Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies

by Antonio Viego

Dead Subjects is an impassioned call for scholars in critical race and ethnic studies to engage with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Antonio Viego argues that Lacanian theory has the potential to begin rectifying the deeply flawed way that ethnic and racialized subjects have been conceptualized in North America since the mid-twentieth century. Viego contends that the accounts of human subjectivity that dominate the humanities and social sciences and influence U.S. legal thought derive from American ego psychology. Examining ego psychology in the United States during its formative years following World War II, Viego shows how its distinctly American misinterpretation of Freudian theory was driven by a faith in the possibility of rendering the human subject whole, complete, and transparent. Viego traces how this theory of the subject gained traction in the United States, passing into most forms of North American psychology, law, civil rights discourse, ethnic studies, and the broader culture. Viego argues that the repeated themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency with respect to ethnic and racialized subjectivity are fundamentally problematic as these themes ultimately lend themselves to the project of managing and controlling ethnic and racialized subjects by positing them as fully knowable, calculable as dead subjects. He asserts that the refusal of critical race and ethnic studies scholars to read ethnic and racialized subjects in a Lacanian framework—as divided subjects, split in language—contributes to a racist discourse. Focusing on theoretical, historical, and literary work in Latino studies, he mines the implicit connection between Latino studies’ theory of the “border subject” and Lacan’s theory of the “barred subject” in language to argue that Latino studies is poised to craft a critical multiculturalist, anti-racist Lacanian account of subjectivity while adding historical texture and specificity to Lacanian theory.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Viego is a genius. His masterful synthesis of historical context and theoretical insight (as if the two could ever be so cleanly bifurcated) result in a book that is uniquely positioned to be the germinal site for many new approaches to so-called Chicano/a identity, Latino/a ethnicity, and Lacanian psychoanalysis more broadly.

Viego makes his approach clear. His consistent refrain is that most so-called anti-racist approaches involve an undue investment in ego psychology and would benefit from a more Lacanian psychoanalytic approach. He makes his point emphatically toward the text's conclusion, "we're bullied into crafting an ego politics of the Imaginary that goes mostly unquested by us and this is having a withering effect on young Latinos and other young ethnic-racialized subjects, whether inside or outside the university apparatus, who are having to perform the labors of ethnic-racialized resemblance in order to code as legible subjects."

Viego draws not just from Lacan but also from Hortense Spillers, Emma Pérez, Rey Chow's formulation of "coercive memeticism," and even Foucault. Dead Subjects is filled with moments of brilliance, both assuming and unassuming. One of the text's high points is Viego's clear articulation of the difference between symptom and sinthome, strengthened by Viego's clear historical (but not historicist) investments. Viego is a precious scholar in that he is, as Joan Copjec would wish, literate in both history and desire and knows how to read the two together. Viego's speculative reading of Lacan in relation to Brown v. Board of Education is a joy. The Brown case serves as a historical touch-stone for Viego, as he uses it to navigate through developments in Lacanian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, Chicano/a resistance, pachucos, and university regulations.

Viego's significant intervention into Lacanian theory is on the topic of race. Viego takes up a point made by Hortense Spillers about race impacting the (not-yet) subject prior to their constitution in language. This is different from Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks's argument in Desiring Whiteness where she claims that the subject can experience the mirror stage prior to experiencing racialization. Seshadri uses the convincing example of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to support her point. Viego, for his part, seems to elide precisely how different his perspective is from Seshadri's. There is a fundamental difference in the ways they are thinking about race in relation to its psychic structures and relation to a given master signifier. Viego seems more invested in the relation to the Other as opposed to "Whiteness" as a master signifier, as Seshadri claims. But Viego, despite not ever repudiating Seshadri's point, remains convincing. Viego closes arguing "the solidarity we might understand in the Lacanian context is organized around the collective understanding that the Other is lacking, that the Other is not complete." Viego goes on, talking about Spillers's notion of dispersion, "this generative drift is crucial to the ne forms of knowledge we might risk producing regarding ethnic-racialist do subjectivity if we dare to mine the intersections between race, psychoanalysis, and politics." Viego seems here to be echoing Lacan in a way Seshadri never does: mirroring Lacan's formulation of understanding and metaphor, and the emergence of the subject in metaphor, as embodied by the oft-quoted section from Seminar XX: Encore.

Viego also takes great strides to disarm critics of so-called postmodern, anti-relational, and negative perspectives. Lee Edelman's No Future constantly erupts into Viego's text, Viego proving to be a far more attentive reader of Edelman than those who would brand him as articulating an "anti-social thesis." Such a claim is laughable, and Viego knows that. Viego is interested in a new kind of pessimism that is not paralyzingly and a new kind of activism that is not utopian. Viego proves himself to be an indispensable asset in both theory and political practice who has produced a text with enough theoretical and historical content to be useful to disciplines across the liberal arts.

[Jefferson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Large swaths of this book are a bit too technical for me to follow but I don't think it's entirely Viego's fault since the subject matter is fairly difficult. I do like how it's written. Being able to articulate the Lacanian parts of Spillers and Fanon - writers I do have familiarity with - is impressive.

[Georgia]

read introduction and first chapter and conclusion. would like to come back for more