Dead Subjects: Towards a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies

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). 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).