Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

The possibility of a philosophical correspondence between Being and Time and Marx’s analyses of capitalist alienation is beginning to emerge, and this is all the more evident with the third point of resonance. To be clear, this point is only secured by modifying Heidegger in the direction of Marx, but it is all the more productive because of this. There is a conjunction between Marx’s phenomenology of the alienation of the worker from both the product of his labour and from other workers, such that these become objective things divorced from and hostile to him, and Heidegger’s account of an everyday absorption in the world which ‘leaps over’ the world and relegates it to a pre-ontological thing. Crucially, this conjunction traverses the two primary and interdependent articulations of ‘world’ in Being and Time: the ready-tohand within the world of circumspective concern [das Umwelt], as well as the world of public interaction between one individual Dasein and another, which is to say the ‘with-world’ of solicitude [Fürsorge]. In Heidegger, the reification [Verdinglichung, literally ‘thingification’] of the world of circumspective concern comes to the fore with what he calls the ‘un-ready-tohand’, an entity which is ‘not missing at all and not unusable’,⁶¹ but which, and here we must realign Heidegger towards Marx, does not ‘stand in the way’ of Dasein’s concern. This is because concern – the existential register of the activity which Dasein performs and the things which this activity procures – is, at the level of individuals, overtly and covertly forced upon Dasein. Against Heidegger, Dasein’s assignment is explicit precisely because this assignment has not been disturbed.⁶² This non-disturbance is a class concern. Within capitalism, it is the exclusive belonging – ownership – of the ready-to-hand whose worldly character ‘announces itself’ as what might be described as a ‘useful presence-at-hand’ (the ready-to-hand qua the un-ready-to-hand). In his reading of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marcuse grasps this subjection to the thing as the economic manifestation of an originary lack of Dasein. For Marcuse, Dasein’s being always exceeds its existence, rendering its labour a futile attempt to realise its capacity for self-fulfilment. Therefore labour is, as he puts it, inescapably ‘burdensome’: ‘in labour it is always first a question of the thing itself and not of the labourer, even when a complete separation between labour and the “product of labour” has not yet taken place. In labour the human is always taken away from its self-being and toward something else: it is always with an other and for an other.’⁶³ It is necessary to read ‘the thing’ in the Marcuse passage as both the product of labour and the other worker in Marx, and as the being of both the ready-to-hand and ‘the other’ in Heidegger. Herein lies the relevance of Heidegger’s concept of solicitude to Marx. Solicitude ‘throws’ the other out of his ‘position’ and dictates that with which he is concerned.⁶⁴ Heidegger acknowledges solicitude to be a relation of dependence, and, in a rare moment of political economic insight, a ‘being-with-one-another of those who are hired for the same affair…[that] thrives only on mistrust.’⁶⁵ Whilst he never establishes the connection, solicitude (in its indifferent and deficient modes) is the objectification of the other as a tangible thing. The ‘one’ may be ‘as little present-at-hand as Dasein itself,’ yet the ‘the being of those entities which are there with us gets conceived as presence-at-hand.’⁶⁶

⁶¹ Ibid. 103.

⁶⁰ Heidegger, BT, 167.

⁶² Ibid. 105.

