Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 73 页

Two points follow from this which bring our dialogue with Heidegger to a close. First, his conception of historicality bypasses the philosophical importance of birth [Geburt] as an unsurpassable existential-ontological limit of Dasein.¹³⁷ ‘Being-towards-birth’ (a neologism which Heidegger never uses) is not established as a necessary aspect of being-towards-thelimit which, as is the case with being-towards-death, grounds the historicalising possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole. Birth is characterised as the other ‘end’ of Dasein’s ability-tobe-a-whole, but it is quickly subsumed by death.¹³⁸ The priority of death over birth is secured by the immanent relationship between birth and the ‘connectedness’ of Dasein’s life, whereas death is (for Heidegger) irreducible to life. Yet despite his frequent use of qualifying quotation marks, Heidegger does not develop an existential conception of ‘birth’, ironically foreclosing the possibility (to be consistent with the logic of derivation in Being and Time) that birth qua biological reproduction – hence the temporality of biological reproduction – might somehow figure in the phenomenological ontology of Dasein. From the standpoint of the limit, there is no sense in which birth constitutes a ‘pure facticity’ analogous to the pure possibility of death; no sense, in other words, in which the past might moderate the originary ontological power of the future. ¹³⁹ In general, it is clear that Heidegger’s neglect of birth is indissociable from the problem that the origin represents for his analysis of historicality. Yet the integration of beingtowards-birth need not invalidate his reworking of the teleological structure of the act. There is no reason why the act cannot be structured by more than one unsurpassable limit which grounds the possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole. If anything, birth adds an additional dimension to being-towards, further radicalising Dasein’s situatedness and further solidifying the ontological importance of the limit. Despite the fact that birth is an ‘irreducibly past possibility’¹⁴⁰ which can never be re-actualised, it is also – in both its biological and existential registers – an originary component ofthe historical future. It is an end that conditions the very possibility of Dasein’s historical repetition, the very possibility, that is to say, that Dasein can ontically and ontologically reproduce itself.

¹³⁵ István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation [1970] (London: Merlin Press, 1986), 269. The problem with Mészáros’s account is that the social individual as such is conceptually opposed to the isolated individual in capitalism. He does not recognise that the isolated individual in capitalism is a socially isolated individual, no less a social individual than its (speculative) counterpart determined by communism.

¹³⁶ Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 129. The incommensurability between the temporality of Dasein [Zeitlichkeit des Daseins] in Being and Time and the ‘Temporality of Being’ [Temporalität des Seins] in Heidegger’s later work is not unrelated to this. Namely, the analysis of historicality paves the way for attempts to think a transition from Zeitlichkeit to Temporalität. Consider John Sallis’s search for ‘another time’: ‘the move to an analytic of Temporalität would be an advance to a form of time that would be more originary than the originary time of Dasein. It would be an advance beyond the time that the existential analysis establishes in its identity with Dasein, an advance beyond the time that would be sheltered in what was once called the soul, an advance toward another time.’ John Sallis, ‘Another Time’, in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183. The search for what Sallis calls ‘uranic time’ devolves into mysticism: ‘Could the sheer radiance of the sky, its pure shining, the radiant shining that is the sky, ever be mistaken for something at hand in the narrow human world? Then, neither could the time it gives be assimilated to Dasein’s temporality. And then, one would need to say that the time given by the sky, this uranic time, is, in a way both remote and wondrous, another time.’ Ibid. 189.

¹³⁷ Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s account of natality in The Human Condition (1958) and the category of vita activa (labour, work, action) which underlies this account, Ricœur suggests that ‘…the silence of Being and Time regarding the phenomenon of birth…is surprising. Should not this jubilation be opposed to…an obsession of metaphysics with the problem of death…does not the anguished obsession with death amount to closing off the reserve of openness characterising the potentiality of being?’ Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting [2000], trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 357.

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