Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

If need is the negation of the negation, scarcity is the negation which is negated: the ‘negation of man in man by matter.’¹⁸⁶ To put it another way, matter and scarcity are indissociable terms in Sartre’s conceptual vocabulary: scarcity is matter, and matter scarcity, but only to the extent that both exist ‘as a human fact, rather than as the malignity of a cruel Nature.’¹⁸⁷ Scarcity is the transhistorical condition under which the negation of the negation becomes an affirmation – a positivity – but it also dictates that this affirmation (viz. need) is a univocal relation: the human must exteriorise itself in matter in order to exist, but matter need not, or rather it cannot, reciprocate the same action. Matter cannot exteriorise itself (at least, that is, at the level of human history): it is only ever exteriorised and reinteriorised by praxis (this is the meaning of passive activity). This is the reason why scarcity produces a ‘permanent framework of a field of tension’¹⁸⁸, not just within individuals facing the constant threat of elimination but between individuals as well. Social relations are thus structured as relations of ‘interiorised scarcity’, as relations, in short, of violence and with the Other.¹⁸⁹ If scarcity and matter are conceptually indissociable in the Critique, so too are violence and need. They articulate two different but interdependent dimensions of totalisation as an ongoing and open movement.

Sartre is often critiqued for this conception of need, primarily because the entire milieu of relations between action and matter, praxis and the practico-inert, individuals, collectives, groups, etc. that is immanent to this conception stems from a transhistorical identification of alienation and objectification, an identification which, Chiodi argues, is mediated by alterity: ‘alienation is bound to alterity to the extent to which alterity is equivalent to objectification.’¹⁹⁰ As Chiodi reads it, the Critique systematically conflates alienation, objectification and alterity. It takes the Hegelian coincidence of objectification and alienation in the Phenomenology, but effectively refuses the latter’s possible disappearance precisely because the former is tied to an ineliminable – existential – alterity. Effectively refuses, since Chiodi denies Sartre’s claim that the group-in-fusion might shoulder the ‘double concrete undertaking’ of ‘removing man from the statute of alterity which makes him a product of his product, in order to transform him, when molten [à chaud], by appropriate practices, into a product of the group, that is to say – as long as the group is freedom – into his own product.’¹⁹¹ For Chiodi, the statute of alterity in fact dictates that ‘de-alienation…becomes possible only through the suppression of objectification, which in being a feature of the reciprocal relation of multiplicity, can only be suppressed through the suppression of multiplicity itself.’¹⁹² Namely, through the suppression of totalisation itself, which is the suppression of history itself. ‘What this means, simply, is that de-alienation has the temporal dimension of an instant.’¹⁹³ If, for Sartre, the individual ‘discovers himself as Other in the world of objectivity’, and if the domination of individuals by matter, through individuals’ own praxes as the Other and through the praxes of Others, constitutes the ‘permanent possibility of alienation for everyone’, it is difficult to imagine how this possibility is not already a permanent necessity, the ‘destiny in exteriority of freedom.’¹⁹⁴ There seems to be no alternative to the fundamental incompatibility between reciprocity and objectivity at the heart of the Critique. For Mészáros, the root of this problem stems from the fact that the Critique ‘turn[s] the eminently historical and socially transcendable category of scarcity into a paralyzing ahistorical and anti-historical absolute, arbitrarily proclaimed to be the insuperable permanence and the overall determination and horizon of our real history.’¹⁹⁵ This is unquestionably true. Sartre resists at every turn the viewpoint that the ‘human fact’ of scarcity and (as he understands it) the alienation to which it gives rise are specific economic manifestations of the division of labour and private property relations within capitalism. This resistance – this over-ontologisation of history – extends to Sartre’s conception of ‘exigency’ (need from the standpoint of the practico-inert, its imperative) and its subcategory of ‘interest’, or ‘being-wholly-outside-oneself-in-a-thing insofar as it conditions praxis as a categorial imperative.’¹⁹⁶ The notion that both exigency and interest owe their historical intelligibility to capitalist private property is something that Sartre continually dismisses.

¹⁸⁶ Ibid. 149. Thus labour ‘has to be defined as praxis aimed at satisfying need in the context of scarcity by a particular negation of it.’ Ibid. 136-37.

¹⁸⁷ Ibid. 140, ft. 21.

¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 125.