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Transposing this dialogue between Marx and Heidegger to the philosophy of time now requires that Dasein’s structural whole [Ganze] be investigated. At the end of the first division of Being and Time, ‘care’ [Sorge] emerges as the totalised manifold of existence which simultaneously refigures existence as ‘existentiality’. Care is formally defined as follows: ‘the being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-being-already-in (the world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).’⁶⁷ For Heidegger, existence, facticity and falling are the ontological characteristics of Dasein which ‘weave together’ the originary context of care, to which disclosedness and truth – and their articulation through discourse and language – essentially belong.⁶⁸ As previously considered, existence is constituted by understanding, an ability-to-be which in turn is structured by projection upon possibilities and the interpretation (the ‘working out’) of these possibilities. Facticity is the affective determinacy of Dasein. It is not the brute ‘factuality’ of something present-at-hand, but rather an actuality marked by a ‘disposedness’ which discloses Dasein in its essential ‘thrownness’. An existential fact that is never settled nor finished, thrownness reveals that Dasein has already always been ‘delivered over’ to being-in-the-world, even if, and in fact precisely because, Dasein ‘initially and for the most part’ evades this fact. ‘Falling’ fills out Heidegger’s notion of care. If existence is the domain of ‘being-ahead’ and facticity that of being-already-in the world, falling is the ‘beingalongside’ or ‘being-amidst’ entities encountered within-the-world. Falling is constituted by idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. As being-in-the-world, it is also temptation, tranquillity and estrangement (falling is the only stated place of estrangement in Being and Time). Reminiscent of the ‘fundamental premise of private property’ for Marx, the fact that the human ‘produces only in order to have’⁶⁹, falling is for Heidegger a ‘downward plunge’ whose ‘tranquillised supposition’ is that ‘it possesses everything…that everything is in reach.’⁷⁰ An existentiale directly linked to the sociality of the one, falling is, for this reason, the primary point of entry into Heidegger’s two existentiell modes of being: authenticity/ownedness [Eigentlichkeit] and inauthenticity/unownedness [Uneigentlichkeit], wherein the latter is not (purportedly) a fall from the purer and higher state of the former, but an ontologically basic fascination with the world and the one, a positive possibility of Dasein’s ‘not-being-its-self’.⁷¹

⁶³ Herbert Marcuse, ‘On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labour in Economics’, [1933] trans. John Abromeit, in Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, 130. Douglas Kellner also translates this essay in Telos 16 (Summer 1973), 9-37. There is clearly an ontological individualism in this essay. ⁶⁴ Heidegger, BT, 158, 161. This is misleadingly characterised as an ‘extreme possibility’ of solicitude, but in fact constitutes the phenomenological core of its ‘indifferent’ and ‘deficient’ modes. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 159.

⁶⁶ Ibid. 166, 168.

⁶⁷ Ibid. 237.

⁶⁸ If disclosedness (understanding, disposedness, falling) ‘maintains its articulation through discourse’ (Heidegger, SZ, 461/BT, 400), and if ‘discourse is existentially equi-originary with disposedness and understanding’ (Heidegger, SZ, 213/BT, 203), is it justifiable to suggest that, even if ‘discourse in itself is temporal,’ it ‘does not temporalise itself primarily in any definite ecstasis’ (Heidegger, BT, 400)? Is Heidegger’s transposition (as we will later consider) of understanding as the future, disposedness as beenness, and falling as making present not woven together with an ecstasis (if not a temporality) specific to Articulation itself? It never made its way into the final manuscript, but Heidegger’s temporalisation of language and speech in the ‘first draft’ of Being and Time addresses this. See Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time (The First Draft of Being and Time) [1924], trans. Ingo Farin (London: Continuum, 2011), 63. This text should not be confused with his Marburg Theological

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lectures of the same year: Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time [1924], trans. William McNeill (Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell, 1992).

⁶⁹ Marx, JM, 274. See also Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Technē in the Thought of Karl Marx [1969], trans. Ronald Bruzina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), 123-42. ⁷⁰ Heidegger, BT, 223.

⁷¹ Ibid. 220. It is difficult to accept Heidegger’s argument that falling ‘does not express any negative evaluation.’ Ibid. As he expresses it: ‘we…misunderstand the ontologico-existential structure of falling if we…ascribe to it the sense of a bad and deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves.’ Ibid. For an attempt to move past this strict separation between the ontic and the ontological, to think affinities between inauthenticity in Heidegger and alienation in Marx, see Anne F. Pomeroy, ‘Remythologizing Heidegger: Capitalism, Time, and Authenticity’, Φιλοσοφία (Philosophia): International Journal of Philosophy 37:2 (2008), 119-38.

