Dead Subjects

"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 that it developed based on a peculiar, distinctly American misinterpretation of Freud's thought. Unlike Freud, American ego psychology imagines a whole, complete, transparent subject. It does not take trauma and loss into account; it conceives of the ethnic and raced subject as fully knowable and therefore inherently damaged. 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 discourses, 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. 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/a studies, he mines the implicit connection between Latino/a studies' theory of the "border subject" and Lacan's theory of the "barred subject" in language to argue that Latino/a studies is poised to craft a critically multiculturalist, anti-racist Lacanian account of subjectivity while adding historical texture and specificity to Lacanian theory.