I was raised in a South Florida town small enough to proclaim itself a village with a population that was, at the time of my upbringing, disproportionately inhabited by retired military engineers and their families. This body of golden-year retirees afforded me a marginal and fleeting invitation into a world not intended by time to be my own: direction and redirection from these voices—who our discourse almost underhandedly circumscribes as “the Greatest Generation”—characterizes the miasma of my childhood and early adolescence. Experiencing this monoculture gifted me another curiosity: the drama of Moore’s Law. Succinctly, I grew up with a gainful inheritance of old tech: teletypes and daisy-chained Commodore computers, pagers and a Sony Walkman—a brief catalog of things I was liable to lug home on my bicycle as gifts from neighbors in exchange for voluntary landscaping or fruits of haggle from garage sales. I cannot say I witnessed the cyberspace revolution firsthand, but, by proxy: I am grateful for the infusion of my quotidian existence with objects that, torn apart unceremoniously and reassembled in new and sometimes impossible anatomies, taught me much about the predecessors of the magic in today’s sophisticated gadgetry. Divested of the illusion of inaccessibility, and with a little help from 8” floppy disks, reel-to-reel tape, and APL, I can happily defend a unique perspective on the revolution-in-motion that we experience at light speed daily.

That said, this illustrates a flat composite of my upbringing. My weekends were almost always spent in the company of very creative, highly intelligent young people cavorting about in the Edenic scrub woods that framed our village. I learned more about poetry, math, and philosophy exploring the ruins of abandoned military bases and their expansive, verdant manger with those individuals—who I am lucky to consider my chosen family—than I ever could in the conceptual purgatory of the written or spoken didactic. I am grateful towards the limits of what language can convey for the absolutely atemporal and unconventionally sublime experiences that my friends and I demanded as informants of the narrative of our adolescence. Through my undergraduate and graduate studies to those at the Association lacanienne internationale, my contact with some of the most inventive and provocative minds I will ever meet continued to fertilize my intellectual maturation in the direction I am steadfast chasing today. This is an underwhelmingly narrow glimpse—conceding reverently to the limit inherent to the signifier-in- discourse—intended for nothing else than to imply, at best, a logical navel for what is articulated here. Nevertheless, what can justify a declaration but a mention of its origin?

At the level of independent pursuit, I am foremost interested in desire. That study is what animates my academic trajectory generally: an encompassing passion for desire—which is fundamentally organized by lack—in a world that offers, at every lapse, a counterfeit of completeness. This substitution and its profound consequences constitute the corpus of my obsession. From a young age, I wanted to take up an axe and chip away at this enigma. Although psychoanalysis took the form of this blade, it is not the only tool in my tool belt. Just because this lifelong investment discovers its most valuable asset in psychoanalytic theory does not imply that my investigations begin and end within the scope within which the discipline is so often inscribed. Furthermore, I am not a fan of the way that most of the academy as such applies guide rails to psychoanalytic theory, which is why I am compelled to redefine it.

The word “psychoanalysis” has been renovated with an exceptionally dimensionless meaning in contemporary literature, both clinical and academic. I will spare the pedagogy where we temporarily revive the etymological fullness of “psyche” and “analusis” as mere life-support for the term itself—I think it is simpler than that. Psychoanalysis is a happenstance signifier that covers the hole in the symbolic where “science” was lodged in Antiquity. Yes, the philosophical, naturalistic, and mathematical science of the materialists and beyond. Science, despite modernity, in the sense of phenomenological verity. But let’s not skip down that road flippantly, again, with the formalist restraints of pedagogical rhetoric intended to do much else than spin the head of a logician. I used to tell my students to beware the trappings of the modern scientific discourse that offers you these digestible quantifications of the infinite; we can ascertain deferences in the ineffable real, instead, through metaphor and art. Poetry helps. 

With metaphor in mind: psychoanalysis is the study of the soul. Call me what you’d like for drawing that lineage. 

Without vibrating a fundamental tension, it is obvious there can be no desire. Despite Maxwell’s daemon, this used to be common intellectual sense. From dramatists to physicists, excitation is the apparatus by which change affects. In this way, desire is, philosophically, the Spirit which impels us onward into the inarticulable wasteland of the real. It is the electrifier of the corporeal, the indicator of life. If I might be so bold, Hegel tried his hand at unveiling this mainspring. Husserl and Kant, too. We get more obscure from there, from Anselm to the Stylites. Psychoanalysis is that which comes in the stead of what studied this animation before. The so- called “post-modernists” can try to lay siege here if they’d like. But their inflexible trebuchet aims blindly at power structures that, in the end, will disarm themselves of authority without the pressure of critical analysis or insistence. In many cases, they already have. 

Without too much deviation, it is without question that our signifying universe has oscillated elsewhere than it had in the 19th and 20th centuries. Power, as a dialectical mediator, appears differently: today, we are socialized by a dead symbolic predicated on vacuous thrones of authority where religion and patriarchy once sat with scepter and crown. The limitation of lack itself has, fundamentally, been replaced with a commercial marketplace that promises always jouissance. Law serves homogeneity, and the global revolution (especially in the imaginary and symbolic as it pervades in gadgets and technology) demands a recusal of heterogeny at every divarication. Egalitarian policy makes of our counterpart Boolean existence a gross entropic unity, where the social field is a common sea of “unique” voices that destabilize the genuine political individuality defined in the sense of Rousseau. We hasten to what many would like to think is our end, while others pray is only the beginning. To this I put forth: yes, tides are certainly turning. But we must not be fantastical nostalgists or, conversely, naive idealists. See the Tao. Where we see a parabola, God sees a sine wave. 

In this way, I am comfortable to “confine” my mission to succinct terms: a study of desire. From this vantage, we can navigate in broad strokes—desire is the waystation of all Being. From Lacanian topology magnified to schematize the interplay of “broader” networks of subjectivities, like assessing the structural knot of political or technological discourses, to unpacking the consequences of new clinical nosographies substituted for the place of individuality, I am content to manifest my life’s work around this study. Especially as we emerge into a world with a new abacus—our duly named “artificial intelligence”—we see unexplored modalities of existence that will come into great contact with our experience. Suffice to say: in many disciplines, known and yet unknown, there is plenty of un-dogmatizing to do. I am joyfully up to the task.