Soggetto, alterità, relazione. Nota sul problema della soggettività nelle filosofie di Descartes e Nietzsche

Résumé

The essay addresses the question of the subject in the philosophies of Descartes and Nietzsche, showing how, behind their traditional opposition, lies a shared ground woven of tensions, aporias, and conceptual reversals. Nietzsche, by criticizing the substantialization of the Cartesian ego, the mindbody dualism, and the illusion of immediate certainty, does not merely dismantle the modern paradigm but rather radicalizes its implications, unveiling a subject that is fragile, historical, embodied, and irreducible to metaphysics. Yet in the Meditationes, Descartes himself unsettles the image of the absolute ego, situating it within a relational and finite framework: exposed to divine deception, to the passions of the body, to the fallibility of error. In both thinkers, the subject thus emerges as a relational entity, defined by an alterity that never yields to complete presence. From this arises a decisive short-circuit: the other, irreducible to definition, reveals itself as identical with the subject, which is constituted through the impossible experience of relation with what escapes it. To think subjectivity, therefore, is to confront an identity that is always already other, a presence given as fragile and elusive transparency.