As I continue to investigate the ideas of Lacan and Foucault (Agamben) I came across a chapter in Joan Copjec’s excellent book: Read My Desire: Lacan against the historicist. The chapter I want to discuss–to anyone who happens upon this writing—or even to have a dialog with myself within a particular contour of thought; keeping in mind a biopolitical-Lacanian mosaic of sorts; which is exactly what Copjec does in this treatise. Chapter 5 is titled Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety—with the interest in vampires and vampire culture I found this chapter to be quite interesting. Copjec begins the chapter quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile:
Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this first depravity [mothers who despise their first duty and no longer want to feed their children]. The whole moral order degenerates…But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together.
She also quotes Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life:
I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring…The mother (if there are not very weighty reasons to prevent her) ought to suckle her children. Her milk is their proper nutriment, and for some time quite sufficient.
Breast feeding takes on in both sets of quotes above values based on the Enlightenment where Kant would declare that the new epoch should render superstition, dogma, no longer necessary; instead the new ideals would be intellectual rigor and reductionism. Rousseau of course was instrumental in the future thought of the Enlightenment but he was most known for his direct thought on Romanticism. One of his thoughts was that we need to get closer to nature, we are natural creatures and this is how all morals should be judged; relate all things towards the natural order of things; which breast feeding would be considered closer to our mammalian history. Now we need to consider this idea in order to understand what Copjec is trying to do with not just this chapter but the entire project. Copjec in this project is explaining that Foucault and other historicist ideas are incomplete because for one thing they do not consider the idea of the Real. 
For instance to this day there are apparatuses in force that push to have women breast feed. Take for example the stance the World Health Organization takes:
The vast majority of mothers can and should breastfeed, just as the vast majority of infants can and should be breastfed. Only under exceptional circumstances can a mother’s milk be considered unsuitable for her infant. For those few health situations where infants cannot, or should not, be breastfed, the choice of the best alternative–expressed breast milk from an infant’s own mother, breast milk from a healthy wet nurse or a human milk bank, or a breast milk substitute fed with a cup, which is a safer method than a feeding bottle and teat–depends on individual circumstance
Foucault would understand this adage as a form of bio-power where the sovereign is administering to bodies; as Foucault understood, power or regulation is no longer in the hands of a king or one sovereign government but instead has ceded to medical regulation and science to administer controls upon the population (not to mention techne). He wrote, “there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of population”. This administration upon bodies is exactly the cause of a particular species of men, which causes their subjectification. This is where chapter 5 of copjec’s book begins basically. After the experts explain to us time and time again how your child can be prettier, smarter, healthier if you breast feed why has the population refused this “expert” advice?
Copjec writes that we must look at more than just the social constructivist argument for breast feeding and peer into the idea of anxiety as the aura that surrounds the very act of the child sucking on the breast—from here we begin to understand her idea surrounding the vampire parasitic orality of the act, however; it is not the child that is the vampire in her idea but instead the vampire as the overproximate double which manifest in the idea of anxiety.
A brief understanding of anxiety of course will help us navigate through this idea. Anxiety is an “extraordinary” affect because it works without signifiers. The cause of anxiety is not causal in the same sense that sadness would be—after a break up for instance—but instead it is not caused by any object or loss of object. Freud noted that anxiety is a signal of danger but often changed his definition of this and it is easy to see that he is equating anxiety with some idea of the fight or flight evolutionary response that was quite popular at the time. It is at this point that Copjec asks the question “Is any interpretation of anxiety superfluous and inappropriate?”
In a sense the best description we have is that of a lack of description, “Anxiety is a gap in the symbolic reality, the logic of cause and effect cannot bridge”. Anxiety according to Copjec signals an overproximity much like vampires—in the sense you are unable to even see their shadow or mirror image. This overproximity is bound up with the Lacanian Real; the symbolic is a way to escape the Real, or even better the Symbolic “shields us against the Real”. This is the beginning of a particular problem for the way the Real functions; the Real is unable to be represented by a signifier (which is the basic definition) which results in the compulsion to repeat—the failure of the signifier to enter into the Symbolic (i.e. the real is unable to be brought into the Symbolic order, we are unable to talk about it, bring it out into the “open”). The problem is with jouissance (see prior post for understanding) or as Copjec perfectly puts it, “knowledge fails” and this failure itself in the Real is exactly what we encounter instead of the Real “real”.
Now we can summarize and bring together this idea of vampires and breast feeding more coherently. The vampire (excluding the “vegetarian” post-modern ones, think Twilight) in the Gothic sense is an “elimination of sentiment”. Copjec writes, “The vampire present us with a bodily double that we can neither make sense of nor recognize as our own”. Vampirism is related to the oral fixation that can be expressed as a particular oral jouissance; of course the blood is nutritive but what occurs so often is the blood is dried up (now we are talking about a surplus), no longer available much like what can occur with the mother breast feeding her infant. The breast then gets tied up with the idea of the extimate appendage that no longer belongs to the gestalt of the body. This appendage as it dries up and no longer producing milk can become the site of trauma; where we (I imagine this is much like male impotence as well) reject this extimate object that becomes for us just a layer of fat that we reject. This rejection can result in a particular repetition which results in a surreal uncanniness where we confront this extimate part of ourselves.
In a sense we must consider affects and repetition when explicating a constructivist argument. There is more to write on the subject, this was basically the summary of Chapter 5.
