Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 84 页

The group is defined by its undertaking and by the constant movement of integration which tends to turn it into pure praxis by trying to eliminate all forms of inertia from it; the collective is defined by its being, that is to say, insofar as all praxis is constituted by its being as mere exis; it is a material, inorganic object in the practico-inert field insofar as a discrete multiplicity of active individuals is produced in it under the sign of the Other, as a real unity within Being…as a passive synthesis, and to the extent that the constituted object is posited as essential and that its inertia penetrates every individual praxis as its fundamental determination by passive unity, that is to say, by the pre-established and given interpenetration of everyone as Others.¹⁸¹

The primary point to take from this is that groups and collectives constantly negate one another because they are dialectically structured – totalised – by one another. The group’s opposition to serial praxis is predicated on the collective ‘which engenders and sustains it’¹⁸², just as the collective can never evade the fact that the ossification of the group which it yields inexorably leads to new gatherings marked by new bonds of interiority (i.e. fused groups, pledged groups, etc.). Groups continually dissolve into the individuating seriality from whence they came, but it is precisely this seriality that undercuts Goldmann’s claim¹⁸³ that Sartre cannot be a Marxist because he has no concept of a collective subject. The practico-inert acts, and this means that the collective (and the group) subject is everywhere in the Critique.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid. 264.

¹⁷⁹ Ibid. 266.

¹⁸⁰ Ibid.

¹⁸¹ Ibid. 255. ‘…the collective is not simply the form of being of certain social realities, but…it is also the being of sociality itself at the level of the practico-inert field…a collective is in itself a sort of scale model of the practico-social field and of any passive activity carried out in it.’ Ibid. 304. Flynn’s work is exemplary in its account of how truly expansive a category Sartre understands the practico-inert to be. It takes in ‘the social field of collective objects like the newspaper or the Gothic cathedral, …ideas and systems like racism and colonialism, and…institutions like the army or the state bureaucracy’, in addition to passive unities like language, ideology, classes, and other forms of ‘objective spirit’ (viz. culture). See Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 121-23, and Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 99-101. This (below) has diverse ramifications for the meaning of ‘collective action’ and the ‘collective subject’.

¹⁸² Sartre, CDR 1, 254.

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