“Nietzsche e il «filo conduttore del corpo». «Was wir “Leib” nennen»

The thought about the body and the body-mind relationship, declined in various ways, crosses the whole of Nietzsche's philosophical journey and represents a decisive stage. This paper will try to focus on it through the reading of a limited constellation of posthumous fragments that are closely interconnected and follow one of the most well-known passages on the theme of the body in the published works, the section of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled "About the despisers of the body " [Von den Verächtern des Leibes]. By the reading of the fragments should emerge how the approach to the problem of the body in Nietzsche is i) coupled with a constant reflection on the limits of the language as a device of definition and exploration of the bodily universe; ii ) characterized by a constant methodological caution, revealing that the body remains an open question. The Nietzschean research seems to outline a notion of the body articulated on two levels: the epistemological and the ontological one. On the epistemological level, both "body" and "mind" are conceivable for Nietzsche as "beliefs", as devices to represent the reality: it is therefore to establish which one of the two is more believable as "prerequisite" of the heuristic method. On the ontological level, the body is framed within a naturalist perspective, however not in the sense of a crude substantial materialism, which is likely to appear as a form of metaphysical dogmatism of inverted sign, but rather in the direction of a dynamic and moving vision, where the body is not reduced to a rigid mechanism or a "thing", but should rather manifest itself as multiple and plural event and process, always in becoming and formation, as a place where history, phylogenetic and ontogenetic condense and settle, as embodied and punctual track of surplus and transcendence respect to temporally determined individuals.