Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 91 页

It is clear that the dialectic of praxis and the practico-inert has the potential to amplify the temporal reading of the first historical act in the previous chapter. Generally speaking, the Critique adds significant depth to the past and the future of this act, qualifying but not undoing the priority that this act accords to the present. As the previous chapter suggests, the past can be identified with the domain of existing needs within the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. From a Sartrean perspective, however, this past takes on a constitutive function which exceeds its mere creation and negation by the present. The past is no longer non-dialectical but rather anti-dialectical: it internally opposes the negation of the negation within the present as a particular negation of the negation itself (exigency is the movement of ‘past-present-past’ that is internal to the movement of need as ‘present-past-present’). Hence the social production of the means of life is (for Sartre) already controlled by the practico-inert (alienation and class are already internal to the first historical act). As for the future of the first historical act, Sartre as well as Heidegger obviously provides us with the framework with which the future is to be grasped as immanent to the present: the teleological structure of the act. Chapter One claims that the future does not lie in waiting: it is not the waiting repetition of an actual dialectic played out between the present and the past. Yet it does not identify telos as the reason why this is the case, such that it is only the end of the act which unifies the time of the act. Telos – not negation – provides the standpoint from which the practical dependence between totalisation and temporalisation is secured. Thus the question emerges: does the unifying power that Heidegger and Sartre grant to the future, and does the prefabricating power that Sartre attaches to the past, undercut the ontological priority of the present within the first historical act? The answer, in a word, is no. The future and the past are constitutive features of this act, but only because they are immanent to the present. Sartre does not thematise this point, and would likely reject it. The Critique is guided by the idea that the future and the past completely determine, and thus overdetermine, the present,²⁰⁶ but nowhere is this idea measured against the idea that temporalisation as such is only actual within the present. This is not, after Heidegger, an appeal to the identity between the present and presence (the phenomenological appearance of matter). More basically, this is the notion, unconsidered by Sartre, that the present is the ontological meaning of movement itself, in both its active and inert registers. In this sense, totalising praxis and passive activity are inseparable movements of the present.²⁰⁷ Far from fitting into the framework of synchrony/diachrony, this present correlates to the phenomenological present outlined in the introduction to this chapter: properly materialised, it is the condition of thinking the past and the future in relation to one another. If this present is an ‘unbridgeable “pernicious chasm”’ that lies ‘between the subject and the object’²⁰⁸, and ‘between’ the past and the future, it is only because – qua the movement of becoming – it is ontologically basic to them.

²⁰² It is crucial to remind ourselves that the dialectic between praxis and the practico-inert is not simply another name for the dialectic between action and matter, but is rather a complex dialectic between a dialectical and anti-dialectical configuration between action and matter.

²⁰³ Ibid. 86, 184.

²⁰⁴ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 53.

²⁰⁵ Sartre, CDR 1, 559. This dovetails with how ‘a group…incorporates lived temporality with the passive temporality of the practico-inert, so as to accomplish, through actions that are multiple and the same, a common result.’ See Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 200.

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