Breast and the Jetty

This essay explores a possible traversal of anxiety in dialogue with Chapter 5 of Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire, “Vampires, Breastfeeding, and Anxiety.” At stake in this traversal is an act of freedom that opens up a future for the human. Starting with the play of Freudian resonances in Copjec’s title, “Breast and the Jetty” plays, in turn, as an echo of “Death and the Maiden” that enables an analysis of fantasy as a solution to castration anxiety in the neurotic, which has the effect of circumscribing desire. Analyses of the problematics of the breast as partial object and object-cause of desire, and of the “forbidden woman” Copjec locates in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, emphasize a shift from Lacanian theory, centered on the symbolic, to Willy Apollon’s recent metapsychology, developed from GIFRIC’s clinic for the treatment of psychosis in Quebec. By attending to this work, and to the nuances of originary fantasy Lucie Cantin offers, I discern the qualities of an unfettered quest of desire, independent from the conditions of neurotic fantasy and capable of confronting a future for which there is no reference in language.