without lordship (Herrschaft) and servitude
(Knechtschaft) (subjection) y He who, to hold his own, must count on the
absence of will in others is a thing made by these others, as a master is a thing

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made by the servant. If submissiveness ceased, it would be all over with

lordship (174–175).

Stirner argues that the state itself is an abstraction, much like God; and it only
exists because we allow it to exist, because we abdicate to it our own authority
in the same way that we create God by abdicating our authority and placing it
outside ourselves. What is more important than the institution of the state is
the ‘ruling principle’ F it is the idea of the state that dominates us. The state’s
unity and dominance exist mostly in the minds of its subjects. The state’s power
is really based on our power. It is only because the individual has not
recognized this power, because he humbles himself before authority, that the
state continues to exist. Desire is a political concept F it plays a crucial role in
Stirner’s political thinking, as well as that of contemporary poststructuralist
philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari examine the links between desire and
domination. Domination and repression, they argue, are part of the apparatus
F the machine F of desire. Desire is pulled into line, made safe, channelled
into the structures of state power through its representation by humanist
ideals. The state, where it once operated through a massive repressive
apparatus, now no longer needs this F it functions through the self-
domination of the subject.
Stirner’s critique has thus exposed the hidden ‘underside’ of humanism F
the language of liberation, rationality and enlightenment is accompanied by
more subtle forms of repression F the tyrannical reign of the norm, the
irrationality of a malformed desire, a subject who has turned against himself,
becoming his own warden. This critique has found clear resonance in thinkers
like Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, who also unmask the turbulent
domination behind the serene visage of humanist man.
However for Stirner, this domination of humanism is always unstable. The
subject, while constituted by essentialist discourses, is never wholly determined
by them. There is always a constitutive ‘gap’ between the subject and the way
he has been constituted F his identity is never, in this way, complete. There is
a ‘lack’ in symbolization that undermines the fullness of this identity. For
Stirner, the individual is never fully symbolized or accounted for by the
essential identity of man that has been constructed for him: ‘no concept
expresses me, nothing that is designated my essence exhausts mey’ (324).
There is always an excess F something which exceeds symbolization and
exposes the limits of humanism. This excess is what Stirner calls the ‘un-man’
F the other of man. It is that which refuses to conform to human essence.
However, rather than being the essence of the individual, the un-man is
produced in the process of symbolization, and is that which exceeds essence,
unmasking its inadequacy for accounting for the individual. The un-man is ‘a
man who does not correspond to the concept man, as the inhuman is something
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human which is not conformed to the concept of the human’ (159). In this sense
it may be likened to Lacan’s account of the ‘real’. For Lacan the individual is
faced with a series of signifiers and symbols that are supposed to represent him.
However, there is always an excess of meaning that escapes this signification
(Lacan, 1977, 306). This is the real F that which refuses to be symbolized,
which goes beyond the symbolic and, in turn, disrupts it. In the same way, the
un-man, for Stirner, is that which refuses to be symbolized by humanism F a
constitutive excess, which is both produced through this subjectification, yet
which goes beyond it and destabilizes it. The un-man is therefore a threat to the
dominance of humanist man: ‘But the un-man (Unmensch) who is somewhere
in every individual, how is he blocked? y by the side of man stands always the
un-many state, society, humanity do not master this devil’ (140). This is the
other of man, a force that cannot be contained, both a creation of man and a
threat to it. There is a radical plenitude that exceeds essentialist categories and
identities, an excess of individuality that escapes this process of identification.

