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insofar as the daunting prospect of exchanging time for eternity no longer tantalizes
humans. Copjec formulates what is at stake here in exemplary fashion (2002: 20):
The modern notion of immortality benefits from the collapse of our belief in an
eternal realm. Where formerly every deed (and the active life, in general) was
thought to fail insofar as it was unable to elevate itself out of time, into eternity,
in modernity the deed was reconceived as affording one the possibility of tran-
scending historical time within time. This is what is new: this idea that the act
could raise itself out of impotence, or out of the immanence of its historical
conditions, without raising itself out of time... The valorization of the act
helped to forge, Lefort argues, a new link between immortality and ‘a sense of
posterity’...
It should be added that this connection of immortality with posterity in Lefort's argu-
ment is mediated through the concept of ‘singularity’, in the sense that someone who
may be said to attain such ‘immortality’ in human society does so by clearing a ‘place’
for her- or himself - ‘...a place which cannot be taken, which is invulnerable, because
it is the place of someone... who, by accepting all that is most singular in his life, re-
fuses to submit to the coordinates of space and time and who... for us... is not dead’
(Lefort, quoted in Copjec 2002: 23).
It seems to me that a strong case could be made for the claim that Friedrich Nietz-
sche preceded Blumenberg, Lefort and Lacan2 as far as the articulation of a distinctly
modern - I would prefer to call it a proto-poststructuralist - conception of ‘immortal-
ity’ is concerned - one which is emphatically not a ‘remnant’ from our religious past,
and which, moreover, shares the paradoxical logic that Copjec detects in Lefort's for-
mulation insofar as it is an indication that mortals can ‘transcend time within time’, in
this way ‘immortalizing’ themselves. It seems to me that Nietzsche's formulation of
this paradoxical capacity on the part of humans is encountered - at least in what is ar-
guably a clear, recognizable form - in the context of some of his most difficult ideas,
including those of the singularity of the individual, of his exhortation to ‘become who
you are’ and the so-called ‘eternal return’ or (a translation of ‘ewige Wiederkehr’ that I
prefer) ‘eternal recurrence’. What one would have to show, then, is that, like
Blumenberg and Lefort, he articulates a notion of ‘immortality’ that is compatible with
the modern farewell to the medieval myth of an ‘eternal’ afterlife, that is, one which
elaborates a conception of immortality that would somehow - however paradoxically
- show its emergence from and within the very temporality characteristic of being hu-
man. In Nietzsche's own terms, it would have to ‘... remain faithful to the earth’ (1984:
125), to the time one is allotted in this life.
At first blush it appears unnecessary to pay lengthy attention to the question whether
the doctrine of the ‘eternal recurrence’ constitutes a cosmological or physical hypothe-
sis, namely that all ‘physical’ states will recur, exactly as they are at a given time in
history, over and over, in perpetuity. Much has been written on it, and the debate will
2 I do not have the space to elaborate here on Lacan's (or Freud's) contribution to the development of the
notion of immortality. Copjec (2002: 25-47) does so at length. One could also add the names of thinkers
such as Heidegger (1978: 279-311), whose death analysis (according to which no one can take the place
of another when it comes to dying) contributes to this modern idea of immortality, Derrida (see 1995:
50-51, e.g.), who elaborates on the notion of responsibility, which ‘... demands irreplaceable singular-
ity’, and Alain Badiou (2001: 10-12), who argues passionately in favour of the ‘immortal singularity’ of
humans. These are not the only ones whose names could be added to the list of those who concern them-
selves with the theme addressed here, either.