¹⁸⁹ Ibid. 815. Violence ‘is the constant non-humanity of human conduct as interiorised scarcity; it is, in short, what makes people see each other as the Other and as the principle of Evil.’ Ibid. 149. ¹⁹⁰ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 88.

¹⁹¹ Sartre, CDR 1, 672-73.

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Yet the critical literature on the Critique generally does not thematise (in most cases it does not acknowledge) the manner in which Sartre’s conception of need forms the backbone of his understanding of the relationship between totalisation and temporalisation. Directly put, need secures the ontological dependence between totalisation and temporalisation. It is that through which the unification of totalisation must be understood as the active differentiation between the past, the present and the future. At the crux of this is Heidegger’s reconstruction of the teleological framework of the act. In Sartre, as in Heidegger, individual praxis is given meaning by the particular end of a particular project, precisely because every individual praxi makes the future present through the end of the act. Yet in the Critique – and this is exactly what is missing in Being and Time – need is where the end comes from. It is what governs the projection of the end. Need, such as it is defined by the negation of scarcity, thus occupies and materially grounds the place of finitude in Being and Time. It is the historical-existential limit in relation to which temporality temporalises itself as a kind of ‘being-towards-need’. As with Heidegger, the future is prioritised as the standpoint of the temporal unity of the act, which is to say that temporal unification is univocal: it originates from the projected future of the act. Yet on top of denoting an existential understanding ability-to-be, the future in the Critique is also structured by the conscious imagination of the end of the act. The future is simultaneously both actual and imaginary in the Critique, which cannot be said of Being and Time. It is open because it is a projective capacity for the sake of which any act exists and because it correlates to an act of the imagination. This latter sense of the future (the broadly Aristotelian conception of the future that guides the third volume of Lukács’s Ontology of Social Being¹⁹⁷) is directly in line with one of Marx’s classic descriptions of labour in Capital: ‘…what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end [Ende] of every labour process, a result emerges which was already present in the imagination of the worker from the start, hence already existed ideally. The worker not only realises a change of form of the natural; he also realises his own purpose [Zweck] in the natural. And this is a purpose he is conscious of. It determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.^’198 This purpose is an implicit formulation of the future in Marx, a teleological future immanent to the metabolism between humanity and nature. Sartre’s future is distinctive because it combines – and therefore exceeds – both Marx and Heidegger’s construction of the teleological future, and because it emerges from (absent in Marx and Heidegger alike) a conception of need which itself emerges from an account of the relationship between materiality and matter. This, as we will now begin to examine, is crucial to our project of thinking historical temporalisation and, consequently, the concept of historicalisation.

¹⁹⁶ Sartre, CDR 1, 197.

¹⁹² Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 93.

¹⁹³ Ibid. 95.

¹⁹⁴ Sartre, CDR 1, 227, 136, 227. Destiny, as Flynn describes it, is ‘a future inscribed in the practicoinert.’ Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 103. Destiny is ‘an irresistible movement [that] draws or impels the ensemble towards a prefigured future which realises itself through it.’ Sartre, CDR 1, 551.

¹⁹⁵ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 243. Mészáros is, bar none, the most forceful critic of Sartre’s conception of scarcity. Again, this is not without irony. Mészáros continually faults the Critique for its ‘ahistorical discourses’ and its lack of ‘historical specificity’, but he never considers the idea that Sartre provides the very means of rendering concepts such as the ‘ahistorical’ and expressions such as ‘historical specificity’ intelligible, which, it seems, are for Mészáros self-sufficiently secured by Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’. This irony is exacerbated by the fact that Mészáros accords to nature an impenetrable (ahistorical?) ‘lawfulness’. According to Mészáros, there is an ‘absolutely inescapable order of Nature’ whose ‘lawfulness…can be dynamically adapted but not violated’, dictating that there is ‘ineliminable natural substratum of human existence itself.’ Ibid. 247-49.

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¹⁹⁷ See in particular Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 3, Labour [1971-3], trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 1-46.

¹⁹⁸ Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band: Der Produktionsprozeß des Kapitals (hereafter Kapital 1), in Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 193 (Capital 1, 284).

