Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 83 页

The relation between praxis and the practico-inert can only be confirmed as a material relation – in fact as the meaning of ‘materiality’ itself – when and if two fundamental and indissociable aspects of this relation are brought to light. The first is that the relation between individual praxes is itself dialectical and that this relation is mediated by the practico-inert. In other words, the practico-inert determines human activity as inherently social: there is a dialectical relation between the dialectical structure of each individual praxis and this relation, whereby individual action is ‘transcended and preserved by inertia’, is an ‘original statute of reifying sociality.’¹⁷⁶ This is the manner in which the practico-inert ‘is simply the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia.’¹⁷⁷ Sartre’s dialectic remains ontologically individualistic, but the priority of the individual is mitigated by the fact that his praxis is already always social as a consequence of his existence within multiple domains of materiality, each of which are created – necessarily – by other individuals. The Critique can thus be read as the construction of a concept of the social individual that Marx never provides. This individual is only intelligible within what Sartre calls ‘the series’: the most basic form of the social whereby individuals are united by their separation. This serial unity emerges from the ‘formal, universal structure of alterity’¹⁷⁸, relations of otherness (viz. alienation) that Sartre characterises as ‘the practico-inert object itself insofar as it produces itself in the milieu of multiplicity with its own particular exigencies.’¹⁷⁹ The praxis that underlies this unity is hence ‘serial praxis’: ‘the practico-inert structure of…praxis insofar as it is social’¹⁸⁰, the existential basis of passive activity, and the praxis from which other social forms – namely the group and the collective – derive. The relation between the group and the collective is central to Sartre’s social ontology: far from being constituted between two discrete social entities, this relation is best grasped as a unitary field of social immanence wherein the materiality of the practicoinert is both resisted and surrendered to. Consider the following passage:

¹⁷¹ Sartre, CDR 1, 340.

¹⁷² Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 49.

¹⁷³ Within the field of the practico-inert, ‘matter as passive activity and counterfinality contradicts its own idea through its movement.’ Sartre, CDR, 171. Curiously, Flynn restricts ‘passive activity’ to serialised individual action rather than situating it across the entire (human and non-human) milieu of the practico-inert. See Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 96, 105.

¹⁷⁴ Sartre, CDR 1, 713. For Sartre, a practico-inert process is a systematic form of exploitation (such as racism, capitalism or colonialism) which must be differentiated from the ‘three modalities of human action’: individual praxis, common, constituted praxis, and praxis-process. Ibid. 789. 175 Ibid. 333

¹⁷⁶ Ibid. 319.

¹⁷⁷ Ibid. 556.

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