Sartre’s scarcity-based starting point restores a nightmarish, myth-free reading of primitive history

Evidence

Sartre’s initial negations, and the stress he lays on scarcity, have the advantage of restoring to primitive societies (no matter what their property system) that dimension of misery and toil, early death, ignorance, and earth-scraping desperation which we know to have been theirs, and of restoring to history its inhuman, nightmarish quality from which myths as such only serve to distract us. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481

Categorization

• XREF: The Engels-as-Eden-myth critique connects to the reader’s dialectical-method interest: the charge that a purely positive origin cannot generate its own negative. — connects to: Engels’s primitive-communism narrative secretly repeats the Eden-and-fall myth — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 481; The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176; Genre codes transform real history into naturalized myth selectively — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 791

Broader Connections

• The constructed image of the primitive past serves a hermeneutic, not historical, function #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 176
• Genre codes transform real history into naturalized myth selectively #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 791