{"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":46,"pdf_page":50,"physical_index":50,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"e7966348647144dab87e66c6d97daac8798b917286a4a5b6efb5cff4c3393610"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"Yet individual action cannot be the only standpoint from which totalisation and its relation to temporalisation is intelligible. What historical totalisation compels us examine – a question which is suppressed by Heidegger, underdetermined by Sartre and simply unasked by Marx – is the ongoing constitution of complex relationships between individual, social and historical temporalities. Take, as one example, Marx’s conception of the ‘social individual’. For Marx, this individual is already and entirely determined by society<sup>27</sup>, such that the social relation – not the individual – is the basic constituent of society. And yet, he also suggests that this individual is ‘the great pillar of production and of wealth.’<sup>28</sup> At the level of the materialist concept of history, it is unclear how this ‘social individual’ should be read, in no small part because Marx’s analyses of social individuality and the social individual are completely tied to his critique of political economy (e.g. to capitalism). At best, we can only suggest that the materialist concept of history schematises the development of the social individual at the level of different modes of production. The point here is that it would be inadequate, and actually misleading, to temporally read the ‘social individual’ exclusively from the standpoint of its individuality. Yet this standpoint remains the privileged point of departure in the philosophy of time. The simple fact is that existing discourses on temporalisation are principally tied to the individual as the crux of that which is implicitly temporal. The individual may be a social or collective individual, as it is (to varying degrees) in Heidegger and Sartre, but the individual is to date the predominant basis of temporalisation within the modern European philosophical tradition more generally. As Sartre articulates it (this sentence comes right after the quotation that frames this chapter): ‘Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, the only conceivable temporality is that of a totalisation as an individual process.’<sup>29</sup> There is no prevailing philosophy of time which begins its account of temporalisation from either the standpoint of the sociality or the historicality of the act. The philosophical tradition that we have inherited resists the possibility of theorising temporalisation from any other basis than that of the individual. The philosophy of time needs to think temporalisation from an origin other than individual praxis, as in Sartre, and other than the ‘in each case mineness’ of death, as in Heidegger. In order to be properly systematic, this philosophy must register the social and the historical as implicitly temporal in their own right, from which the complex relationship between individual, social and historical temporalities can be investigated in their reciprocal – and asymmetric – determination. The individual is this chapter’s necessary point of departure, but we must also insist that a concept of historical time can only be constructed out of Marx’s work when and if ‘temporalisation itselfis conceived in direct relation to historicalisation. The meaning and consequences of this will remain unknown until the concept of historicalisation is investigated in its own right. The final section of this chapter, on Sartre’s Critique, begins this exploration.\n\n<sup>21</sup> Louis Althusser, ‘The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy’, in Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings [1966-7], ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York and London: Verso, 2003), 174.\n\n<sup>22</sup> Ibid.\n\n<sup>23</sup> Labica, Marxism and the Status of Philosophy, 280, 365.\n\n<sup>24</sup> Each in his own way, Althusser, Labica and Marx fail to critically appropriate the place of ‘nonphilosophy’ within Feuerbach’s Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy [1842], a place which qualifies the decisiveness and originality of their respective formulations of a science of history.\n\n<sup>25</sup> Herbert Marcuse, ‘On Concrete Philosophy’ [1929], trans. Matthew Erlin, in Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. John Abromeit and Richard Wolin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 36. Marcuse’s ‘concrete distress’ derives from Kierkegaard’s stance that ‘qualitative pressure’ must be placed on philosophy in order to exist in the public realm, as only the public realm realises the immense concrete difficulties of social and historical existence, of ‘existing-with-one-another’.\n\n<sup>26</sup> Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 40, 119.\n\n<sup>27</sup> Marx, Grundrisse, 248.\n\n46","previous_page":45,"next_page":47}