La légèreté du mourir Le Dernier Homme de Maurice Blanchot

The aim of this paper is to analyse the metaphor of lightness [légèreté] in The Last Man by Blanchot, where lightness is associated with death. When considering the full meaning of the word, lightness structures Blanchot’s novel both as for its form and its theme. One may thus consider lightness as a harbinger of two types of community: the community of friends and the community of lovers, both based on a specific bond without bond that Blanchot will have developed in his subsequent essays.