L'inconsistenza spettrale della vita. La "meditatio mortis" in Ganivet e Unamuno

The article analyzes the *meditatio mortis* in the thought of Ángel Ganivet and Miguel de Unamuno, interpreting them as emblematic figures of the nihilistic crisis that affected Spain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the context of the 1898 crisis. Both thinkers confront the anxiety surrounding the fragility of human existence, but arrive at different conclusions. For Ganivet, writing represents an attempt to respond to existential emptiness, ultimately doomed to failure: his reflection leads to a nihilistic and self-destructive vision, culminating in suicide as a form of liberation. Unamuno, by contrast, develops the “tragic sense of life,” based on the conflict between reason and the desire for immortality: from this tension arises an agonistic faith and a conception of existence as a struggle against nothingness. The article thus shows how, starting from the same experience of finitude, Ganivet and Unamuno offer two opposing responses: one annihilating, the other dynamic and oriented toward ethical and spiritual resistance.