Latino Studies With Lacan

13 Pages·2014·0.13 MB·English

by  H. N. Lukes

Criticism
Volume 50|Issue 2 Article 6
2008
Latino Studies With Lacan
H. N. Lukes
New York University
Follow this and additional works at:http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism
Recommended Citation
Lukes, H. N. (2008) "Latino Studies With Lacan,"Criticism: Vol. 50: Iss. 2, Article 6.
Available at:http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol50/iss2/6
LATINO STUDIES Freud called his positioning of the
WITH LACAN unconscious at the center of studies
of the mind a Copernican revolu-
H. N. Lukes
tion. In more humble terms, Anto-
nio Viego’s impressive new book,
Dead Subjects, calls for nothing less
Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics
than such a Copernican shift for
of Loss in Latino Studies by
contemporary Latino studies in the
Antonio Viego. Durham, NC:
United States. Viego decenters what
Duke University Press, 2007.
he sees as the reigning activist and
Pp. 293. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.
academic ideal of a liberated and
“whole” ethnic self by resituating
the orbit of Latino critical inquiry
around a subject destined to lan-
guage, and thus bound to decomple-
tion and loss. Dead Subjects traces
how Jewish analyst émigrés fl eeing
Hitler brought to the United States,
not the plague that Freud imagined
psychoanalysis to be in an American
context, but its even more noxious
manifestation as curative practice
advocating the ego’s adaptation to a
white, Protestant, and heterosexual
way of life. Through close readings
of diverse cultural texts and con-
cise accounts of America’s racial-
ized misinterpretation and misuse
of psychoanalysis, Dead Subjects ex-
plicates the subtle yet persistent vi-
olence of ego psychology in the
United States while calling for the
advancement of a Lacanian ap-
proach to the ongoing problematics
of the psyche in ethnic studies.1
Like many scholars currently
reconsidering the ideological foun-
dations of American studies and
political theory, Viego takes aim at
neoliberalism, the university’s col-
lusion with it, and the confl ation
Criticism, Spring 2008, Vol. 50, No. 2, pp. 301–311. 301
© 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201. ISSN: 0011-1589.
302 H. N. LUKES
of emancipatory movements with of their humanity—that all (nonpsy-
discourse on rights. Whereas his chotic) humans are beholden to lan-
contemporaries are turning increas- guage and thus sacrifi ce part of their
ingly to Michel Foucault’s notions being for the promise of meaning.
of biopolitics and governmentality, Because language then fails to pro-
to Giorgio Agamben’s painfully pre- vide consistent meaning, the subject
scient work on bare life and states of is doubly bereft and yet free of total-
exception, or to a kind of critical sal- izing subjection. Recognition of this
vation of the terms human and fundamental loss allows subjects to
universal, Viego wants to focus the “traverse the fundamental fantasy”
conversation on the privative nature of their impossible completion, to
of language itself as a potentially articulate the history of their own
political function undertheorized unconscious as interwoven with the
by ethnic studies.2 In Viego’s terms, history of their world (24). Viego
the ethnic-racialized subject is dead proposes, “The challenge for us
on arrival if it is understood, on the would be to craft analyses that can
one hand, as an autonomous self ca- read for the historical specifi city and
pable of cultural adaptation unto texture of loss that is constitutive of
happiness or, on the other hand, as a subjectivity in relation to those losses
mere effect of power relations and that can be attributed to the unequal
knowledge rendered through weak distribution of social and material
historicist applications of Foucault. resources, losses that continually ap-
In the place of this dead subject, pear to accrue more on the side of
mortifi ed in the realm of the ego, some people than others” (50).
