Keywords:

Key figures:

Critical:

Fichte; Hegel; Marx; Althusser; Adorno; Jameson; Lukacs; Durkheim; Bataille ; Debord ; Luhmann; Bohm;

Adorno; Derrida; Lyotard; Martin Jay; Deleuze; Levinas ; Badiou;

A totality is a whole, but often it means a certain type of whole. It normally refers to a whole that is thought about as or has an effectivity as a whole. So 'totalities' are really wholes thought about as wholes. It thus designates the constitution of a whole; that is to say a relation superior to its elements. The totality in this sense represents a system with internal relationships or alternatively an entity that does not relate to anything outside of itself. It is complete. Different types of totality

Its usage as a concept is predominant in Marx and Hegel and most dialectical philosophy. However the category of totality is also important for classical sociology as well as in a looser sense, holistic theories of society which can include religion. The question of totality should interest any analysis of the present. One reason for this is it has been a point at which one can think thorugh the relationship between thought and being. Hegelian Marxism promised a strong form of unity between an existing social reality and the categories of reflection, science and experience that arise as political subjectivity within it. In Lukacs the conflict between classes, the practice of the working class, is a recovering of an objective unity between the subject and his own objective ground of being. Totality qua epistemological category, is the methodological principle of thought’s abstraction from its fundamental identity with what is (in what ever shape it presents itself e.g. Bourgeois naturalism, the state, nationalism, the imperatives of capital), to its reconciliation in the actualised potential of social consciousness realising itself in social being as envisaged in the politics of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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On other sites

Read essay:

Politics and totality - Erik Empson

The breath of the possible - Gavin Grindon

Resources:

The Empire of the Known: Subjectivity and anti-totality within the discourse of totality (book)

Multiplicité, totalité et politique by Lazzarato (in French)

Wholeness - by Jean Piaget

The concept of structure - discussed by Giddens as an absent totality

Negri and Hardt 'Totalities' excerpt from Empire 

Totality and totalisation - Sartre (from Critique of Dialectical Reason)

Spinoza and totality

Different types of totality

The Paradox of Finite totality - Zizek

The premature obituary of the book

Sufism and the whole

Bibliography:

History and Class Consciousness Georg Lukacs

Marxism and totality Martin Jay

History and totality John Grumley

Wholeness and the implicate order David Bohm

September 6, 2003 22:00