translated by Jorge Jauregui

We find in Lacan’s return to Freud four main propositions that characterize his own journey trough madness. Four propositions that reveal four different stations in Lacan’s discourse. The existentialist soul that underlines the relationship between madness and freedom as being ethically crucial; the Spinozean-Hegelian soul which emphasizes the universal function of the symbolic, here madness is perceived as negative in relation to its pacifying nature; the Freudian-structuralist soul, which considers madness the result of a fundamental failure of the signifying function and the Oedipal inefficacy of the Name-of-the-Father; and, finally, the soul “beyond Oedipus” that will lead Lacan to conceive the Other as inconsistent and, consequently, to articulate madness as the dimension proper to any human being: the Name-of-the-Father is exposed as pure semblance among the others and thus fails to foster the neurotic belief in its being the foundation of the symbolic order. [...]