Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it

Evidence

But the problem is not only one of being “forced” into politics. For what Henri begins to realize- and to experience as a profound crisis- is that there is no going back to the prewar Henri. With regard to his desire to write, he begins to discover that the problem is not only one of lack of time- for actually he has nothing left to say! When he does sit down to work at his novel, he is blocked. Th e “impasse” is not merely a practical one. For now what should he say? And to whom? Who now will be his audience? His whole life lacks meaning, lacks fl avor. He is “living like an engineer in a mechanical world”; he has become “dry as a stone” (Man, 191). — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 493

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to existentialist themes of bad faith and the crisis of the committed intellectual — resonates with Sartre’s own postwar trajectory and with Simone de Beauvoir’s analyses of the engaged writer in ‘Privilèges’/contemporary essays. — connects to: Attempting partisan engagement can destroy the critical gap that gives intellectuals their value. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 74; Reclaiming a stripped radical aesthetic can restore politics emptied from it by advertising — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 474; Political hope can lift personal mood and restore creative capacity
• DEFINE: Illustrates the existentialist concept of the ‘impasse’ — a material and practical blockage that reveals itself as a deeper crisis of meaning and audience.