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2.2 Death, Temporality and Historicality: Being and Time

‘Being-in-the-world’, Heidegger declares at the opening of his analysis of care, ‘is a structure which is originarily and constantly whole.’⁷² Yet the entire chapter devoted to care (chapter 6 of the first division) never analyses the meaning of the whole or the totality as such. This task is left to the opening section of the second division of Being and Time (§45), which reminds the reader that existence ‘formally indicates that Dasein is as an understanding ability-to-be which firstly ‘raise[s] the question of this entity’s ability-to-be-a-whole [Ganzseinkönnen].’⁷³ As such an ability-to-be, there is thus some sense in which Dasein is necessarily not yet, some sense in which it is necessarily still outstanding, to which an ‘end’ belongs. But the issue for Heidegger is not the actual realisation of this end, such that Dasein ontically ‘completes’ its own ability-to-be-a-whole, but rather the end which defines – which is – this open ability, this possibility of being-a-whole. In short, this end of being-in-the-world is death [Tod], and it is an end which ‘limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein.’⁷⁴ This is, as we will now examine, a distinct existential-ontological conception of death, which only exists as a possibility – Dasein’s pure, ‘ownmost’ [eigenst]⁷⁵ possibility – and hence ‘is only in an existentiell being towards death.’⁷⁶ In other words, the existential structure of this existentiell being makes up Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole, such that this structure is modally divided between an authentic being-towards-death (anticipation) and an inauthentic everyday evasion in the face of death (awaiting).

Heidegger differentiates his conception of death from both ‘perishing’ and ‘demise’ at an analogous level to his dissociation of Dasein from both the present-at-hand and the readyto-hand. Perishing is the biological end of life: the heartbeat stops. But since perishing is a category of the ontology of life which – as Heidegger wants it – is subordinate to the ontology of Dasein,⁷⁷ the end of Dasein from the standpoint of its existence as a living entity is not its perish but rather its demise. Strictly speaking, Dasein never perishes, but it certainly demises, but only so long as this demise is understood as the end of its life, not its death. The primary problem, however, with perishing and demise is that they situate death at the level of beingat-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein] rather than being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende]. For Heidegger, these conceptions of death operate with a conception of end which displaces the fact that the end is already always there [da], such that Dasein’s understanding ability-to-be-a-whole is, one might say, already always constituted by an understanding inability-to-be-a-whole. Comparing the not-yet of Dasein to a piece of ripening fruit, he suggests that ‘…as long as any Dasein is, it too is already its “not yet”.’⁷⁸ Heidegger never uses the word, but there is an implicit concept of totalisation being developed here, such that being-towards-death totalises precisely because it is not nor can never be a totality (in the ordinary or so-called preontological sense of the term). This is also the unique way in which Heidegger’s conceptions of death and the end dovetail with a particular conception of the limit [Grenze].⁷⁹ As White explains, ‘We are interested in why and how the possibilities are thus limited’⁸⁰, and ‘death delineates and delimits Dasein’s possibilities as an understanding able-to-be.’⁸¹ Or as Blattner states, ‘it is a limit-situation in which the ability-to-be is stifled.’⁸² The conception of death which is appropriate to the entity that is its possibilities is the fundamental limit of those possibilities, but what kind of limit is this?

⁷² Heidegger, SZ, 240 (BT, 225).

⁷³ Heidegger, SZ, 307, 310 (BT, 274, 276).

⁷⁴ Heidegger, BT, 277. Following Macquarrie and Robinson, Ganze will be translated as ‘whole’, whereas Ganzheit will be rendered as ‘totality’. Heidegger rarely uses the technical term Totalität for totality.

⁷⁵ White prefers to translate eigenst as ‘most proper’ rather than ‘ownmost’, so as to resist the reduction of Dasein to individual persons. See White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, 332. However, she does not mitigate the overt individualism of other dimensions of Heidegger’s analysis of death, particularly his depiction of the ‘in each case mineness’ of death.

⁷⁶ Heidegger, BT, 277.

⁷⁷ Ibid. 291.

