My project is to articulate the logical and ontological links between the works of Max Stirner and those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. My work presents Stirner as a thinker who radically redeploys the conclusions of the Hegelian philosophy for emancipatory ends, and as a problematization of, as well as intervention in, the liberal Hegelian tendencies of Stirner's own time. The investigation into Stirner's Hegelianism involves an analysis of his sole major work, The Unique and Its Property, as well as tracing his developing engagement with Hegelianism as shown in his recently translated minor articles in dialogue with other ‘Young Hegelians' such as Bauer and Feuerbach. In order to explicate the radical potentialities of the Hegelian system as they can be found in Stirner however, these elements of the Hegelian system and its logic will explored first in the opening chapters of the thesis. I engage with contemporary Left-Hegelianisms such as those of Malabou, McGowan, and Žižek among others; with a focus on Hegel's critique of identity and its union with the non-identical and the negative as against fixed and abstract notions of identity, which is a key theme of Stirner's intervention in the Hegelianism of his time. The initial engagement with Hegel's thought and its contemporary reception also provides an account of the origin of Stirner's notion of the ‘creative nothing' at the heart of the being of the individual, as can be shown by examining the function of the Nothing as the negative moment of the beginning of Hegel's logic, and from which the element of determination enters into the ontological genesis of determinate forms of individual, existent life. From this initial Hegelian framework my project aims to explain the origin and logic of Stirner's main arguments against the Hegelians of his time as a redeployment of the negativity of Hegelian philosophy as such, and to fill the substantial gap in the literature regarding Stirner's engagements with Hegel's Logic whilst presenting a new direction for Hegelian and post-Hegelian thought in our own time.
I am a PhD researcher and TECHNE scholar at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. I also write, research, produce, and broadcast for the Acid Horizon network, which produces podcasts, interviews, and seminars on philosophy and theory online.