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The Critique does not investigate the ontological dependence between totalisation and temporalisation to the extent to which it might. There is, for instance, no consideration of how the movement of totalisation-detotalisation-retotalisation might correspond to something like ‘temporalisation-detemporalisation-retemporalisation’, nor does Sartre specify how collective and group praxes institute new bonds between totalisation and temporalisation irreducible to individual praxis. As the introduction to this chapter argues, if temporalisation is conceivable beyond the scope of individual praxis as totalisation, then there is an entire domain within the Critique which is missing, a domain which, this thesis contends, must be explored in order to both maximise and qualify Sartre’s formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’. Nonetheless, there are passages in the Critique that must be highlighted, as they represent a critical departure from Heidegger as well as the means through which Marx and Engels’s first historical act can be read temporally, and done so beyond what the previous chapter provides. The first passage is a general exposition of what Sartre calls ‘dialectical time’:

Organic functioning, need and praxis are strictly linked in a dialectical manner; dialectical time came into being, in fact, with the organism; for the living being can survive only by renewing itself. This temporal relation between the future and the past, through the present, is none other than the functional relation of the totality to itself; the totality is its own future lying beyond a present of reintegrated disintegration. In short, a living unity is characterised by the decompression of the temporality of the instant; but the new temporality is an elementary synthesis of change and identity, since the future governs the present insofar as this future strictly identifies itself with the past.¹⁹⁹

The second passage reworks Heidegger’s analysis of being-towards-death:

Need, as a negation of the negation, is the organism itself, living itself in the future, through present disorders, as its own possibility and, consequently, as the possibility of its own impossibility; and praxis, in the first instance, is nothing but the relation of the organism, as exterior and future end, to the present organism as a totality under threat; it is function exteriorised.²⁰⁰

¹⁹⁹ Sartre, CDR 1, 82.

²⁰⁰ Ibid. 83.

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The third passage is an account of the temporality of exigency:

Inertia comes to him from the fact that previous work has constituted in the machine a future which cannot be transcended in the form of exigency…and from the fact that this untranscendable future is actualised in all its urgency by present circumstances (the capitalist process as a whole and the conjuncture in the unity of historical totalisation). Thus the inertia of praxis, as a new characteristic of it, removes none of its previous characteristics: praxis remains a transcendence of material being towards a future reorganisation of the field. But passivising annulment modifies it from the future towards the past within the petrified framework of exigency: this is because the future to be realised is already fabricated as mechanical inertia in the way in which past being is transcended. And indeed it can always be said that any material circumstance which has to be transcended, even the configuration of the land in the course of a walk, imposes a certain content on the future towards which it is transcended. It restricts certain possibilities and provides a certain instrumentality which will characterise the final result. However, it does not produce that future; the future comes to material circumstances through men, and if material circumstances are preserved in it as significations, it is not because it is homogeneous with them (and passive like them), but on the contrary because human praxis has given it a human future by projecting it (as transcended and preserved) into this future. On the contrary, precisely because they have been worked and assembled by men, who have made them anti-human, the machine and the combination of exigencies contain the movement of transcendence in themselves and, in connection with this inert movement, the future of the ensemble is the mechanico-practical meaning of this totality insofar as it functions (that is to say, insofar as an exterior force enables it to realise itself as a pseudo-organic function). Thus the reason why past being cannot be transcended is that it is itself the inscription in being of a praxis which produces, beyond any particular human praxis, its own meaning as transcendent being. So the human praxis which lives in symbiosis with this inert practice and which is controlled by it as exigency constitutes itself as a mechanical means (in exteriority) of introducing mechanics amongst its characteristics as a human undertaking. It remains entirely what it is (if one takes it abstractly as a pure, isolated praxis) but its own future as transcendence of its past being is transcended by this very past-being insofar as it is already signified by the future.²⁰¹