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There is a complex philosophical appropriation of the conceptual lineage of the limit at work here. As with Heidegger’s reconstruction of the purity of a priori synthetic judgements through his conception of world, this appropriation begins with Kant, although its relation to being-towards-death stems from the (for Heidegger) underdeveloped difference between the whole and the sum in Plato and Aristotle.⁸³ There are different but overlapping dimensions to this appropriation whose shared origin is arguably the systematic distinction between the limit and the barrier [Schranke] within Kant’s critical philosophy. For Kant, ‘limits…always presuppose a space that is found outside a certain fixed location, and that encloses that location; barriers require nothing of the kind, but are mere negations that affect a magnitude insofar as it does not possess absolute completeness.’⁸⁴ Unlike mathematics and the natural sciences, the ‘dialectical endeavours of pure reason’ within metaphysics lead to limits whose transgression (qua transcendental ideas) ‘cannot be avoided and yet will never be realised.’⁸⁵ In Heidegger, the existential rendition of this comes by way of Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety and Jasper’s conception of the ‘limit-situation’ [Grenzsituation] in his Psychology of Worldviews (1919), which Heidegger footnotes.⁸⁶ Specifically, it is the towards within beingtowards-the-end, such that anxiety ‘amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end’⁸⁷, which existentially registers the unavoidability and yet actual impossibility of death. To put it another way, the anxiety inherent within being-towardsdeath corresponds to and yet critically modifies the function of the limit in Kant: corresponds to, because the limit (death) which begets this anxiety is certain and yet unrealisable; critically modifies, because the transgression of this limit in Heidegger is only ever a being-towards the limit, such that anxiety is not generated beyond the phenomenal realm of time and space but is rather only ever being-in-the-world itself.⁸⁸ Against Kant’s transcendental idea, therefore, being-towards-death is not illusory or deceptive (at least, that is, in its ‘authentic’ mode).

⁷⁸ Ibid. 288. ‘…the “lack of totality in Dasein, the constant “ahead-of-itself”, is neither something still outstanding in a summative togetherness, nor something which has not yet become accessible. It is a “not-yet” which any Dasein, as the entity which it is, has to be.’ Ibid.

⁷⁹ As we will examine, this is also the unique manner in which Heidegger ties temporalisation to the basic teleological structure of action by way of the concept of finitude [Endlichkeit], that ‘characteristic of temporalisation itself’ (ibid. 378). It is the limit – qua the finitude of temporality – which secures being-towards-death as the existential ground of temporalisation.

⁸⁰ White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, 338.

⁸¹ Carol J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2005), 79.

⁸² William Blattner, ‘The Concept of Death in Being and Time’, in Heidegger Reexamined, Vol. 1: Dasein, Authenticity, and Death, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (London: Routledge, 2002), 325. Blattner stresses the centrality of anxiety [Angst] to Heidegger’s analysis of death, although in a very curious fashion. On his reading, anxiety is not a disposedness in line with anticipatory beingtowards-death, as Heidegger argues, but death as such. In other words, Blattner expresses the idea that death is actually a possible way to be Dasein (in which Dasein is unable to be). Death, it seems, is akin to an anxiety attack. It is a state in which the ability-to-be is stifled. His metaphor for this is as follows: ‘in the absence of light, the ability-to-see is not non-existent, it is simply stifled.’ Ibid. To Blattner’s credit, he carefully reconstructs Heidegger’s nuanced understanding of the end, drawing on Jasper’s concept of the limit-situation, in order to evade any sense of the end as ‘stopping’. However, his idea that death is a situation that ‘occurs’ when Dasein is beset by anxiety, in which none of its possibilities matter to it whatsoever, does little else but flatten the crucial importance of anticipation.

⁸³ Heidegger, BT, 288, ft. iii (494).

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This recoding of transgression as anticipation – this reworking of the transgression of the limit as what might be called ‘being-towards-the-limit’ – forms the background to the most consequential passage within Heidegger’s analysis of death:

The closest closeness of being towards death as a possibility is as far as possible away from anything actual. The more undisguisedly this possibility gets understood, the more purely does the understanding penetrate it as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all [überhaupt]. Death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be ‘actualised’, nothing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting towards anything, of every way of existing. In the anticipation of this possibility it becomes ‘greater and greater’; that is to say, the possibility reveals itself to be such that it knows no measure at all, no more or less, but signifies the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence.

