Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (review)

Rarely does an academic book aspire to "reclaim a loss for disenfranchised peoples," yet this is exactly what Viego's Dead Subjects seeks to do. Bringing to bear psychoanalysis on the study of the Latino subject, Viego's book manages to bridge two fields that until recently have not found a way to converse with one another. Building heavily on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Dead Subjects provides a much-needed illumination of why Lacan matters to those thinking about race, ethnicity, and the politics of minority groups in the U.S. Viego's book follows in the steps of recent scholarship that explores the connections between psychoanalysis and ethnic/racial difference, such as Patricia Gherovici's The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003) and Ranjana Khanna's Dark Continents (Duke UP, 2003).

Divided into seven chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion), Dead Subjects provides a thorough examination of the key legal, psychological, social, cultural, and political texts that have contributed to the dominance of ego psychology and social psychology as the preferred frameworks for understand-ing the minority subject in the U.S. today. Viego reminds us of the dangers inherent in ego psychology, especially Lacan's key insight that the subject should not be confused with the ego; furthermore, he insists that the subject is formed in a relationship with language. Whereas ego psychology proceeds by misrecognizing the subject as the ego, Dead Subjects makes us aware of the ego's constitution as not a coherent but rather a disunified entity. His book exposes the fact that ego psychology is fundamentally "wedded to an understanding of loss and trauma that refuses to consider the effects of language as structure on the speaking human organism" (93). This is a problem because Latino studies has adopted uncritically ego and social psychology.

For the most part, scholarship in Latino studies produces work that fails to engage the disharmony between the human body and the structures of language that Lacanian psychoanalysis identifies at the core of the human subject: "The result of our scholarship is an undertheorized explanation of loss and trauma at the psychic, political, juridical, and economic levels, as well as an overly simplistic and commonsensical conceptualization of human subjectivity in which we bracket the effects of language on the speaking organism in order to win back some empty promise of fullness and completeness" (16). One of the unexpected consequences of this undertheorized approach is that Latino studies' scholarship tacitly perpetuates the racist images that it seeks to contest: "In this latter compensatory, falsely reparative critical move, we, against our best intentions, provide precisely the image of ethnic-racialized subjectivity as whole, complete, and transparent, an image upon which racist discourse thrives and against which we imagine we are doing battle" (16).

The book's introduction develops an engagement with Hortense Spillers's critical essay "All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother" (1996). Viego finds inspiration in Spillers's proposal to mine psychoanalysis as necessary in the search for the ethnic-racialized subject's emancipation. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 develop the discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its relation to the development of ego psychology in the U.S. Viego connects this to an analysis of the important 1954 legal case Brown vs. Board of Education, whose decisions was based on studies using social and ego psychological methodology.

Chapter 4 uncovers correspondences between Lacan's Barred subject and the Latino studies' Border subject; Chapter 5 underscores the resonances among the Freudian symptom, Lacanian sinthome, and Latino studies' Sinthomestiza. Chapter 6 discusses Emma Pérez's scholarship, particularly her The Decolonial Imaginary (1999), an earlier attempt to bring psychoanalysis to bear on the Chicano and Latino subject. To decolonize the Latino subject entails for Viego, a practice of leaving behind the knowledge that disguised loss as completion. The final two chapters take us back to Lacanian psychoanalysis and the discussion of...