Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies

Antonio Viego. Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. vii + 293 pp.

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 understanding 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...