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# Marx and the Concept of Historical Time
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The potential solution to this problem is the systematic reconstruction of the a priority of Heidegger’s world. This reconstruction would resituate the ontological structure of worldhistorical happening as integral to the ‘ontological enigma’ of the movement of happening in general, precisely because historicality is not simply the concrete working out of originary temporality. This solution would by no means remove contradiction from the world; rather, it would register the fundamental relationship between contradiction and historicalisation more generally. It would register a fundamental originariness to historicality irreducible to, because equi-originary with, the Ursprünglichkeit of temporality. This world presents the possibility of historicising the relationship between temporality and historicality in Being and Time. It theoretically enables us to address the previously raised question of the changing relationships between temporality and existentiell (authentic and inauthentic) modes of being. Of central importance to Marx, this world would therefore allow us to engage Being and Time from the standpoint of the ‘economic fact of the present’148, thus rendering the ontological structure of capitalist everyday life constitutive of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s everyday use of time, or what he refers to as Dasein’s ‘reckoning with time’. For Heidegger, this is the temporality of circumspective concern which ‘permits’ the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand to be encountered in time. It is a temporality which guides Dasein’s everyday encounter with others, in which making present possesses a ‘peculiar importance’.149 Yet there is nothing in Being and Time which allows us to historicise this importance, nothing which might historicise timereckoning as a particular ‘system of time accountancy’150, whereby worldly entities receive their basic temporal attribute, their ‘within-time-ness’.151 Ultimately, the essential issue is this: Heidegger’s world is not just a de-historicising but a de-historicalising world, but what exactly does this mean? What is the existential-ontological meaning of ‘historicalisation’ itself?
146 Blattner, ‘Temporality’, 321.
147 Heidegger, SZ, 514 (BT, 441).
148 Marx, EPM, 107. In her introduction to Marcuse’s Hegel’s Ontology, Seyla Benhabib essentially makes the same claim on behalf of Marcuse’s intervention, such that ‘a Heideggerian objection to the present work would be that it contains no clear distinction between the “world-historical” dimension, the historicity of entities and of our shared world, which unfolds in public space, and the “historicity” proper to Dasein.’ Marcuse, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, xxx. Along with Marcuse, this thesis rejects a distinction between the ‘world-historical’ and ‘Dasein’ at the level of historicality. 149 Heidegger, BT, 459.
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150 Harry Harootunian, ‘Marking time, making histories’, a review of Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, Radical Philosophy 178 (March/April 2013), 40.
151 Heidegger, BT, 382. For Heidegger, within-time-ness should not be confused with Henri Bergson’s analysis of the externalisation of qualitative time into a measurable quantity in space.
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2.3 Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Concept of Historicalisation
Of 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?
Sartre’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.152 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.’153 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.154 How and why this amounts to totalisation and temporalisation must now be demonstrated.
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152 Pietro Chiodi suggests that ‘…in many important respects the Critique is a straightforward return to the Heideggerian position after the attack on it in Being and Nothingness.’ Pietro Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism [1965], trans. Kate Soper (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1976), 8.
153 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 1: Théorie des ensembles pratiques [1960] (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 9. Marcuse’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s expresses the same position. His essays during this period seek to rewrite Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology within the terms of Marx. However, they do not engage Heidegger’s philosophy of time, and thus their implicit attempt to fashion a ‘Heideggerian Marxism’ at the level of history and historicality is ultimately a failure, relegating their contribution to what is better described as a ‘Marxist Heideggerianism’. These essays are collected in Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, ed. John Abromeit and Richard Wolin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
154 This is the manner in which materiality is a historical monism. Critiquing Engels, Sartre contends that ‘the monism which starts from the human world and situates man in Nature is the monism of materiality. This is the only monism which is realist, and which removes the purely theological temptation to contemplate Nature “without alien addition”.’ Sartre, CDR 1, 180-81.
