Categorial foundations of the Lacanian Logical Time

Abstract

There are many possibilities for establishing theoretical relations between psychoanalysis, Peircean semiotics and the philosophy in which it is based, in whose heart lays the categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. The present study is oriented in two complementary directions: the first, more general, presents the Peircean categorial framework and evinces its influences in the elaboration of the three Lacanian registers; the second, more specific, shows how the relations between the categories and the three registers are at the base of the Lacanian logical time comprehended as the subjective time in the psychoanalytic process. The psychical process presents itself in a tripartite form, dividing itself into a sequence of three stages: the instant of the glance, the time for comprehending and the moment of concluding. This logical-subjective temporality can be best understood in the light of Peirce’s philosophy, for whom “time is an organized something” and that posits three necessary faculties to “open our mental eyes” in the investigation of any phenomenon.