Frederique Stref

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27/04/2026

La séance de l'hôte
Petite fable analytique venue après une lecture en groupe d’un des séminaires de Lacan autour d'un texte de Freud de 1910, « Du sens opposé dans les mots primitifs ».

Il arrive en re**rd. Je suis son hôte depuis trois ans, il ne sait jamais lequel de nous deux reçoit l'autre.
Ce matin-là, il vient me remercier. Le mot tombe avant qu'il s'allonge, et je le laisse tomber avec lui. Il a, dit-il, beaucoup appris. Il parle d'un père qui le défendait de tout, et qu'il n'a jamais pu défendre. Il parle d'une mère qui le gâtait, et de ce qu'elle a gâté en lui. Il dit qu'il regrette son enfance, sans savoir s'il la pleure ou s'il la désire encore.
Puis ce lapsus : « j'ai loué cet appartement à ma sœur ». Silence. Il ne sait plus s'il le lui a pris ou donné. Moi non plus.
Le crépuscule entre dans la pièce, celui qui se lève, ou celui qui tombe ? Il dit : « c'est terrible ». Je ne relève pas le mot. Terrible : épouvantable, ou magnifique. Les deux, sans doute. C'est ce qu'il est venu déposer ici depuis le début.
Quand il se relève, il me serre la main avec une gratitude sacrée. Sacré : saint, ou maudit. La séance, ce jour-là, n'a pas tranché. Elle a seulement laissé entendre qu'aucune de ses phrases ne disait qu’une seule chose.

En 1910, Freud publie un bref article, « Du sens opposé dans les mots primitifs », à partir des travaux du philologue Carl Abel. Il y observe que les langues les plus anciennes possédaient des mots désignant simultanément une chose et son contraire , fort et faible, haut et profond, sacré et maudit. Il y voit une parenté avec le travail du rêve, où la contradiction n'existe pas et où chaque élément peut tenir lieu de son opposé. La linguistique a depuis nuancé Abel, mais la trouvaille reste : l'inconscient parle une langue où le « non » s'efface, et où chaque mot porte en lui sa propre antithèse.

Hook
In English, to cleave is to split and to cling. Every consulting room, perhaps, is built on words like that.
Cleaving
A short analytic fable, written after a Lacan seminar reading group, prompted by Freud's 1910 paper "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words."
She has been fast for three years. Fast as in quick, quick to speak, quick to laugh, quick to leave. Fast as in held, fixed to the same sentence, the same mother, the same Tuesday at eleven.
That morning, she tells me her marriage is finished. I do not ask which finished she means: completed, or ruined. She does not know either, and that is precisely why she has come.
She speaks of her husband. He has, she says, always sanctioned her ambitions. The word hangs in the air between us, approved or punished. She lets it hang. Then she adds that she has decided to cleave to him. Cleave: to cling, or to cut in two. She hears it as she says it, and a small laugh escapes her.
She tells me she has been dusting the house all weekend, adding a fine layer of order, or wiping one away, I cannot tell from her tone. She has weathered a great deal, she says. Weathered as in survived, weathered as in worn down. The light at the window is out: the lamps are off, the stars are showing.
Near the end, the slip: "I let him go." Let: allowed, or hindered. Did she release him, or hold him back? She looks at me. I say nothing. The session does not decide. It only lets the sentence stand, with both its faces turned toward her, the way Janus stands at every threshold including this one.
When she leaves, she says she is chuffed. In her North, that means pleased. In another North, it means the opposite. She knows this. She closes the door softly behind her, on both meanings at once.

In 1910, Freud published a short paper, "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words," drawing on the philologist Carl Abel. He noted that the oldest known languages contained words designating a thing and its opposite at once strong and weak, high and deep, sacred and accursed and that the dream-work knows no contradiction, gladly representing any element by its contrary. Linguistics has since qualified Abel; Benveniste, in 1956, dismantled most of his etymologies. But what Lacan retains is this: equivocity is not an archaic accident of language, it is the very logic of the signifier. English, with its cleave and its sanction*, its* fast and its chuffed*, keeps that logic alive in every consulting room.

