{"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":96,"pdf_page":100,"physical_index":100,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5540d86c3b2a8e45ee860f9aac3167d3f091e00693768056ffa305a9990d999d"},"chapter":"Marx and the Concept of Historical Time","content":"This yields a more fundamental problem. The concept of historicalisation must register the singularity of the historical event<sup>224</sup>, but do so in such a way that historical time does not become relegated to a passive medium through which this singularity is realised (Benjamin’s ‘homogenous, empty time’). Yet the only way to avoid this relegation is to likewise conceive historicalisation at the level of history as a collective singular, consistent with the idea that the problem of history is ‘how to universalise the singular without suppressing its specificity.’<sup>225</sup> That is, the concept of historicalisation must equally register relations between totalisation, temporalisation and materiality – need-based relations of dependence – specific to history as a whole. This returns us to the argument that enveloping totalisation unsettles the formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’. The reason why enveloping totalisation is useful is not because it provides a model for the concept of historicalisation, but because, in holding historical temporalisation ontologically accountable to ‘the real’, which is to say to the entire field of historical time, it casts considerable doubt on the idea that history is not in some sense constituted by a totaliser. This is not a ‘mysterious totaliser’<sup>226</sup> which forces ‘the dialectic to become a divine law again, a metaphysical fate’<sup>227</sup>, but is better understood as the condition of thinking what Sartre calls ‘our History’ (viz. human history). This is the premise of the rest of this thesis: there is an identifiable totaliser that totalises, and thus temporalises, history. It has not existed throughout history, but this lack of transhistorical validity takes nothing away from the fact that it is (to date) the only historically totalising stand.\n\n<sup>224</sup> The existential notion of ‘historialisation’ in Sartre’s War Diaries (1939-40) and his Notebooks for an Ethics (1947-48) is the philosophical precursor of the singularity of the historical event in his second Critique. This is the sense in which the lives of, to use Sartrean examples, Flaubert and Stalin incarnate their respective ‘epochs’.\n\n<sup>225</sup> Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242. According to Mészáros, this is both the definitive problem of history and an ‘insurmountable problem’ for Sartre. <sup>226</sup> Ibid. 241.\n\n<sup>227</sup> Sartre, CDR 1, 36. It is the unconditional absence – not the presence – of a totaliser within historical totalisation which consigns the dialectic to metaphysics.\n\n96","previous_page":95,"next_page":97}