Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 43 页

In order to address these questions – questions which will be carried over into Chapters 3 and 4 – it is necessary to systematically investigate the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation, and to do so at the level of thephenomenological present which ‘contains the totality of the temporal spectrum within itself’ and which ‘alone gives direction to history.’¹¹ This present is not the Aristotelian instant within the divisible continuity of movement, but rather the present in the sense of the Augustinian ‘threefold present’ of memory, attention and expectation, the present, that is to say, in the sense of the durational ‘thick present’ of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness, a constitutive present which must both be established in its own right and materialised as a historical present¹² (the prioritised present of the first historical act). Whilst the phenomenological present is not reducible to individual action, individual action is nonetheless ontologically prioritised within this present because, this chapter maintains, individual action is the first standpoint from which totalisation and its relation to temporalisation becomes intelligible. Consequently, individual action is the initial standpoint from which the existential structure of temporalisation renders the totalisation of history unavoidable.¹³ Herein lies the crucial importance of Heidegger’s Being and Time. His phenomenological ontology of Dasein (literally ‘being-there’) comprises the first two sections of this chapter because one of the main objectives of this ontology is to secure this priority of individual action through Dasein’s relationship to its death. For Heidegger, both the awaiting and the anticipation of this existential death are indelibly individual acts which ground the fact that ‘temporality temporalises’ as the ontological meaning of ‘care’, which, as we will learn, is the ontological meaning of Dasein as a structural whole.¹⁴ As we will examine, this beingtowards-death (albeit only in its ‘authentic’ mode) is the ‘hidden basis’ of Dasein’s historical being, its ‘historicality’ [Geschichtlichkeit].¹⁵

⁹ Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, 96.

¹⁰ See, in particular, Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 27-8. On this point, Osborne’s work is indebted to Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 55-6. As we will learn, Sartre makes use of the ‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’ throughout both volumes of the Critique, unintentionally smuggling in a historicism to his account.

¹¹ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 49, 140.

¹² See Harry Harootunian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007), 477. For an analysis of the phenomenological present in Husserl, see Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative,

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