These passages exemplify the unique fashion in which Sartre dialecticises Heidegger’s anti-dialectical philosophy of time. Ifthere is a single dimension that cuts across each passage, it is the way in which, as the first passage expresses it, the ‘future strictly identifies itself with the past’. This is not a conflation of the future and the past within an absolutised present. The difference between the future and the past has not been flattened, but rather dialecticised, and dialecticised, crucially, under the immense weight and pressure of the practico-inert. The basic teleological structure of the act prevails (the future still governs the act through its end), but need and exigency, the functional relations of, respectively, organic and inorganic totalities to themselves, are only actual within the dialectic between praxis and the practico-inert²⁰², or what might be described as the dialectic between the totalising present and the totalised past. Both praxis and the practico-inert ‘contain the movement of transcendence in themselves’, but each encompasses a different kind of movement corresponding to a different kind of transcendence. Praxis is a dialectical movement between the present and the past wherein the present is prioritised as the totalising transcendence of the past towards the future. As the totalising present, praxis is the dialectical negation of the past as a totality, which is to say that the materiality of the present is the dialectical negation of the past as matter. To the extent that it is embodied as matter – i.e. to the extent that it is totalised as a totality – the past is fated to inertia (the totality cannot undo its separation from the process of its own production). But the past is equally fated to movement, because the totalising present cannot totalise without reinteriorising matter (there is no praxis without poiêsis). In contrast to praxis, the practico-inert prioritises the totalised past as an anti-dialectical force that incessantly saps the present of its ability to transcend the past, such that the future becomes untranscendable insofar as it already signifies and already identifies itself with the past. As the milieu of recurrence and historical repetition, the practico-inert constitutes the standpoint from which passivity is ‘the whole as the presence of the future’, and worked matter is ‘the solidified threat of the future.’²⁰³ This ‘theft of the end’²⁰⁴ at the hands of anti-praxis and counterfinality deforms temporalisation into the production of passive temporalities (‘the ingenuity of the organiser’ within Taylorism ‘consists in replacing temporalisation by passive temporality.’²⁰⁵) In short, the practico-inert temporalises, but only because, to invoke Marx, it represents the perversion [Verrücktheit] of human praxis as temporalisation.

²⁰¹ Ibid. 235-36.

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It is clear that the dialectic of praxis and the practico-inert has the potential to amplify the temporal reading of the first historical act in the previous chapter. Generally speaking, the Critique adds significant depth to the past and the future of this act, qualifying but not undoing the priority that this act accords to the present. As the previous chapter suggests, the past can be identified with the domain of existing needs within the dialectic of the creation of the means to satisfy existing needs and the creation of new needs. From a Sartrean perspective, however, this past takes on a constitutive function which exceeds its mere creation and negation by the present. The past is no longer non-dialectical but rather anti-dialectical: it internally opposes the negation of the negation within the present as a particular negation of the negation itself (exigency is the movement of ‘past-present-past’ that is internal to the movement of need as ‘present-past-present’). Hence the social production of the means of life is (for Sartre) already controlled by the practico-inert (alienation and class are already internal to the first historical act). As for the future of the first historical act, Sartre as well as Heidegger obviously provides us with the framework with which the future is to be grasped as immanent to the present: the teleological structure of the act. Chapter One claims that the future does not lie in waiting: it is not the waiting repetition of an actual dialectic played out between the present and the past. Yet it does not identify telos as the reason why this is the case, such that it is only the end of the act which unifies the time of the act. Telos – not negation – provides the standpoint from which the practical dependence between totalisation and temporalisation is secured. Thus the question emerges: does the unifying power that Heidegger and Sartre grant to the future, and does the prefabricating power that Sartre attaches to the past, undercut the ontological priority of the present within the first historical act? The answer, in a word, is no. The future and the past are constitutive features of this act, but only because they are immanent to the present. Sartre does not thematise this point, and would likely reject it. The Critique is guided by the idea that the future and the past completely determine, and thus overdetermine, the present,²⁰⁶ but nowhere is this idea measured against the idea that temporalisation as such is only actual within the present. This is not, after Heidegger, an appeal to the identity between the present and presence (the phenomenological appearance of matter). More basically, this is the notion, unconsidered by Sartre, that the present is the ontological meaning of movement itself, in both its active and inert registers. In this sense, totalising praxis and passive activity are inseparable movements of the present.²⁰⁷ Far from fitting into the framework of synchrony/diachrony, this present correlates to the phenomenological present outlined in the introduction to this chapter: properly materialised, it is the condition of thinking the past and the future in relation to one another. If this present is an ‘unbridgeable “pernicious chasm”’ that lies ‘between the subject and the object’²⁰⁸, and ‘between’ the past and the future, it is only because – qua the movement of becoming – it is ontologically basic to them.

²⁰² It is crucial to remind ourselves that the dialectic between praxis and the practico-inert is not simply another name for the dialectic between action and matter, but is rather a complex dialectic between a dialectical and anti-dialectical configuration between action and matter.

²⁰³ Ibid. 86, 184.

²⁰⁴ Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, 53.

²⁰⁵ Sartre, CDR 1, 559. This dovetails with how ‘a group…incorporates lived temporality with the passive temporality of the practico-inert, so as to accomplish, through actions that are multiple and the same, a common result.’ See Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 200.

