Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 95 页

Sartre leaves unaddressed – he does not ask – what kind of relationship exists between ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ and enveloping totalisation. For Flynn, enveloping totalisation is ‘in its most comprehensive form’ a ‘version’ of totalisation without a totaliser, such that the former constitutes the diachronic (or progressive) meaning-direction [sens] of the synchronic (or regressive) latter.²¹⁷ Consequently, ‘“totalisation without a totaliser” does not refer to some “hyperorganism” or some transcendent reality, which Sartre would reject on principle. Rather, it denotes that set of objective relations or possibilities that are put in motion and sustained, even in their deviating and counterproductive functions, by individual and group or collective activity.’²¹⁸ Put in motion and sustained, he should add, by singular (enveloping) totalisations, by praxis-processes. This is an interesting – and faithful – reading of the relationship between Sartre’s two Critiques. It takes Sartre at his word on the last page of the first Critique that ‘we have not yet considered the diachronic depth of practical temporalisation’²¹⁹, implicitly stating that ‘enveloping temporalisation’ fulfils this need. However, Sartre and Flynn do not realise that the framework of synchrony/diachrony (the framework that grounds the implied (Sartre) and reconstructed (Flynn) relationship between totalisation without a totaliser and enveloping totalisation) threatens to undercut the dynamic – the dialectical – relationship between what Sartre identifies as ‘the formal structures of history’ (volume 1) and ‘real history’ (volume 2). This dovetails with what Mészáros calls the ‘unfinishability of [Sartre’s] theory of historical totalisation.’²²⁰ Whilst Mészáros singles out the ‘existential-ontological foundation’ of the Critique, and the ‘incorrigible’ lack of social and historical mediation it yields, as the reason for this unfinishability²²¹, the blame is better placed on Sartre’s attempt to yoke the philosophy of history ‘to the double synchronic and diachronic movement by which History constantly totalises itself.’²²² It is exceedingly difficult to transcend the atemporal origins of synchrony and diachrony within structuralist linguistics, origins, as the introduction to this chapter warns, which indelibly steer us towards historicism. ‘Diachronic totalisation’ therefore becomes the meaning of historical temporalisation. Even if we grasp ‘the double synchronic and diachronic movement’ as doubly dialectical, such that it correlates to the movement within and between the formal structures and the ‘concrete and absolute reality of History’²²³, we are still left with the problem of how to understand historical change and difference through Sartre’s unique dialectical-teleological conception of time. In Heideggerian terms, how are historical change and difference irreducible to the ‘ordinary’ (chronological) conception of time?

²¹⁷ Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157, 177.

²¹⁸ Ibid. 177.

²¹⁹ Sartre, CDR 1, 818.

²²⁰ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242. ²²¹ Ibid. 243.

²²² Sartre, CDR 1, 818.

²²³ Sartre, CDR 2, 335. ‘The concrete and absolute reality of History can be only in the singularity of the practical relations uniting singular men to the singular objectives they pursue, in the singularity of the conjuncture.’ Ibid.

95