From: thomas.bedorf-AT-ruhr-uni-bochum.de
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 13:26:48 +0100
Subject: RE: totalizing


Lois,

perhaps i may step back a little in the discussion. Here is the
Sartre book I thought of, which you presumably know: "Critique of
Dialectical Reason", french publication 1962 (Gallimard).
In his historical anthropology of the "Critique" Sartre seems to
suggest that the process of history has to illustrate itself in the
single existence and that conversely history has to integrate the
materiel conditions of the existence of the individual. "The
singularity of the behaviour is before all the concrete reality as a
lived totalization, it is not an attribute [trait] of the individual,
it is the total individual conceived in its process of
objectivation." (Critique 1962, p. 88) The individual contingencies
are no longer irrelevant specificities of the individual, but rather
his caracteristics pointing to its implementation in historical
processes. The meaning of these contingencies is only to realize when
they are correlated to an objective process. "The demand for
totalization implies [...], that the individual finds its own
wholeness in all of his manifestations." (p. 88) Sartre is
emphasizing, that totalities like groups or classes are neither
static nor substantial but dynamic, because they are only conceivable
by totalization. The individual not only has historical meaning, but
is can thereby recognize itself in its single practical acts.
Totalizing for Sartre, as I understood it (in his reader-unfriendly
800 pages book without subtitles), is less an discursive act, as it
was discussed here, but a part of an individual praxis with regard to
a historical process: as a "proceeding act" [acte en cours] (p. 138).
The totalization as as generalized judgement effective in politics
would in the Sartrean sense be translated by "totality".

don't know if that kind of explanation helps, but this is at least
what i understood from Sartre's use of the term (which by the way is
already used by Proudhon in "Creation de l'Ordre").

Thomas