Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

Setting aside this digression, we must now address, albeit at a broad level of abstraction, the relationship between the temporality of the first historical act and the dialectic of the forces and relations of production. In other words, what is the temporal relation between the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs, on the one hand, and the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, on the other? The answer to this question begins with a short account of what productive forces are. Along with needs and time⁷¹, productive forces fill out Marx’s category of wealth (‘wealth’, for Marx, is a particular relation between needs, productive forces and time.⁷²) Accordingly, the scope of a productive force is expansive. It takes in, although it is not exhausted by, what David Harvey describes as ‘the power to transform and appropriate nature through human labour.’⁷³ Productive forces encompass, but are irreducible to, the means of production [Produktionsmittel]: e.g. the tools, instruments, technologies and machineries of production (this includes, it is important to add, human bodies).⁷⁴ Socialised matter – both organic and inorganic matter – is a productive force, and this register informs, to take the most notable example, Marx’s extensive analyses of the relationship between land and production. Conceptually, it is important to indicate that in The German Ideology and elsewhere, forces/powers [Kräfte] should be conceived as ontologically basic to ‘means’ [Mitteln], although our understanding of the relationship between ‘productive forces’ and the broader philosophical literature on forces/powers remains largely in the dark.⁷⁵ It would seem, at the very least, that Marx’s ‘productive force’ is indebted to the work of Kant, Hegel and particularly Leibniz, whose internalisation of motion and force within matter points towards a necessary condition of Marx’s critical reconstruction of materialism more broadly.⁷⁶

⁷⁰ Friedrich Engels, letter to Joseph Bloch (in Königsberg) on 21 September 1890, quoted in Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, 176. Translation modified: see Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 37 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967), 463. For Althusser, ‘…to talk about the determination by the economy in the last instance is to mark oneself off from every mechanistic conception of determinism and to adopt a dialectical position.’ Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, 177. ⁷¹ The essential relation between time and wealth is addressed in Chapter 3. As we will later see, ‘the whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 398. ⁷² Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 21.

⁷³ David Harvey, The Limits to Capital [1982] (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 101.) Alex Callinicos defines productive forces as ‘the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity.’ Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory (Leiden/Boston/Cologne: Brill, 2004), 42-4.

⁷⁴ ‘Means of production’ also include the objective conditions without which social production cannot occur (e.g. office buildings, factories, fields, and so forth).

⁷⁵ To my knowledge, there is no work in the Anglophone secondary literature that looks at this relation. ⁷⁶ Drawing on an unpublished manuscript by Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Riley states (without providing any further analysis) that ‘…Leibniz’s notion of “force” and forces (Kräfte) may be the remote ancestor of Marx’s “forces of production”.’ Patrick Riley, Leibniz’s Universal Jurisprudence:

36

From the standpoint of classical political economy, Adam Smith and Friedrich List undeniably influence Marx’s conception of labour as a productive force. On the whole, the complex and multidimensional meaning of a productive force in Marx might be attributed to the fact that, in its dialectical relationship with a relation of production, it constitutes a purely social power that simultaneously arises from labour and is that through which labour actualises itself. This accounts for why, to take another example, Marx and Engels insist that the mode of social cooperation amongst individuals in the production of their means of life ‘is itself a “productive force”.’⁷⁷ At the same time, the dialectic between the forces and relations of production cannot be collapsed, if indeed, as Marx and Engels repeatedly state in The German Ideology, existing relations of production become ‘fetters’ to the expansion of productive forces, such that this ongoing conflict gives direction to history. What, if any, temporality can be gleaned from this, and what relation does this temporality have to the social production of the means of life (the temporality of the first historical act)? These questions are, at a transhistorical level, difficult, if not impossible, to answer, not simply because the temporality of a relation of production is only intelligible at the level of different modes of production (the temporal relation between the worker and the capitalist is, of course, not the same as that between the feudal serf and his lord), but also because the significance of the expansion of productive forces is not something which is unto itselftemporally intelligible (unless, that is, one is satisfied, as Marx often seems to be, with the historicist framework of linear, progressive time being the implicit framework for our understanding of this expansion⁷⁸). Even if, for Marx, a ‘force’ is a more ontologically expansive category than a ‘means’, such that forces are ontologically basic to means, it is the creation of the means of life, expressing as it does the temporality inherent in an act, that must anchor our (provisional) temporal understanding of history. There is no reason to suggest that the dialectic of the forces and relations of production could not be rendered as reinforcing the temporality of the dialectic of the present and the past previously analysed, thereby reinforcing the relative priority of the historical present over the historical past (the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is internal to the historical present), but this is something that can only be done at the level of a specific mode of production (this is not our current task⁷⁹).

Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 272. Marx expresses his admiration for Leibniz in a letter to Engels on 10 May 1870. See Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 32 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), 504.

⁷⁷ Marx and Engels, GI, 50.

⁷⁸ Even if one tacitly accepts the historicist model of linear, progressive time, does the materialist concept of history not dictate that there is no historical temporality when there is no expansion of productive forces, that it is possible that stretches of chronological time can become ‘stagnant’ to the extent that they are void of historical time, outside of history itself?

⁷⁹ Chapter 4 investigates in more detail the essential correspondence between the creation of new needs and the expansion of productive forces.

37

What about the division of labour and class? This question clearly intersects with the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, but it must also be explored in its own right. In The German Ideology, there are certainly passages that register the idea that the division of labour and the resultant creation of classes is ‘one of the chief forces of history up till now.’⁸⁰ Indeed, as previously argued, if need constitutes the ontological basis of the sociality of human individuation, then we might follow this up by stating that the division of labour and class are the (to date) fundamental historical expressions of this. Ontologically this is true because this individuation first manifests itself through the division of labour⁸¹, and epistemologically this is true because the very thought of this as ‘historical’ – in fact the very thought of ‘history’ as opposed to its ‘actual act of genesis’⁸² – relies on the existence of a ruling class, without which ‘the division between material and spiritual labour’ cannot appear.⁸³ It is crucial to note here that this is a division between material [materiellen] and spiritual (or ‘intellectual’) [geistigen] labour, not a division between manual and mental labour. In The German Ideology (or for that matter anywhere else), Marx does not speak of ‘a division between manual and mental labour’. Material labour – the ‘actual basis’ of history – is not reducible to manual labour [manuelle Arbeit], nor is mental labour the same thing as spiritual/intellectual labour, since mental labour is inseparable from material labour (even the harshest manual drudgery still involves cognitive activity). However, as regards spiritual/intellectual labour, it is precisely the opposite: it must be dissociated from material labour, in order for history to be thought. It is thus misleading to translate ‘materiellen und geistigen Arbeit’ as ‘manual and mental labour’: to do so closes the door on the ongoing constitution of the open relationship between history and materiality. To take a contemporary example: the service industries in so-called ‘cognitive capitalism’ would not be material labour were this translation to capture the meaning of the division between materiellen und geistigen Arbeit. Service labour – which like all labour necessarily has some manual dimension – is material labour. Within capitalism, there is no such thing as ‘immaterial labour’⁸⁴ except that which is spiritual labour, and only the bourgeoisie can be comprehended as ‘immaterial labourers’ because they personify the thought (they are not the actual genesis) of history. Hence class is of vital importance to the materialist concept of history: it is a central condition of its thought. As Balibar puts it, ‘Marx…[extends] the scheme of the division of labour to its fullest extent…’, whereby he ‘accord[s] existence to classes on the dual plane of the division of labour and consciousness, and therefore also [makes]…the division of society into classes a condition or a structure of thought.’⁸⁵

⁸⁰ Marx and Engels, GI, 65.

⁸¹ What else but the social division of labour first differentiates one ‘individual’ from another?

⁸² ‘The entire movement of history is, therefore, both its actual act of genesis (the birth act of its empirical existence) and also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.’ Marx, EPM, 135. Chapter 4 will problematise the transhistoricality of this argument.

