Latino Studies with Lacan

Freud called his positioning of the unconscious at the center of studies of the mind a Copernican revolution. In more humble terms, Antonio Viego's impressive new book, Dead Subjects, calls for nothing less than such a Copernican shift for contemporary Latino studies in the United States. Viego decenters what he sees as the reigning activist and academic ideal of a liberated and "whole" ethnic self by resituating the orbit of Latino critical inquiry around a subject destined to language, and thus bound to decompletion and loss. Dead Subjects traces how Jewish analyst émigrés fleeing Hitler brought to the United States, not the plague that Freud imagined psychoanalysis to be in an American context, but its even more noxious manifestation as curative practice advocating the ego's adaptation to a white, Protestant, and heterosexual way of life. Through close readings of diverse cultural texts and concise accounts of America's racialized misinterpretation and misuse of psychoanalysis, Dead Subjects explicates the subtle yet persistent violence of ego psychology in the United States while calling for the advancement of a Lacanian approach to the ongoing problematics of the psyche in ethnic studies.¹

Like many scholars currently reconsidering the ideological foundations of American studies and political theory, Viego takes aim at neoliberalism, the university's collusion with it, and the conflation of emancipatory movements with discourse on rights. Whereas his contemporaries are turning increasingly to Michel Foucault's notions of biopolitics and governmentality, to Giorgio Agamben's painfully prescient work on bare life and states of exception, or to a kind of critical salvation of the terms human and universal, Viego wants to focus the conversation on the privative nature of language itself as a potentially political function undertheorized by ethnic studies.² In Viego's terms, the ethnic-racialized subject is dead on arrival if it is understood, on the one hand, as an autonomous self capable of cultural adaptation unto happiness or, on the other hand, as a mere effect of power relations and knowledge rendered through weak historicist applications of Foucault.

In the place of this dead subject, mortified in the realm of the ego, Viego evokes a living and livid Latino subject who suffers both historically specific Imaginary (i.e., "real world") power relations and the signifier as such; the latter rends the speaking human between Jacques Lacan's definition of the Real and the Symbolic. In this nexus, Dead Subjects makes the unlikely claim that ethnic subjects have not been allowed to lose enough. For Viego, the imperative to recognize loss and lack in the material world, coupled with the psychic burden of having to "play brown" for both racist and liberal multicultural regimes, has prevented Latino subjects from realizing the fundamental condition of their humanity—that all (nonpsychotic) humans are beholden to language and thus sacrifice part of their being for the promise of meaning. Because language then fails to provide consistent meaning, the subject is doubly bereft and yet free of totalizing subjection. Recognition of this fundamental loss allows subjects to "traverse the fundamental fantasy" of their impossible completion, to articulate the history of their own unconscious as interwoven with the history of their world (24). Viego proposes, "The challenge for us would be to craft analyses that can read for the historical specificity and texture of loss that is constitutive of subjectivity in relation to those losses that can be attributed to the unequal distribution of social and material resources, losses that continually appear to accrue more on the side of some people than others" (50).

The necessity of including Lacan in Latino theory is hardly Viego's point; neither is his point the necessity of including "Latino" identity in psychoanalytic criticism. Rather, a critique of the very concept of inclusion functions as the leitmotif weaving through the book's interrogation of contemporary academic theory and identity politics. Viego follows other analysts of race by pointing out that in absence of a more nuanced model of...