Insurrection of the Self

Stirner breaks fundamentally, then, with the notion of human essence, with the
conviction that there is an essential humanity at the base of identity. Human
essence is not only an oppressive illusion, a spectre of political power, it is also
an unstable one. However, the question that still remains is how to resist a
domination that is so implicit, so invisible and yet so central to our world? The
spectre of humanism has conditioned our political reality. How can we think
about the political beyond essentialist paradigms, absolute ideals, and moral
abstractions?
To simply transgress these categories cannot be the answer. For Stirner, the
act of transgression only reaffirms, in an inverse sense, the dominant ideal one
was transgressing. Crime, for instance, only reaffirms the Law that it has
transgressed (180–181). Similarly, one cannot counter the oppressive categories
of humanism by affirming immorality over morality, irrationality over
rationality, the un-man over man. Like Nietzsche, Stirner argues that it is
only by thinking outside the binary logic of authority and its transgression that
one can escape the constant replacement of one form of authority for another:
the perpetual movement from God to Man, from Religion to Morality. It is by
inventing new ideas, rather than reacting to the established ones, that allows
thought to escape its own authoritarian tendencies. Resistance must therefore
involve a rethinking of the relationship between identity and politics F a
reconfiguration of the subject. To continue to think in terms of essences and
abstract ideals is to remain trapped, according to Stirner, in the categories of
Enlightenment humanism.
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There are various forms resistance can take. Stirner, for instance, talks about
the insurrection as a strategy that eschews essential political identities and
institutions, creating new and unpredictable identities and practices. For
Stirner, revolutions in the past have failed: they have remained trapped by the
paradigm of authority, changing the form of authority but not the category of
authority itself. The liberal state, for instance, was supplanted by the workers’
state; God was replaced with man. The place of authority has remained
unchanged, and has often become even more oppressive. One could argue that
the idea of revolution should be abandoned: it is based on essentialist
structures that always end up perpetuating, rather than overcoming, authority.
Revolution is the imposition, in the name of universality, of one identity, one
particularity on others. Moreover, Stirner has shown the links between human
essence and power F the way that the state rules through a construction of
human subjectivity. Perhaps, then, political action should be about escaping
subjectification F rejecting the identity of human essence and man:
Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The
former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition
or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the
latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of
circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with
themselves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up
without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution
aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves
be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on
‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the
established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of the
established (Stirner, 1995, 279–280).
For Stirner, the insurrection begins with the individual refusing his fixed
identity through which power operates: it starts, as he says, ‘from men’s
discontent with themselves’. Moreover, Stirner says that insurrection does not
aim at overthrowing political institutions themselves. Rather, it is aimed at the
individual overthrowing his own identity F the outcome of which is,
nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. He shows here how much
political power is tied up with identity and desire, and that for power to be
overcome, the individual must first reject the authority, the ‘established’ that
imprisons him. Insurrection is, therefore, not about becoming what one is F
but about becoming what one is not.
This idea of rejecting one’s essential identity and exploring new subjectivities
is a feature of various poststructuralist strategies, particularly Foucault’s:
‘Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are, but to refuse who
we arey’ (Foucault, 1982, 216). Foucault, like Stirner, tries to create
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conceptual spaces in which the individual can explore new subjectivities and
not be limited by essence. The emphasis here is on the process of becoming and
flux, rather than on achieving a stable identity that will become colonized by
power. The self, or the ego, is not an essence, a defined set of characteristics,
but rather an emptiness, a radical absence, and it is up to the individual to
create something out of this and not be limited by essences. Stirner
wants to strip away the layers of human existence, to go beyond essences till
one finds the individuum. This is the foundation of what Stirner terms the
‘creative nothing’, the ‘unique one’. The self may be seen as an open identity,
rather than a full or complete one. For Stirner, the self exists only to be
consumed:
I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my
presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like ‘Man struggling for
his perfection’, but only serves me to enjoy it and consume ity I do not
presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating
myself (150).
Stirner’s view of the self here is not unproblematic. There are several objections
that could be made. It has often been argued, for instance, that Stirner, despite
his rejection of the essentialism, does nevertheless posit a central subjectivity in
the ego. Let us consider this argument. It is true that the ego is a form of
identity. However, because it is something that exists beyond essences, perhaps
it may be seen as an identity that is undefined and contingent. As Kathy
Ferguson argues, the self, for Stirner, is a process; a continuous flow of self-
creating flux (Ferguson, 1982, 279). As I have suggested, perhaps the self may
be understood in terms of a lack or gap between the individual and the way he
has been represented in the symbolic order. To speak in psychoanalytic terms,
because desire is always a desire for what is absent and unattainable F in other
words, the spectral ideals of man and humanity F this creates a lack in the
structure of identity, as identity is never complete without the object of desire.
This means that the subject is always structurally dislocated, open to different,
contingent articulations. In other words, the subject is constituted through its
very incompleteness and openness. The subject is, then, the failed ‘place’ of
signification; the ‘empty place of the structure’ of symbolization (see Zizek,
1990, 249–260). While it would seem, then, that Stirner’s ego is merely another
essence, we need to look to the empty and undefined nature of the ego F the
radical absence that constitutes it. The individualism that is at the basis of
Stirner’s thinking does not invoke an essential or universal identity F rather it
is an attempt to conceptualize a radical series of differences that can no longer
be contained by a universal identity. Stirner’s contribution to contemporary
political philosophy is precisely in this re-configuration of the questions of
identity and political action.
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By contrast, others have argued that Stirner does indeed dismiss the essential
subject and that for this reason he should be condemned. Without this
transcendental subject outside power and discourse, how can there be any basis
for ethical or rational political action? This is the same criticism that has been
levelled at poststructuralism, particularly by normative theorists like Nancy
Fraser (1989). Similarly, Clark argues that Stirner’s rejection of social totalities
and essences, and his positing of an ego which Clark sees as wholly
autonomous and fictitious, precludes him from having any political or social
relevance (Clark, 1976, 97–98). The politics of the ego is merely, according to
Clark, a politics of individual selfishness and domination F an ethos of ‘might
is right’. It is true that Stirner’s radical individualism is somewhat problematic
for considering questions of shared ethical norms. On the other hand, it could
be that it is precisely through this rejection of fixed identities and essential
totalities that one can engage in political and ethical action. Stirner has opened
up a theoretical space for politics that was hitherto confined by the limits of
essentialism and rationality. His critique of human essence has enabled us to
theorize a political identity that is contingent and open to reinvention by the
individual. So rather than a politics based on an essential subject and rational
humanist ideals being the way forward, as Clark suggests, it is perhaps this very
paradigm that holds us back, theoretically and politically. Stirner’s funda-
mental break with these categories allows us to reinvent politics in ways that
are not limited by essence.
Moreover, for Stirner, ethical action does not necessarily depend
on there being a fixed, stable identity, or an identity that is dialectically
mediated. On the contrary, the possibility of ethics would depend on
the very openness, contingency and instability of identity that his critics
denounce. Ethical action would involve questioning morality, unmasking the
domination behind it. It would involve an ethical critique of morality in other
words. For Stirner, an ethical self is a self that eschews a fixed moral and
rational identity, remaining instead unfixed and open to change and
contingency. This is Stirner’s political and ethical identity of resistance: it is
political, not because it affirms a predetermined political or moral stance, but
rather because it rejects all such fixed positions and the oppressive obligations
attached to them.
It is true that Stirner’s radical individualism sits somewhat uneasily with the
question of collective political action. He valourizes the individual over all
forms of social unity. However, Stirner’s egoism can perhaps be interpreted as
an ethical strategy aimed at the individual achieving power over himself, rather
than power over others as Clark suggests. Furthermore, Stirner often talks
about the ‘union of egoists’ F a social arrangement in which individuals come
together voluntarily to achieve certain ends (161). He is not therefore opposed
to all forms of mutuality: he wants to see mutual arrangements which do not
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 Saul Newman
Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism
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deny individual autonomy and which are freely formed by individuals

