An epilogue to the trilogy? In The Last Man, a récit published at the beginning of 1957, we find another narrator who is a writer—but is he still writing?1 On the table in the room, “there [are] some written pages.”2 What are we to make of them? What are we to make of the self, the self that has written? What happens when the last writer encounters the last man?
This encounter takes place in a sanatorium in the mountains, a place from “where we could see the sea, very far away” (38). If it is still possible to situate a récit in Blanchot’s life, we might place this one in Cambo, not far from the Atlantic. The supposed age of the characters might confirm this. The last man is slightly older than forty. The young woman and the narrator are markedly younger, and yet old enough for the woman, who has been at the sanatorium for many years, to be known as the “queen of the place” (67). Perhaps she has even been there since childhood. The narrator, who is much less ill and who has recently arrived, is perhaps thirty years old.
There are descriptions of the gardens, the buildings, the corridors, the rooms. Grievances, coughing, cries violently interrupt the night, each night, leading to a terrifying indifference. “The moans, the calls, at night, still had something dry about them that didn’t arouse pity” (53). The last man’s suffering is among the most intense. “He is a man alone, a stranger, gravely ill. For a long time now he has not left his bed, he doesn’t move, he doesn’t speak” (11). His silence is the zero state of suffering, the cry’s final moments.
Who are these exhausted characters? In terms of names and identities, we never find out. We know only that they are narrator who writes or has written, a young woman with whom he has a relationship. A “last man,” sometimes referred to as “professor,” who has no characteristics of the last inhabitant of the planet or a master of morals. He bears no resemblance to the last man of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: he who razes space, the offspring of the old morality. In Nietzsche’s terms, he is something like the “last philosopher.”3 In Kafka’s, he is the man who loves great city in the East, as well as his own anguish, and writes a Journal whose questions he reformulates (“Are you altogether forsaken? Can’t you speak for yourself? Must we think in your absence, die in your place?” 7).4 For Hermann Hesse, he would be the wolf from the steppes who constantly surveys his room, the solitary and ill man, the “genius of suffering”—he who twice compares himself, explicitly, to a wolf.5 For Thomas Mann, he would be the inhabitant of the magic mountain.6 After Beckett, and also after Michaux, he could a fantastic, glorious, exhausted figure. In Levinasian terms, he has patience, and in Antelme’s, there is the thought of misfortune. “The bare presence of suffering” recalls Antonin Artaud.7 These various links, sketched quickly here, have a single aim: approaching a point of lightness where life, suddenly and finally, is soon to be spent. This is one reason why, along with Death Sentence, this is one of Blanchot’s most admired récits.
The last man is like the last of literature’s characters, composed of the most sovereign characters—of their very shapelessness, of their anteriority to any shape, of the gulf from which they only emerge when the book is to come. “Often, what he told of his story was so obviously borrowed from books” (6). But if the last man is the man of books, if he is Kafka, if he is a wolf, if he is Castorp, he is also Blanchot, that figure who constantly tells his story by borrowing from books: in and from the name of the other. Having an extraordinary fate makes one fearful, it makes one feel guilty and ashamed. To meet when one is “dead, then . . . dying” (4) is both terrifying and paralyzing. Having to borrow one’s words rules out glorification; effacement rules out the question of reputation. Via a long journey, a long detour, all of these situations return the man in question to life, a life that has continued, meanwhile, in a displaced manner, masked, in the other time belonging to literature.
The figure of the last man had haunted Blanchot for almost twenty years. Bataille attests to this in Inner Experience:
Blanchot was asking me: why not pursue my inner experience as if I were the last man? In a certain sense. . . . However, I know that I am the reflection of the multitude and the sum of its anguish. In another sense, if were the last man, the anguish would be the most insane imaginable! I could in no way escape, I would remain before infinite annihilation, thrown back into myself, or even: empty, indifferent. But inner experience is a conquest, and it is such for others!8
There could be no better commentary on The Last Man. Only one point remains: the contradictions raised by Bataille are all dissolved by the last man of the récit, so completely that his various anguishes come together with his severe neutrality and his boundless generosity at a point of exhaustion and overthrowing.
