{"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":78,"pdf_page":82,"physical_index":82,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c3968f14326b654903cd80c4ec4c79ff8f5b2e9e6d295f96b2ab809f3d77895d"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"2.3 Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Concept of Historicalisation\n\nOf all the ways in which the materialist concept of history destabilises the phenomenological ontology of Dasein in Being and Time, the philosophical (not to mention political) jolt which Marx’s concept of need gives to this ontology stands as the most consequential. The historical materialism which this concept grounds raises critical social, biological and natural questions for this ontology, questions which expose the absence within this ontology of the inseparable concepts of the origin and the act. As the previous chapter reveals, The German Ideology does not just subsume need under a historical logic, but structures need as the logic of history itself. Our grasp of the historicalising power of need begins with the category of the economic – and the definition of the first historical act – as the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. This grasp also registers need as the ontological basis of the sociality of human individuation, from which the division of labour receives its historical intelligibility. Yet since Marx and Engels do not provide a temporal reading of their materialist concept of history, and since they do not, as the introduction to this chapter states, situate their concept of history in relation to the totalisation of the time of all human lives, The German Ideology yields what is at best a nascent and descriptive concept of historicalisation. That is, it does not provide an account of historicalisation as constituted by relations between temporalisation, totalisation and materiality more broadly. Hence it does not offer the means by which the historicalising logic of dialectics is secured, such that the dialecticisation of need provides the transhistorical category of wealth with its formal structure of historical measure. The stakes of this are high, if in fact a concept of historical time is to be constructed out of the materialist concept of history. The question is therefore: how would an existential-ontological concept of historicalisation enrich Marx’s philosophy of history more generally?\n\nSartre’s Critique does not use the word ‘historicalisation’, but unlike Being and Time, it enables the construction of a concept of historicalisation in a way which reframes, qualifies and extends the materialism of praxis in the Theses on Feuerbach and the materialism of need in The German Ideology. It is clear that Heidegger’s ‘historicality’ does not and cannot do the same. Yet the importance of Being and Time is not thereby diminished. In his presentation of the totalising structure of individual praxis as the ‘original intelligibility’ of history, such that totalisation becomes, to employ the classical Marxist expression, the ‘law of dialectics’, Sartre does not just consider certain aspects of Being and Time useful for his project to existentially rework the materialist concept of history. More fundamentally, he is finding his way to Marx through (not just with) Heidegger. The Critique must be read, I argue, as a determined attempt to affect a transition from Heidegger’s existential problematic to Marx’s historical materialist problematic, an attempt that is spurred by a gap – an immanent deficit – within Heidegger which, as should now be evident, is the decisive lack of a concept of need. For Sartre, Marx speculatively fills this gap, but only on the condition that (1) Marx’s concept of human need is subjected to the logic of totalisation and temporalisation, as this is the only way in which it can be sustained as ‘materialist’; this condition is itself predicated on the condition that (2) dialectics constitutes the logic of totalisation and temporalisation. This is the crux of Sartre’s methodological approach: Marx and Heidegger are dialectically confronting one another, such that – so to speak – Heidegger is being made to totalise and temporalise Marx, and Marx is being made to dialecticise and historicalise Heidegger. What secures this as a unique approach is the fact that Heidegger is as much a catalyst for this confrontation as is Marx.<sup>152</sup> Heidegger constitutes a lack, but it is a constitutive lack: he as much as Marx initiates the possibility of constructing a properly ‘materialist’ concept of human need, a concept which, as we will see, is by no means faithful to that offered by Marx. But – and this is crucial – there is an unequal exchange at work here. The Critique is not, as much of the secondary literature characterises it, a ‘synthesis’ between existentialism and Marxism. On the contrary, the relationship between Heidegger and Marx is for Sartre – it must be – asymmetric: Marxism, after all, is ‘the unsurpassable philosophy [l’indépassable philosophie] of our time.’<sup>153</sup> The fundamental relation between Dasein and the ready-to-hand – namely, being-in-the-world – is in the Critique systematically replaced and ontologically reconstructed through the relation between praxis and the ‘practico-inert’, a relation which takes the name of ‘materiality’. Dialectical intelligibility itself emerges from this relation. For Sartre, the dialectic is the necessary consequence of individual action under certain material conditions, and therefore, to integrate Marx into this, the necessary structure of different ‘regions’ of materiality wherein the social production of the means of life occurs.<sup>154</sup> How and why this amounts to totalisation and temporalisation must now be demonstrated.\n\n78","previous_page":77,"next_page":79}