Abstract

This article explores a certain type of affect that accompanied the post-1945 European dream: the feeling that an impassable distance separates us from worlds at war. Starting with the interplay between protected spaces and devastated territories, the article seeks to trace the operations that give life to this affect of distance. How does this distance play a part in our ways of being at war? And what kind of agentivity is at work, which makes it possible not to feel involved? Drawing on Martha Rosler’s montages of images and a fragment of Simone Weil, the article unravels the tortuous mechanisms that allow us to be at war, while at the same time setting war apart.