⁸³ The ‘division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division between material and spiritual labour appears.’ Marx and Engels, DI, 31 (GI, 51). Emphasis added. The German reads as follows: ‘Die Teilung der Arbeit wird erst wirklich Teilung von dem Augenblicke an, wo eine Teilung der materiellen und geistigen Arbeit eintritt.

⁸⁴ For Negri, ‘we live today in a society increasingly characterised by the hegemony of immaterial labour.’ Quoted in Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 145, ft. 243. More often than not, assertions such as these (thus the concept of ‘immaterial labour’) points to a basic misunderstanding of Marx, whereby matter, not sensuous human activity or labour, is the assumed ground of Marx’s concept of materialism.

38

We should, however, raise two points of caution here. First, whilst the division of labour and class can be understood as ‘chief forces of history’ (to date), they should not be understood as ontologically originary forces of history in the same way that labour and need can and must. The importance of the division of labour and class is unquestionable, but from the standpoint of the basic intelligibility of ‘history’, they are both logically and ontologically ‘down the line from labour and need.⁸⁶ Second, we should be quite careful about how the division of labour and class are figured transhistorically. Whereas it is possible to consider the division of labour as truly transhistorical, from an original sexual division of labour implied by the third moment of history to some kind of technical division of labour under the conscious and rational control of the producers after capitalism, the same cannot be said of class: the social production of the means of life within communism cannot, of course, be conceived of as a ‘class act’.⁸⁷ We also need to be careful about over-ontologising the division of labour and class, which is to say not extending their meaning at the level of a specific mode of production (particularly capitalism) to history as a whole (for example, the ‘exclusive ownership of the means of production’ is a specifically capitalist feature of class formation, whereas something like ‘the differentiation and grouping of humans in relation to the surplus product’ might be understood as valid within all history to date). However – and this point guides us into Chapter 2 – the division of labour and class register a fundamental question that this thesis cannot ignore, but that Marx does not provide us with the means of answering. Simply put: how do we comprehend the relationship between individual, social and historical temporalities? The division of labour and class may be the historical expressions of the sociality of human individuation (‘the individual’ may first actualise itself through the division of labour and classes), but this does not explain how an individual act temporalises, nor does it explain how the temporalities thereby produced relate to social and historical temporalities. Stated differently, The German Ideology establishes the ontological primacy of social and historical being through the categories of labour and need, but it does not address the complicated relationship between individual, social and historical temporalities that these categories implicitly register. This is a question that a temporal reading of the materialist concept of history cannot avoid. It is a question that cuts to the heart of what, as previously argued, Kant and Hegel do not provide: the philosophical ground of this reading, which is to say an account of why and how the act itself temporalises. This question not only compels us to look beyond Marx. It also introduces something without which the concept of historical time cannot be thought: historical totalisation.

⁸⁵ Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 46, 44.

⁸⁶ There is a material basis to history that is structured by human need and the labour that creates the means of satisfying this need. It is because of this basis that the division of labour and classes become intelligible.

⁸⁷ Marx and Engels never develop a conceptual relationship between class and the first historical act in The German Ideology, and for good reason: whilst it might be suggested that the first historical act has, on some level, been structured by class relations until now, class cannot have a conceptual place within this act, even if it is (to date) a condition of thinking this act.

39

40

Chapter Two Totalisation, Temporalisation and History: Heidegger and Sartre

It remains the case that the totalisation differs from the totality in that the latter is totalised while the former totalises itself. In this sense, it is obvious that to totalise itselfmeans to temporalise itself.¹

The human is a social being inasmuch as it is historically constituted as multiple individuals in relation to one another and those very relations themselves.² History and the human are inseparable concepts in Marx, thus the temporal reading of the materialist concept of history must also be understood as the temporal reading of the human which creates and is created by this history. This understanding is mediated by the transhistorical concept of labour in general. As the social production of the means of life, which is a dialectical production of the means of life, labour is an ontological domain of temporalisation because it constitutes the movement of negation. As in Hegel, the dialectical movement of negation is in Marx the first and most evident register of an active difference between the past, the present and the future. But is the historical status of negation thereby secured? Is negation thereby the movement of historical temporalisation? The German Ideology offers a particular dialectic as a possible foundation of historical time: the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. And it is through negation that the three temporal coordinates within this dialectic first becomes intelligible, such that there is futurity immanent to the present’s transcendence of the past. But in what sense is historical temporalisation about more than negation? In other words, with what, or rather through what, must negation be thought in order to reconstruct the materialist concept of history as a concept of historical time?

