White Riot: “Logical Time” and the January 6 Riot

White Riot: “Logical Time” and the January 6 Riot Clint Burnham Simon (bio) Introduction: To Anticipate In the following paragraphs I propose to discuss the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol buildings with the help of Jacques Lacan’s essay “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” What Lacan’s essay works out for us is not simply the intersubjective nature of interiority: rather, we have the paradox that subjective agency is dependent upon some big Other, which finding is certainly germane to any political account of the riots. The assertion, as many rioters have made, that they were following Donald Trump’s orders to storm the Capitol and “fight like hell” (Feuer A16), rather than releasing rioters of individual responsibility instead extends causality to senior actors and to the systemic order. This assertion ticks the boxes of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, leaving the Real, or jouissance, untouched. Here the conundrum has to do with both the political action being diagnosed (Where was the enjoyment at the riot?) and the analytic diagnosis (How do we bring Lacan of the 1940s, kicking and screaming, into 2021?). The usual problem, often as unacknowledged as the fact that the land on which one writes Lacanian theory is Indigenous territory, is that Lacanian theory may only awkwardly be able to fit into a political or social [End Page 37] critique because: a) psychoanalysis is just a therapy game for the bourgeoisie; b) it’s too wrapped up in private neuroses; c) Lacan’s theory itself is so obscure that the working class or everyday trans person or Indigenous subject is unlikely to find it a workable text for their subjective or social needs. This critique, however, is nicely avoided in this specific text as “Logical Time,” if still super complicated as a piece of writing, and in terms of its references (logical theory), provenance (some kind of 1940’s existentialist parlour game), and style. To this last, of his Écrits, as Lacan famously said, the “[w]riting is in fact distinguished by a prevalence of the text in the sense that we will see this factor of discourse take on here—which allows for the kind of tightening up that must, to my taste, leave the reader no other way out than the way in, which I prefer to be difficult. This, then, will not be a writing in my sense of the term” (412, emphasis added). Commenting on this passage, Bruce Fink explores the uterine metaphor and makes the argument that Lacan forbore (or anticipated) any deconstruction of his theory. Rather, my argument in this essay will be that it is precisely the difficulty of Lacan’s text, its “prevalence of the text” qua discourse, its leaving “the reader no other way out than the way in,” that connects his text to the unusual (for Lacan) social dimension. That is, the “Logical Time” essay is already, on the face of it, a political analysis, dealing as it does with a version of the prisoner’s dilemma which, in this case, is a cruel game whereby three prisoners are told that one of them will be freed if they follow a form of logical reasoning. The “forced choice,” as Lacan will later call it in Seminar XVII (Slavoj Žižek extends that trope) is akin to Robert Pfaller’s discussion in On the Pleasure Principle in Culture regarding the delegation of guilt to the Other, a delegation achieved via “coerced games,” or the “guilt of appearances,” or “the naïve observer and a sense of guilt” (15–34). The historical example of this is the “Frankenburger Würfelspiel,” a bloody incident during the counter-reformation when Protestant rebels were forced to play dice to decide which of them would be hanged (Pfaller 238–47). We see this dynamic in the game (Lacan’s or as described by Pfaller) works similarly with today’s political situation, even as we must not hastily ascribe a social or political meaning to a text (that is, Lacan’s “logical time” essay) merely because it offers such surface content. The literature is rife with warnings against precisely this interpretive trap, from Derrida’s critique...

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