{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","id":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","uuid":"cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","normalized_title":"marxandtheconceptofhistoricaltime","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":216,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Marx%20and%20the%20Concept%20of%20Historical%20Time","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/cfa147d3-494e-49cc-b356-7aceff50b181/search"},"page":{"printed_page":41,"pdf_page":45,"physical_index":45,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7bf84773b90aefad07bc76e06625340d0e3f8cda637a4f32e5df3f9c2ea39f0c"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Chapter Two Totalisation, Temporalisation and History: Heidegger and Sartre\n\nIt remains the case that the totalisation differs from the totality in that the latter is totalised while the former totalises itself. In this sense, it is obvious that to totalise itselfmeans to temporalise itself.<sup>1</sup>\n\nThe human is a social being inasmuch as it is historically constituted as multiple individuals in relation to one another and those very relations themselves.<sup>2</sup> History and the human are inseparable concepts in Marx, thus the temporal reading of the materialist concept of history must also be understood as the temporal reading of the human which creates and is created by this history. This understanding is mediated by the transhistorical concept of labour in general. As the social production of the means of life, which is a dialectical production of the means of life, labour is an ontological domain of temporalisation because it constitutes the movement of negation. As in Hegel, the dialectical movement of negation is in Marx the first and most evident register of an active difference between the past, the present and the future. But is the historical status of negation thereby secured? Is negation thereby the movement of historical temporalisation? The German Ideology offers a particular dialectic as a possible foundation of historical time: the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. And it is through negation that the three temporal coordinates within this dialectic first becomes intelligible, such that there is futurity immanent to the present’s transcendence of the past. But in what sense is historical temporalisation about more than negation? In other words, with what, or rather through what, must negation be thought in order to reconstruct the materialist concept of history as a concept of historical time?\n\nThe proposition of this chapter is that a concept of historical time cannot be constructed out of the materialist concept of history until dialectical negation is put in relation to historical totalisation, which is to say the totalisation of the time of all human lives. Whether it is openly acknowledged, left unstated or disavowed, this totalisation is the overarching intelligibility and narrative of every post-Enlightenment conception of history from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Within the modern philosophy of history, this is the sense in which the human is ‘historical’ because history is the development of the time of the human species as a whole. Marx does not thematise this totalisation in relation to the materialist concept of history. ‘World history’ and the ‘world-historical’ figure in The German Ideology (primarily in relation to alienation and its speculative end in communism), but they are tautologically defined by Marx and Engels<sup>3</sup>, and the extent to which they function as totalising concepts is unclear. The world market is depicted as an integral dimension of the production of world history ‘for the first time’<sup>4</sup>, but its relation to the social production of the means of life is not established, and it is clearly a phenomenon specific to capitalism.<sup>5</sup> As with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach<sup>6</sup>, these concepts invoke the ordinary conception of ‘world’, a conception which (at least on the surface) is much more about space than it is about time. Therefore, the ‘ongoing totalisation of the time of the human’<sup>7</sup> is a philosophical problem for the materialist concept of history, because the relationship between totalisation and negation within this concept remains undeveloped. What is this relationship? Namely, how is totalisation a kind of temporalisation itself, indissociable from and yet irreducible to the movement of negation?\n\n<sup>1</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 53.\n\n<sup>2</sup> The ‘social’ is not just direct communal relations. As Marx states: ‘Social activity…exist[s] by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity…when I am active scientifically…when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others, then I am social, because I am active as a human. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product – as is even the language in which the thinker is active – my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.’ Marx, OPM, 538 (EPM, 137).\n\n41","previous_page":40,"next_page":42}