Laurent Milesi

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’.

The first in-depth engagement with and close reading of Anankè, this essay focuses on how Cixous's novel plays with and rewrites psychoanalytic concepts and practices. The critical elaboration of her own ‘cixanalysis’ in this fiction-as-becoming and journey, which reinvents psychoanalysis as it gives free creative rein to woman's desire instead of pathologizing it, unfolds in six related studies: on ‘conduct’, ‘habit’, staging, transference and/as translation, the interpretation of interpretation, and the shift from drive to drift in Cixous's fictional liberation of woman from destiny and destination.

Derrida's treatment of Chinese script as essentially non-phonetic in Of Grammatology has been a recurrent leitmotif among several sinologists and scholars of Chinese origin, particularly in Rey Chow's famous 2001 essay ‘How Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory’. Despite forceful refutations of this misconception, the accusation of a fantasizing ‘ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism’ has endured and could still be found in a recent 2015 article suggestively titled ‘A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida's “Chinese Prejudice”’. This essay will probe into the recurrent accusation of a Derridean hallucination of the other as the other's own hallucination in order to analyse the sustained misreading of Derrida's phrase ‘outside of all logocentrism’ used about the Chinese ideogram.