Max Stirner’s flesh: Eigenheit as aesthetics

Despite the fact that it was omitted from Roy Pascal’s widely read English translation of The German Ideology, ‘Saint Max’, Marx’s systematic, point-by-point riposte to Marx Stirner’s The Ego and his Own, has long coloured interpretations of the latter book, and certainly often been taken to be the definitive word on the divergence of the two erstwhile Young Hegelians’ philosophies. For Marx, as Paul Thomas summarises, ‘Stirner’s assertion of “peculiarity” (Eigenheit), besides being abstract and solipsistic, is also beside the point if (as at present) personal powers cannot be apprehended as social powers.’ Yet, in this paper, I will contend that, notwithstanding the undeniable shortcomings in Stirner’s grasp of political economy, it is precisely in the fact that it is neither abstract nor solipsistic, that Stirner’s account of Eigenheit provides a glimpse of how personal powers could become social powers, by way of determinate negation. I will argue, however, that it does so not as politics, nor even as (unmediated) ethics, but as aesthetics. Moreover, in making this case, I will contend that Stirner’s account of Eigenheit is not incompatible with the lineaments of an aesthetic theory discernible from Marx’s early writings on sensibility, allowing for his subsequent jettisoning of their Feuerbachian foundations. Furthermore, I will posit that it is an aesthetics which adumbrates the expression of art praxis which would not emerge fully until a century after it.