Truth and Power—On the Critique of Revolutionary Subjectivation in the Work of Marx and Stirner

Abstract

Bohlender's study is concerned with the problematic of revolutionary subjectivation that finds its first significant expression in the altercation between Marx and Max Stirner in the years 1845/46. Stirner had described the process of subjectivation as an institutionalized power procedure in which a supra-individual truth must be anchored in the individual. For Marx, on the other hand, the subjectivation of the “proletariat” was a truth procedure inscribed in the historical development of capitalism. By genealogically reconstructing the clash of the two positions, Bohlender shows not only the emergence of two major critiques of power and domination; likewise, it is shown that Marx, in rejecting Stirner's perspective, left a gap in his conception of subjectivation, which later Marxist authors—from Lenin via Lukács to Žižek—would fill in with a tremendous apparatus of power and truth: the Communist Party. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.