⁸⁴ Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science [1783], trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103-4 (§57). Translation modified to register Grenzen as ‘limits’ and Schranken as ‘barriers’. ⁸⁵ Ibid. 104.

⁸⁶ Heidegger, BT, 293, ft. vi (494-95). See also William Blattner, ‘Heidegger’s Debt to Jasper’s Concept of the Limit-Situation’, in Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 153-65.

⁸⁷ Heidegger, BT, 295. Emphasis in the original.

⁸⁸ ‘That in the face of which there is anxiety is being-in-the-world as such.’ Heidegger, SZ, 247 (BT, 230).

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This passage works with a twofold conception of the limit. On the one hand, death is the limit of all limits: the limit as such, the collective singular limit which grounds every limit of the understanding (the limit of the ability-to-be which ontologically grounds every limit of every ability-to-be). As Dasein’s purest and ownmost possibility, this is the meaning of death as the absolute limit within the multitude of every limited experience. In this regard, the ‘possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’ is the possibility of complete nonexistence, the possibility of the utter lack of existence. On the other hand, there is a radical situatedness at the heart of this passage, such that each and every act is existentially structured by a limit specific to that act. This limit is not death, but rather the factical domain of being-towardsdeath. The limit as such (death) ontologically grounds the specificity of the limit of each and every act, but it only does so because there is a specificity – a facticity – to the limit of each and every act. Hence the ‘possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’ also registers the simple fact that Dasein cannot be in any particular way (this is equally evident within the doubled meaning of the ‘possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting towards anything, of every way of existing.’) Existentially speaking, every act is constituted by a limit particular to that act, and, because of this, Dasein cannot be – it is not free to be – any existence whatsoever. This dimension of the limit is central to Heidegger’s later analysis of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, wherein the resolution is ‘precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time’⁹⁰, and that through which Dasein’s ability-to-be-awhole has ‘existentiell authenticity’. As being-towards-death, there is no measure to what Dasein cannot be: no measure to both the limit as such (death) which it cannot avoid but which it can never actualise, and no measure to the factical limit which structures each and every act. The ontological meaning of the possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole takes in both of these measureless impossibilities of existence.⁹¹

⁸⁹ Heidegger, SZ, 348. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation of this passage (Heidegger, BT, 306- 7) includes a ‘one’ (‘The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility’) and a ‘oneself’ (‘the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything’) which, as previously mentioned (footnote 51), effectively compels the English-language reader to grasp Dasein as already and only an individual entity, and as already and only an individual person at that.

⁹⁰ Heidegger, BT, 345. This analysis of resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] figures conscience as the ‘call’ of care, whereby an appeal is made – from Dasein to Dasein – to ‘summon’ it out of its fall into ‘the one’ and towards its ‘ownmost ability-to-be’. Heidegger, SZ, 369 (BT, 322).

⁹¹ At the end of her analysis of Heidegger’s conception of death, White points out that the prefix ‘Un’ of Unmöglichkeit (impossibility) denotes both ‘excessive amount’ as well as ‘non/not’. She advances the notion that Heidegger might be playing with a doubled meaning of Unmöglichkeit, and that, in the anticipation of death, what is ‘measureless’ about the measureless impossibility of existence is both

