A completed act collapses into inert thinghood without ongoing reaffirmation.

Evidence

If I leave behind an act which I have accomplished, it becomes a thing by falling into the past. It is no longer anything but a stupid and opaque fact. In order to prevent this metamorphosis, I must ceaselessly return to it and justify it in the unity of the project in which I am engaged. … Thus I can not genuinely desire an end today without desiring it through my whole existence, insofar as it is the future of this present moment and insofar as it is the surpassed past of days to come. To will is to engage myself to persevere in my will. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 24

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Joyce’s or Bergson’s duration, and to Sartre’s for-itself/in-itself dialectic; also prefigures the commitment ethic the reader tracks in their bad-faith typology project. — connects to: Win condition planned precisely was achieved but its aftermath was empty. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 425