{"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":82,"pdf_page":86,"physical_index":86,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0df32a2b9c90ae47b28dc8e6719fa7a57eb1c900bc8c34f470950cf7a1bdcfcd"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"The relationship between praxis and the practico-inert cannot be comprehended from the perspective of human action and inorganic matter ‘in themselves and as such’. For Sartre, action and matter have never been, nor will ever be, exclusive and self-sufficient domains: ‘within praxis…there is a dialectical movement and a dialectical relation between action as the negation of matter…, and matter, as the real, docile support of the developing reorganisation, as the negation of action.’<sup>166</sup> This is the sense in which matter is already always worked matter; matter in itself, which is to say worked matter considered from the standpoint of its pure exteriority, ‘does not appear anywhere in human experience.’<sup>167</sup> Sartre’s conception of worked matter is a potential basis from which ‘labour’ in The German Ideology might be (retroactively) secured as the meaning of praxis in the Theses, such that worked matter is ‘the fundamental motive force of History’ in which ‘the actions of all unite and take on a meaning [sens], that is to say, they constitute for all the unity of a common future.’<sup>168</sup> Worked matter is without question at the heart of the practico-inert, but it by no means exhausts the scope of the practico-inert. Invoking (and transgressing the limits of) Marx’s concept of a productive force, the practico-inert takes in a radically expansive and differential ensemble of forces: ‘to the extent…that these forces are forces of inertia…, they introduce exteriority in the form of passive unity as a material bond of interiority.’<sup>169</sup> For Flynn, the practico-inert is the functional (one might add heretical) heir to ‘being-in-itself’ in Being and Nothingness.<sup>170</sup> The multiple forms of passivity which it designates actively constitute the practical field, but only insofar as these anti-dialectical forces defined by anti-praxis (‘praxis without an author’) and ‘counterfinality’ negate the finality of the dialectical praxis-project. ‘This negation, however, operates not by destruction or dissolution, but by deviation and inversion’<sup>171</sup>, a negation whose effect ‘is to render material external to the project and opposed to it as necessity to freedom.’<sup>172</sup> Hence, like praxis, the practico-inert is internally structured by multiple, shifting relations between action and matter, relations that coalesce in the forces of ‘passive activity’.<sup>173</sup> Unlike praxis, however, the practico-inert is neither the origin nor ontological ground of totalisation: ‘the practico-inert can be treated as a process…, but this process, insofar as it is already passive action, presupposes the entire praxis…, which it reabsorbs and transforms in the object, while still being based on its real, abstract pullulation.’<sup>174</sup> As with the dialectic of living and dead labour in Marx, the material realisation of praxis is entirely dependent on the field of the practico-inert, just as the practico-inert can only be activated through praxis. Yet praxis and ‘praxis alone…is, in its dialectical freedom, the real and permanent foundation (in human history up to the present) of all the inhuman sentences which men have passed on men through worked matter.’<sup>175</sup> The humanism of the Critique is thus simultaneously mitigated and fuelled by matter: praxis is ontologically accountable to the exteriority of matter, but exteriority itself is nothing but the product of praxis, of totalisation as exteriorisation.\n\n<sup>165</sup> ‘…there is one human history, with one truth and one intelligibility.’ Ibid. 69. The critical departure which Sartre’s conception of negation makes from Hegel’s is inseparable from his dialecticisation of Heidegger’s anti-dialectical philosophy of difference. Sartre is a notable exception to the predominant trajectory of the philosophy of difference within 20<sup>th</sup> century French philosophy more generally.\n\n<sup>166</sup> Ibid. 159. ‘Matter as the receptacle of passivised practices is indissolubly linked to lived praxis, which simultaneously adapts to material conditions and inert significations, and renews their meaning [sens], re-constituting them by transcending them, if only to transform them.’ Ibid. 168. Flynn emphasises the crucial distinction between signification [signification] and meaning/direction [sens] in Sartre’s work: the former ‘refers to a static, conceptual meaning’, whereas the latter ‘denotes the ongoing unity of a lived process.’ Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 104. Just as history cannot be a totality but it can, it is, a totalisation, so too it cannot be signified but it can, it does, have sens.\n\n<sup>167</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 180.\n\n<sup>168</sup> Ibid. 183. On multiple occasions (90, 124, 136-37, 165, 178, etc.) in which worked matter is the implicit or explicit subject, Sartre either implies or explicitly states that labour is the historical meaning of praxis.\n\n<sup>169</sup> Ibid. 179. ‘Thus materialised praxis…has the effect of uniting men precisely to the extent that it separates them by imposing on everyone a meaningful reality infinitely richer and more contradictory than they anticipated individually.’ Ibid. Totalisation and the practico-inert are indissociable.\n\n<sup>170</sup> Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 120.\n\n82","previous_page":81,"next_page":83}