Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 86 页

If need is the negation of the negation, scarcity is the negation which is negated: the ‘negation of man in man by matter.’¹⁸⁶ To put it another way, matter and scarcity are indissociable terms in Sartre’s conceptual vocabulary: scarcity is matter, and matter scarcity, but only to the extent that both exist ‘as a human fact, rather than as the malignity of a cruel Nature.’¹⁸⁷ Scarcity is the transhistorical condition under which the negation of the negation becomes an affirmation – a positivity – but it also dictates that this affirmation (viz. need) is a univocal relation: the human must exteriorise itself in matter in order to exist, but matter need not, or rather it cannot, reciprocate the same action. Matter cannot exteriorise itself (at least, that is, at the level of human history): it is only ever exteriorised and reinteriorised by praxis (this is the meaning of passive activity). This is the reason why scarcity produces a ‘permanent framework of a field of tension’¹⁸⁸, not just within individuals facing the constant threat of elimination but between individuals as well. Social relations are thus structured as relations of ‘interiorised scarcity’, as relations, in short, of violence and with the Other.¹⁸⁹ If scarcity and matter are conceptually indissociable in the Critique, so too are violence and need. They articulate two different but interdependent dimensions of totalisation as an ongoing and open movement.

Sartre is often critiqued for this conception of need, primarily because the entire milieu of relations between action and matter, praxis and the practico-inert, individuals, collectives, groups, etc. that is immanent to this conception stems from a transhistorical identification of alienation and objectification, an identification which, Chiodi argues, is mediated by alterity: ‘alienation is bound to alterity to the extent to which alterity is equivalent to objectification.’¹⁹⁰ As Chiodi reads it, the Critique systematically conflates alienation, objectification and alterity. It takes the Hegelian coincidence of objectification and alienation in the Phenomenology, but effectively refuses the latter’s possible disappearance precisely because the former is tied to an ineliminable – existential – alterity. Effectively refuses, since Chiodi denies Sartre’s claim that the group-in-fusion might shoulder the ‘double concrete undertaking’ of ‘removing man from the statute of alterity which makes him a product of his product, in order to transform him, when molten [à chaud], by appropriate practices, into a product of the group, that is to say – as long as the group is freedom – into his own product.’¹⁹¹ For Chiodi, the statute of alterity in fact dictates that ‘de-alienation…becomes possible only through the suppression of objectification, which in being a feature of the reciprocal relation of multiplicity, can only be suppressed through the suppression of multiplicity itself.’¹⁹² Namely, through the suppression of totalisation itself, which is the suppression of history itself. ‘What this means, simply, is that de-alienation has the temporal dimension of an instant.’¹⁹³ If, for Sartre, the individual ‘discovers himself as Other in the world of objectivity’, and if the domination of individuals by matter, through individuals’ own praxes as the Other and through the praxes of Others, constitutes the ‘permanent possibility of alienation for everyone’, it is difficult to imagine how this possibility is not already a permanent necessity, the ‘destiny in exteriority of freedom.’¹⁹⁴ There seems to be no alternative to the fundamental incompatibility between reciprocity and objectivity at the heart of the Critique. For Mészáros, the root of this problem stems from the fact that the Critique ‘turn[s] the eminently historical and socially transcendable category of scarcity into a paralyzing ahistorical and anti-historical absolute, arbitrarily proclaimed to be the insuperable permanence and the overall determination and horizon of our real history.’¹⁹⁵ This is unquestionably true. Sartre resists at every turn the viewpoint that the ‘human fact’ of scarcity and (as he understands it) the alienation to which it gives rise are specific economic manifestations of the division of labour and private property relations within capitalism. This resistance – this over-ontologisation of history – extends to Sartre’s conception of ‘exigency’ (need from the standpoint of the practico-inert, its imperative) and its subcategory of ‘interest’, or ‘being-wholly-outside-oneself-in-a-thing insofar as it conditions praxis as a categorial imperative.’¹⁹⁶ The notion that both exigency and interest owe their historical intelligibility to capitalist private property is something that Sartre continually dismisses.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid. 149. Thus labour ‘has to be defined as praxis aimed at satisfying need in the context of scarcity by a particular negation of it.’ Ibid. 136-37.

¹⁸⁷ Ibid. 140, ft. 21.

¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 125.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid. 815. Violence ‘is the constant non-humanity of human conduct as interiorised scarcity; it is, in short, what makes people see each other as the Other and as the principle of Evil.’ Ibid. 149. ¹⁹⁰ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 88.

¹⁹¹ Sartre, CDR 1, 672-73.

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