This one-day session will explore and experiment with Lacan's early and short text Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism (1945, 14p.) – by reading and staging it. Its basic setup is a (non-probabilistic) version of the prisoners dilemma through which Lacan seeks to articulate a logical temporality resulting not from the application of logical form to non-logical, spatio-temporal content but from an internal temporality of logical operativity. This sophisticated construction directly offers itself to a hands-on or embodied approach by departing from three prisoners trying to exit their prison – a scenario which we will stage in order to find our way into the reading. 

Besides staging and reading the session will provide a brief introductory contextualization of the text, referencing Lacan's earlier text on the mirror stage, Sartre's play No Exit / Hui clos (1944), Hegel's master/bondsman dialectic and other possible points of reference.Throughout his whole work, Lacan will come back again and again to the questions he addressed in his early text on Logical Time. Hence, our session seeks to open a space between at least two poles: Discussions about the sophistications of the Lacanian project of formalization and its relation to formalism in general, but also first steps into reading Lacan.No prior knowledge is required to participate.

Materials will be shared in this drive.