It is by reaching an extreme state of sensibility, even by disinterring such a state (when the nocturnal companion takes on the stiffness of a corpse),9 that the récit attempts to indicate the minimal but also originary nature of a life of exhaustion. The last man is an almost man: “almost nothing distinguished him from others” (1), but this “almost nothing” allows for a precise, rigorous, minute description: distilled or instilled, and foggy, extending into the far reaches of perception and of sensibility. His “near stammering” (3) places him at the boundary of speech and silence, confrontation and pain, giving and withdrawal, the repeated murmur and the forgetful world. His face, which is “of a radiant near-invisibility” (12), returns from death as if from a divine sojourn. This almost is the always already of the critical texts. Both represent interruption into fatigue, the possibility or the attempt to reflect upon it, to think it. Both introduce the same rupture within language: for both almost and always already, time is broken down. Placed before a noun, almost acts adjectivally, weakly, almost invisibly, discreetly questioning the force that all noun-forms convey. Paradoxically, passivity toughens, separates, hermeticizes language, not by making it difficult to comprehend vocabulary or syntax, but by introducing an indifference to figuration (what is a face when it is invisible? what is speech when it stutters?). “As soon as I was given to use that word” (1): the récit begins with such a presupposition, with a presupposition that will never be dislodged. This passive form acts on behalf of mystery alone: chance, the power of chance set in opposition to any will to power.
This passivity brought into language is the mark of the last man’s gift and sovereignty. “Retiring” and “imperious” (1), “worn out by knowledge as one who knows things can be” (24–25) and yet divinely childish, he still manages to be reserved in such a way as to take others into his charge. He is not the “first man” that Thomas was, he no longer has the same mythical capacity, the gift of being able to metamorphose.10 He is the last man: the man of “the absence of myth” in the language developed by Bataille at the time, the man of the absence of poetry, of the impossibility of poetry, of the interruption of thought. “I can’t think about myself,” (2) he confides: No one can now think of himself or herself without thinking of humankind.
Such a gentleness is at the mercy of all desire for violence; the narrator’s does not escape this (55–56). But it also has a strength of its own, taken from the gulf of a solitude abundantly offered to the other’s becoming. It opens up an unexpected ability to listen:
someone other than me was listening to him, someone who was perhaps richer, vaster, and yet more singular, almost too general, as though, confronting him, what had been “me” had strangely awakened into an “us,” the presence and united force of the shared mind. (2)
It creates a virtual feeling of belonging to a community, paradoxically but efficiently suited to a new affirmation of singularity. This gentleness also allows for “the happiness of saying yes, of endlessly affirming” (4). This is not without pain, nor without demands. “Why is that all you think? Why can’t you help me?” (1). In truth, these are not questions; they are necessary admissions that something is lacking, and they impose an ethical transcendence on thought. To think beyond then becomes a way of helping a singularity that no longer thinks of itself. To think beyond is to help humankind insofar as it is represented by the last man. The last man is the thinnest point of humanity; he is the last man (dernier homme) in the sense that one speaks of the very latest thing (du dernier cri). To think beyond is thus to think “at the very last” (à toute extrémité, 23), the very lastness of death, of the human race. The formulation just cited also refers, when used in an article of February 1955 and therefore contemporary to the writing of The Last Man, to the lastness of art and, more specifically, of the novel, whose end has been predicted for centuries, says Blanchot. Adorno’s statement on the impossibility of poetry has nothing to do with the traditionalists’ attempt to salvage something.
Art is always, in every artist, the surprise of what is, without being possible, the surprise of what must begin at the very last [à toute extremité], the work of the end of the world, art that finds its beginning only where there is no more art and where its conditions are lacking.11
The récit therefore has to think “at the very last” or “at every extremity,” where there is no more art, no more world, no more death.12 The interruption of thought is the interruption of the récit; it is also its genesis, and this is what The Last Man accomplishes, this récit of how the interruption of the récit takes hold.
The Last Man provides a figure for what, outside myth, outside the symbolic and outside narration itself, can still be transmitted by a récit in a world quite prepared to live without narratives. What, then, can be made of miraculous experiences? How far-reaching can the damage caused by mankind’s cultural death be (would this be a culture stripped of all types of belief)? Could it reach the heart of its body and its thought? Why is such a death blindly tolerated, to what state of fatigue, exhaustion, illness will we allow ourselves to be reduced? Is the thought of death itself mortal? Into what death does it plunge us? How workless does it leave us? Is that what we must henceforth communicate? This risk?
Now, in the mid-1950s, Blanchot can finally risk the last man in the récit. The last man is he whose withdrawal allows the world to be recreated. It is he who allows the writer to attempt to enter a new, Mallarmean space, in which at once the origin (the last man) and the site of withdrawal (the narrator) can be given shape. It is he who thinks the limitlessness of suffering, who suffers the limitlessness of thought (and he helps the narrator to think it, to suffer it). “When he thinks,” the young woman says of him, “he suffers, and when he doesn’t think, his suffering is naked” (51). Let us recall the end of the article on Artaud, published in November 1956, when The Last Man was being readied for publication: “suffering and thinking are linked in a secret way. . . . Do extreme thought and extreme suffering open up the same horizon? Is to suffer ultimately to think?”13 Any response to these questions would be singularly reductive. We could say that suffering is already thinking, is the interruption of thought; that thinking is suffering, if one manages to remain faithful to that interruption; that not thinking is to increase suffering if it consists in laying suffering bare by depriving it of any language, which is to say of any community. But if to think is to sacrifice thought (to sacrifice: to alter without neglecting, says Bataille), staying faithful to sacrifice also demands that we stay faithful to refusal, and that we think the affirmation that sacrifice, joy, and refusal all represent.14 The last man is he whose strength (his faithfulness to sacrifice) and gentleness (his faithfulness to refusal) will allow the thinking of misfortune to be a thinking of joy; they will allow the narrator to write this, and the author to complete the cycle of novels in order to begin his ethical and political interventions (or interruptions).
