Dead subjects : toward a politics of loss in Latino studies / Antonio Viego.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Viego, Antonio, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.

Lacan, Jacques.

Hispanic Americans--Study and teaching (Higher).

Hispanic Americans.

Hispanic Americans--Psychology.

Loss (Psychology)--Social aspects--United States.

Loss (Psychology).

Racism--United States--Psychological aspects.

Racism.

Ethnic relations.

Psychological aspects.

Psychoanalysis--Social aspects.

Social aspects.

United States.

Psychoanalysis--Social aspects--United States.

Psychoanalysis.

United States--Ethnic relations--Psychological aspects.

Ethnic relations--Psychological aspects.

Racism--Psychological aspects.

Physical Description:

ix, 293 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.

Summary:

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 conceptualised 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, he shows how its distinctly American misinterpretation of Freudian theory was driven by a faith in the possibility of rendering the human subject whole, complete, and transparent. He traces how this theory of the subject gained traction in the United States, passing into most forms of North American psychology, law, civil rights discourse, 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 as these themes ultimately lend themselves to the project of managing and controlling ethnic and racialized subjects by positing them as fully knowable, calculable sums: as dead subjects.

Contents:

All the things you can't be by now

Hollowed be thy name

Subjects-desire, not egos-pleasures

Browned, skinned, educated, and protected

Latino studies' Barred subject and Lacan's Border subject, or Why the hysteric speaks in Spanglish

Hysterical ties, Latino amnesia, and the Sinthomestiza subject

Emma Pérez dreams the breach : rubbing Chicano history and historicism 'til it bleeds

The clinical, the speculative, and what must be made up in the space between them

Ruining the ethnic-racialized self and precipitating the subject.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-278) and index.

Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, Winner, 2007

Other Format:

Online version: Viego, Antonio, 1970- Dead subjects.

ISBN:

9780822340997

0822340992

9780822341208

0822341204

OCLC:

133465431