Lastness: Blanchot's First Extremities

Blanchot's writings evince a recurrent preoccupation with figures of lastness, such as the last man or the last writer. However, within his adaptation of Nietzsche's Eternal Return, ‘lastness’ not only calls up (what may or may not come after) death and extinction but is indissociable from an ‘always already’ joining first and last, originariness (the ‘first man’) and destination (the ‘ends of man’). The essay will first clarify Blanchot's reworking of the figure of the last man as a universal first man within nature's cyclical return, before considering the role of prehistoric art in shaping his (and Bataille's) conception of a truly human history as (re)beginning at the end of history. Bataille's essay on Blanchot's Le Dernier homme will afford final thoughts on how ‘the world we live in’ may well (not) be at the same time ‘the world we die in’.