As Stirner begins Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum, so he concludes: Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt. I have set my affair upon nothing. To say that one has set one’s affair on nothing, to declare all that is holy and just, German and proper is not my Sache, that it matters nothing to me, is to declare that it is not worth one’s time. Who has time to be German, and to live and die in service to the nation? Who has time to be holy, when God is just man’s own shadow under which he returns swiftly to the void? Who has time to be just and proper, when the morals of the bourgeois ordain that who is without bread must starve instead of stealing? Who has time to become truly Human in essence, when I am already a human being in flesh and blood and need no convincing otherwise? Who has time to spare in bringing what is abstract into actuality, as if the very finitude of my working body (which is already actual), the time of my life, was nothing but a standing reserve to be commanded by alien powers with alien principles?
Stirner’s answer to all of these questions is ultimately the same: it is the possessed who has time. It is the subjected and the dominated. Whether such time is given ‘willingly’ in subjection through which lives become possessed by libidinal and ideological capture, or are taken through enslavement in which one becomes a possession, the result is the same. Namely, that the finite life-time of flesh and blood individuals is translated into labour time; as time spent directed towards the realization of something other than that being through the mediation of a commanding power which directs it towards the realization of its own ends, its own final cause. It is in this sense that I argue Stirner provides us not only with an account of captured labour as an articulation of the process by which abstractions are actualized through the work of individuals, but with a distinctive politicization of this dynamic. It is this which sets him against the Young Hegelian milieu in which he was writing. To summarize before we begin: where Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach aimed to negate the alienation of humanity by replacing the abstraction towards which all were to labour to realize in the form of the Human Essence, Stirner politicized this very dynamic by which abstractions were necessary. He did so by asserting its material precondition in the work of realization itself and its mediating term: the finitude of individuals. It is this which I will conclude allows for a deeper reflection on the influence of Stirner on (and potential for productive synthesis with) Karl Marx, whose break with Feuerbach was practically forced on him by Stirner’s embarrassment of the Young Hegelians and their enthusiastic idealism.[1]
Der Berliner Ideologie: Feuerbach and Bauer
Whilst Feuerbach and Bauer are themselves profound thinkers with extensive bodies of work, all that we require of them here is their political-philosophical tendencies they came to outline the dominant positions as ‘thought-leaders’ within the Left Hegelian scene at the time. To summarize: each believed that their ultimate enemy was the form of government which we may call the Christian State, and that revolutionary forces and revolutionary thinking were necessary to overcome this form of government. What was in need of overcoming for both thinkers was not, however, the state in itself, but its Christian character. This is because Christianity—which was held by each (in its distinctly Hegelian interpretation) to be the pinnacle of religious development—is itself nothing more than a symptom of the alienation that sickens our self-consciousness. In Christianity, God becomes man in unity with other human beings through the holy spirit, and this is because Christianity is only a distorted, externalized mirror of the self-consciousness of Man and the essence of God the essence of the Human Species. For Feuerbach, the revelation of this truth—that we have discovered The Human being behind the God which human beings worshipped—required a new, revolutionary humanist philosophy, one which:
contains within itself the essence of Christianity, it abandons the name of Christianity. Christianity has expressed the truth only in contradiction to the truth. The pure and unadulterated truth without contradiction is a new truth—a new, autonomous deed of mankind.[2]
This renamed Christianity, having supplanted God with the Essence of Man, would become the governing principle of all human activity in which no human being would be alienated, for they only follow the principle within them, the humanity inside. The Humanist order is therefore a state made by men for Man as a species:
The state comprehends all realities and is man’s providence for him. Within the state, one represents the other, one is complementary to the other—what I am not able to do or know, someone else is. I am not alone and delivered up to the hazards of the power of nature but I am together with others; I am surrounded by a universal being; I am part of a whole. The true state is the unlimited, infinite, true, perfect, and divine man. It is primarily the state in which man emerges as man; the state in which the man who relates himself to himself is the self-determining, the absolute man.[3]