Viego evokes a living and livid La- The necessity of including Lacan
tino subject who suffers both his- in Latino theory is hardly Viego’s
torically specifi c Imaginary (i.e., “real point; neither is his point the neces-
world”) power relations and the sity of including “Latino” identity
signifi er as such; the latter rends the in psychoanalytic criticism. Rather,
speaking human between Jacques a critique of the very concept of
Lacan’s defi nition of the Real and inclusion functions as the leitmotif
the Symbolic. In this nexus, Dead weaving through the book’s inter-
Subjects makes the unlikely claim rogation of contemporary academic
that ethnic subjects have not been theory and identity politics. Viego
allowed to lose enough. For Viego, follows other analysts of race by
the imperative to recognize loss and pointing out that in absence of a
lack in the material world, coupled more nuanced model of human ex-
with the psychic burden of having istence, racialized subjects may
to “play brown” for both racist and only appear as either uncompli-
liberal multicultural regimes, has cated primi tives with special access
prevented Latino subjects from re- to jouissance or as impossible bearers
alizing the fundamental condition of all civilizations’ discontents.3 Viego
ON ANTONIO VIEGO’S DEAD SUBJECTS 303
asks: if no human can either fully Muñoz, Emma Pérez, Chela San-
symbolically mean or really be, then doval, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.
how is the racial subject required to Even as he earmarks the need for
perform meaning and being in a so- further conversation about Latino
cial spectrum that sees color only at appropriations of Chicano studies’
either end, and what is he or she to conceptualization of the “border,”
do about it? The answer Dead Sub- Viego’s book reads the effects and
jects offers is: let’s get hysterical. affects surrounding this common
As is well documented, white fe- confl ation of Latino and Chicano in
male hysterics gave birth to psycho- dominant renderings of the future
analysis by talking back to Freud, (and once) “Latinization” of the
telling him to shut up and listen. United States (122–23). In Dead Sub-
Feminist readings of hysteria have jects this presumed demographic
underscored how these women got shift in the United States (projected
off on the “talking cure” while also to make it “the third largest Latin
complicating mandated images of American nation” by 2050 [108])
themselves in the mirror of bour- brings with it a purloined, Spanglish
geois Anglo-European society.4 verbal function that suggests a dis-
Viego’s chapter 4, on hysteria, ar- comfi ting, dislocated, and perhaps
gues: “Insofar as Latino studies cri- unlocatable object. For Viego, Lati-
tique stands to bring some noise nos are less identities than those al-
regarding how the production of ways already objectifi ed subjects
knowledge is conceptualized in the who nonetheless “get off” by disar-
university—the role of knowledge, ranging “America” and its demand
its purpose, whom does it serve—I for ethnic assimilation; those who
liken Latino studies critique to La- hystericize the concept of race; those
can’s ‘hysteric’s discourse.’ Latino subjects who confl ate and compli-
studies gets off on knowledge and cate the voice and the gaze of the
gets off on undermining the master Other in their bringing of “noise”
just as much as the hysteric does” through the cacophony attending,
(113). Viego offers that Latino and for example, the “pachuco’s/a’s and
Chicano “border subjects”—given zoot suiter’s response to the hailing
their inherently refl exive positional- ‘Hey you, Mexican American’ ” (142).
ity relative to the “barred” condition And in these examples one might
of the Lacanian subject—function realize that the brilliance of Dead
as hysterical poltergeists in the mir- Subjects—the uncontainable thing
ror of social and theoretical systems of it—appears in its close readings
in the contemporary United States. and its demonstration that history
Viego also indicates that such need not be at war with the textual.
productive hysteria is already foment- Following this last example,
ing in the works of scholars inclu- Viego transfigures standard in-
ding Walter Mignolo, José Esteban terpretations of the zoot suit as a
304 H. N. LUKES
recalcitrant and excessive use of in a second critical skin, wherein he
cloth in the context of U.S. World admits both his distance from and his
War II rationing into a psychic pro- imbrications with/in archives past.
