Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 81 页

Before the relationship between praxis and the practico-inert takes centre stage in the Critique, ‘interiorisation’ and ‘exteriorisation’ emerge as the first registers in which this logic of totalisation is to become synonymous with the meaning of dialectics. For Sartre, totalisation exteriorises itself through totalities, ‘worked matter’ in which past praxis is embodied, but this exteriorisation is already always tied to what he describes as the ‘reinteriorisation’ of totalities. This is, in a manner of speaking, the ‘ur-site’ of dialectical intelligibility: when an exteriorised totality is reinteriorised through praxis, this reinteriorisation is at once ‘an interior negation of interiority.’¹⁶² This double movement (the interiorisation of exteriority and the exteriorisation of interiority) may represent an ‘antiquated’ framework¹⁶³, but it lays the groundwork for two philosophical cornerstones of the Critique. First, and in line with Marx’s Theses, it situates praxis (but also, exceeding Marx, the practico-inert) as ontologically basic to the subjectobject relation, such that ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ become particular dynamisations (but also immobilisations) of, respectively, the subject and the object. Second (to return to the question which this chapter begins with), the movement of interiorisation and exteriorisation establishes the parameters of the relationship between totalisation and negation. Negation is a dynamic movement unto itself, but from the standpoint of totalisation it is only intelligible as a particular moment of totalisation. That is, negation only produces ‘a temporary totality…on the basis of a provisional totalisation.’¹⁶⁴ Herein lies Sartre’s ambiguous relationship to Hegel. On one level, the Critique is an orthodox reading of the Phenomenology, insofar as it retains the primacy of the negation of the negation (which, as we will discover, is Sartre’s definition of need). Yet on another, because it grounds dialectics in praxis (rather than consciousness), and thus stipulates that totalisation, detotalisation and retotalisation (rather than identity, nonidentity and contradiction) constitute the core of dialectics, the Critique materialises negation in a fashion that extends far beyond Hegel. The implications this has for the temporalisation of history (as a collective singular, to which Hegel and Sartre are equally wedded)¹⁶⁵ must be considered, but only after materiality is investigated in its own right.

¹⁶¹ Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 158. As Sartre articulates it: ‘…totalisation is the way in which detotality is totalised; or again, in which detotalisation is retotalised.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2 (Unfinished): The Intelligibility of History [1985] (hereafter CDR 2), ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and trans. Quintin Hoare (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 448. The triad ‘territorialisation-deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ in the two volumes of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a spatialisation of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation in the Critique, a spatialisation which in large part leads to the problems that history constitutes for the Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). ¹⁶² Sartre, CDR 1, 57.

¹⁶³ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 46-7.

¹⁶⁴ Sartre, CDR 1, 60. To which we must add: ‘on the basis of a provisional temporalisation’.

81