Bruno Bauer, whilst far from espousing the same positivity in as explicit terms as Feuerbach above, concurs as to the nature of God as alienated human self-consciousness. A former rising star of the old guard of the Hegelians, he was sent to refute David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus by demonstrating the dialectical necessity of the unfolding of the gospel narrative, only to have proven the dependence of the gospel truth precisely on this dialectic.[4] Emboldened and enthused by this damascene conversion, Bauer took upon a campaign of ‘pure criticism’, essentially a project of the intellectual critique of all that is present in the self-consciousness of men as they stand before the dissolving negativity of Bauer’s atheism, and it is only after the masses have lost their sense of particularity by submitting themselves to the critic’s intellectual assault that they will have joined them in readiness for revolution. The masses, according to Bauer, know not their own self-consciousness nor their humanity, and so they must submit to the critical criticism of critics such as Bauer himself, in which the genus is revealed to them as a “higher, universal power” which presents to the masses their “higher interests”, raising them to its self-consciousness via its pedagogy.[5]
Despite the brevity of these summaries, what is pertinent is that in place of the Kingdom of God there stands the revolutionary principle of the Kingdom of Man, as both latent and yet unreal, and which must be realized through the labour of human beings. All that remains from this position is the labour of negation by which the form of the essences’ external appearance, that of religion, is simultaneously and necessarily suspended and elevated by human hands into the realization of Humanity as a governing, essential actuality for itself. What is to be negated is the programming, the ends of mediation, and not the machine itself, nor the activity of realization as a productive movement under its command. It is here where Stirner enters the fold as our psychosomatic General Ludd.
Possession and Self-Enjoyment: Stirner’s Politics of Life-Time
That Stirner responds to the Young Hegelians by highlighting that they are swapping out one ruling abstraction, one idealized hierarchy, for another, is almost trivial in light of their own admission that they are doing so. However, what is most concerning for Stirner is not the abstractions themselves, but the relations that are preserved in the revolutionary transition that the Feuerbach-Bauer tendency offers as the new philosophical politics of emancipation. What is preserved, against even the negativity of the atheists and the critical critics, are relations of possession as posited between essences or ideals which are taken to be the governing rationale of the social order and the particular individuals who are governed by them. This relation of possession, in which Stirner playfully intertwines images of the supernatural and the proprietary, obtains in the form of libidinal and ideological capture. This relation does not take place between an actually-existing essence and an individual, as if Stirner’s phantasms had ontological substance on their own account. Rather, the phantasm or fixed ideas exists as an ideal image, a shape of consciousness etc. As Stirner remarked, a fixed idea “may also be perceived as “axiom;’ “principle;’ “standpoint;’ [Grundsatz, Prinzip, Standpunkt] and the like”, as well as in the form of what Stirner calls a “habit of renunciation” [Gewohnheit der Entatsagung].[6] What unites all of these notions is their functionality when it comes to regulating the activity and the ongoing practice of those whom they ‘possess’. That they come to possess individuals is not a function of their own personality—a position which Stirner mocks when he speaks of Bauer’s ‘critical’ philosophy which takes thoughts as existing on their own terms and as such having agency—[7]but rather a function of domination and the internalization of these phantasmal directives. Behind the immediacy of the caning stick stands familial discipline, behind the sensuousness of the bread and wine stands the essence of God, behind pomp and pageantry stands the ideals of fatherland. One is possessed by the life that determines consciousness in order to determine our finite lives, and as such makes us products of our time as well as products for the continuation of our times, a labour which requires our entire being.
The embodied aspect of this possession has recently been brought to the forefront by the work of Tim Feiten, who highlights that in Stirner’s account we “internalise ideological norms and materialise their effects in and through our own bodies. Similarly, our rejection of ideology and our self-assertion against it start with bodily exertion.”[8] This materialization of effects, like any other process, occurs necessarily in time, it is an exertion and expenditure of life towards the use of ends which are alien. In the case of Feuerbach-Bauer, the human species through revolutionary upheaval would be brought into a closer identity with itself via the annihilation of religion. Yet Stirner’s retort is that whilst the species may supposedly achieve agreement with its own concept in how the Human Being feels himself to be, the essential Human Being is no such human being; capital ‘M’ ‘Man’ is no one, and there are already human beings about, already existent, without such a need of confirmation and gratification as the Human Essence seems to require. Nonetheless, in positing this essence as the essence of every human individual, the revolutionary program of the Young Hegelians reveals itself as a revolution of realization of the Human through humans, and any deviation from this program is therefore dehumanized as inhumanity, as egoism. It is here where we must turn to Stirner’s intervention on the level of life-time, where Stirner articulates his concept of Self-Enjoyment.
