Abstract

The question I intend to address here concerns the ontological status of the Doppelgänger (the Double). “Who” is the Double? How is it connected to our lives, and to other lives? I would like to describe, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the ambiguity of this figure, which has been interpreted in art and literature as a copy of the original or as a doubling of the self. Drawing on Waldenfels’s reflections on the experience of the alien, I will try to show that the intrinsic ambiguity of the Doppelgänger is rooted in an ambiguity that is even more original than that of the Double: the ambiguity of our own life, which is always intertwined with that of others, with what is alien. What makes us to some extent radically alien even to ourselves and, precisely for this reason, “founded” on our very “groundlessness” is our relational, contextual or responsive freedom.