Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 89 页

The Critique does not investigate the ontological dependence between totalisation and temporalisation to the extent to which it might. There is, for instance, no consideration of how the movement of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation might correspond to something like ‘temporalisation-detemporalisation-retemporalisation’, nor does Sartre specify how collective and group praxes institute new bonds between totalisation and temporalisation irreducible to individual praxis. As the introduction to this chapter argues, if temporalisation is conceivable beyond the scope of individual praxis as totalisation, then there is an entire domain within the Critique which is missing, a domain which, this thesis contends, must be explored in order to both maximise and qualify Sartre’s formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’. Nonetheless, there are passages in the Critique that must be highlighted, as they represent a critical departure from Heidegger as well as the means through which Marx and Engels’s first historical act can be read temporally, and done so beyond what the previous chapter provides. The first passage is a general exposition of what Sartre calls ‘dialectical time’:

Organic functioning, need and praxis are strictly linked in a dialectical manner; dialectical time came into being, in fact, with the organism; for the living being can survive only by renewing itself. This temporal relation between the future and the past, through the present, is none other than the functional relation of the totality to itself; the totality is its own future lying beyond a present of reintegrated disintegration. In short, a living unity is characterised by the decompression of the temporality of the instant; but the new temporality is an elementary synthesis of change and identity, since the future governs the present insofar as this future strictly identifies itself with the past.¹⁹⁹

The second passage reworks Heidegger’s analysis of being-towards-death:

Need, as a negation of the negation, is the organism itself, living itself in the future, through present disorders, as its own possibility and, consequently, as the possibility of its own impossibility; and praxis, in the first instance, is nothing but the relation of the organism, as exterior and future end, to the present organism as a totality under threat; it is function exteriorised.²⁰⁰

¹⁹⁹ Sartre, CDR 1, 82.

²⁰⁰ Ibid. 83.

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