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²⁰⁶ See in particular Sartre, CDR 1, 709. The present is – by far – the least theorised of the three temporal modes in the Critique, largely because the historicist framework of synchrony/diachrony predetermines its meaning. This leads Flynn to problematically accept that temporalisation = ‘diachronic totalisation (which in turn is = historical totalisation). See Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 111.

²⁰⁷ After Hegel, Heidegger and Marcuse, it is important to establish the difference and relation between the movement/motility [Bewegtheit] of existence/life and the motion [Bewegung] of a tangible object in space (see footnote 127 in this chapter and footnote 69 in Chapter 1). This difference does not feature in Marx but, this thesis argues, it might be productively integrated into his work (especially the various drafts of Capital).

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This underdetermination of the present notwithstanding, the Critique equips us with the means of constructing a concept of historicalisation that promises to enrich Marx’s philosophy of history. In order for this concept to work, it must register the singularity of the historical (as opposed to the individual and the social) act, as well as articulate a general set of relations within and between totalisation, temporalisation and materiality, relations that each and every historical act ‘incarnates’.²⁰⁹ There are a number of ways to approach historicalisation through Sartre, but undoubtedly the most productive is through the concept of ‘enveloping totalisation and its correlative ‘praxis-process’ in Sartre’s second Critique. Enveloping totalisation does not represent a departure, but rather an intensive and extensive expansion – a ‘compression and ‘decompression’ – of totalisation in his first Critique. As Flynn puts it, ‘what [enveloping totalisation] adds to ‘totalisation’ tout court from volume 1 is a greater intensity and a broader scope. It is more comprehensive than isolated organic praxis in both senses of the term: it is more inclusive of the mediating relationships that render abstract organic praxis concrete and, correspondingly, it yields greater understanding of the praxis in question…it is a unifying notion (historicising praxis-process), not an atemporal concept, that subsumes our praxes as parts of a dynamic whole.’²¹⁰ Commenting on Sartre’s position that ‘every singular totalisation is enveloping as a totalisation as well as enveloped as a singularity’²¹¹, Flynn goes on to state that ‘the singularity of the totalisation comes from its unique locus as the nodal point and matrix of an indefinite multiplicity of relationships’, and ‘its enveloping character arises from the linkage it constitutes (both in knowledge and in being) to the entirety of these relations.’²¹² There are two noteworthy conclusions to take away from this. First, the primacy of individual and social (collective, group) praxis has been supplanted by that of ‘praxis-process’, which, irreducible to its individual and social actors, is the ontological basis not of totalisation sans phrase, but of singular totalisations. The upshot of this is that there is no such thing as concrete praxis ‘as such’. There are only concrete praxes, each of which temporalise because they are orientated towards an end and because, as praxis-processes, they forge ‘passive syntheses’ that ‘reintroduce multiplicity’ into all modalities of human action.²¹³ Temporalisation has now become ‘the movement of enveloping temporalisation’²¹⁴, which is to say temporalisation ‘by every event, every praxis and every particular exis.’

²⁰⁸ Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ [1923], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1972), 204. The expression ‘pernicious chasm’ comes from Ernst Bloch.

²⁰⁹ ‘Incarnation’ does not feature as a central category in Sartre’s first Critique. It mainly designates individuation within the group, particularly its ‘summit’ (e.g. the sovereign). Incarnation is, however, crucial to the dialectical logic of his second Critique. As an ‘internal and local temporalisation’ of ‘a certain moment of the ongoing totalisation’, it encompasses every level of enveloping totalisation. It is, ‘at all levels, the retotalisation of the enveloping totalisation by every event, every praxis and every particular exis.’ Sartre, CDR 2, 77, 256. The conceptual homology between Sartre’s ‘incarnation’ and Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’ is clear.

²¹⁰ Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157.

²¹¹ Sartre, CDR 2, 49.

²¹² Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157. As Flynn points out, this aspect of enveloping totalisation is for Sartre the ‘law of immanence’ which constitutes ‘the synthetic interiority of the historical field.’ Sartre, CDR 2, 384.