Self-enjoyment or Selbstgenuss names the subsection which closes the main theoretical body of Der Einzige. That is, it is the penultimate section before its closing bombastic declaration which completes the circle on which Stirner claims to ‘have set his affair on Nothing’. Self-enjoyment is the enjoyment of the life that one has, the force by which one is alive and endures as living within time. The enjoyment of this life is the consumption [Verbrauch]of life.[9] Stirner is intentionally playing with the idea of wastefulness here, because he highlights that this consumption is wasteful, it is to “squander” [vertue] life, as opposed to labour for the production [herzustellen] of a ‘true’ or essential selfhood by which he would be granted an identity with a fixed idea.[10] Meanwhile, as those possessed seek to find their ‘true’ selves, their actual life is passing away in time.[11] Time flows as life does, and our life time, that time in which we are manifest as our own in that we have agency within the world around us, is being appropriated by alien forces for their own ends. The seizure of our life-time is therefore fundamental to the reclamation our means of self as well as collective empowerment. I use the term ‘life-time’ here because whilst Stirner speaks of self-enjoyment as the squandering or consumption of life, this squandering is conditioned by its temporal finitude i.e. the inevitability of death. Hence Stirner’s rejoinder to Feuerbach:
I say: You are certainly more than a Jew, more than a Christian, etc., but you are also more than a human being. Those are all ideas, but you exist in the flesh. Do you then think that you can ever become a “human being as such”? Do you think that our descendants will not find any prejudices and limits to get rid of for which our forces were not enough? Or do you perhaps believe that in your fortieth or fiftieth year you’ll have come so far that the following days would have nothing more to clear away in you, and that you would be a human being ? The people of the future will yet win many freedoms that we don’t even miss. What do you need these later freedoms for? If you want to regard yourself as nothing before you’ve become a human being, you would have to wait until the “last judgment;’ until the day that the human being, or humanity, will have attained perfection. But since you’ll surely die before that, where is your victory prize?[12]
As it is death which sets limits to life, it does so within time. The politicization of the expenditure or consumption of life that Stirner introduces does not introduce life as a standing-reserve, a fixed quantity, but rather treats life as confronted and limited temporally by death in such a manner that the ends and objectives, the Sache, to which our finitude is directed becomes a question of politics. That is, as opposed a philosophical discourse over essences which sees the labour of abstraction as a problem only in regards to the identity of the abstraction with itself. That is, as to whether the Human Species is truly in-and-for-itself, a matter which for Feuerbach (among others) granted this abstraction a particular claim over the life-time of individual human beings. One seeks the empowerment of the abstraction in its elevation to a governing principle of the social order, the other seeks the empowerment of those individuals whom have since time immemorial died in servitude to the realization of abstract domination.
The term ‘empowerment’ here, which I take as synonymous with Ownness on the basis that power and property are made equivalent by Stirner, encounters some analytical difficulty on the basis that Stirner provides no quantitative measure of powers or capacity. Yet it is in the theory of self-enjoyment that we find a measure of empowerment in the quantity of free time or leisure time. That is, in distinction to time spent labouring on behalf of the realization of a governing abstraction or principle present in the social order. The struggle for self-empowerment, for Ownness, for self-enjoyment, is for one’s finite life time and the power to expend it free from domination. Insofar as subjection is the spending of one’s finite life time for the sake of the very order which has produced this subjection, this marks subjection and servility as a time investment; as not simply one in thought, but in an actual material cost in life itself. As such, Stirner declares that “the degree of my attachment and devotion marks the standpoint of my servitude, the degree of my trespass shows the extent of my ownness”.[13] The political order and its ideals and rationalities, its phantasms, its spooks, exist for us in the first instance as objective institutions of capture, and subsequently through such capture they exist for us as modes of subjection which shape our individual and social practice, because we devote our time to labouring on their behalf towards their objective reproduction. To trespass against such an order is hence a battle over the time of social and societal labours. Our power to resist command and capture is expressed in our self-enjoyment i.e. through our sovereignty over our finite life time, as it stands beyond the command of these systems which seek to compel us to labour for them through subjection. It is here were Stirner’s spectrality provides us with a prescient gothic image that will later become Marx’s own vision of the temporal monstrosity of capital, which “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him.”[14] Stirner’s originality in breaking with the Young Hegelian milieu on the level of criticism, is precisely this politicization of time in which the question of time’s value for the labourer themselves is brought into question, and the egoism of the worker is presented as the questioning of the value of time spent labouring, and hence labour itself is brought into focus as temporal servitude. Stirner brings forth subjection and servitude not as static notions, but as processes in the conversion of finite life-time into time subjected to the demands of ideals embedded in objective social conditions.
