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dance on the feet of Chance’. The point is that the ‘impossible’ strength to affirm the
chance events in life - ‘impossible’ because sometimes this would include affirming
devastating, contingent events such as losing one's sight, or one's physical ability to
move in what is properly called an ‘accident’, or unexpectedly contracting the HI virus
- bestowing on contingency a certain necessity or ‘destiny’, is what activates the ‘eter-
nal recurrence’. Once affirmed in this way, the contingent, the arbitrary, is tied into the
circle of necessity, of the ‘eternal recurrence’. And the rare individual who is able to
do this, to rise to such unconditional acceptance of her or his finitude (our inability to
undo what has happened once), of her or his mortality - in this way overcoming what
Nietzsche, in the persona of Zarathustra (1984: 252), calls the ‘spirit of revenge’: ‘...
the will's ill will against time and its “it was”’ - lays the foundation for paradoxically
attaining ‘immortality’, for surpassing the bounds of time and (human) history within
time and history. Such a person would also attain ‘singularity’ in so far as it is linked
with the affirmation of the unique, though contingent, actions performed by an indi-
vidual, in this way imparting ‘necessity’ to them.
Is it at all surprising to find in this an echo of Lefort's notion of ‘singularity’, dis-
cussed by Copjec in relation to ‘modern immortality'? Her clarification of the concept
of singularity (as opposed to particularity, associated with what is fleeting and does
not endure) is worth quoting at length (Copjec, 2002: 23-24):
This notion of singularity, which is tied to the act of a subject, is defined as
modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or supe-
rior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. Soul, eternity, absolute
or patriarchal power, all these notions have to be destroyed before an act can
be viewed as unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity.
One calls singular that which, ‘once it has come into being, bears the strange
hallmark of something that must be,’ and therefore cannot die...
Is there not a striking consonance between Lefort's words, quoted by Copjec towards
the end of this excerpt, and what was outlined earlier concerning the connection be-
tween contingency and necessity in Nietzsche's thought, in so far as it bears on singu-
larity (and therefore immortality of the modern sort)?14
It would be remiss on my part to omit a brief reference to some of Nietzsche's re-
marks on the ‘free spirit’ in Beyond Good and Evil (1966), given the (not unambigu-
ous) light that these observations cast on the question of singularity and ‘modern im-
mortality’. Consider the following such remark, for instance (1966: 37):
Every choice human being strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy
where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the great majority - where he may
forget ‘men who are the rule,’ being their exception - excepting only the one
case where he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a
seeker after knowledge in the great and exceptional sense.
Nietzsche's conception of the ‘free spirit’ as exceptional and distinctive is apparent in
14 Admittedly, it seems ironic to make this statement, considering that Copjec includes ‘patriarchal power’
among those things, the destruction of which are a prerequisite for an ‘act’ to be affirmed as being
unique, if Nietzsche's own arguable inability to free himself from the hold of patriarchy is remembered.
Nevertheless, I believe that, despite this, one could indeed discern in his thought the lineaments of ac-
tions being unique or singular. This could be shown to have paved the way for the demise of patriarchy,
to the extent that it created receptivity for such actions on the part of women by articulating the condi-
tions of comprehensibility of singularity.