{"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":90,"pdf_page":94,"physical_index":94,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f01797d9c1bf033157a42cd7a6cd2761c255d571798916178d7effd95229346b"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"The third passage is an account of the temporality of exigency:\n\nInertia comes to him from the fact that previous work has constituted in the machine a future which cannot be transcended in the form of exigency…and from the fact that this untranscendable future is actualised in all its urgency by present circumstances (the capitalist process as a whole and the conjuncture in the unity of historical totalisation). Thus the inertia of praxis, as a new characteristic of it, removes none of its previous characteristics: praxis remains a transcendence of material being towards a future reorganisation of the field. But passivising annulment modifies it from the future towards the past within the petrified framework of exigency: this is because the future to be realised is already fabricated as mechanical inertia in the way in which past being is transcended. And indeed it can always be said that any material circumstance which has to be transcended, even the configuration of the land in the course of a walk, imposes a certain content on the future towards which it is transcended. It restricts certain possibilities and provides a certain instrumentality which will characterise the final result. However, it does not produce that future; the future comes to material circumstances through men, and if material circumstances are preserved in it as significations, it is not because it is homogeneous with them (and passive like them), but on the contrary because human praxis has given it a human future by projecting it (as transcended and preserved) into this future. On the contrary, precisely because they have been worked and assembled by men, who have made them anti-human, the machine and the combination of exigencies contain the movement of transcendence in themselves and, in connection with this inert movement, the future of the ensemble is the mechanico-practical meaning of this totality insofar as it functions (that is to say, insofar as an exterior force enables it to realise itself as a pseudo-organic function). Thus the reason why past being cannot be transcended is that it is itself the inscription in being of a praxis which produces, beyond any particular human praxis, its own meaning as transcendent being. So the human praxis which lives in symbiosis with this inert practice and which is controlled by it as exigency constitutes itself as a mechanical means (in exteriority) of introducing mechanics amongst its characteristics as a human undertaking. It remains entirely what it is (if one takes it abstractly as a pure, isolated praxis) but its own future as transcendence of its past being is transcended by this very past-being insofar as it is already signified by the future.<sup>201</sup>\n\nThese passages exemplify the unique fashion in which Sartre dialecticises Heidegger’s anti-dialectical philosophy of time. Ifthere is a single dimension that cuts across each passage, it is the way in which, as the first passage expresses it, the ‘future strictly identifies itself with the past’. This is not a conflation of the future and the past within an absolutised present. The difference between the future and the past has not been flattened, but rather dialecticised, and dialecticised, crucially, under the immense weight and pressure of the practico-inert. The basic teleological structure of the act prevails (the future still governs the act through its end), but need and exigency, the functional relations of, respectively, organic and inorganic totalities to themselves, are only actual within the dialectic between praxis and the practico-inert<sup>202</sup>, or what might be described as the dialectic between the totalising present and the totalised past. Both praxis and the practico-inert ‘contain the movement of transcendence in themselves’, but each encompasses a different kind of movement corresponding to a different kind of transcendence. Praxis is a dialectical movement between the present and the past wherein the present is prioritised as the totalising transcendence of the past towards the future. As the totalising present, praxis is the dialectical negation of the past as a totality, which is to say that the materiality of the present is the dialectical negation of the past as matter. To the extent that it is embodied as matter – i.e. to the extent that it is totalised as a totality – the past is fated to inertia (the totality cannot undo its separation from the process of its own production). But the past is equally fated to movement, because the totalising present cannot totalise without reinteriorising matter (there is no praxis without poiêsis). In contrast to praxis, the practico-inert prioritises the totalised past as an anti-dialectical force that incessantly saps the present of its ability to transcend the past, such that the future becomes untranscendable insofar as it already signifies and already identifies itself with the past. As the milieu of recurrence and historical repetition, the practico-inert constitutes the standpoint from which passivity is ‘the whole as the presence of the future’, and worked matter is ‘the solidified threat of the future.’<sup>203</sup> This ‘theft of the end’<sup>204</sup> at the hands of anti-praxis and counterfinality deforms temporalisation into the production of passive temporalities (‘the ingenuity of the organiser’ within Taylorism ‘consists in replacing temporalisation by passive temporality.’<sup>205</sup>) In short, the practico-inert temporalises, but only because, to invoke Marx, it represents the perversion [Verrücktheit] of human praxis as temporalisation.\n\n<sup>201</sup> Ibid. 235-36.\n\n90","previous_page":89,"next_page":91}