Completing the fictional cycle allows the fragmentation of writing to begin. In The Last Man the sheer number of noun phrases is striking, as is the fracture that they impose on the récit, their dryness, the effect they have as a block that does not conform to the movement of creation, irreducible to the cycle of metamorphosis, a splintering of the world and deterioration, even of silence. These “calm blocks here fallen from obscure disaster” always appear in unexpected ways, providing constant danger for the continuity of the narrative thread, which they deprive of any verb, even as they accrue in numbers, providing a stippling effect.15 The narration—the relation, the communication—is constructed by both retaining flow and at the same time (but in another temporality) placing alongside it various forms of confrontation, withdrawal or brokenness. The tensions between separation and attraction, oblivion and memory, invisibility and figurability, loss and discovery, limitlessness and claustrophobia are what elevate the récit, raising it to a high level of thinking (though without relying on any notion of purification). As in the space of criticism, in this space where death strikes, where each group of nouns represents a crude and devastated drive, even the appearance of disappearance disappears, and interruption and fragmentation set in.
The last man is therefore also he who is capable of opening a space of gentleness within himself, a gentleness held out over and against the worst violence, sometimes even encouraging the illusion that he might be able to think everything. He is capable of effacing himself before this space that he creates, that he delivers unto us, and unto which we are delivered. This happens in the second part, which is really a sort of long epilogue, less than a third of the total length of the récit. Alone, the narrator confronts a space that has no center and seems to be searching for something within him: “something hungrily obvious” (66). Stripped of anything that might align it with mysticism, this space of writing exercises a mad pressure, echoes with nocturnal noises, and exalts the impossible elevation that it promises: “I stayed on the crest of that narrow drunkenness, cramped against a phantom of lightness, controlling a feeling of pain, of joy, not controlling it. It was light, joyous, of an amazing lightness” (66). This feeling has a limitless communitarianism about it. Writing is what takes us back to the community, “that chorus whose bedrock I situated over there, somewhere in the direction of the sea.” “That was where we all were, over there” (67).
It is above all in this second part that these groups of nouns and this impossible syntax fill the text, and that it fragments and breaks into short dialogues printed in italics, announcing the fragmentary aesthetic that for Blanchot is powerfully linked to communitarian feeling, and that is the aesthetic of his last major works. In this section, he erases the differences between characters, allowing what is said to be readable in various ways, as if the last man were dying in and through all of the words written. This second part, a veritable interruption of the récit, gives to us fragmentary, neutral, free, shared speech: a “we” that is alone capable of evoking glory, Thomas’s inverse hypostasis, the effaced shadow of the last man. This “We” is not immanent, but is made up of the encounters opened by the last man, the interruption of the personhood present in each of us. “When someone stops speaking it is hard not to go looking for the missing thought” (9).
“The spirit of lightness” has the virtue of giving one over to the “innocence of the worst” (5). The narrator is given over to this. The relation to the last man is goes for all speech. It returns the guilty subject to freedom, to lightness. The récit constructs—as if by transference—such a companion of writing. This construction always threatens, of course, to sink into idealization, into a redeeming divinization. Accepted, this risk would limit the last man, assuming that he also waits for an admission, “the unreserved admission that would put an end to everything” (25). But the feeling of community—friendship—is created precisely by such an admission’s being recognized as impossible. It is precisely because community is founded on the impossibility of the admission that it is shameful. A dangerous model of friendship, we might say, a way of granting a pardon without having any guarantees; or at least if we had forgotten the last man’s sovereignty, the convictions it leads to, the demands it imposes (the thought of misfortune, the interruption of thought), the values it refuses (purification, salvation). The friendship thus created exists only by placing last men in relation to one another; the community thus created exists only by relating to the lastness present in each of us. For Blanchot, the last man is also what is most originary: “perhaps he is only me, from the very beginning me without me, a relationship that I don’t want to embark upon, that I push away and that pushes me away” (26). A relationship henceforth open, a relationship ultimately opened up by dying and writing.