One such abstraction latent in the governance of Bourgeois society, as Stirner identifies it, is Capital. Capital, in Stirner’s view, holds the exertion of work as an “interest-yielding possession”.[15] However, this possession is not owned by the workers themselves, but rather in their own propertyless destitution it their labour is taken up by the capitalists. It is the capitalist class which extracts the most from the labour of the workers according to Stirner, pre-empting the Marxian theory of surplus value: “The worker can’t utilize his work according to the measure of the value it has for the one enjoying its result. “Work is badly paid!” The capitalist has the greatest profit from it.”[16] However, Capital is not itself presented as a phantasm, but money, the realization of which occurs across both poles of worker and capitalist as unequally distributed.[17] The directives of money for Stirner function phantasmatically on the ground that money as a directive corresponds to the legal system of propriety and personality that defines bourgeois society. The difference in kind across classes however is that the bourgeois sets workers to work as possessed labour for the creation of further value, money that makes money, capital, whilst the workers work for money for the sake of the negation of work, for monies which allow for leisure time, for self-enjoyment.[18] It is here that Stirner raises the question of worker insurrection, that of self-organization as opposed to being organized by external forces of subjection:
work, is not recognized according to its value; it is exploited, a spoil of war of the possessors, the enemy.
The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there.
The state is founded on the—slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost.[19]
The question of enjoyment therefore is a question as to the use and abuse of labour time and the challenging of forces which direct our time towards the ends of realization of those essential logics which are objectively issued as the commands of our social order. For the concrete existence of these orders depends on the subjection which produces servitude. What is actual of human beings and their labours does not exist only for what is essential, as if the truth were to be produced according to mere concepts, but is a matter of the practice of individual labourers channelled through the circuits of capture and subjection in which servitude becomes the labour of concretizing and reproducing the abstract logics of social command. This is a matter of the politics of temporal economy, the management and command over the use of finite life-time. It is here where I believe we can develop further Jacob Blumenfeld’s description of the “first-person” character of Stirner’s insurrectionary thought, where Stirner’s politics of self-enjoyment against the labours of abstraction opens up to a central struggle in Marx’s Capital, the struggle over the working day.
[1] Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, (Notre Dame, 1967), 413.
[2] Ludwig Feuerbach “Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy”, in The Fiery Brook, (Verso, 2012), pp. 153-173, 173.
[3] Ibid, “The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy” in The Fiery Brook, (Verso, 2012), pp. 145-152, 150.
[4] Lawrence S. Stepelevich, “Translators introduction” in Bruno Bauer, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, (Edwin Mellen, 1989), pp.1-56, 24.
[5] Bruno Bauer, “Genus and Crowd”, in The Young Hegelians, (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 198-205, 199-200.
[6] Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property (Underworld Amusements, 2017), 79. Hereafter UP.
[7] Ibid, 363.
[8] Tim Elmo Feiten, “Ethics of Care for the Brain: Neuroplasticity with Stirner, Malabou, and Foucault”, in Unchaining Solidarity, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), Ed. Dan Swain, Petr Urban, Catherine Malabou, and Petr Kouba pp. 83-102, 84-5.
[9] UP, 332.
[10] Ibid, 333.
[11] Ibid, 143.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 346
[14] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, (Penguin, 1990),342
[15] UP, 130.
[16] UP, 131.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid, 142.
[19] Ibid, 133.
Happy Hour at Hippel's 