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We are now in a position to comment on Heidegger’s culminating definition of death. Following his order of presentation, death is, in full: Dasein’s ownmost possibility, which is non-relational [unbezügliche], unsurpassable [unüberholbar], certain [gewiß] and indefinite [unbestimmt].⁹² Grounding each of these dimensions is what Heidegger calls the ‘in each case mineness’ [Jemeinigkeit] of Dasein’s death which, after John Haugeland, indicates that in being-towards-death, it is not Dasein per se which is ‘mine’, but rather Dasein in each respective case which is ‘mine’.⁹³ The extent to which a conception of the limit is interwoven through each of these dimensions is readily apparent. However, there is an equally apparent philosophical problem with this conception of death, a problem which is not beget by the concept of the limit as such, but rather by the particular individualising character of the limit which underlies being-towards-death. This is the well-documented problem which Dasein’s originary sociality (the equi-originary existentiales of being-with and Dasein-with) constitutes for being-towards-death. For Levinas, the individualising structure of being-towards-death in Heidegger ignores the ethical, non-derivative structure of responsibility for the Other which produces ‘a world where I can die as a result of someone and for someone.’⁹⁴ For Ricœur, the ‘intimist tendency’ at the core of Heidegger’s analysis of death conceals the full scope of the ‘horizon of the world…from our sight.’⁹⁵ It is possible to mitigate these critiques through the ambiguities inherent within certain passages. For instance, when Heidegger states that ‘death lays claim to it [Dasein] as an individual Dasein’⁹⁶, it is important to recall that it is unclear what the exact contours of this ‘individual’ are, since, as earlier suggested, the individuation of Dasein signifies the demarcation of Dasein from other domains of entity, not – at least originarily – the difference of one individual human being from another. In this sense, and on the condition that being-with and Dasein-with are in fact originary existentiales, we might suggest that death lays claim to Dasein as, to invoke Nietzsche, an ‘individual more-thanindividual’ (wherein the latter individual is an individual human being but the former individual is not). However, the stance that ‘death individualises – but only in such a manner that…it makes Dasein, as being-with, have an understanding of the ability-to-be of others’⁹⁷ undercuts the philosophical potential of the individual and the social alike, because the content of this understanding is not the same understanding which first ‘raise[s] the question of this entity’s ability-to-be-a-whole’. The latter understanding is in both existential and existentiell opposition to the former, given that ‘all being-alongside things of concern and all being-with others…fails when the ownmost ability-to-be is at stake.’⁹⁸ Despite their originary status, concern and solicitude have been relegated to second-rate existentiale. From the standpoint of being-towards-death, they are not constitutive limits of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole, but mere barriers which Dasein can choose to overcome, and in fact must choose to overcome, if it is to free itself from the illusions of ‘the one’.

the non- and excessive possibility of existence. If Heidegger is in fact invoking Unmöglichkeit in this doubled sense, it is possible to suggest that death erases any measure to possibility both within and outside the limit, thus grounding the ontological importance of the limit. See White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, 342.

⁹² Heidegger, SZ, 349-52 (BT, 307-10).

⁹³ Haugeland, ‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’, 62. As previously indicated (see footnote 47), this specification of Jemeinigkeit adds weight to the idea that Dasein is not already always a human individual, that there is, in other words, a unique and separate Dasein for each individual person.

⁹⁴ Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 239.

⁹⁵ Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, 295, ft. 38. Consider Ricœur’s comment in light of the fact that the ‘horizon’ (from the Greek horizein) is that which limits, surrounds and encloses. Simon Critchley’s insistence on the ‘fundamentally relational character of finitude’ qua the ‘originary inauthenticity’ of death is a thought-provoking but ultimately unconvincing reworking of Heidegger, because it strips all existentiality away from Heidegger’s explicitly existential conception of death, and because the novelty of his ‘originary inauthenticity’ is premised on the notion that authenticity is the exclusive domain of the origin in Being and Time, which is simply untrue [ursprüngliche ≠ eigentliche]. See Simon Critchley, ‘Originary Inauthenticity – on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit’, in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Steven Levine (London: Routledge, 2008), 144.

⁹⁶ Heidegger, BT, 308.

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It is structured by an anti-social individualism, but Heidegger’s analysis of death is not thereby irrelevant to the construction of a concept of historical time in Marx. Being-towardsdeath is not just the existential-ontological ground of temporalisation but so too the ground of the indissociable tie between temporalisation and totalisation. It thus has a direct bearing on the construction of a concept of historical time in Marx, but like all philosophical encounters, this has its conditions. The entire range of these is vast, but it is evident that Being and Time must be critically reconstructed in such a way that the anticipation of death becomes indelibly social.⁹⁹ Being-towards-death must become compatible with Marx’s distinctly social concept of the human. What this socialisation of death brings to light, as will soon be examined, is the problem of the historicality of the act in Heidegger more generally. With this socialisation comes an essential restriction of the Heideggerian project: time cannot give being as such.¹⁰⁰ Rather, time’s ‘gift’ is only Dasein. Or better: time and Dasein give one another. Restricting Heidegger in this fashion enables ‘the procedure of separating out the existential analytic of

⁹⁷ Heidegger, SZ, 351 (BT, 309).

