This episode explores Lacan’s early essay, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty”, originally published in 1945 for the journal Les Cahiers d’Arr. In “Logical Time”, Lacan presents “a new sophism”—a logical problem he describes as the “prisoner’s dilemma”. As he says:
I will now place myself under the auspices of he who sometimes dons the philosopher’s garb, who—ambiguous—is more often to be sought in the comedian’s banter, but who is always encountered in the politician’s secretive action: the good logician, odious to the world.1
Lacan the logician will take us into the movement of time as a suspended motion, modulated in “the instant of the glance”, “the time for comprehending”, and “the moment of concluding”. With this, Lacan places the egoic subject within a temporal tension that signals anxiety:
The “I,” subject of the conclusive assertion, is isolated from the other—that is, from the relation of reciprocity—by a logical beat. The movement of the logical genesis of the “I” through a decanting of its own logical time largely parallels its psychological birth. Just as, let us recall, the psychological “I” emerges from an indeterminate specular transitivism, assisted by an awakened jealous tendency, the “I” in question here defines itself through a subjectification of competition with the other, in the function of logical time. As such, it seems to me to provide the essential logical form (rather than the so-called existential form) of the psychological “I”.2
Lacan is thus elaborating the temporal logic of the mirror stage—where the infant, standing before its own speculation, experiences an anticipatory movement of its body that remains suspended in the very instant of the glance.
Join us as we unfold Lacan’s riddling logic with our special guest, Nick Castellucci, co-host of the Vanishing Mediators channel.
00:00 - 07:53 Lacan the Logician
07:54 - 24:01 Logic and Language in Western Philosophy
24:02 - 39:04 Kantian Ethics and Self-Authorization
39:05 - 50:55 Lacan's Sophism: Explaining the Prisoner's Dilemma
50:56 - 01:02:06 Signifying Motion and Phenomenological Time
01:02:07 - 1:20:00 Influencer Culture and the Anxiety of Verification
01:20:01 - 1:45:19 Logical Time in Analysis
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 163.
Lacan, Écrits, 170.