01/04/2026

We never know what we pass on

On Saturday evening, meeting Louis, a young professor freshly graduated from Cambridge, and Marta, a brilliant English student of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries French literature, turned into a beautiful surprise: a conversation where the books, authors and sentences that accompany us quite naturally found their way to the table.
As we talked, each of us brought in our readings, our questions, our moments of wonder, and it became clear how much thought feeds on those moments when it is shared with others.
It was Louis who, at some point in the conversation, wanted to bring back a quotation. It slipped away from him a little, could be approached but not completely grasped, and that is precisely what moved me. What escaped in the quotation, rather than a mechanical recitation, opened up a real space for questioning the place of words in what we call “thinking”.

All the more so since it was:“It is in words that we think.” Hegel.

This sentence kept working in me after the evening, as an echo of what we had just experienced: a thought woven in dialogue, clarified in spoken exchange, shifting as words circulate between us. In searching with Louis for Hegel’s exact wording, we were in fact experiencing this idea: words do not merely express thought, they bring it into being, with all their hesitations, approximations and unexpected findings.
It is from this attempt at an “almost” recovered quotation, and from the joy of that evening, that the desire to write these few lines emerged today.

Samedi soir, la rencontre avec Louis, jeune professeur fraîchement diplômé de Cambridge, et Marta, brillante étudiante anglaise, en littérature française des XVIᵉ et XVII siècle, a pris la forme d’une magnifique surprise : celle d’une conversation où les livres, les auteurs et les phrases qui nous accompagnent se sont invités à la table.
Au fil de l’échange, chacun faisait circuler ses lectures, ses questions, ses émerveillements, et l’on sentait combien la pensée se nourrit de ces moments où elle se partage à plusieurs.

C’est Louis qui, au détour d’une discussion, a voulu faire revenir une citation Elle lui échappait un peu, se laissait approcher sans se laisser tout à fait saisir, et c’est précisément ce qui m’a touchée.
Ce qui échappe , plutôt que de la réciter mécaniquement, a ouvert un véritable espace de questionnement sur la place des mots dans ce que nous appelons « penser ».
D’autant qu’il s’agissait :
« C’est dans les mots que nous pensons. » de Hegel.
Cette phrase a continué de travailler en moi après la soirée, comme un écho à ce que nous venions de vivre : une pensée qui se tisse dans le dialogue, qui se précise dans la parole échangée, qui se déplace à mesure que les mots circulent entre nous.
En cherchant, avec Louis, les mots d’Hegel, nous faisions l’expérience même de cette idée : les mots ne se contentent pas d’exprimer la pensée, ils la font advenir, avec leurs hésitations, leurs approximations et leurs trouvailles.
C’est à partir de cette tentative de citation « presque » retrouvée, et de cette soirée faite de joie qu’est née aujourd’hui l’envie d’écrire ces quelques lignes.
Philosophie de l’esprit, tome III de l’Encyclopédie) Hegel

21/12/2025

I am so grateful for the privilege of translating the texts of Rudy Goubet Bodart and Christian Dubuis Santini.
Their writing obliges me to slow down, to listen more closely to what a sentence demands, to what a concept resists.
Translation, in this sense, is not a technical exercise but a form of apprenticeship: it teaches me where my English still falters, where it opens, where it can be tightened or allowed to breathe. I progress through this work, not by accumulation, but by exposure.
I thank them both for this opportunity, which is a space of transmission, and for the trust implied in allowing their words to pass through my hands.