⁹⁸ Heidegger, SZ, 349-50 (BT, 308).

⁹⁹ Osborne, ‘Marx and the Philosophy of Time’, 20.

¹⁰⁰ ‘Time cannot at all be present-at-hand, it does not at all have any sort of determinate being – rather it is the condition of the possibility that it gives something like being (not entities). Time does not have the sort of being of some other thing, but rather, time temporalises [Zeit zeitigt].’ Martin Heidegger, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit [1925-6], in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 2: Vorlesungen 1923-1944, Band 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 410.

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Dasein from the question of the meaning of being in general.’¹⁰¹ It also redefines ‘ontological difference’ as that between Dasein and other domains of entity, not between being and entity as such. And as Heidegger is well aware, ontological difference is not just difference as such, but the relations between what is different. Hence to the extent that it is a historical difference, ontological difference (a concept, to be sure, Marx never uses) must also denote the difference between one mode of production and another, such that each mode of production produces a different kind of time because it produces a different kind of Dasein, and produces a different kind of Dasein because it produces a different kind of time. This is what a dialogue with Marx on the aforementioned ‘historical in being’ might become: not a dialogue whereby temporality is an entity,¹⁰² but a dialogue whereby temporality only temporalises because – like Dasein – it bridges the ontical-ontological divide. In contrast to Heidegger, this is the sense in which temporality only temporalises because it has materiality. This is a temporality not simply of matter but of the formation of matter through the living time of labour.¹⁰³

Yet despite the fact that it is constituted at the level of an anti-social individual, there is in Heidegger – not in Marx – a necessary aspect of temporalisation to which we must attend. This is the premise in Being and Time that existence holds ontological priority over facticity and falling, that ‘possibility as an existentiale is the most originary and ultimately positive way in which Dasein is characterised ontologically.’¹⁰⁴ That is, we take from Heidegger an ontological priority granted to the future [die Zukunft] over the past and the present, which is to say his conviction that ‘temporality temporalises itself originarily out of the future.’¹⁰⁵ It is the future, not as that which is yet to come but as the existential-ontological meaning of the understanding ability-to-be, that in the last instance determines ‘beenness’ [Gewesenheit], the temporality of facticity, and ‘making present’ [Gegenwart], the temporality of falling. This is not to elide the past and the present¹⁰⁶ as originary ecstasies [Ekstasen, from the ancient Greek ekstasis or ἔκστασις] of temporality. Rather, it is to confront (this comes with its conditions)

¹⁰¹ Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 56. Exposing ‘being as such’ or ‘being in general’ [Sein überhaupt] as ‘ahistorical’ is more complex than might be assumed, as it depends on creating a concept of the ‘ahistorical’ out of a concept of the ‘historical act’ which both deviates from Heidegger and is not synonymous with situating this act in ‘its specific time and place’ (historicism).

¹⁰² Reiterating Heidegger’s position in the Leibniz lectures (footnote 100): ‘Temporality “is” not an entity at all. It is not, but it temporalises itself.’ Heidegger, BT, 377.

¹⁰³ As cited in the previous chapter: ‘Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time.’ Marx, Grundrisse, 361. ¹⁰⁴ Heidegger, SZ, 191 (BT, 183). 104 Heidegger, SZ, 191 (BT, 183)

¹⁰⁵ Heidegger, SZ, 438 (BT, 380).

¹⁰⁶ Whilst this thesis utilises the terms ‘the past’ and ‘the present’ in conjunction with facticity/beenness and falling/making present, it must be noted that Heidegger relegates ‘the past’ to an entity which is no longer present-at-hand, and ‘the present’ to the ‘levelling off’ of the significance of ‘now-time’. The future is the only coordinate of time which keeps its everyday name in Being and Time.

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