Jorge Pacheco Gómez

Since Antiquity, the bond between genius and madness has marked a limit-problem for philosophy and psychology, revealing tensions between meaning, value, and subjectivity. In 1912, Sigmund Freud advanced decisive analogies—hysteria and artistic creation, obsessional neurosis and religion, paranoid delusion and philosophical systems—thereby situating psychopathological formations in continuity with major symbolic productions of culture. Freud’s later distinction between neurosis and psychosis allows genius to be relocated on the side of paranoia, understood not as a mere pathology but as a singular mode of reorganising meaning. This article draws on Lacan’s notion of the paranoia of genius (1932) as a structure capable of sustaining symbolic production, while also engaging Nietzsche’s psychological critique of morality and religious neurosis. Within this framework, I propose an operative distinction between the philosopher as an existential figure and the professional philosopher as an academic function. Against the stabilising logic of religious neurosis, philosophy and art are analysed as potential sites of affirmative sublimation and value-creation. The category of Axiogeniality is introduced to designate a specific mode of subjectivity in which rupture with established reality enables the creation of new axiological horizons rather than mere symbolic collapse. The article argues that philosophy, understood as a vital and clinical practice, is closely linked to axiogeniality, functioning both as a space of transvaluation and as a criterion for evaluating the health or pathology of value systems.

Some pre-psychoanalytic proposals by Friedrich Nietzsche describe cruelty and fear as the Western principles of humanisation. Consequently, through negation, the identity of an animal ‘Other’—non-human, feared, and devalued— is constructed. Within this animal are represented the natural and instinctual values from which the human being distances itself. Through the ‘material and symbolic’ death of that animal, the human is constructed and exalted. According to the German thinker’s psychological formulations, a transvaluation of the Western principles of humanisation is necessary in order to preserve that which, as life, reveals to us the Real and divine dimension of our animality. Keywords: forgetting, memory, drive, culture, animal.

A large number of philosophers have said in their writings and life examples that philosophy has to be seen as an activity, as a way of life and thinking, outside of common conventions. She observes what others observe, but sees in the observed something deeper and different from what others see. What is the nature or origin of this philosophical knowledge that is different from the rest of knowledge? If we think of philosophy as an activity, as a way of life, then we can understand that the nature of this knowledge is not only in the reflections on the world, but also in a particular mode of behavior. In this paper I intend to approach the activity of the philosopher, to expose and understand in the key psychoanalytic terms what is proper to philosophy, to her activity and her lifestyle.