“Subsister au cœur du noir” The sublime of war from Le Rivage des Syrtes to Les Terres du couchant

War, insofar as it is a limit-experience, constitutes one of the privileged sites of the sublime in Gracq’s work. Studied through this prism, it bears witness to the crucial poetic changes that take place between Le Rivage des Syrtes and Les Terres du Couchant. This mutation of Gracq’s poetics proceeds from a shift from the Dionysian sublime to the Panic sublime.