The proposition of this chapter is that a concept of historical time cannot be constructed out of the materialist concept of history until dialectical negation is put in relation to historical totalisation, which is to say the totalisation of the time of all human lives. Whether it is openly acknowledged, left unstated or disavowed, this totalisation is the overarching intelligibility and narrative of every post-Enlightenment conception of history from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Within the modern philosophy of history, this is the sense in which the human is ‘historical’ because history is the development of the time of the human species as a whole. Marx does not thematise this totalisation in relation to the materialist concept of history. ‘World history’ and the ‘world-historical’ figure in The German Ideology (primarily in relation to alienation and its speculative end in communism), but they are tautologically defined by Marx and Engels³, and the extent to which they function as totalising concepts is unclear. The world market is depicted as an integral dimension of the production of world history ‘for the first time’⁴, but its relation to the social production of the means of life is not established, and it is clearly a phenomenon specific to capitalism.⁵ As with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach⁶, these concepts invoke the ordinary conception of ‘world’, a conception which (at least on the surface) is much more about space than it is about time. Therefore, the ‘ongoing totalisation of the time of the human’⁷ is a philosophical problem for the materialist concept of history, because the relationship between totalisation and negation within this concept remains undeveloped. What is this relationship? Namely, how is totalisation a kind of temporalisation itself, indissociable from and yet irreducible to the movement of negation?

¹ Sartre, CDR 1, 53.

² The ‘social’ is not just direct communal relations. As Marx states: ‘Social activity…exist[s] by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity…when I am active scientifically…when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others, then I am social, because I am active as a human. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product – as is even the language in which the thinker is active – my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.’ Marx, OPM, 538 (EPM, 137).

41

These are crucial questions, if only because the consequence of not tying the movement of totalisation to temporalisation is the overdetermination of historical time in Marx by the other predominant thread of the post-Enlightenment conception of history: the idea that the human is subject to change over time. Totalisation is a condition of thinking this conception of history, because totalisation is a condition of thinking the objects – the totality of time and the totality of history – in, through and across which this conception of change is understood to occur. After 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.’⁸ In Marx, this is the idea that social relations and the individuals which constitute these relations are subject to change over time, and moreover that the ways in which social relations change over time differs from how individuals change over time, and in fact determines how individuals change over time. In The German Ideology and elsewhere, Marx frequently invokes this historicist conception of historical time, because he implicitly treats historical time as the medium in which change within and between modes of production occurs. As the previous chapter demonstrates, the social production of the means of life bears a nonlinear temporal structure, but, this chapter maintains, Marx’s failure to examine this production in relation to totalisation unavoidably relegates historical change and historical difference within the materialist concept of history to a historicism which might be summed up as ‘the change and difference between one specific time and place and another’. However, the totalisation of history does not thereby constitute an appeal to the ‘synchronic’ as against the ‘diachronic’. And this is not, as Althusser has it, because the synchronic is an instant within ‘the ideological conception of a continuous-homogenous time’, from which the diachronic becomes ‘successive contingent presents in the time continuum.’⁹ Rather, synchrony and diachrony are in origin ahistorical concepts which emerge from structuralist linguistics – qua the atemporal succession of semiological systems – and are thus ill-suited to thinking the essential relation between totalisation, temporalisation and the materialist concept of history.¹⁰ Many questions arise: in what sense does totalisation register a non-historicist understanding of historical change and historical difference? In other words, in what sense does totalisation register an understanding of historical time as constituted by its own historicality, which is to say by different modes of production themselves? More basically, what is the relationship between totalisation and historicalisation?