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This leads to the second conclusion. Enveloping totalisation fundamentally unsettles the culminating formulation of history as ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ in the first Critique. We must consider how Sartre defines this formulation:

History is intelligible if the different practices which can be found and located at a given moment of historical temporalisation finally appear as partially totalising and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalisation from which there is no appeal. It is by seeking the conditions for the intelligibility of historical vestiges and results that we shall, for the first time, reach the problem of totalisation without a totaliser and of the very foundations of this totalisation, that is to say, of its motive-forces and of its non-circular direction.²¹⁵

The point here is straightforward. The end of individual and social praxis is one thing, but is there such a thing as ‘the end of history’, and if so, what mediates the relationship between these ends? What gives history its unity? ‘How’, as Sartre asks early in his first Critique, ‘can there be a historical future?’²¹⁶ ‘Totalisation without a totaliser’ is a placeholder of a response to these questions. The essence of this formulation is that totalisation at the level of individual and social praxis (totalisations which ‘have’ totalisers) is not – it cannot be – the totalisation that totalises history. That is, if history is in some way the totalisation of the time of the human, then it might be understood as the totalisation of all individual and social totalisations, and as the temporalisation of all individual and social temporalisations, yet this totalisation and this temporalisation are not – they cannot be – the same totalisation and temporalisation immanent to individual and social praxes. The difference between individual and historical totalisation is particularly important to Sartre. We know totalisation from the standpoint of the individual, but the intelligibility of historical totalisation, that totalisation ‘from which there is no appeal’, is obscure. It is akin to Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’, and to the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market, each of which work behind the backs of individuals.

²¹³ Ibid. 335. Recall that Sartre identifies ‘three modalities of human action’ in the first volume of the Critique: individual praxis, common (constituted) praxis, and praxis-process. ²¹⁴ Ibid.

²¹⁵ Sartre, CDR 1, 817.

²¹⁶ Ibid. 79.

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Sartre leaves unaddressed – he does not ask – what kind of relationship exists between ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ and enveloping totalisation. For Flynn, enveloping totalisation is ‘in its most comprehensive form’ a ‘version’ of totalisation without a totaliser, such that the former constitutes the diachronic (or progressive) meaning-direction [sens] of the synchronic (or regressive) latter.²¹⁷ Consequently, ‘“totalisation without a totaliser” does not refer to some “hyperorganism” or some transcendent reality, which Sartre would reject on principle. Rather, it denotes that set of objective relations or possibilities that are put in motion and sustained, even in their deviating and counterproductive functions, by individual and group or collective activity.’²¹⁸ Put in motion and sustained, he should add, by singular (enveloping) totalisations, by praxis-processes. This is an interesting – and faithful – reading of the relationship between Sartre’s two Critiques. It takes Sartre at his word on the last page of the first Critique that ‘we have not yet considered the diachronic depth of practical temporalisation’²¹⁹, implicitly stating that ‘enveloping temporalisation’ fulfils this need. However, Sartre and Flynn do not realise that the framework of synchrony/diachrony (the framework that grounds the implied (Sartre) and reconstructed (Flynn) relationship between totalisation without a totaliser and enveloping totalisation) threatens to undercut the dynamic – the dialectical – relationship between what Sartre identifies as ‘the formal structures of history’ (volume 1) and ‘real history’ (volume 2). This dovetails with what Mészáros calls the ‘unfinishability of [Sartre’s] theory of historical totalisation.’²²⁰ Whilst Mészáros singles out the ‘existential-ontological foundation’ of the Critique, and the ‘incorrigible’ lack of social and historical mediation it yields, as the reason for this unfinishability²²¹, the blame is better placed on Sartre’s attempt to yoke the philosophy of history ‘to the double synchronic and diachronic movement by which History constantly totalises itself.’²²² It is exceedingly difficult to transcend the atemporal origins of synchrony and diachrony within structuralist linguistics, origins, as the introduction to this chapter warns, which indelibly steer us towards historicism. ‘Diachronic totalisation’ therefore becomes the meaning of historical temporalisation. Even if we grasp ‘the double synchronic and diachronic movement’ as doubly dialectical, such that it correlates to the movement within and between the formal structures and the ‘concrete and absolute reality of History’²²³, we are still left with the problem of how to understand historical change and difference through Sartre’s unique dialectical-teleological conception of time. In Heideggerian terms, how are historical change and difference irreducible to the ‘ordinary’ (chronological) conception of time?

²¹⁷ Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Vol. I, 157, 177.

²¹⁸ Ibid. 177.

²¹⁹ Sartre, CDR 1, 818.

²²⁰ Mészáros, The Work of Sartre: Search for Freedom and the Challenge of History, 242. ²²¹ Ibid. 243.

²²² Sartre, CDR 1, 818.

²²³ Sartre, CDR 2, 335. ‘The concrete and absolute reality of History can be only in the singularity of the practical relations uniting singular men to the singular objectives they pursue, in the singularity of the conjuncture.’ Ibid.

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