{"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":45,"pdf_page":49,"physical_index":49,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"fe3b0a6aceb5e33d81b808c9a6737932c56c14fd53886cd5228475de321dd560"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Existential temporalisation is the subversive core of a phenomenological ontology of human being, because it upends how we (to use a Heideggerian expression) ‘initially and for the most part’ understand action [Aktion, Handeln], activity [Aktivität, Tätigkeit] and the act [Akt, Tat] themselves. In this sense, existential temporalisation intervenes into existing claims made on behalf of the originary character of The German Ideology. It intervenes, to give two examples, into Althusser’s assertion that The German Ideology represents an ‘epistemological break’ and ‘state of rupture’ in Marx’s work<sup>18</sup>, as well as Georges Labica’s contention that The German Ideology is a groundbreaking ‘construction site’ for a ‘scraping operation’ and ‘settling of accounts’ with Marx’s predecessors, his contemporaries and himself.<sup>19</sup> However, against Labica’s outright reduction of all philosophy to ideology, there is a distinct possibility that philosophical discourses on temporalisation might in fact enrich the materialist concept of history, and that this concept of history might in turn enrich these discourses, such that it forces these discourses to reckon with ‘…men and women, not in any fantastic isolation and fixation, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.’<sup>20</sup> The German Ideology may convey a desire, as Althusser puts it, to ‘purely and simply abolish’<sup>21</sup> philosophy, but this desire not only ‘hardly means that there is no philosophy at work in The German Ideology’<sup>22</sup>, but, we might add, hardly means that there need not be more philosophy put to work within The German Ideology. Marx’s emancipatory project need not converge with Labica’s militant (but not necessarily radical) grasp of Marx’s materialism as ‘situating all philosophy, whether idealist or materialist, in its true place, namely in ideology’, as rendering the notion of a Marxist philosophy ‘absurd’.<sup>23</sup> The philosophy within Marxist philosophy need not be that philosophy (e.g. classical German idealism) in opposition to which Althusser, Labica and Marx articulate the ‘science of history’.<sup>24</sup> Herbert Marcuse’s notion of ‘concrete philosophy’ is a useful example of this. For Marcuse, philosophy is ‘the concrete distress of human existence’<sup>25</sup> which makes visible, and demands that we overcome, our contemporary historical situation. This philosophy, what Marcuse calls ‘philosophising’ – philosophy as a concrete mode of human existence – is a far cry from the abstract thought from which Althusser, Labica and Marx seek to dissociate themselves, and with which they are arguably preoccupied, to the point where they dismiss, to name the most prominent figure, the practical and concrete dimensions of Hegel’s thought. To invoke Engels, perhaps it is not an ‘exit from philosophy’ which is warranted, but an exit from the exit from philosophy. As Balibar points out, this exit is not a simple return to the inside of philosophy unburdened by history.<sup>26</sup> It is an exit marked by a dialectic between philosophy and Marx’s own foreign land (history), a foreign land which is itself a dialectic between philosophy and non-philosophy.\n\n<sup>17</sup> In a certain sense, the Critique allows us to grasp the difference between totalisation and totality as analogous to the difference between temporalisation and time, such that time is the exteriorised product of temporalisation, cut off from its own temporalising process, and subject to inertia. This dovetails with the doubled meaning of the German Gegenwart as both presence and the present, and points to one dimension of Sartre’s indebtedness to Heidegger (who invokes this doubled meaning across his corpus). In addition to Sartre, Althusser relies on Heidegger on this point. See Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, 95.\n\n<sup>18</sup> Louis Althusser, For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 33, 36.\n\n<sup>19</sup> Georges Labica, Marxism and the Status of Philosophy [1976], trans. Kate Soper and Martin Ryle (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), 165-72.\n\n<sup>20</sup> Marx and Engels, DI, 27 (GI, 47-8).\n\n45","previous_page":44,"next_page":46}