Scarcity replaces facticity as the concrete framework conditioning human acts

Evidence

This initial terminological shift brings others with it: just as lack, as an abstract way of characterizing human existence, takes place in a world abstractly characterized as contingent, whose essential structure, with respect to man, is facticity (that is to say, incommensurability with human thought and human existence, or, in the terminology of a more literary existentialism, absurdity or meaninglessness); so in these new concrete terms, in which man’s emptiness takes the form of need, the resistance of the world to man is now defined in terms of scarcity. … For scarcity is precisely the unanalyzable starting point, the contingent datum, of the world in which we exist. Unintelligible in itself, simply a fact to which we cannot assign any metaphysical significance whatsoever, it nonetheless is the framework in which we must act, and conditions and alienates our acts and projects even in their very conception. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 471

Categorization

• XREF: The parallel mapping — lack/facticity translated into need/scarcity — is the same relation Jameson elsewhere draws between existentialism and Marxism that the reader is charting across the book. — connects to: Scarcity makes human existence itself a threat to others and the root of violence — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 472
• DEFINE: Clarifies how Sartre’s scarcity functions as the material translation of existential facticity.