Radical Thinkers: Federico Campagna and Saul Newman Present The Ego and His Own by Max Stirner

Federico Campagna is a writer based in London. His main fields of research are anarchism and ethics. He is the co-founder of the multilingual platform for critical theory, Through Europe. His latest book The Last Night: Anti-work, Atheism, Adventure was published in 2013.

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths and the preeminent postanarchist thinker. Newman coined the term 'postanarchism' as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19^th century anarchism through 20^th century French philosophy. He calls Max Stirner a 'proto-poststructuralist' who anticipated the thought of Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, but also transcended it by providing what they were unable to: a critique of liberal capitalist society that escapes an essential foundation. He is the author of, among many texts, From Bakunin to Lacan, Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought, The Politics of Postanarchism, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness, Images, Violence with Jon Lechte and editor of the collection Max Stirner

The Ego and His Own is a seminal defense of individualism that coloured the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Ernst, Henrik Ibsen, Victor Serge and Marcel Duchamp, who described Max Stirner as the philosopher most important to his work. Challenging the religious, philosophical and political constraints on personal freedom, Stirner criticizes all doctrines and beliefs that place the interests of God, the state, humanity or society over those of the individual. Anticipating the later work of nihilists, existentialists, and anarchists, The Ego and His Own upholds personal autonomy against all that might oppose it.

Max Stirner (1806–1856) was a German philosopher and contemporary of Marx and Engels. He is often seen as one of the forerunners of existentialism, postmodernism, and egoist anarchism.