³ ‘The proletariat can…only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means [the] existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.’ Marx and Engels, GI, 56. ⁴ Ibid. 78.

⁵ ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 408.

⁶ ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Marx, ToF, 423.

⁷ Osborne, ‘Marx and the philosophy of time’, 16.

⁸ Koselleck, Future’s Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time, 236.

42

In order to address these questions – questions which will be carried over into Chapters 3 and 4 – it is necessary to systematically investigate the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation, and to do so at the level of thephenomenological present which ‘contains the totality of the temporal spectrum within itself’ and which ‘alone gives direction to history.’¹¹ This present is not the Aristotelian instant within the divisible continuity of movement, but rather the present in the sense of the Augustinian ‘threefold present’ of memory, attention and expectation, the present, that is to say, in the sense of the durational ‘thick present’ of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness, a constitutive present which must both be established in its own right and materialised as a historical present¹² (the prioritised present of the first historical act). Whilst the phenomenological present is not reducible to individual action, individual action is nonetheless ontologically prioritised within this present because, this chapter maintains, individual action is the first standpoint from which totalisation and its relation to temporalisation becomes intelligible. Consequently, individual action is the initial standpoint from which the existential structure of temporalisation renders the totalisation of history unavoidable.¹³ Herein lies the crucial importance of Heidegger’s Being and Time. His phenomenological ontology of Dasein (literally ‘being-there’) comprises the first two sections of this chapter because one of the main objectives of this ontology is to secure this priority of individual action through Dasein’s relationship to its death. For Heidegger, both the awaiting and the anticipation of this existential death are indelibly individual acts which ground the fact that ‘temporality temporalises’ as the ontological meaning of ‘care’, which, as we will learn, is the ontological meaning of Dasein as a structural whole.¹⁴ As we will examine, this beingtowards-death (albeit only in its ‘authentic’ mode) is the ‘hidden basis’ of Dasein’s historical being, its ‘historicality’ [Geschichtlichkeit].¹⁵

⁹ Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, 96.

¹⁰ See, in particular, Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 27-8. On this point, Osborne’s work is indebted to Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 55-6. As we will learn, Sartre makes use of the ‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’ throughout both volumes of the Critique, unintentionally smuggling in a historicism to his account.

¹¹ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 49, 140.

¹² See Harry Harootunian, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007), 477. For an analysis of the phenomenological present in Husserl, see Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative,

43

The first volume of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (hereafter Critique) is the focus of the final section of this chapter. An existential reading of the relationship between the new materialism of praxis in the Theses on Feuerbach and the historical materialism of need in The German Ideology, the Critique systematically reconstructs dialectics as the very movement of totalisation. For Sartre, individual praxis not only ontologically grounds this reconstruction, but so too the practical identity between totalisation and temporalisation, because it is individual praxis wherein the conceptual difference between ‘totalisation’ and ‘totality’ is first revealed. This is the sense in which totalisation is a ceaselessly developing activity of synthetic unification¹⁶, whereas a totality is the exteriorised product of this activity, that which has been cut off from the totalising process of its production (which it nonetheless contains sedimented within itself). However – in Heidegger and Sartre alike – this process of unification should not be understood as subsequent to an existing state of difference. As with the previous chapter (one moment, the existence of a need, is not subsequently followed by another, the creation of the means to satisfy that need), there is no chronological succession here. Rather, following Heidegger, to whom Derrida’s concept of différance is also indebted, totalisation is the production of difference, a unification whose unity is the process of its differentiation. For Sartre, this understanding of unification grounds the practical identity between totalisation and temporalisation, such that temporalisation is, as previously stated, the production of the very difference between the past, the present and the future.¹⁷ The relationship between totalisation and temporalisation is thus a relationship of dependence: the totalising structure of individual praxis totalises precisely because it produces temporal difference. The totalising structure of individual praxis is predicated on temporalisation, just as the temporalising structure of individual praxis is predicated on totalisation. For Sartre, this dependence grounds the primary (ontological) and secondary (epistemological) intelligibility of history. It also, as we will see, enables the construction of a concept of historicalisation.