test addressed to racist and egoistic This book is structured by such
regimes: “I would say that the clothes “hysterical ties” and thus intervenes
do not disguise an identity from the on aesthetic, political, and episte-
state as much as they reveal iden- mological levels that are equally yet
tity as a disguise itself” (145). Later, asymmetrically in accordance with
Viego reveals that the material symp- the author’s shifting cultural mate-
tom of the zoot suit is what African rial. The hybridity of Dead Subjects
American poet Gwendolyn Brooks presents the best of drapes, as Viego
dubs the “wonder-suits in yellow moves gracefully from early psy-
and wine . . . All the drapes . . . hys- choanalytic and neurological stud-
terical ties / like narrow banners for ies; to the writings of Frantz Fanon
some gathering war” (Brooks, “The and Gloria Anzaldúa; to fi lms in-
Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,” quoted cluding Giant and Mulholland Drive
in Viego 146). According to Dead (in which he isolates Latinidad rising
Subjects, this “gathering war” indi- from white fi lmmakers’ produc-
cates neither just a historically spe- tions). Employing Lacanian psycho-
cifi c riot nor the synecdochic logic analysis allows Viego a system of
that would locate an uprising as a homology that is more oblique, evo-
harbinger of revolution. Rather, cative, and ethical than the analogous
zoots’ clothes and pachucos’/as’ logic attending standard recogni-
threatening moves are “symptoms tions of “difference” in ego-based
[that] won’t yield up their meaning, identity politics. Whereas multicul-
and even when an interpretation is tural mandates for pluralism at best
offered, the pachuco/a and zoot privilege the relationship between
suiter, like Lacan’s hysteric, pro- representing and represented sub-
duces another symptom to take its jects, Viego situates unknowing
place, more knowledge and thus yet also unknowable subjects who
more need for interpretation” (148). manifest unpredictably in culture
Viego outlines zoot hysteria as a through formations of “structure”
tactico-unconscious dispersion of and “discourse” within psychoanal-
force through what Brooks herself ysis. Dead Subjects works in a mode
locates in shifty signifi ers, including of oblique recognition akin to La-
wonder; all; ties; the linguistic func- can’s functional preposition avec, as
tion of like itself; and even the term seen in his essay “Kant avec Sade,”
narrow. In this case study, a Bor- indicating what Kenneth Reinhard
romean knot forged by a Latino lit- calls a form of “comparative litera-
erary critic, an African American ture otherwise than comparison.”5
poet, and the sartorial sages of the In keeping with its dispersed con-
barrio allows Viego to drape himself tent, the structure of Dead Subjects
ON ANTONIO VIEGO’S DEAD SUBJECTS 305
dodges and swerves through time. writes large the biopolitics attend-
Although Viego’s account of post– ing historically shifting understand-
World War II ego psychology is the ings of mind and mental illness in
centerpiece of his historiography, relation to race without conceding
his book spans well before and after to historicist cultural determinism.
the mid-century without subscrib- The logic, or rather the logistics,
ing to a telic narrative that would of Dead Subjects lingers on the idea
produce ethnos as the proper subject of time and the ego as out of joint
of community, history, or inquiry. for the political subject. And so
The immigrant infl ection of ego psy- Viego quotes—many times, in a
chology in the United States at radical form of critical repetition
once meets and exceeds the de- complex—Richard T. Ford’s line:
mands of an American melting “It may be that the price of provid-
pot, just as it at once shapes the fu- ing our descendants with a world
ture of psychoanalysis in the United free of social stigma and oppression
States and segues with belated ver- of identities such as race, a world
sions of nineteenth-century “good that we could be proud to call more
old-fashioned American pragma- just, is that they would not share
tism” (41). For example, Viego reads our identities, that they would be
the seeming categorical impossibil- our heirs but not our descendants”
ity of African American “insanity” (quoted fi rst in Viego 107). And so
in the context of late nineteenth- Viego sits, as an heir, with Lacan’s
century struggles between alienists statement: “What is realized in my
and neurologists as a racialist con- history is neither the past defi nite as
struction of “mind” that reemerges what was, since it is no more, nor
in Dr. John E. Lind’s 1913 claim even the perfect as what has been in
that African Americans cannot met- what I am, but the future anterior
aphorize like white subjects but as what I will have been, given what
merely form “the dream picture as a I am in the process of becoming”
faithful representation of a wish” (Lacan, quoted in Viego 163). And
(30–31, 43). Yet we cannot receive so Viego humorously fantasizes the
the true import of Viego’s reading future icon of his shrunken head on
of fi n de siècle psychology unless it one of his mother’s home altares in a
is read avec his critique of current reversal of ancestral time—what I
psychiatric trends that, toward clini- take to be an homage to both the
cal sensitivity to cultural differences, young men who died of HIV-
deploy sociological typologies as related illnesses in the decades that
virtual market research for selling precede his book and to the syn-
analysis to ethnic subjects who are cretic spirituality and endurance of
presumed to be otherwise too bur- his own mother, whom he mythol-
dened to engage in self-searching ogizes as “being made of equal parts
(210–20). In other words, Viego iron and stone” and yet beholden
306 H. N. LUKES
to the “irritating responsibility” scarcity and lack and the placid
of dealing with his postmortem gloom of renunciation” (24).
