Il prodigioso duello. La sfida per l'uomo

The book investigates the duality of “know yourself” in a scenario both ethical and dramatic, in which the man is given to himself as a task to be fulfilled so that his identity will become known only at the end of his own existence. Ignorance seems to be won in two ways. On the one hand the awareness of the genre “man”, which leads to an appeasing universal wisdom. On the other hand, the knowledge of the individual, the “unrepeatable single”, which is disturbing as it requires an “infinite rendering”. In the first case, Oedipus, knowing “man”, wins the Sphinx (the chaotic nature): knowledge translates into power. In the second case the conceit of knowledge as a tool to discover one’s “self” and “ultimate fate” lands catastrophically in the perspective of the humanistic tradition (Oedipus loses himself in forcing the oracle Tiresias) or allegedly gloriously in the trans-post-human perspective.