Axiogeniality: Paranoia, Philosophy, and the Genealogy of Value-Creation

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.