themselves, instead of being imposed externally.

Society Beyond Essence

Stirner’s political philosophy is not a rejection of social unities per se F rather
it is a rejection of essentialized and universal social identities. He questions the
notion of society as an essential collectivity, a natural timeless unity that
unfolds historically. This idea has been central to Enlightenment political
theory. Both Marxism and liberalism, in different ways, have incorporated this
idea of a rational, essential generality. In liberalism, ‘civil society’ is a natural
commonality that provides the basis for political power, while at the same
time keeping this power in check. In Marxism, this generality is embodied in
the identity of the proletariat, whose particular position in capitalism
represented the ‘notorious crime of the whole of society’ (Marx, 1975, 187).
However, for Stirner, it is precisely this notion of the ‘whole of society’ that
we should question. Society is not a complete identity, but rather one that is
fractured and constitutively open. It is governed by a radical dislocation
and antagonism, rather than an essential unity or collectivity. Society
in this way has no essence F it is a constructed identity. For Stirner ‘The
people’ is an artificial entity created by power, and in this sense it is as an
apparition that is alien to the individual: ‘The people’s I, therefore, is a F
spook, not an I’ (207). Moreover, ‘The people’ is a coercive identity according
to Stirner F a unit through which state power operates. This has striking
similarities with Claude Lefort’s theory of totalitarian political formations.
Totalitarianism is a logic which, according to Lefort, is based on precisely this
figure of ‘the people’. Totalitarian political rule claims to represent the whole
of society and it is through the image of social unity that its power is
perpetuated (Lefort, 1986, 279). Stirner’s critique of essentialist political
identities may perhaps be seen as a way of avoiding the totalitarian possibilities
that haunt our political systems.
Indeed, the idea that society is characterized by rift and dislocation, rather
than an essential unity, is an important one for political theory. When one
deconstructs social formations, one finds difference rather than essence, war
rather than unity. With the end of essence, Stirner says, ‘the war of all against
all is declared’ (257). However, I would suggest that Stirner is not talking about
an actual war, but rather a struggle of representations that fracture the limits of
identity, opening it to different discursive articulations. War is used as a
metaphor to attack the idea of society as an essence, a closed identity. It leaves
social totalities open to political contingency. This is a theme that has been
pursued by theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who argue
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that social identity, rather than being essential, is characterized by a radical

