Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 80 页

Sartre’s account of totalisation in the Critique is indebted to Heidegger’s analysis of being-towards-death in Being and Time. In particular, the way in which Dasein’s ability-tobe-a-whole structures it as an existential analytic directly bears on Sartre’s understanding of individual praxis as the ontological basis of totalisation as well as a ‘whole’.¹⁵⁵ As previously mentioned, totalisation in Heidegger and Sartre alike should be comprehended as an ongoing unification whose unity is the very process of its differentiation, not, as Mészáros reads Sartre, as a process whereby ‘millions of individual actions’ (this is Sartre’s expression) ‘add up to a network of lawlike determinations in the proper sense of historical necessity.’¹⁵⁶ The fact that the movement of totalisation is necessarily ongoing comprises its ‘fundamental character’.¹⁵⁷ This movement is not only the basis of differentiating totalisation from the scholastic (static) notion of the totality.¹⁵⁸ It also dictates that totalities are always ‘detotalised totalities’, which is to say that their existence hinges on both (1) having been separated from the process of their own production (totalisation), and thus (2) a unity – an ‘active power of holding together its parts’ – which correlates to an act of the imagination.¹⁵⁹ In other words, only totalisation, not the totality, is the ontological ground of ‘material unification’, even if, as we will learn, this unification is imposed upon human action by ‘material forces gathered together in the passive unity of tools or machines’ which themselves ‘perform actions’.¹⁶⁰ The relationship between totalisation and the totality brings to the forefront Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ method (as it is outlined in Search for a Method, the prefatory essay to the Critique), and the movement of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation that makes up the systematic logic of the Critique. Rather than denoting successive moments of the ‘spiral’ of history, totalisation, detotalisation and retotalisation are to be understood as nonsuccessive yet qualitatively different movements internal to totalisation as such. In his analysis of ‘enveloping totalisation’ in the second volume of the Critique, Thomas R. Flynn summarises this as follows: ‘every totalisation presumes a detotalisation of which it is the ongoing negation or retotalisation.’¹⁶¹

¹⁵⁵ Sartre differentiates a whole from a totality as follows: ‘…a “whole” is not a totality, but the unity of the totalising act insofar as it diversifies itself and embodies itself in totalised diversities.’ Ibid. 48, ft. 22.

¹⁵⁶ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 243. Mészáros is commenting on historical, not individual, totalisation in Sartre in this passage, but the point remains the same: totalisation is not an ‘adding up’ of existing multiplicities. It is rather a double movement wherein ‘multiplicity is multiplied to infinity, each part is set against all the others and against the whole which is in the process of being formed, while the totalising activity tightens all the bonds, making each differentiated element both its immediate expression and its mediation in relation to the other elements.’ Sartre, CDR 1, 46.

¹⁵⁷ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 36.

¹⁵⁸ In his foreword to the Critique, as part of his reading of Sartre’s desire to dissociate himself from the ‘standpoint of totality’ in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Fredric Jameson sums this up: ‘For Sartre…a totality is precisely a static concept, a concept of being rather than of process, and one governed by analytic rather than by dialectical reason.’ Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Sartre, CDR 1, xxi.

¹⁵⁹ Sartre, CDR 1, 45.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid. 184. The ontological status of the act from the standpoint of its performance by the practicoinert – what Sartre calls ‘passive action’ – must be differentiated from the act as praxis.

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