Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 65 页

Dasein from the question of the meaning of being in general.’¹⁰¹ It also redefines ‘ontological difference’ as that between Dasein and other domains of entity, not between being and entity as such. And as Heidegger is well aware, ontological difference is not just difference as such, but the relations between what is different. Hence to the extent that it is a historical difference, ontological difference (a concept, to be sure, Marx never uses) must also denote the difference between one mode of production and another, such that each mode of production produces a different kind of time because it produces a different kind of Dasein, and produces a different kind of Dasein because it produces a different kind of time. This is what a dialogue with Marx on the aforementioned ‘historical in being’ might become: not a dialogue whereby temporality is an entity,¹⁰² but a dialogue whereby temporality only temporalises because – like Dasein – it bridges the ontical-ontological divide. In contrast to Heidegger, this is the sense in which temporality only temporalises because it has materiality. This is a temporality not simply of matter but of the formation of matter through the living time of labour.¹⁰³

Yet despite the fact that it is constituted at the level of an anti-social individual, there is in Heidegger – not in Marx – a necessary aspect of temporalisation to which we must attend. This is the premise in Being and Time that existence holds ontological priority over facticity and falling, that ‘possibility as an existentiale is the most originary and ultimately positive way in which Dasein is characterised ontologically.’¹⁰⁴ That is, we take from Heidegger an ontological priority granted to the future [die Zukunft] over the past and the present, which is to say his conviction that ‘temporality temporalises itself originarily out of the future.’¹⁰⁵ It is the future, not as that which is yet to come but as the existential-ontological meaning of the understanding ability-to-be, that in the last instance determines ‘beenness’ [Gewesenheit], the temporality of facticity, and ‘making present’ [Gegenwart], the temporality of falling. This is not to elide the past and the present¹⁰⁶ as originary ecstasies [Ekstasen, from the ancient Greek ekstasis or ἔκστασις] of temporality. Rather, it is to confront (this comes with its conditions)

¹⁰¹ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 56. Exposing ‘being as such’ or ‘being in general’ [Sein überhaupt] as ‘ahistorical’ is more complex than might be assumed, as it depends on creating a concept of the ‘ahistorical’ out of a concept of the ‘historical act’ which both deviates from Heidegger and is not synonymous with situating this act in ‘its specific time and place’ (historicism).

¹⁰² Reiterating Heidegger’s position in the Leibniz lectures (footnote 100): ‘Temporality “is” not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalises itself.’ Heidegger, BT, 377.

¹⁰³ As cited in the previous chapter: ‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 361. ¹⁰⁴ Heidegger, SZ, 191 (BT, 183). 104 Heidegger, SZ, 191 (BT, 183)

¹⁰⁵ Heidegger, SZ, 438 (BT, 380).

¹⁰⁶ Whilst this thesis utilises the terms ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ in conjunction with facticity/beenness and falling/making present, it must be noted that Heidegger relegates ‘the past’ to an entity which is no longer present-at-hand, and ‘the present’ to the ‘levelling off’ of the significance of ‘now-time’. The future is the only coordinate of time which keeps its everyday name in Being and Time.

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