debts; his “mangy, nasty” cat and Given that Lacanian psycho-
dog; and the reading of his “shabby analysis has been widely critiqued
last will and testament against the as a metaphysics of lack, this claim
grain” (108). to generation over scarcity and
For its meta-critique of Latino renunciation seems counterintui-
studies and the status of ethnic sub- tive.8 Viego, in fact, studiously
jects in the university and U.S. com- avoids the term lack after his intro-
modity culture alone, Dead Subjects duction and instead diverts atten-
is a powerful intervention, and in tion to the concept of loss. Certainly,
this regard the book is deeply infl u- the idea of fundamental human
enced most specifi cally by Rey lack appears as a crass abstraction in
Chow.6 But make no mistake: Viego the face of racialized subjects’ his-
is here to tell the good news about torical suffering of violence and pri-
Jacques Lacan. Yet unlike Slavoj vation. By contrast, loss has struck a
Žižek, the apocalyptic evangelist common chord with recent analysts
currently most associated with the of marginalized identities’ social
name Lacan, Viego is more like the and psychic subjectivity.9 Yet Viego
itinerate preacher who takes in the joins Juliet Flower MacCannell in
problems of the cultural locations outlining how racialization pro-
he visits while returning gently but duces the want of privileged (white,
fi rmly to the Scripture. Viego does imperial) subjects as an eternally
not conform to the form of the insatiable and infi nitely complex
polemic—explicit in Lee Edelman’s desire over, above, and on the
queer Lacanian No Future and im- backs of subalterns, whose wants
plicit in the tone of most of Žižek’s are reduced to the mere fulfi llment
work.7 I found Dead Subjects re- of animal jouissance (MacCannell
freshing in its patience of persua- 109, referenced in Viego 24). If, ac-
sion, especially as it presumes neither cording to Lacan, the “analysand”
its readers’ knowledge of its many is generalized as the neurotic
archives nor the transparency of its who approaches the psychoanalyst
complicated theoretical interven- as the subject-supposed-to-know
tions. Viego’s vision is a dark one, a (sujet-supposé-savoir), then, Viego
form of Foucault’s “pessimistic ac- asks, how does a racialized analys-
tivism” (13), but only inasmuch as and, a subject-supposed-to-enjoy, a
he wants to push the “border subject” subject who might not care less about
of Chicano and Latino studies to and the analyst’s knowledge, receive the
into its limit, to the bar of the Laca- potentially useless her meneutic of
nian signifi er, where one might fi nd psychoanalysis now, or ever?
