Complicated principles which seem important right now #126

Like a moth attracted to flame, literature turns towards war not because it sees war as its source, the condition of its own possibility, but on the contrary because it sees war as what threatens or promises to take away its own conditions of possibility. War forces literature to take the risk - or gives it the hope - of being stricken at last with impossibility, of having nothing at all to fall back on.

Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave - French Literature Under the Threat of War