Lacan on Logical Time (1): The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Lacan’s (1945) ‘Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty’ is a landmark paper in Lacanian psychoanalysis not only because of the contribution it makes to how we might think of temporality psychoanalytically (i.e. it gives us a logical as opposed to developmental or chronological conceptualization of time). Lacan’s paper poses a logical problem for, a kind of riddle – the prisoner’s dilemma. We dramatize this dilemma, working our way through the anxiety-provoking and time-pressured situation Lacan describes. There are three prisoners facing each other, each wearing a hat – either black or white - that they themselves can’t see, despite that the other two prisoners can indeed see it. The first prisoner to correctly deduce the color that they are wearing, will win their freedom. Importantly, there are only two colors available (black and white) and there are only two black hats. By carefully watching the actions of the other two prisoners, and with the knowledge that there are only ever two black hats in play, each prisoner can, in theory, deduce what color hat they must be wearing. Lacan’s description of the various permutations of this dilemma involves a differentiation between ‘the instant of the glance’, ‘the time of comprehending’, and ‘the moment of concluding’, each of which we describe.