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Sartre’s account of totalisation in the Critique is indebted to Heidegger’s analysis of being-towards-death in Being and Time. In particular, the way in which Dasein’s ability-tobe-a-whole structures it as an existential analytic directly bears on Sartre’s understanding of individual praxis as the ontological basis of totalisation as well as a ‘whole’.155 As previously mentioned, totalisation in Heidegger and Sartre alike should be comprehended as an ongoing unification whose unity is the very process of its differentiation, not, as Mészáros reads Sartre, as a process whereby ‘millions of individual actions’ (this is Sartre’s expression) ‘add up to a network of lawlike determinations in the proper sense of historical necessity.’156 The fact that the movement of totalisation is necessarily ongoing comprises its ‘fundamental character’.157 This movement is not only the basis of differentiating totalisation from the scholastic (static) notion of the totality.158 It also dictates that totalities are always ‘detotalised totalities’, which is to say that their existence hinges on both (1) having been separated from the process of their own production (totalisation), and thus (2) a unity – an ‘active power of holding together its parts’ – which correlates to an act of the imagination.159 In other words, only totalisation, not the totality, is the ontological ground of ‘material unification’, even if, as we will learn, this unification is imposed upon human action by ‘material forces gathered together in the passive unity of tools or machines’ which themselves ‘perform actions’.160 The relationship between totalisation and the totality brings to the forefront Sartre’s ‘progressive-regressive’ method (as it is outlined in Search for a Method, the prefatory essay to the Critique), and the movement of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation that makes up the systematic logic of the Critique. Rather than denoting successive moments of the ‘spiral’ of history, totalisation, detotalisation and retotalisation are to be understood as nonsuccessive yet qualitatively different movements internal to totalisation as such. In his analysis of ‘enveloping totalisation’ in the second volume of the Critique, Thomas R. Flynn summarises this as follows: ‘every totalisation presumes a detotalisation of which it is the ongoing negation or retotalisation.’161
155 Sartre differentiates a whole from a totality as follows: ‘…a “whole” is not a totality, but the unity of the totalising act insofar as it diversifies itself and embodies itself in totalised diversities.’ Ibid. 48, ft. 22.
156 Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 243. Mészáros is commenting on historical, not individual, totalisation in Sartre in this passage, but the point remains the same: totalisation is not an ‘adding up’ of existing multiplicities. It is rather a double movement wherein ‘multiplicity is multiplied to infinity, each part is set against all the others and against the whole which is in the process of being formed, while the totalising activity tightens all the bonds, making each differentiated element both its immediate expression and its mediation in relation to the other elements.’ Sartre, CDR 1, 46.
157 Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 36.
158 In his foreword to the Critique, as part of his reading of Sartre’s desire to dissociate himself from the ‘standpoint of totality’ in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Fredric Jameson sums this up: ‘For Sartre…a totality is precisely a static concept, a concept of being rather than of process, and one governed by analytic rather than by dialectical reason.’ Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Sartre, CDR 1, xxi.
159 Sartre, CDR 1, 45.
160 Ibid. 184. The ontological status of the act from the standpoint of its performance by the practicoinert – what Sartre calls ‘passive action’ – must be differentiated from the act as praxis.
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Before the relationship between praxis and the practico-inert takes centre stage in the Critique, ‘interiorisation’ and ‘exteriorisation’ emerge as the first registers in which this logic of totalisation is to become synonymous with the meaning of dialectics. For Sartre, totalisation exteriorises itself through totalities, ‘worked matter’ in which past praxis is embodied, but this exteriorisation is already always tied to what he describes as the ‘reinteriorisation’ of totalities. This is, in a manner of speaking, the ‘ur-site’ of dialectical intelligibility: when an exteriorised totality is reinteriorised through praxis, this reinteriorisation is at once ‘an interior negation of interiority.’162 This double movement (the interiorisation of exteriority and the exteriorisation of interiority) may represent an ‘antiquated’ framework163, but it lays the groundwork for two philosophical cornerstones of the Critique. First, and in line with Marx’s Theses, it situates praxis (but also, exceeding Marx, the practico-inert) as ontologically basic to the subjectobject relation, such that ‘interiority’ and ‘exteriority’ become particular dynamisations (but also immobilisations) of, respectively, the subject and the object. Second (to return to the question which this chapter begins with), the movement of interiorisation and exteriorisation establishes the parameters of the relationship between totalisation and negation. Negation is a dynamic movement unto itself, but from the standpoint of totalisation it is only intelligible as a particular moment of totalisation. That is, negation only produces ‘a temporary totality…on the basis of a provisional totalisation.’164 Herein lies Sartre’s ambiguous relationship to Hegel. On one level, the Critique is an orthodox reading of the Phenomenology, insofar as it retains the primacy of the negation of the negation (which, as we will discover, is Sartre’s definition of need). Yet on another, because it grounds dialectics in praxis (rather than consciousness), and thus stipulates that totalisation, detotalisation and retotalisation (rather than identity, nonidentity and contradiction) constitute the core of dialectics, the Critique materialises negation in a fashion that extends far beyond Hegel. The implications this has for the temporalisation of history (as a collective singular, to which Hegel and Sartre are equally wedded)165 must be considered, but only after materiality is investigated in its own right.
