Le Dernier Entretien: La Pensée Epuisée et L’Epuisement du Sujet

Critics of Blanchot's work long considered L'Attente l'Oubli (1962) to be his final work of fiction, that is until Blanchot published L'Instant de ma mort in 1994. Yet a short fragmentary text had appeared in 1966 in the Nouvelle Revue Française under the title "L'entretien infini", republished a few years later as the liminal text to Blanchot's longest work of philosophical reflection, entitled precisely L'Entretien infini (1969). Building on from, but going beyond previous readings, notably by Christophe Bident, Christopher Fynsk, and Éric Hoppenot, I argue in the present study that Blanchot's text is not non-generic but a récit and that it should be read indeed as an autonomous work of fiction that has its place in Blanchot's narrative corpus. Although Blanchot's thought at the time was seeking to go beyond generic boundaries of the literary, the critical, the theoretical, and the philosophical, "L'entretien infini" remains a pivotal fictional text in which thought itself is exhausting itself in endless possibilities.