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Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal
recurrence1
Bert Olivier
Philosophy
NMMU
Port Elizabeth
South Africa
Abstract
Joan Copjec has shown that modernity is privy to a notion of immortality all
its own - one that differs fundamentally from any counterpart entertained in
Greek antiquity or the Christian Middle Ages. She points to Blumenberg and
Lefort as thinkers who have construed this concept in its modern guise in dif-
ferent ways, and ultimately opts for Lefort 's paradoxical understanding of im-
mortality as the ‘transcending of time, within time’ before elaborating on a
corresponding notion in Lacan's work. It can be shown that Nietzsche, too,
provides a distinctly modern conception of ‘immortality’, articulated in rela-
tion to his notions of affirmation, singularity and eternal recurrence. In brief,
this amounts to his claim that, to affirm even one single part or event in one's
life entails affirming it in its entirety, and, in so doing - given the intercon-
nectedness of events - affirming all that has ever existed. Moreover, once
anything has existed, it is in a certain sense, for Nietzsche, necessary despite
its temporal singularity. Therefore, to be able to rise to the task of affirming
certain actions or experiences in one's own life, bestows on it not merely this
kind of necessary singularity, but what he thought of as ‘eternal recurrence’ -
the (ethical) affirmation of the desire to embrace one's own, and together
with it, all of existence ‘eternally’, over and over. This, it is argued, may be
understood as Nietzsche's distinctive contribution to a specifically modern
notion of immortality: the ability of an individual to live in such a way that
his or her singular ‘place’ in society is ensured, necessarily there, even after
his or her death.
In her book, Imagine there's no woman (2002: 19-25), Joan Copjec compares the
thought of Lefort and Blumenberg on the topic of immortality in the modern epoch.
She remarks quite aptly that the word ‘immortalize’ - used by Lacan with reference to
Antigone - comes across as ‘anachronistic’ in the modern age (Copjec 2002: 19). Only
those who still live as if nothing changed in the transition from the medieval period to
the Renaissance (where the battle for the soul of modernity was fought) and from there
1 © 2007 Bert Olivier; licensee South African Journal of Philosophy.
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