the example of this particular match, what Sartre sees among the
“conditions and grounds” of this conflict, which their praxis interiorizes,
is the fundamental scarcity of the “material conditions of their existence”
(CDRii: 9 ). He considers this the “deepest source” of their violent
combat: “the absolute isabove allthe difference separating life from
death...Every violence-event is produced, lived, refused, accepted as
the absolute”(CDRii: 31 ). In the present example, it is the knockout,
“always risked, always awaited by the crowd – [which] is a public
realization of death” (CDRii: 31 ). Later he elaborates that it isviolent
death that condemns an individual or a group to utter failure: “For
such a death is realized as theincarnationof theenveloping totalization
inasmuch as itis in itself, rather than as a determination for itself
of intersubjectivity” (CDRii: 310 ). Harkening back to his Bergsonian
influence, Sartre lays bare the basis of this struggle to overcome scarcity:
“human praxis has a non-transcendable aim: to preserve life” (CDR
i: 385 ). And echoing his prediction in Search for a Method of an
unimaginable philosophy of freedom to emerge in a world without
scarcity, he cautions: “Nothing warrants the assertion that this end
[the preservation of life] would remain non-transcendable, even if
humanity one day freed itself from the yoke of scarcity. On the other
hand, it is clear that it is our own History – the history of need – which
we are describing, and that the other, if it does exist one day as a
transcendence of ‘pre-history,’ is as unknown to us as that of another
species living on another planet” (CDRii: 385 n.).
Two technical terms, just introduced in the previous paragraphs and
one unique to this volume, require additional explanation: Enveloping
Totalization^16 and Incarnation. Presumably more appropriate to the
Progressive method and the history that it is groomed to comprehend,
they gloss the previous pair (“practico-inert” and “praxis”) by expanding
the scope of “totalization” and sharpening the focus of “free organic
praxis.” One could say that together they constitute and clarify the
“Concrete” or “Singular” universal by which Sartre enlists the Hegelian
“notion(Begriff)” in his pursuit of the concrete (le concret).^17 Sartre had
(^16) This is my translation of totalisation d’enveloppement, which Quentin Hoare renders
17 “totalization-of-envelopment” inCritiquevolumeii.
See his lecture to the French Philosophical Society inChapter 11 above as well asSFHR
i: 106 – 117.
Vol. II,Critique 349