From this point of view, and before taking the discussion any
further, we must make a clear distinction between the notions of totality and
totalisation. A totality is defined as a being which, while radically distinct
from the sum of its parts, is present in its entirety, in one form or another,
in each of these parts, and which relates to itself either through its relation
to one or more of its parts or through its relation to the relations between
all or some of them. If this reality is created (a painting or a
symphony are examples, if one takes integration to an extreme), it can exist
only in the imaginary (1’imaginaire), that is to say, as the correlative
of an act of imagination. The ontological status to which it lays claim by its
very definition is that of the in-itself, the inert. The synthetic unity -which
produced its appearance of totality is not an activity, but only the vestige of
a past action (just as the unity of a medallion is the passive remnant of its
being struck). Through its being-in-exteriority, the inertia of the in-itself
gnaws away at this appearance of unity; the passive totality is, in fact,
eroded by infinite divisibility. Thus, as the active power of holding together
its parts, the totality is only the correlative of an act of imagination: the
symphony or the painting, as I have shown elsewhere, are imaginaries
projected through the set of dried paints or the linking of sounds which
function as their analogon. In the case of practical objects — machines,
tools, consumer goods, etc. — our present action makes them seem like
totalities by resuscitating, in some way, the praxis which attempted to
totalise their inertia. We shall see below that these inert totalities are of
crucial importance and that they create the kind of relation between men which
we will refer to, later, as the practico-inert. These human objects are
worthy of attention in the human world, for it is there that they attain their
practico-inert statute; that is to say, they lie heavy on our destiny because
of the contradiction that opposes praxis (the labour which made them and
the labour which utilises them) and inertia, within them. But, as these remarks
show, they are products; and the totality, despite what one might think,
is only a regulative principle of the totalisation (and all at once
disintegrates into the inert ensemble of its provisional creations).
If, indeed, anything is to appear as the synthetic unity of the
diverse, it must be a developing unification, that is to say, an activity. The
synthetic unification of a habitat is not merely the labour that has produced
it, but also the activity of inhabiting it; reduced to itself, it reverts to
the multiplicity of inertia. Thus totalisation has the same statute as the
totality, for, through the multiplicities, it continues that synthetic labour
which makes each part an expression of the whole and which relates the whole to
itself through the mediation of its parts. But it is a developing activity,
which cannot cease without the multiplicity reverting to its original statute.
This act delineates a practical field that - as the undifferentiated
correlative of praxis - is the formal unity of the ensembles that are to
be integrated; within this practical field, the activity attempts the most
rigorous synthesis of the most differentiated multiplicity. Thus, by a double
movement, multiplicity is multiplied to infinity, each part is set against all
the others and against the whole which is in the process of being formed, while
the totalising activity tightens all the bonds, making each differentiated
element both its immediate expression and its mediation in relation to the
other elements. On this basis, it is easy to establish the intelligibility of
dialectical Reason; it is the very movement of totalisation. Thus, to take only
one example, it is within the framework of totalisation that the negation of
the negation becomes an affirmation. Within the practical field, the
correlative of praxis, every determination is a negation, for praxis,
in differentiating certain ensembles, excludes them from the group formed
by all the others; and the developing unification appears simultaneously in
the most differentiated products (indicating the direction of the movement), in
those which are less differentiated (indicating continuities, resistances,
traditions, a tighter, but more superficial, unity), and in the conflict
between the two (which expresses the present state of the developing
totalisation). The new negation, which, in determining the less differentiated
ensembles, will raise them to the level of the others, is bound to eliminate
the negation that set the ensembles in antagonism to each other. Thus it is
only within a developing unification (which has already defined the limits of
its field) that a determination can be said to be a negation and that the
negation of a negation is necessarily an affirmation. If dialectical Reason
exists, then, from the ontological point of view, it can only be a developing
totalisation, occurring where the totalisation occurs, and, from the
epistemological point of view, it can only be the accessibility of that
totalisation to a knowledge which is itself, in principle, totalising in its
procedures. But since totalising knowledge cannot be thought of as attaining
ontological totalisation as a new totalisation of it, dialectical knowledge
must itself be a moment of the totalisation, or, in other words, totalisation
must include within itself its own reflexive re-totalisation as an essential
structure and as a totalising process within the process as a whole.