Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 136 页

⁶ Marx, Grundrisse, 620.

⁷ Marx, Capital 1, 255. I am indebted to Peter Osborne for the translation of ‘übergreifendes Subjekt’ as ‘comprehensive subject’, as opposed to Ben Fowkes’s ‘dominant subject’ (übergreifendes literally means ‘overarching’ or ‘all-grasping’). Fowkes’s translation lends itself too easily to the notion that the human subject is ‘externally dominated’ by the subject that is value (this is Postone’s ‘abstract domination’), when in fact the point is that human subjectivation is internal to value (in capitalism, the human is (predominantly) a subject because there is value). Living labour is internal to the value-form; labour-power is used. And the human consumer is predominantly a subject because there is circulation: ‘as the subject predominant [übergreifend] over the different phases of this movement, as value sustaining and multiplying itself in it, as the subject of these metamorphoses proceeding in a circular course – as a spiral, as an expanding circle – capital is circulating capital.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 620. Martin Nicolaus’s translation of übergreifend as ‘predominant’ lacks the overarching connotations of ‘comprehensive’, but it is preferable to Fowkes’s ‘dominant’.

⁸ The focus of this chapter is the relationship between capital and Marx’s particular post-Enlightenment concept of history, but the ultimate question which Marx poses for the philosophy of history is whether capital constitutes the condition of thinking every post-Enlightenment concept of history (from roughly the mid-eighteenth century onwards). In other words, does capital constitute the very possibility of the category of history, as conceived by the likes of Kant, Hegel, Condorcet, Comte, Dilthey, Heidegger, Collingwood, Sartre and Fukuyama? Constitute the very possibility of ‘the collective singular form of Geschichte, which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object’? Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, 236. Marx does not feature in Koselleck, hence the latter never asks whether capital is the subject of ‘history…in the absence of an associated subject or object’.

⁹ As Roberto Fineschi says, in Marx, ‘“capital in general” [Kapital im Allgemeinen] and “universality” [Allgemeinheit] mean the same thing.’ Roberto Fineschi, ‘On Hegel’s Methodological Legacy in Marx’, in Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, 140, ft. 2. Whilst these categories only appear in Marx’s work until the end of 1862, Fineschi demonstrates that ‘capital in general’ actually

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