Volume 3 [1985], trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23-44.

¹³ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, X.

¹⁴ For Heidegger, care [Sorge] is the totalised manifold of existence, which he formally defines as follows: ‘the being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-being-already-in (the world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).’ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927] (hereafter BT), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 237. Heidegger establishes temporality as the ontological meaning of care in §65 of Being and Time. ¹⁵ Ibid. 438.

¹⁶ Sartre, CDR 1, 46.

44

Existential temporalisation is the subversive core of a phenomenological ontology of human being, because it upends how we (to use a Heideggerian expression) ‘initially and for the most part’ understand action [Aktion, Handeln], activity [Aktivität, Tätigkeit] and the act [Akt, Tat] themselves. In this sense, existential temporalisation intervenes into existing claims made on behalf of the originary character of The German Ideology. It intervenes, to give two examples, into Althusser’s assertion that The German Ideology represents an ‘epistemological break’ and ‘state of rupture’ in Marx’s work¹⁸, as well as Georges Labica’s contention that The German Ideology is a groundbreaking ‘construction site’ for a ‘scraping operation’ and ‘settling of accounts’ with Marx’s predecessors, his contemporaries and himself.¹⁹ However, against Labica’s outright reduction of all philosophy to ideology, there is a distinct possibility that philosophical discourses on temporalisation might in fact enrich the materialist concept of history, and that this concept of history might in turn enrich these discourses, such that it forces these discourses to reckon with ‘…men and women, not in any fantastic isolation and fixation, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions.’²⁰ The German Ideology may convey a desire, as Althusser puts it, to ‘purely and simply abolish’²¹ philosophy, but this desire not only ‘hardly means that there is no philosophy at work in The German Ideology’²², but, we might add, hardly means that there need not be more philosophy put to work within The German Ideology. Marx’s emancipatory project need not converge with Labica’s militant (but not necessarily radical) grasp of Marx’s materialism as ‘situating all philosophy, whether idealist or materialist, in its true place, namely in ideology’, as rendering the notion of a Marxist philosophy ‘absurd’.²³ The philosophy within Marxist philosophy need not be that philosophy (e.g. classical German idealism) in opposition to which Althusser, Labica and Marx articulate the ‘science of history’.²⁴ Herbert Marcuse’s notion of ‘concrete philosophy’ is a useful example of this. For Marcuse, philosophy is ‘the concrete distress of human existence’²⁵ which makes visible, and demands that we overcome, our contemporary historical situation. This philosophy, what Marcuse calls ‘philosophising’ – philosophy as a concrete mode of human existence – is a far cry from the abstract thought from which Althusser, Labica and Marx seek to dissociate themselves, and with which they are arguably preoccupied, to the point where they dismiss, to name the most prominent figure, the practical and concrete dimensions of Hegel’s thought. To invoke Engels, perhaps it is not an ‘exit from philosophy’ which is warranted, but an exit from the exit from philosophy. As Balibar points out, this exit is not a simple return to the inside of philosophy unburdened by history.²⁶ It is an exit marked by a dialectic between philosophy and Marx’s own foreign land (history), a foreign land which is itself a dialectic between philosophy and non-philosophy.

¹⁷ In a certain sense, the Critique allows us to grasp the difference between totalisation and totality as analogous to the difference between temporalisation and time, such that time is the exteriorised product of temporalisation, cut off from its own temporalising process, and subject to inertia. This dovetails with the doubled meaning of the German Gegenwart as both presence and the present, and points to one dimension of Sartre’s indebtedness to Heidegger (who invokes this doubled meaning across his corpus). In addition to Sartre, Althusser relies on Heidegger on this point. See Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: an Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’, 95.

¹⁸ Louis Althusser, For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 33, 36.

¹⁹ Georges Labica, Marxism and the Status of Philosophy [1976], trans. Kate Soper and Martin Ryle (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), 165-72.

²⁰ Marx and Engels, DI, 27 (GI, 47-8).

45