Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 94 页

This leads to the second conclusion. Enveloping totalisation fundamentally unsettles the culminating formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ in the first Critique. We must consider how Sartre defines this formulation:

History is intelligible if the different practices which can be found and located at a given moment of historical temporalisation finally appear as partially totalising and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalisation from which there is no appeal. It is by seeking the conditions for the intelligibility of historical vestiges and results that we shall, for the first time, reach the problem of totalisation without a totaliser and of the very foundations of this totalisation, that is to say, of its motive-forces and of its non-circular direction.²¹⁵

The point here is straightforward. The end of individual and social praxis is one thing, but is there such a thing as ‘the end of history’, and if so, what mediates the relationship between these ends? What gives history its unity? ‘How’, as Sartre asks early in his first Critique, ‘can there be a historical future?’²¹⁶ ‘Totalisation without a totaliser’ is a placeholder of a response to these questions. The essence of this formulation is that totalisation at the level of individual and social praxis (totalisations which ‘have’ totalisers) is not – it cannot be – the totalisation that totalises history. That is, if history is in some way the totalisation of the time of the human, then it might be understood as the totalisation of all individual and social totalisations, and as the temporalisation of all individual and social temporalisations, yet this totalisation and this temporalisation are not – they cannot be – the same totalisation and temporalisation immanent to individual and social praxes. The difference between individual and historical totalisation is particularly important to Sartre. We know totalisation from the standpoint of the individual, but the intelligibility of historical totalisation, that totalisation ‘from which there is no appeal’, is obscure. It is akin to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, and to the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market, each of which work behind the backs of individuals.

²¹³ Ibid. 335. Recall that Sartre identifies ‘three modalities of human action’ in the first volume of the Critique: individual praxis, common (constituted) praxis, and praxis-process. ²¹⁴ Ibid.

²¹⁵ Sartre, CDR 1, 817.

²¹⁶ Ibid. 79.

94