“generative metaphors of possibility, For Viego, if border subjects
even excess[,] and not metaphors of were to admit themselves as barred
ON ANTONIO VIEGO’S DEAD SUBJECTS 307
subjects without succumbing to ret- with Lee Edelman’s and Tim Dean’s
rograde universal humanism, then appropriations of Lacanian psy-
Latinos might exploit their position choanalysis as “queer theory avant
as already recognizing that both the la lettre” by himself claiming Lacan
Other and race do not exist, a real- as an implicitly antiracist theorist
ization that marks the end (and whose “position signifi cantly over-
ends) of analysis, according to La- laps with some of the basic positions
can. As Viego writes: “[T]he subject in the best critical multiculturalist,
at the end of analysis is no longer a antiassimilationist work” (5). Yet
slave to the demand seen to issue unlike these white queer theorists’
from the Other; the subject learns to deconstructive polemics against a
assume responsibility for herself by future bound to reproduction and
becoming her own cause, as it were” a sexuality bound to identity, Viego’s
(201–02). If the aim of analysis, ac- critique admits a fantasy subject, a
cording to Lacan, is to get the sub- sinthomestiza subject, who fi nds
ject to “enjoy her symptom,” then enjoyment-in-meaning après la lettre,
the racialized sujet-supposé-jouir who recognizes that racialized sub-
might enjoy psychoanalysis itself jects are always already submitted
as a historical symptom of the to discourses of identity politics and
Other for which she is the cause, reproductive technologies (Viego
inasmuch as she is already beyond 160–63). Edelman’s sinthomosexual
and before psychoanalysis as a white in No Future is a fi gural nonidentity
bourgeois fi eld of knowledge. Thus that functions as an absence relative
the point of Dead Subjects is not to “the Child” as transcendental
that Latino subjects simply need to political identity. By contrast, Viego’s
take their issues to the couch; rather, sinthomestiza is always too much
the couch needs to take political and there—in history, on the corner, and
psychic issues to the streets, as Frantz as an infi nitely reproductive identity
Fanon did, according to Viego’s that crosses borders of both geogra-
reading of Fanon’s “revolutionary phy and temporality. Dead Subjects
position that wants to mine in psy- subtly reads white queer misrecog-
choanalysis material that might com- nitions of the difference between
pel a real intervention in changing descendants and heirs by showing
racist structures” (209). For Viego, up the backhandedly presentist
psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutic and egoist logic of queer theory’s
but an ethics. Once turned inside best boys, those who will lash out
out, psychoanalysis may indeed pro- against their inherited privilege
duce “generative metaphors of pos- while also subscribing to a secular
sibility, even excess.” time already stitched up in white-
This generative quality distin- ness, modernity, and masculinity.
guishes Viego from his fellow trav- Viego’s immaculate reconception
elers in queer theory. Viego identifi es of Latino politics and academic
308 H. N. LUKES
inquiry admits that for racialized 237) could indeed be called Viego’s
subjects the Lacanian future ante- cause, in both the political sense and
rior involves both a becoming and the Lacanian sense of cause as a lack
an always already having to be for so structuring as to take on the sta-
others, but not necessarily for the tus of an object of desire. Mingus’s
Other. I would argue that the acci- song title frames missed opportu-
dentally gathered members of the nity as at once impossible and ab-
so-called anti-relational school of surd, but also uncannily productive
queer theory—including Lee Edel- on the plane of fantasy: Anna Freud
man, Leo Bersani, and Tim Dean did, in fact, enjoy all that she could
(despite their crucial differences)— be as the child of Sigmund and his
position themselves in the place of wife—and suppressed her father’s
the historically and theoretically archive in order to forward ego
necessary structure of the pervert, psychology as a psychoanalyst in
he who disavows sexual difference, her own right. But that is not what
castration in language, and psycho- Mingus is asking. Rather, he and
analysis itself, while also bolstering Spillers and Viego ask an implic-
the logic of lack that attends these itly racial, historical, and incestu-
laws.10 Viego’s identifi cation with the ous question: what are you now if
hysteric speaks to his refusal of per- you are at once your mother’s child
version’s will to disavow yet also in- but also your master’s baby? What
vite the law. And herein lies the if you could fuck your mother, or
difference for Dead Subjects between Freud’s wife, or the master?
