Presence and Emptiness. Building Soteriology between Ernesto de Martino and Nāgārjuna

Being-in-the-World, as an elementary phenomenal experience – that nonetheless can be thought and built in different ways – appears fundamentally fragile. By analyzing the works of two authors from radically different cultural, intellectual and philosophical milieux, I will try to show how some similar problems and solutions are given in front of the various forms of suffering and of the radical, ultimate crisis of existence. Elaborating the thought of the two authors focusing on their most important and philosophically dense works – Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Ernesto de Martino’s La fine del mondo – it will be shown how the drama of existence and the problem of the end, always exposed to impermanence, undertake different formulations and yet alike. Most importantly, I will try to highlight how both solutions pass through a new understanding of the subject, a presence standing on emptiness as its (absence of) grounding.