Description
Book SynopsisSuitable for scholars in critical race and ethnic studies to engage with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this title 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.
Trade Review“
Dead Subjects offers an approach that could remediate many of the impasses and failures of the ego-psychological underpinnings of contemporary ideas of ethnicity and identification. These ideas have had a strong impact not only on academic ethnic studies but also on the very shaping of American law. Antonio Viego provides an important alternative model to them that will have immediate academic relevance. I also think that the influence of
Dead Subjects may well be broader than the American case that Viego emphasizes. As thinkers all over the world struggle to frame new ways of dealing with immigrant and ethnic identities, the book can serve as an important guidepost. Viego’s carefully drawn distinction between the ego and the subject, based on Lacan’s work, is key to the new model.”—Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of
Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious“A strikingly original contribution,
Dead Subjects represents a new and sophisticated movement in Latino/a studies and the critical discourse on race and psychoanalysis. Arguing that the psychic realm should be read along with the social if our analysis of ethnic/racial subjectivity is ever to surpass ‘weak multiculturalism,’ Antonio Viego situates Lacanian analysis through carefully chosen case studies and examples. He reveals Lacanian thought as relevant in a way that will be nothing short of startling for most readers.”—José Esteban Muñoz, author of
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of PoliticsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: All the Things You Can’t Be By Now 1
Chapter 1: Hollowed Be Thy Name 30
Chapter 2: Subjects-Desire, Not Egos-Pleasures 48
Chapter 3: Browned, Skinned, Educated, and Protected 75
Chapter 4: Latino Studies’ Barred Subject and Lacan’s Border Subject, or Why the Hysteric Speaks in Spanglish 108
Chapter 5: Hysterical Ties, Latino Amnesia, and the Sinthomestiza Subject 138
Chapter 6: Emma Perez Dreams the Breach: Rubbing Chicano History and Historicism ‘til It Bleeds 165
Chapter 7: The Clinical, the Speculative, and What Must Be Made Up in the Space between Them 196
Conclusion: Ruining the Ethnic-Racialized Self and Precipitating the Subject 224
Notes 243
Bibliography 267
Index 279
