Historical categories applied to actors are absconded from enemies rather than self-derived

Evidence

If there remains anything problematical about this ultimate version of the Sartrean model, it has to do with the nature of the judgments passed on the Gironde: to describe them as a certain type of bourgeois revolutionary is to categorize them from the outside, to evaluate them in a larger context with which they themselves could not have been familiar. Even to the degree that they knew themselves in some such fashion, in the obscure kind of self-awareness Sartre is describing here, such self-knowledge could only have resulted from some previous judgment on them from the outside, by enemies who saw them in a certain light, who stamped them with a certain label and a certain accusation, which they themselves then attempted to recuperate and to interiorize, to justify. At this point, therefore, we begin to pass outside the traditional area of existential analysis, the world of lived experience or the monad, in the direction of judgments made from the outside, and seemingly unjustifiable in existential terms. It will be the ultimate purpose of the Critique itself to found such judgments, and in doing so, to replace the relativism inherent in an intrinsic analysis of any given historical moment (such as the Gironde) in and for itself with a more absolute sense of the ultimate meaning of history itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 460

Categorization

• XREF: This is the move from phenomenology to totality — the transition Jameson frames throughout as the core dialectical problem, linking Sartre to Lukács’s notion of reification and class consciousness. — connects to: Agency is a historical concept, not a natural category — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 354; Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors; Acting traditions reflect cultural regimes of selfhood rather than universal truths
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that historical self-knowledge is always a recuperation of an enemy’s label is dense enough to sit with — it inverts the usual priority of self-understanding over external categorization.

Broader Connections

• Agency is a historical concept, not a natural category #expands (0.85) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 354
• Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors #corroborates (0.82)
• Acting traditions reflect cultural regimes of selfhood rather than universal truths #expands (0.80)