161 Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 158. As Sartre articulates it: ‘…totalisation is the way in which detotality is totalised; or again, in which detotalisation is retotalised.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2 (Unfinished): The Intelligibility of History [1985] (hereafter CDR 2), ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and trans. Quintin Hoare (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 448. The triad ‘territorialisation-deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ in the two volumes of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a spatialisation of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation in the Critique, a spatialisation which in large part leads to the problems that history constitutes for the Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). 162 Sartre, CDR 1, 57.
163 Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 46-7.
164 Sartre, CDR 1, 60. To which we must add: ‘on the basis of a provisional temporalisation’.
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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.’166 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.’167 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.’168 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.’169 For Flynn, the practico-inert is the functional (one might add heretical) heir to ‘being-in-itself’ in Being and Nothingness.170 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’171, a negation whose effect ‘is to render material external to the project and opposed to it as necessity to freedom.’172 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’.173 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.’174 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.’175 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.
165 ‘…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 20th century French philosophy more generally.
166 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.
167 Sartre, CDR 1, 180.
168 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.
169 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.
170 Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 120.
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The relation between praxis and the practico-inert can only be confirmed as a material relation – in fact as the meaning of ‘materiality’ itself – when and if two fundamental and indissociable aspects of this relation are brought to light. The first is that the relation between individual praxes is itself dialectical and that this relation is mediated by the practico-inert. In other words, the practico-inert determines human activity as inherently social: there is a dialectical relation between the dialectical structure of each individual praxis and this relation, whereby individual action is ‘transcended and preserved by inertia’, is an ‘original statute of reifying sociality.’176 This is the manner in which the practico-inert ‘is simply the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia.’177 Sartre’s dialectic remains ontologically individualistic, but the priority of the individual is mitigated by the fact that his praxis is already always social as a consequence of his existence within multiple domains of materiality, each of which are created – necessarily – by other individuals. The Critique can thus be read as the construction of a concept of the social individual that Marx never provides. This individual is only intelligible within what Sartre calls ‘the series’: the most basic form of the social whereby individuals are united by their separation. This serial unity emerges from the ‘formal, universal structure of alterity’178, relations of otherness (viz. alienation) that Sartre characterises as ‘the practico-inert object itself insofar as it produces itself in the milieu of multiplicity with its own particular exigencies.’179 The praxis that underlies this unity is hence ‘serial praxis’: ‘the practico-inert structure of…praxis insofar as it is social’180, the existential basis of passive activity, and the praxis from which other social forms – namely the group and the collective – derive. The relation between the group and the collective is central to Sartre’s social ontology: far from being constituted between two discrete social entities, this relation is best grasped as a unitary field of social immanence wherein the materiality of the practicoinert is both resisted and surrendered to. Consider the following passage:
171 Sartre, CDR 1, 340.
172 Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 49.
173 Within the field of the practico-inert, ‘matter as passive activity and counterfinality contradicts its own idea through its movement.’ Sartre, CDR, 171. Curiously, Flynn restricts ‘passive activity’ to serialised individual action rather than situating it across the entire (human and non-human) milieu of the practico-inert. See Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 96, 105.
