Dialectical analysis must regress to origin then progress to synthesis

Evidence

The aim is not only to “understand” the Gironde (in the reductive sense described above); but once understanding has been attained, to use it as a way back into what is essentially a concrete reexperiencing of the Girondins’ actual situation itself, a reenactment of their thoughts and acts, in something of the form they might take for a historical novelist. This is, indeed, the sense of what Sartre (following Marc Bloch) calls the “progressive-regressive method”: after having analytically worked back from the present to what must have been the meaning and value of past acts at their moment of performance, synthetically to recreate them in thought in such a way that justice is done their original richness and complexity. This was also the method of Marx, who in speaking of the understanding of religious beliefs (and thus of ideological phenomena in general) declares that “it is, in fact, much easier to find by analysis the secular kernel of the religious mysteries than, conversely, to derive their exalted forms from the prevailing real conditions. The latter is the unique materialistic and therefore scientific method.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 452

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Sartre’s progressive-regressive method as analysis-back-then-synthesis-forward, which is also presented as Marx’s own ‘unique materialistic method’.
• XREF: Direct bridge for this reader: connects Jameson’s account of Sartre to Marx’s 1857 Introduction and to Lukács’s method of historical totality. This is the Frankfurt-School lineage core the reader wants. — connects to: Literature is an ideal laboratory for observing dialectical method in action; Negative dialectics rejects systematic progression in favor of releasing the non-identical — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2545