The passages on the last man from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra frighten us: who would want to be this creature, product of a terrible entropy, end result of a movement that appears to move through everything in this age of administration and bureaucracy. Read Blanchot’s The Last Man: now we learn that the last man is the one whose place all of us will take. Only this man is, as it were, the Other stripped of specificity, subject to no predicate, bearer of no attribute. Who is he? To call him the ‘last’ man – is this to indicate what remains in each of us when we become, for another, the Other [Autrui]? Recall that he is said to be dying (the tale is set in a sanatorium). But isn’t there a sense that the others in the tale will come to assume the place of the last man, and, in so doing, open themselves to the other patients? The last man: the one whose place we occupy in turn. The one we become when we are drawn close, too close to a dying without limit, without term.
Is there a sense that the reader, before a book like this one – a work of literature – will likewise occupy the place of the last man?
This is difficult, very difficult, but I also sense that this goes to the heart of this difficult book. A few notes: to read, one might think, is to determine, to delimit – in Hegel’s terms, to see through the work of death. Then, through reading, no longer to be bound to oneself – to have had introduced, at the heart of the relation through which you are bound to yourself, the opening which unbinds. Who are you? Not yet anyone. Not yet because self-relation is, for a moment, impossible. Dying is a word for this. Dying, not death; the illimitable, not the limit; worklessness, not the work.
Dying – this is the word that Blanchot allows to indicate the way in which we are unbound to ourselves in the opening to the Other (a story that should be told by way of Levinas). Dying, then: the name for an interruption of relationality through which, reading, exposed, you become no one in particular. No one? The self despecified, the ‘I’ given over to the ‘il‘. The last man? Each of us takes part in the roundplay where we take the place of no one, of the last man, in turn.
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