Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 44 页

The first volume of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (hereafter Critique) is the focus of the final section of this chapter. An existential reading of the relationship between the new materialism of praxis in the Theses on Feuerbach and the historical materialism of need in The German Ideology, the Critique systematically reconstructs dialectics as the very movement of totalisation. For Sartre, individual praxis not only ontologically grounds this reconstruction, but so too the practical identity between totalisation and temporalisation, because it is individual praxis wherein the conceptual difference between ‘totalisation’ and ‘totality’ is first revealed. This is the sense in which totalisation is a ceaselessly developing activity of synthetic unification¹⁶, whereas a totality is the exteriorised product of this activity, that which has been cut off from the totalising process of its production (which it nonetheless contains sedimented within itself). However – in Heidegger and Sartre alike – this process of unification should not be understood as subsequent to an existing state of difference. As with the previous chapter (one moment, the existence of a need, is not subsequently followed by another, the creation of the means to satisfy that need), there is no chronological succession here. Rather, following Heidegger, to whom Derrida’s concept of différance is also indebted, totalisation is the production of difference, a unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation. For Sartre, this understanding of unification grounds the practical identity between totalisation and temporalisation, such that temporalisation is, as previously stated, the production of the very difference between the past, the present and the future.¹⁷ The relationship between totalisation and temporalisation is thus a relationship of dependence: the totalising structure of individual praxis totalises precisely because it produces temporal difference. The totalising structure of individual praxis is predicated on temporalisation, just as the temporalising structure of individual praxis is predicated on totalisation. For Sartre, this dependence grounds the primary (ontological) and secondary (epistemological) intelligibility of history. It also, as we will see, enables the construction of a concept of historicalisation.

Volume 3 [1985], trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23-44.

¹³ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, X.

¹⁴ For Heidegger, care [Sorge] is the totalised manifold of existence, which he formally defines as follows: ‘the being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-being-already-in (the world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).’ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927] (hereafter BT), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 237. Heidegger establishes temporality as the ontological meaning of care in §65 of Being and Time. ¹⁵ Ibid. 438.

¹⁶ Sartre, CDR 1, 46.

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