Sublime e sublimazione: Eros e Thanatos nella Fedra di Seneca

Lines 604 f. of Seneca’s Phaedra (uos testor omnis, caelites, hoc quod uolo / me nolle), while representing a kind of aporia for the constitution of the text, may be a gateway to the recognition not only of an impor- tant philosophical theme (on free will), but also and above all of an extraordinary poetic vision, capable of penetrating the psychic dy- namics of amorous passion in the unstable balance between guilt and innocence, between Eros and Thanatos. Starting from this tex- tual crux, this paper analyses the process of sublimation of the pro- tagonist’s eros and the sublime as a poetic category describing an emotional excursion from a somewhat common existential state to a higher one.