174 Sartre, CDR 1, 713. For Sartre, a practico-inert process is a systematic form of exploitation (such as racism, capitalism or colonialism) which must be differentiated from the ‘three modalities of human action’: individual praxis, common, constituted praxis, and praxis-process. Ibid. 789. 175 Ibid. 333
176 Ibid. 319.
177 Ibid. 556.
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The group is defined by its undertaking and by the constant movement of integration which tends to turn it into pure praxis by trying to eliminate all forms of inertia from it; the collective is defined by its being, that is to say, insofar as all praxis is constituted by its being as mere exis; it is a material, inorganic object in the practico-inert field insofar as a discrete multiplicity of active individuals is produced in it under the sign of the Other, as a real unity within Being…as a passive synthesis, and to the extent that the constituted object is posited as essential and that its inertia penetrates every individual praxis as its fundamental determination by passive unity, that is to say, by the pre-established and given interpenetration of everyone as Others.181
The primary point to take from this is that groups and collectives constantly negate one another because they are dialectically structured – totalised – by one another. The group’s opposition to serial praxis is predicated on the collective ‘which engenders and sustains it’182, just as the collective can never evade the fact that the ossification of the group which it yields inexorably leads to new gatherings marked by new bonds of interiority (i.e. fused groups, pledged groups, etc.). Groups continually dissolve into the individuating seriality from whence they came, but it is precisely this seriality that undercuts Goldmann’s claim183 that Sartre cannot be a Marxist because he has no concept of a collective subject. The practico-inert acts, and this means that the collective (and the group) subject is everywhere in the Critique.
178 Ibid. 264.
179 Ibid. 266.
180 Ibid.
181 Ibid. 255. ‘…the collective is not simply the form of being of certain social realities, but…it is also the being of sociality itself at the level of the practico-inert field…a collective is in itself a sort of scale model of the practico-social field and of any passive activity carried out in it.’ Ibid. 304. Flynn’s work is exemplary in its account of how truly expansive a category Sartre understands the practico-inert to be. It takes in ‘the social field of collective objects like the newspaper or the Gothic cathedral, …ideas and systems like racism and colonialism, and…institutions like the army or the state bureaucracy’, in addition to passive unities like language, ideology, classes, and other forms of ‘objective spirit’ (viz. culture). See Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 121-23, and Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 99-101. This (below) has diverse ramifications for the meaning of ‘collective action’ and the ‘collective subject’.
182 Sartre, CDR 1, 254.
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The mediation of the practico-inert which grounds the social materialism of the Critique would be nothing if it were not situated in relation to Sartre’s unique conception of need. In a word, need motors the dialectic of action and matter within praxis; philosophically, it is that through which materiality is ontologically basic to matter. Early in the Critique, Sartre outlines the broad contours of his understanding of need:
Everything is to be explained through need [le besoin]; need is the first totalising relation between the material being, man, and the material ensemble of which he is part. This relation is univocal, and of interiority. Indeed, it is through need that the first negation of the negation and the first totalisation appear in matter. Need is a negation of the negation insofar as it expresses itself as a lack within the organism; and need is a positivity insofar as the organic totality tends to preserve itself as such through it…; the negation of this negation is achieved through the transcendence of the organic towards the inorganic: need is a link of univocal immanence with surrounding materiality insofar as the organism tries to sustain itselfwith it…; as soon as need appears, surrounding matter is endowed with a passive unity, in that a developing totalisation is reflected in it as a totality: matter revealed as passive totality by an organic being seeking its being in it – this is Nature in its initial form.184
Following Marx and Engels, Sartre’s conception of need proceeds from the physiological and biological reproduction of human life. The living body is absolutely crucial to the Critique: it is an originary condition of totalisation and the first coexistence of praxis and matter – of ground and product – in time and space. The body is thus an organic totality that ‘acts on inert bodies through the medium of the inert body which it is and which it makes itself.’185 However, in sharp contrast with Marx, it is not surplus but scarcity [la rareté] which for Sartre underlies this metabolism between humanity and nature. Scarcity, not surplus, fuels history, such that, in Marx’s terms, new needs are created and productive forces expand because there is scarcity.
183 See Lucien Goldmann, Marxisme et sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 330-31, as well as Flynn’s response to Goldmann in Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 173-77.
184 Sartre, CDR 1, 80-1. This conception of need safeguards dialectical reason from being killed twice over ‘to make sure it is dead – the first time by claiming to have discovered it in Nature, and the second time by suppressing it within society.’ Ibid. 712.
185 Ibid. 82. ‘…the matter outside it subjects the living body to an inorganic statute precisely to the extent that it is itself transformed into a totality.’ Ibid. 81.
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