Desiderio, godimento, amore intellettuale di Dio. Spinoza e Lacan a confronto

The article aims at providing an analysis of the influence of Spinoza’s philosophy on Lacan’s thought. In his youthful research on the structure of the personality Lacan explicitly refers to three fundamental aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy (the notion of desire, the doctrine of parallelism between the mind and the body, and the theory of discordance), which are among the keystones of his new theory of psychic causality. After his encounter with Kojève, mediated by Saussure’s linguistics, and the establishment of the fundamental dialectic between desire and jouissance, Lacan definitively distanced himself from his youthful philosophical ally. His interest in Spinoza was only to re-surface much later, in 1964, during the Seminar XI, when he invokes Spinoza’s «amor Dei intellectualis». Spinoza is not only the philosopher who first taught him man’s essential condition as a desiring being, but also the one who proposes the final appeasement of the mind in the re-pacified unity of the system. To this, psychoanalysis opposes the problematic question of jouissance as a sign of the necessity of the Other and of the internal rift that divides the subject.