Christian Dubuis Santini
Goubet Bodart

21/12/2025

"The Impossible School of Psychoanalysis

In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot remarks that, more often than not, there is no other choice than heresy if one is not to lose faith, that is to say, schism appears as the only way to keep the spirit of a religion alive. Is this not precisely the only solution in light of what is happening today with a so-called psychoanalysis that retains nothing of psychoanalysis but the name?
Lacanian teaching, having laid bare the religious structure of Capitalist Discourse, leaves room for only one possible salvation of what deserves to be saved from our Freudo-Lacanian heritage: a new “heresy” that would claim the unbearable, subversive, revolutionary core of the real of the unconscious, as uncovered by Freud. What is at stake is preserving the fact that society proceeds from repression and not the other way around; that the responsibility of the subject is always engaged; that logical rigor, ethical exigency, access to the discourse of the analyst, and so forth, all come at a price, namely, first clarifying the unconscious of which “I” am (is) the subject.
If the unconscious is indeed a knowledge without a subject, a knowledge that does not speak itself, a saying that does not know itself, it is not for all that to be conceived as the site of some immemorial wisdom hidden in a secret depth. The unconscious is in everything I do insofar as I have been able to transmute it into a saying; and if it is indeed structured like a language, it nonetheless remains a clever bricolage made up of fantasies and symptoms that cover over the void of the fundamental inconsistency of both the subject and the Other.
Freeing oneself from the stupid injunction of the superego to jouissance presupposes being able to grasp the death drive that traverses our fantasy, in order to fight the death drive with the death drive itself, this appearing as the only possible means… it being understood that indeed, “there is no other entry for the subject into the real than fantasy” (J. Lacan, Ornicar? 29).
Fantasy thus constructs the jouissance of which we are structurally deprived by attributing it to the Other (here lies the root of racism, manipulation, exploitation, and so on).
What the subject discovers in analysis is its alienation in fantasy as the “engine of psychic reality.” For psychoanalysis, die Realität is psychic reality; insofar as it is the division of the subject, there is no other, no revelation of a beyond of reality that would not itself be fantasy. Psychoanalysis is the reality of the subject alienated by its fantasy.
“The grace of going each time further, more naked, in naming the same half-light object that amply figures us, this is, to the letter, to take up life again.”
(René Char, Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit, Gallimard, 1979)
The difference between the subject of philosophy and the subject of psychoanalysis lies in the logic of fantasy.
An analysis carried through to its logical end makes it possible to grasp:
• that the formula of fantasy, $a, is valid not at the outset but at the end of an analysis;
• that the reconstruction of the fundamental fantasy as such consists in a reversal of the drive into fantasy proper;
• that the analytic act is required in order to obtain this reversion from $D (demand) to $a (fantasy).
Through the difference in writing between demand and fantasy, psychoanalysis brings to light the gap forever carved between “desires”, that is, demand insofar as it concerns “the service of goods”, and desire.
The “matheme” of fantasy, $a, thus reads:
• $, the subject of the unconscious, represented only by the fissures of discourse insofar as it is an effect of that discourse,
incommensurable (both smaller and greater) with
• the object, which is no longer anything but a “symbolic” object, that is to say, itself a signifier.
The lack in the Other being radical, abyssal, impossible to fill, the subject can ratify the fact that its desire is at stake in everything that happens to it; it can no longer, from then on, consider itself an “object” of the Other.
As Samuel Beckett puts it, “Everything that happens, happens in words,” which does not, however, exclude signifying equivocation.
P.S. It is only from this point onward that acts (in their psychoanalytic sense, not to be confused with acting out or passage à l’acte) become possible: acts as effects of language, impossible to calculate.
N.B. The subject does not, for all that, abandon its dream of realizing the jouissance of the Other, and in this it is right, since sexual life rests upon this belief in a possible jouissance, but it will no longer be entirely taken in by it.
(To be continued…)"
original text in French by Christian Dubuis Santini
translated by Frederique Stref

18/12/2025

«Le sujet dont il s’agit, celui dont nous suivons la trace, est le sujet du désir et non pas le sujet de l’amour, pour la simple raison qu’on n’est pas sujet...

