{"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":8,"pdf_page":12,"physical_index":12,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f62e6d1190613d85d4b2571847f7b8a3ea36e7b0dc16ebb3f48ca9dc2dca3663"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"In short, historicalisation is the production of historical time. We must clearly differentiate historicalisation from ‘historicisation’: whereas historicalisation is an ontological concept that registers the creation of history itself, historicisation is an epistemological concept inseparable from its origins within historicism. This is the sense in which to ‘historicise’ something is to place it in its particular historical context, its ‘particular time and place’. Historicisation is the meaning of the ‘historical specificity’ of something (such as capitalism). Historicalisation, this thesis argues, is the condition of possibility of historicisation. Historicisation is ontologically grounded by historicalisation.\n\nTwo points follow from this conceptual outline. First, it is important to highlight at the outset that the ‘history’ which features in this thesis is, as earlier indicated, a distinctly modern, post-Enlightenment understanding of history. After Reinhart Koselleck, this is history as ‘the collective singular form of Geschichte, which since around 1780 can be conceived as history in and for itself in the absence of an associated subject or object.’<sup>16</sup> In Sartre’s words, this is history conceived at the level of ‘one human history, with one truth and one intelligibility.’<sup>17</sup> Unless otherwise indicated, the ‘history’ in this thesis is not, as one might put it, the ‘history of the historians’ (methodologically speaking, the empirical comprehension of history which structures most academic history departments), nor is it the kind of history associated with the theological tradition, which is to say history as the independent otherness of God.\n\nThe second point is more substantial. In fact, it is the essential point of the second half of this thesis. This point is a direct response to Sartre’s position, as we will learn, that historical totalisation is a totalisation which does not have a totaliser. In other words, according to Sartre, the ongoing totalisation of all individual and social totalisations exists, but this is a totalisation without a totaliser. In opposition to this, the second half of this thesis maintains that one of the philosophical consequences of Marx’s critique of political economy (e.g. from the Grundrisse onwards) is that, contrary to Sartre’s position, there is a totaliser that totalises and temporalises history. It is capital. This does not mean that capital has existed in all human history to date, or will exist in all human history from now, but it does mean that, as the comprehensive subject of the mode of production to which it gives rise, capital historicalises, and it does so in such a way that it is the condition of thinking the materialist concept of history (if not the modern, post-Enlightenment conception of history more generally). The arguments of Chapters 3 and 4 are thus simultaneously ontological and epistemological. Chapter 3 begins building the case for grasping capital as the condition of thinking history by arguing that, consequent to the fact that the specifically capitalist form of labour known as ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking Marx’s transhistorical category of labour (or ‘labour in general’), the totalising and temporalising power of abstract labour is a fundamental dimension of capital’s historicalising power. In the wake of the examination of Marx’s concepts of ‘necessary’ and ‘surplus-labour in Chapter 3 (concepts that also owe their intelligibility to abstract labour), Chapter 4 rereads the production-process of capital – the valorisation-process – as the production of historical time, indeed as the production of the kind of historical time upon which every modern concept of history – the materialist concept of history included – depends. The production-process of capital, we will see, is precisely what makes possible our understanding of some of the most basic qualities of history itself: it not only exists ‘it itself and as such’, but its time never stops.\n\n<sup>16</sup> Reinhart Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time [1979], trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 236.\n\n<sup>17</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 69.\n\n8","previous_page":7,"next_page":9}