JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics329becomes impossible, or when the synthetic event reveals that the impossibility ofchange is an impossibility of life. 10 The direct result of this is to make the impossibilityof change the very object which has to be transcended if life is to continue. In otherwords, we have come to a vicious circle: the group constitutes itself on the basis of aneed or common danger and defines itself by the common objective which determinesits common praxis. Yet neither common need, nor common praxis, nor commonobjectives can define a community unless it makes itself into a community by feelingindividual need as common need, and by projecting itself, in the internal unification ofa common integration, towards objectives which it produces as common. Withoutfamine, this group would not have constituted itself: but why does it define itself ascommon struggle against common need? Why is it that, as sometimes happens,individuals in a given case do not quarrel over food like dogs? That is the same asasking how a synthesis can take place when the power of synthetic unity is botheverywhere (in all individuals as a free unification of the field) and nowhere (in that itwould be a free transcendent (transcendante) unification of the plurality of individualunifications). Indeed, let us not forget that the common object, as the unity of themultiple outside itself, is above all the producer of serial unity and that it is on thebasis of this double determination that the anti-dialectical structure of the collectivity,or alterity, constitutes itself.But this last observation may help us. If the object really produces itself as thebond of alterity between the individuals of a collective, then the serial structure ofmultiplicity depends, basically, on the fundamental characteristics of the object itselfand on its original relation with each and all. This is how the set of means of production,in so far as they are the property of Others, gives the proletariat an original structureof seriaiity because it produces itself as an indefinite ensemble of objects whoseexigencies themselves reflect the demand of the bourgeois class as the seriality of theOther. Conversely, however, it is possible for the investigation to consider the commonobjects which constitute by themselves, and in the practico-inert field, an approximationto a totality (as the totalisation of the multiple by the Other through matter) and to tryto discover whether they too must constitute the multiple in question as seriality.Notes1 Marx has stated this thought specifically: to act upon the educator, it is necessaryto act upon the factors which condition him. Thus the qualities of externaldetermination and those of that synthetic, progressive unity which is human