loss and lack, a concept that in spite Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s
of its nonappearance in the text Maybe: An American Grammar
nonetheless anamorphically emerges. Book” answers this quandary by
Viego announces the presence of tracing the matrilineage of slave kin-
such absence on a performative crit- ship that underwrites(rights) this
ical plane with his introduction’s ti- discourse of race and recognition.11
tle: “All the Things You Can’t Be But why has the academy not taken
by Now,” a riff on Hortense Spill- up Spillers’s radical critique, even as
ers’s titular appropriation of Charles some scholars reference her inter-
Mingus’s jazz piece “All the Things vention in passing? Viego’s point is
You Could Be by Now If Sigmund not that ethnic studies lacks Lacan
Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” but that it has missed an opportu-
The underappreciation of Spillers’s nity presented by Spillers. In miss-
1996 demand to embrace Freudian/ ing there is loss, and historically
Lacanian psychoanalysis as the speaking this oversight will inevita-
“missing layer of the hermeneutic/ bly convert this lack of a critical ap-
interpretative projects of an entire paratus into a loss that should not be
generation of black intellectuals now mourned but rather made into a
at work” (Spillers, quoted in Viego melancholic structure of critique.
ON ANTONIO VIEGO’S DEAD SUBJECTS 309
Although Lacanian psychoanal- relationship to Lacan, would like to
ysis does in many ways function like think that interventions like Viego’s
a proselytizing fringe religion in the would make for more, perhaps un-
U.S. university, perhaps an addiction expected, discourse about the rela-
metaphor is more apt in describing tionship between identity and critical
this academy’s nervous address to inquiry. This book will be mean-
this hard theory qua hardcore drug. ingful for anyone who might see the
In Lacan’s own terms, “[I want] to Latinization of the United States
leave the reader no other way out and its redefi nition of identity poli-
than the way in, which I prefer to be tics as an opportunity to reconsider
diffi cult.”12 And so tarrying with the subject and social justice as such,
Lacan has always felt like a slippery especially in our current “pharm
slope for American academics who culture” that would medicate away
are committed to accessible intellec- any discontent with civilization.
tual work and social justice outside I am sure that even as Dead Sub-
the ivory tower. On the one hand, jects will serve as a guidepost, it will
evoking Lacan even in passing tends also serve as a lightning rod. Viego
to elicit from leftist cultural studies offers himself as an objet a, a cause
camps a rolling of eyes at best and for more talk. In the end, Dead Sub-
an accusation of reactionary phall- jects offers and asks in equal but ana-
ogocentrism at worst. On the other morphic terms: what would it mean
hand, any scholar seriously engag- to talk more, but less about iden-
ing Lacan these days is no doubt tity? What if the “noise” of Latini-
wincing with the expectation of dad had no ego, but rather provoked
being attacked for inaccuracies and an agonistic care of the self that
a lack of critical commitment from sounded nothing like the paranoia
a camp trained in the era of the of “America”?
Slovenian invasion. When it comes
to Lacan for the United States, the —New York University
Alcoholics Anonymous saying ap-
plies: one’s too many and a hundred
ain’t enough.
NOTES
Viego’s book is neither a casual
use of Lacan, borrowing some key
1. A number of scholars of American
ideas as a theory-stencil set over his psychology provide the background for
primary texts, nor is it a thorough Viego’s specifi cally political focus, some
of whom he mentions: Philip Cushman,
introduction to Lacanian concepts.
Constructing the Self, Constructing
Arguably, Viego’s “more Laca-
America: A Cultural History of
nian” approach is a better one. I for Psychotherapy (Reading, MA: Addison-
one, not being an expert in the fi eld Wesley, 1990); Ellen Herman, The
Romance of American Psychology:
of Latino studies, and admitting a
Political Culture in the Age of Experts
suspicious yet persistent readerly (Berkeley: University of California