Sartre rationalized abandoning revision as politically virtuous

Evidence

This was when he convinced himself that literary quality control was bourgeois self-indulgence; only the cause mattered, and it was a sin to revise or even to reread. He filled sheets with ink while Beauvoir, a painstaking reviser herself, watched nervously. Sartre churned out essays, talks, philosophical works — occasionally with help from Cau, but mostly alone. His bibliographers Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka calculated that, over his entire life, he averaged twenty pages a day, and that was of completed work, not drafts. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 844

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that quality control could be reframed as bourgeois self-indulgence — a political commitment weaponized against craft — is a dense, disquieting mechanism worth sitting with.
• SEED: Angle: productivity myths and the ideology of never revising — how the modern ‘shipping culture’ echoes Sartre’s political rationalization of carelessness.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s farewell to literature meant abandoning revision, not writing — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 699; Transforming concrete political questions into abstract principles guarantees political failure.; Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Reform-minded dissent within a system strengthens rather than threatens it #complicates (0.74)
• Transforming concrete political questions into abstract principles guarantees political failure. #expands (0.72)
• Obscurantist prose in theory often substitutes for argumentative clarity #complicates (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1403