Yet the critical literature on the Critique generally does not thematise (in most cases it does not acknowledge) the manner in which Sartre’s conception of need forms the backbone of his understanding of the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation. Directly put, need secures the ontological dependence between totalisation and temporalisation. It is that through which the unification of totalisation must be understood as the active differentiation between the past, the present and the future. At the crux of this is Heidegger’s reconstruction of the teleological framework of the act. In Sartre, as in Heidegger, individual praxis is given meaning by the particular end of a particular project, precisely because every individual praxi makes the future present through the end of the act. Yet in the Critique – and this is exactly what is missing in Being and Time – need is where the end comes from. It is what governs the projection of the end. Need, such as it is defined by the negation of scarcity, thus occupies and materially grounds the place of finitude in Being and Time. It is the historical-existential limit in relation to which temporality temporalises itself as a kind of ‘being-towards-need’. As with Heidegger, the future is prioritised as the standpoint of the temporal unity of the act, which is to say that temporal unification is univocal: it originates from the projected future of the act. Yet on top of denoting an existential understanding ability-to-be, the future in the Critique is also structured by the conscious imagination of the end of the act. The future is simultaneously both actual and imaginary in the Critique, which cannot be said of Being and Time. It is open because it is a projective capacity for the sake of which any act exists and because it correlates to an act of the imagination. This latter sense of the future (the broadly Aristotelian conception of the future that guides the third volume of Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being<sup>197</sup>) is directly in line with one of Marx’s classic descriptions of labour in Capital: ‘…what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end [Ende] of every labour process, a result emerges which was already present in the imagination of the worker from the start, hence already existed ideally. The worker not only realises a change of form of the natural; he also realises his own purpose [Zweck] in the natural. And this is a purpose he is conscious of. It determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.<sup>’198</sup> This purpose is an implicit formulation of the future in Marx, a teleological future immanent to the metabolism between humanity and nature. Sartre’s future is distinctive because it combines – and therefore exceeds – both Marx and Heidegger’s construction of the teleological future, and because it emerges from (absent in Marx and Heidegger alike) a conception of need which itself emerges from an account of the relationship between materiality and matter. This, as we will now begin to examine, is crucial to our project of thinking historical temporalisation and, consequently, the concept of historicalisation.
<sup>196</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 197.
<sup>192</sup> Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 93.
<sup>193</sup> Ibid. 95.
<sup>194</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 227, 136, 227. Destiny, as Flynn describes it, is ‘a future inscribed in the practicoinert.’ Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 103. Destiny is ‘an irresistible movement [that] draws or impels the ensemble towards a prefigured future which realises itself through it.’ Sartre, CDR 1, 551.
<sup>195</sup> Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 243. Mészáros is, bar none, the most forceful critic of Sartre’s conception of scarcity. Again, this is not without irony. Mészáros continually faults the Critique for its ‘ahistorical discourses’ and its lack of ‘historical specificity’, but he never considers the idea that Sartre provides the very means of rendering concepts such as the ‘ahistorical’ and expressions such as ‘historical specificity’ intelligible, which, it seems, are for Mészáros self-sufficiently secured by Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’. This irony is exacerbated by the fact that Mészáros accords to nature an impenetrable (ahistorical?) ‘lawfulness’. According to Mészáros, there is an ‘absolutely inescapable order of Nature’ whose ‘lawfulness…can be dynamically adapted but not violated’, dictating that there is ‘ineliminable natural substratum of human existence itself.’ Ibid. 247-49.
87