Edipo sin complejos: la ley en crisis bajo los efectos del capitalismo

Abstract

Lacan’s reading of the Freudian Oedipal myth amounts to its historization and demythologization: it is an illustration of the discourse of the master –an effect of language and the fundamental principle of subjectivation. This article argues that the condition of possibility of this historization stems from the historical crisis of the Oedipus complex as the ideological discourse that was characteristic of the liberal stage of capitalism. In Seminar XVII Lacan establishes a dialectics between the discourse of the master and the logic of capitalism that can be translated as a conceptualization of that crisis, and also, and in a parallel way, as the most accurate articulation of the emergence of psychoanalysis as a historical practice.