admitted to having delivered in volumei“not the real concrete, which
can only be historical, but the set of formal contexts, curves, structures
and conditionings that constitutethe formal milieuin which the historical
concrete must necessarily occur” (CDRi: 671 ).
Enveloping totalization
A term unique toCritiquevolumeii, enveloping totalization (ET) is “a
turning back of the inert upon the agent to recondition him” ( 284 ). In
terms ofCritiquevolumei, it is a temporalizing of praxis-process and, as
such, draws its unity from its transcendence toward a goal (praxis) and
forges passive syntheses and multiplicities (processes). The editor of this
text calls it a “system” (CDRii: 183 n.). In this sense it could describe
colonialism discussed earlier. True to his dialectical nominalism, Sartre
gives “enveloping totalization” a somewhat different meaning as its
referent shifts.^18 Still, he preserves the primacy of praxis when he adds,
in rejecting any idealist interpretation of this phenomenon, that “it goes
without saying that this dissolving mediation [of the practical process]
is carried out by men” (CDRii: 232 ). Once more, the meanness is not
entirely in the (colonial) system.^19
In its most comprehensive form, enveloping totalization may be seen
as a version of that “totalization without a totalizer” on the possibility
of which Sartre hangs the meaning of history in volumei. Retaining the
hypothetical mode of these volumes, he writes early in volumeii:“Wedo
not even know yet if the enveloping totalizaion can exist. We shall
see further on that it is the condition of any intelligibility of history”
(CDRii: 33 n.).
Incarnation
“Correlative to ET, it is an internal and local temporalization, a
‘moment,’ as Hegel might say, of the ongoing totalization” (CDR
ii: 77 ). “Incarnation” appeared earlier in the context ofsensand the
(^18) But if there is a “family resemblance” among these uses, one, it seems, is the head of the
family: “Enveloping totalization, inasmuch as it is implied and aimed at by all partial
totalizations, is praxis itself inasmuch as it engenders the corporeity that sustains and
deviates it, and inasmuch as it attempts at every moment to dissolve its own exteriority into
immanence” (CDRii: 232 ). In effect, the totalization is seekingincarnation, the universal is
19 pursuing theconcrete.
SeeCP 183.
350 Individuals and groups:Critique of Dialectical Reason