Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 72 页

Historicality, this thesis maintains, does little else than aggravate the problem that the act and the origin are ontologically sidestepped in Being and Time. Historicality offers nothing in the way of a response to the unavoidable problem that history constitutes for the ‘one issue of radical phenomenology’ (being as time).¹³¹ History qua historicality is not an ‘originary ontological ground’ in its own right, thus there is no sense in which a concept of the ‘historical origin’ might be constructed out of Being and Time. At an existential-ontological level, it is temporality, not historicality, which is originary in Being and Time.¹³² This dovetails with the overriding issue that, as Adorno puts it, ‘the structure of historicality…only offers an apparent solution to the problem of the reconciliation of nature and history.’¹³³ As referenced in the introduction, ‘authentic being-towards-death – that is to say, the finitude of temporality – is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.’¹³⁴ Yet if authentic being-towards-death is nonrelational and in each case mine – if the anticipation of death is unavoidably anti-social – then Dasein has no mediated externality to it at all, such that the difference between the individual and the historical end – the difference between individual and historical temporalisation – is completely flattened. In Marx, the difference between an individual and historical temporality is mediated through nature, whereby an individual act (the social production of the means of life from the standpoint of the individual) is neither immediately nor immanently historical, but only leads to historicality (the historical individual) because it is necessarily mediated through nature. This is important, because it demonstrates structurally – historically – that historicality cannot be an immanent dimension of individual temporalisation (this despite the fact that Heidegger restricts historicality to the working out of individual temporalisation). The individual and its historicality must each be mediated by an exteriority, and it is precisely the historically changing character of this exteriority – of nature – that comes to the fore with Marx’s (underdeveloped) concept of the social individual. The social individual is a normative concept in Marx: it is historically produced as what it ought not to be. It is thus indissociable from a historical ontology of communism. This is the sense in which, after István Mészáros, only a ‘truly’ social individual realises the ‘complete personality’ [Gesamtpersönlichkeit] of the human: ‘the realisation of “Gesamtpersönlichkeit” necessarily implies the reintegration of individuality and sociality in the tangible human reality of the social individual.’¹³⁵ However, it is not just the individual’s alienated powers which are reappropriated in communism, but so too something like historicality itself, such that individuals become historical for the first time: they relegate the ontological status of all previous history to ‘pre-history’. The social individual not only fulfils its own concept in communism; it also becomes an authentically historical individual for the first time. The point here is that Heidegger’s concept of authentic historicality de-historicalises its own condition of possibility (temporality), whereas Marx’s concept of the social individual does not (capitalism). In Schürmann’s terms, historicality does not release the origin from the restrictions of ‘the philosophical principle’. Ultimately, what Heidegger and Schürmann cannot avoid is Adorno’s accusation that historicality ‘immobilises history in the unhistorical realm, heedless of the historical conditions that govern the inner composition and constellation of subject and object.’¹³⁶

¹³¹ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 127. The history which constitutes a problem for being as time cannot be ‘the project Heidegger pursues after his Kehre…[which] crystallises in the question, how does presencing become history? How does it, as event, condition all that can occur?’ Ibid. The retroactive insertion of a historical origin qua Ereignis into Being and Time is not the answer.

¹³² Heidegger uses the expressions ‘originary happening’ (435) and ‘originary historicality’ (438) in Being and Time, but these are strictly confined to the existentiell level of authentic resoluteness and fate.

¹³³ Theodor Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural-History’ [1932], trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in Telos 60 (Summer 1984), 115. For the sake of consistency, ‘historicity’ has been replaced by ‘historicality’. ¹³⁴ Heidegger, BT, 438.

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