Arleen Ionescu

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’.

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters.

Starting with a recall of the overwhelming feeling, voiced by many thinkers, that the post-WWII era brought about the ‘sense of an ending’ of history as Mitsein, the essay explores the renewed necessity to re-learn to be together in the wake of the worst modern pandemic by appealing to Jean-Luc Nancy’s imagination of a community without community. Nancy’s plea for a singular togetherness will be re-examined in relation to his view that COVID-19 makes us equal and ‘communizes’ us, including in our respective isolations, which we attempt to re-interpret within the critical framework, in memory studies, of what James E. Young called ‘collected memory’. Inflecting Maurice Halbwachs’s original ‘collective memory’ to allow for the many discrete, fragmented memories of disparate individuals united in common moments of remembrance, ‘collected memory’ will be seen as a hyphenated process of ‘re-membering’, a poetic piecing together of disjointed, scattered members and isolated communities gathered in virtual unison through their respective losses. This research is supported by The Program for Professor of Special Appointment at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.