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Forum for Modern Language Studies 2008 44(1):40-52; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqm123
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved

Weakness as a Form of Engagement: Maurice Blanchot on the Figure of the Last Man1

Daniel Just

Department of Literature
University of Essex
ColchesterEssex CO4 3SQ
UK


  Abstract

Against the background of the literary and philosophical debates in France in the mid- and the late 1950s, this article examines Maurice Blanchot's narrative Le Dernier homme (1957), as well as his critical essays from this period, asking whether the emphasis Blanchot puts in these texts on exhaustion, weakness and suspended deixis is, at the height of the war in Algeria, a sign of an apolitical withdrawal. I argue that instead of positing stylistic asceticism, slowness and silence as autonomous aesthetic categories, these texts propose them as historically conditioned literary devices – devices capable of undermining the drive for mastery that Blanchot identifies as the cause of the present Western ego- and ethnocentrism.

Key Words: Blanchot, Maurice • literature and politics • ethics • France • 1950s • decolonisation • humanism • Algerian War


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