Logical time
Logical time

Summary/Abstract: Lacanian analysis gives three dimensions of time: the instant of the gaze, the time for comprehending or understanding, and the moment to conclude. These three dimensions of time were developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the structure of a logical sophism called the prisoners’ dilemma. Thus, for the human subject, time cannot be narrowed to the flowing continuity of the past, present and future because there is an essential and constitutive lack of adequacy between the time of discourse and grammar and the specific time of the psychoanalytic experience. Freudian unconscious functions in a synchronic way, but its singular diachronic opening is given by the emergence of the real in an event. The sophism has two suspensive scansions, as the urgency of concluding is not without a time of delay. Thus,logical time is no longer a sophism, but a pure logic of action. In fact, each of the three prisoners of the dilemma is at stake under the two others’ view Lacan turns to this sophism when he speaks about the end of analysis: when the subject is no longer suspended at the time of the Other, but finds himself within the time that remains, as in Agamben’s words about messianic time. The end of analysis confronts the subject with such a time and this is why, in Lacan, there is correspondence between clinical practice and topology.Lacanian analysis gives three dimensions of time: the instant of the gaze, the time for comprehending or understanding, and the moment to conclude. These three dimensions of time were developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the structure of a logical sophism called the prisoners’ dilemma. Thus, for the human subject, time cannot be narrowed to the flowing continuity of the past, present and future because there is an essential and constitutive lack of adequacy between the time of discourse and grammar and the specific time of the psychoanalytic experience. Freudian unconscious functions in a synchronic way, but its singular diachronic opening is given by the emergence of the real in an event. The sophism has two suspensive scansions, as the urgency of concluding is not without a time of delay. Thus, logical time is no longer a sophism, but a pure logic of action. In fact, each of the three prisoners of the dilemma is at stake under the two others’ view Lacan turns to this sophism when he speaks about the end of analysis: when the subject is no longer suspended at the time of the Other, but finds himself within the time that remains, as in Agamben’s words about messianic time. The end of analysis confronts the subject with such a time and this is why, in Lacan, there is correspondence between clinical practice and topology.Lacanian analysis gives three dimensions of time: the instant of the gaze, the time for comprehending or understanding, and the moment to conclude. These three dimensions of time were developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the structure of a logical sophism called the prisoners’ dilemma. Thus, for the human subject, time cannot be narrowed to the flowing continuity of the past, present and future because there is an essential and constitutive lack of adequacy between the time of discourse and grammar and the specific time of the psychoanalytic experience. Freudian unconscious functions in a synchronic way, but its singular diachronic opening is given by the emergence of the real in an event. The sophism has two suspensive scansions, as the urgency of concluding is not without a time of delay. Thus, logical time is no longer a sophism, but a pure logic of action. In fact, each of the three prisoners of the dilemma is at stake under the two others’ view Lacan turns to this sophism when he speaks about the end of analysis: when the subject is no longer suspended at the time of the Other, but finds himself within the time that remains, as in Agamben’s words about messianic time. The end of analysis confronts the subject with such a time and this is why, in Lacan, there is correspondence between clinical practice and topology. Lacanian analysis gives three dimensions of time: the instant of the gaze, the time for comprehending or understanding, and the moment to conclude. These three dimensions of time were developed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the structure of a logical sophism called the prisoners’ dilemma. Thus, for the human subject, time cannot be narrowed to the flowing continuity of the past, present and future because there is an essential and constitutive lack of adequacy between the time of discourse and grammar and the specific time of the psychoanalytic experience. Freudian unconscious functions in a synchronic way, but its singular diachronic opening is given by the emergence of the real in an event. The sophism has two suspensive scansions, as the urgency of concluding is not without a time of delay. Thus, logical time is no longer a sophism, but a pure logic of action. In fact, each of the three prisoners of the dilemma is at stake under the two others’ view Lacan turns to this sophism when he speaks about the end of analysis: when the subject is no longer suspended at the time of the Other, but finds himself within the time that remains, as in Agamben’s words about messianic time. The end of analysis confronts the subject with such a time and this is why, in Lacan, there is correspondence between clinical practice and topology.

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