Anticipation
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This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (3)
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#01
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.179
Presentation on Psychical Causality > A New Sophism
Theoretical move: The passage introduces Lacan's logical puzzle of the three prisoners as a demonstration of how subjective certainty can be derived through purely logical (non-probabilistic) reasoning, where each subject's conclusion depends on a nested anticipation of the others' reasoning — establishing Logical Time as the structural condition for the emergence of a subject's self-knowledge.
As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them. At that, I made for the door to make my conclusion known.
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#02
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.186
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *Discussion of the Sophism* > (I) Being opposite two blacks, one knows that one is a white.
Theoretical move: Lacan's analysis of the sophism's three logical moments—instant of the glance, time for comprehending, moment of concluding—demonstrates that subjectivity is constituted through temporal modulation rather than formal logic alone: the subject's self-assertion as a judgment ("I am white") is precipitated by the urgency of the logical movement itself, not by contingent stakes, revealing time as the very medium in which the subject emerges through anticipatory certainty.
he will be incapable of verifying unless he first attains it as a certainty. *Temporal tension* culminates here since... it is the sequential steps of its release that will scand the test of its logical necessity.
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#03
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.188
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *Temporal Tension in the Subjective Assertion and Its Value Manifested in the Demonstration of the Sophism*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "I" of subjective assertion is not a pre-given logical subject but is constituted through a temporal dialectic—anticipation, doubt, and verification—that progressively desubjectifies certainty while simultaneously grounding a collective logic irreducible to classical propositional logic.
what makes this act so remarkable in the subjective assertion demonstrated by the sophism is that it anticipates its own certainty owing to the temporal tension with which it is subjectively charged.