Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 93 页

This underdetermination of the present notwithstanding, the Critique equips us with the means of constructing a concept of historicalisation that promises to enrich Marx’s philosophy of history. In order for this concept to work, it must register the singularity of the historical (as opposed to the individual and the social) act, as well as articulate a general set of relations within and between totalisation, temporalisation and materiality, relations that each and every historical act ‘incarnates’.²⁰⁹ There are a number of ways to approach historicalisation through Sartre, but undoubtedly the most productive is through the concept of ‘enveloping totalisation and its correlative ‘praxis-process’ in Sartre’s second Critique. Enveloping totalisation does not represent a departure, but rather an intensive and extensive expansion – a ‘compression and ‘decompression’ – of totalisation in his first Critique. As Flynn puts it, ‘what [enveloping totalisation] adds to ‘totalisation’ tout court from volume 1 is a greater intensity and a broader scope. It is more comprehensive than isolated organic praxis in both senses of the term: it is more inclusive of the mediating relationships that render abstract organic praxis concrete and, correspondingly, it yields greater understanding of the praxis in question…it is a unifying notion (historicising praxis-process), not an atemporal concept, that subsumes our praxes as parts of a dynamic whole.’²¹⁰ Commenting on Sartre’s position that ‘every singular totalisation is enveloping as a totalisation as well as enveloped as a singularity’²¹¹, Flynn goes on to state that ‘the singularity of the totalisation comes from its unique locus as the nodal point and matrix of an indefinite multiplicity of relationships’, and ‘its enveloping character arises from the linkage it constitutes (both in knowledge and in being) to the entirety of these relations.’²¹² There are two noteworthy conclusions to take away from this. First, the primacy of individual and social (collective, group) praxis has been supplanted by that of ‘praxis-process’, which, irreducible to its individual and social actors, is the ontological basis not of totalisation sans phrase, but of singular totalisations. The upshot of this is that there is no such thing as concrete praxis ‘as such’. There are only concrete praxes, each of which temporalise because they are orientated towards an end and because, as praxis-processes, they forge ‘passive syntheses’ that ‘reintroduce multiplicity’ into all modalities of human action.²¹³ Temporalisation has now become ‘the movement of enveloping temporalisation’²¹⁴, which is to say temporalisation ‘by every event, every praxis and every particular exis.’

²⁰⁸ Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ [1923], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1972), 204. The expression ‘pernicious chasm’ comes from Ernst Bloch.

²⁰⁹ ‘Incarnation’ does not feature as a central category in Sartre’s first Critique. It mainly designates individuation within the group, particularly its ‘summit’ (e.g. the sovereign). Incarnation is, however, crucial to the dialectical logic of his second Critique. As an ‘internal and local temporalisation’ of ‘a certain moment of the ongoing totalisation’, it encompasses every level of enveloping totalisation. It is, ‘at all levels, the retotalisation of the enveloping totalisation by every event, every praxis and every particular exis.’ Sartre, CDR 2, 77, 256. The conceptual homology between Sartre’s ‘incarnation’ and Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ is clear.

²¹⁰ Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157.

²¹¹ Sartre, CDR 2, 49.

²¹² Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157. As Flynn points out, this aspect of enveloping totalisation is for Sartre the ‘law of immanence’ which constitutes ‘the synthetic interiority of the historical field.’ Sartre, CDR 2, 384.

93