Abitare la fine. La questione dell'Ultimo uomo nell'opera di Nietzsche

Despite the wide resonance known throughout the twentieth-century philosophical scene, Nietzsche's figure of the Last Man (der letzte Mensch) has received only a little attention within critical literature. This work aims to cover this gap by providing both a philological and theoretical account of what Mazzino Montinari called 'the greatest objection to the Overman'. Since this character made its only appearance in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the first part of the dissertation deals with the hermeneutical problem we need to take into consideration when focusing on such a hybrid literary work, in between poetry and philosophy. After having shown how the form of the text itself turns into content, shaping all of its symbolic figures, the investigation moves on to a more thematical approach. Through the figure of the Last Man and its constitutive relation with the Overman, it becomes possible to see that Nietzsche's ethical thought is built on a system of asymmetrical oppositions. In the last years of his conscious life, he explained the core of this view with the idea of the 'pathos of distance', namely the feeling of power arising from the awareness of being different. Finally, in the last chapter, I focus on the reason why Nietzsche chose to counterbalance the Über-mensch with the letzter Mensch and not with the Unter-mensch, therefore hinting at its temporal dimension with a sense of definitiveness.