The Critique’s final section turns abstract structures into concrete history
Evidence
It is here, therefore, that we reemerge from the abstract structures of isolated individual and group action studied in the first five hundred pages of the book back out into the “level of the concrete, the place of history itself’ (p. 632). This reemergence is both a fact of our reading and a significant conclusion to the argument: for it annuls whatever objections might have been made to the previous chapters on the basis of their abstractness, and confirms the presence of the earlier structures within that dense existential reality which we recognize as history itself. Indeed, this conclusion of the book, which many readers are perhaps too fatigued to reach or at least to consider with the intellectual alertness they may have been willing to devote to the earlier chapters, is as indispensable to an understanding of Sartre’s position as its ending to a novel that one ought (in an ideal world) to read at a single sitting. For it is at this point, with a prodigious whirring of dialectical machinery in which quantity turns around into quality, that the earlier, self-contradictory impressions of revisionism and Stalinism are wholly canceled out and replaced by the first genuinely political writing in the Critique, which, with its passion, intransigence, and attachment to the lived fact, matches the Sartre already familiar to us from Les Communistes et la paix and the political articles in Les Temps modernes. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 557
Categorization
- XREF: Jameson here performs the classic dialectical move of mediation — the concrete as ‘the level of history’ — that descends from the Frankfurt School’s notion of totality and Lukacs’s chapter on the standpoint of the proletariat. — connects to: Sartre’s Critique philosophically grounds already-accepted Marxist history; The May Events of 1968 vindicated Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique; Moving from abstract theory to concrete analysis requires adding new concepts (+2 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The closing argument that the book’s final concrete turn retroactively validates the abstract early chapters — quantity turning into quality as a structural reading act, not just a claim about the world — is a dense metacritical point about how formal structure itself carries philosophical argument.