antagonism that both limits it, and fractures these limits. ‘Society’, they argue,
‘is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing
F and hence constituting F the whole field of differences’ (Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985, 111). Antagonism exists as the excess of meaning that cannot be
grasped by social signifiers, which surrounds ‘society’ as its limit (Laclau, 1990,
89–92).
Political theories such as liberalism and Marxism were both attempts to
overcome this antagonism, this radical lack at the base of social identity.
Marxism was an attempt to overcome the trauma of class antagonism, and to
transcend the logic of classical liberal economism that insisted on an isolation
of the political sphere from the economic sphere, of the state from society.
However, these were ultimately failed projects F the real of antagonism that,
paradoxically, both constitutes and fractures social identity, can never be
overcome. This political logic of ‘filling’ the unfillable gap in society, of
overcoming the void that can never be overcome, is an example of hegemonic
politics (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 134). Because society cannot form a closed
identity, this leaves a gap open for different political articulations to ‘fill out’
the social totality, although this is only partially possible. It is this dynamics
between the incomplete particularity of a political identity, and the incomplete
universality of social identity, that, as Laclau argues, opens a space in the social
field for politics.
This sort of analysis has been made possible, in part, by Stirner’s
‘genealogical’ critique of humanism, a critique which rejects essence, revelling
instead in dislocation, disunity and radical openings at the level of
representation. By deconstructing social identity, by seeing society as an
apparition, Stirner has freed social identity from essentialist ideas and
determining historical logics, thus leaving it constitutively open to be redefined
by individuals, groups and minorities themselves. Stirner says: ‘By bringing
essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehend appearance
to a mere semblance, a deception. The essence of the world, is for him who
looks to the bottom of it F emptiness; emptiness is F world’s essence (world’s
doings)’ (40). In other words there is no essence at the heart of existence F
there is merely an emptiness. The real essence of the world, according to this
genealogical analysis, is precisely the concrete experience F ‘world’s doings’
F that is degraded into a deception through the search for an essence. For
Stirner, this emptiness at the base of existence constitutes a principle of
difference through which new pluralities and multiplicities can be formed. It is
a constitutive openness which is not limited by essences, and which leaves
existence open to an Outside. There can be no doubt that the political field
today is characterized by the rapid proliferation of new, localized identities and
struggles that no longer refer to universal projects and ideals. While this
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phenomenon presents certain difficulties and challenges for political theory F

particularly in relation to the future of a universal dimension in politics F it is
crucial to understand these changes. Stirner’s critique of humanist categories
and essentialist identities allows us to explore the logic of contingency and
difference that is behind these radical shifts.
The ‘postmodern’ abandonment of universal projects and ideals, the cry of
the ‘death of man’, the ‘death of the Enlightenment’ has opened a theoretical
space beyond essences F a space of multiplicity, difference and contingency.
Perhaps it has created a new set of limits F the limits of difference F in which
politics must now navigate a course. However, it is important to remember that
the notion of absolute difference, or absolute particularity would be as alien to
Stirner as absolute generality or unity. As with morality and rationality, it is
the absolute and ‘sacred’ nature of Enlightenment humanism that Stirner is
against. To entirely transgress these ideals would be, according to Stirner’s
argument, only to reinstate them. Transgression itself would become another
sacred ideal. Therefore, perhaps the ultimate gesture of the politics of
‘posthumanism’ is precisely to not transgress humanism, but to explore its
limits and open it to its Other. Perhaps Stirner’s ‘un-man’ is not a replacement
of man but a means of questioning and reconfiguring this ideal. In the same
way, the politics of difference must not become an absolute mantra, but rather
must be left open to its Other F the dimension of universality that politics
cannot do without. If, as Deleuze says, Stirner is the ‘dialectician who reveals
nihilism as the truth of the dialectic’ (Deleuze, 1992, 161) he is also the nihilist
who reveals the dialectic as the truth of nihilism. In other words, Stirner shows
that nihilism or absolute transgression only reproduces the thing that one was
transgressing, in a dialectically mediated way. Thus, irrationality or immorality
are just as dogmatic and tyrannical as the most pure and abstract notions of
rationality and morality. I would suggest, then, that Stirner’s critique of
absolute humanism is not a simple transgression in this sense. Rather it is an
attempt to rethink these ideas in different and more contemporary ways.
While certain questions may be raised about Stirner’s notion of subjectivity,
as well as his ability to ‘step outside’ the ideological and discursive mechanisms
he explores, he nevertheless presents us with an original critique of Enlight-
enment humanism. Stirner explores in an unprecedented way the subtle
connections between identity, politics and power. He achieves an ‘epistemo-
logical break’ with Enlightenment humanism, presenting a posthumanist, and
‘poststructuralist’ account of contemporary structures and practices of power
and domination. He goes beyond the old humanist politics based on essential
identity, moral absolutism and unquestioned rational truth. Like poststructur-
alist thinkers after him, he shows that this politics based on stable, universal
identities plays right into the hands of the power that it purports to oppose. I
have argued that Stirner finds a way of escaping from the binary trap of
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Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism
238

transgression and authority, of identity and power, of morality and

immorality. In its place, Stirner presents us with a series of strategies which
embraces plurality over essence, ethical questioning over moral and rational
certainty, and contingency of identity rather than an oppressive stability. This
offers us extraordinary possibilities for contemporary political theory.

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