17/12/2025

Reading Natalie's letter to Felix in Balzac's Le Lys dans la vallée...

Are we not here in the register of the subject’s positioning in relation to her desire, rather than in the register of a demand for love? The letter is not a supplication. It does not seek recognition as a loved woman, nor even as a woman who might finally be understood. It marks a full stop.
She already seems elsewhere, slightly withdrawn; something has been grasped before being formulated, and this grasp takes on the status of an act. Her words are not an affective reaction; they are an inner positioning. And this position is striking: she does not plead, does not rival, does not offer herself further. She holds her ground.
Félix’s letter, as Natalie receives it, is a saturated letter full of memories, female figures, the dead, the absent. Freud showed that attachment to loss can become a form of jouissance. Félix does not appear to be speaking of a love that has ended, but of a love frozen in place, turned into an inner norm, might this be a libidinal fixation?
Natalie seems to hear something other than the narrative itself: that everything is already occupied, already written, stifled, without air, without any possible tremor.
The place Félix appears to offer her is that of a woman loved through others, measured against ideals, summoned to repair, console, appease, an ideal object of reparation, the lost object that is not relinquished but incorporated into the ego.
She refuses this place without anger. There is a sentence in her letter that resonates like a knowledge of the body: I do not want to die like her. This is not an accusation and it is enough. She does not turn it into a tragedy. She listens to what, in herself, says no.
Might this be an illustration of what Lacan formulated as: “Do not give way on your desire.” “ne pas céder sur son désir”?

If love aims at the One, the illusion of imaginary completeness, desire presupposes separation. Félix dreams of an impossible synthesis; Natalie, for her part, accepts disjunction. She does not seek to be everything for the other. She does not even seek to be loved at that price. Could it be named Love? She chooses to preserve a space in which desire would not be crushed by the ideal, nor sacrificed to fidelity to the dead.
What moves us is the way she withdraws. Without drama. Without a scene. She destroys nothing. She leaves a clear word, then she effaces herself. This withdrawal is not a flight; it is an ethics. She yields neither to compassion that erases, nor to love that demands. She remains faithful to something very simple: not to lose herself.
She marks a limit. She withdraws, not in order to evade the other, but in order not to dissolve into him. This gesture is discreet, almost imperceptible, and yet decisive. It is precisely there that something is at stake.
Freud showed that desire is born of lack; Lacan insisted on the impossible to be filled. Nathalie neither seeks to interpret this impossible nor to soften it. She accepts it. She makes room for it.
In this letter, she embodies a position that Freud and Lacan never ceased to work through: that of not responding to demand, of leaving the other confronted with his desire, without mitigating it or exacerbating it.
What Natalie’s letter shows us is neither a technique nor a moral lesson. It is a subjective bearing. A way of consenting to lack, of respecting the impossible, and of wagering that it is only under this condition that something living may still come into being, that desire may circulate.
And this, perhaps, belongs to an analytic ethics.

17/12/2025

En lisant la lettre de Natalie à Félix dans Le Lys dans la vallée de Balzac, j’ai été étonnée par la position de Natalie dans sa réponse à la longue lettre confession de Félix
J’en saisi une lettre de rupture brutale définitive où elle interprète l’ingratitude passée de Felix et ramène au présent ce qu’elle perçoit de ses illusions avec une lucidité amère.
Ce qui m’a étonnée n’est pas tant ce que Natalie écrit que d’où elle parle. Freud nous a appris à distinguer ce qui relève du discours adressé et ce qui relève de l’acte psychique. Ici, la lettre ne fonctionne pas comme une tentative de liaison supplémentaire avec Félix, mais comme une séparation symbolique. Nathalie écrit, mais elle n’écrit pas pour Félix au sens de la demande. Elle écrit depuis un point où quelque chose a déjà été incorporé.
Serions-nous ici dans le registre de la prise de position du sujet par rapport à son désir plutôt que dans le registre de la demande d’amour. La lettre n’est pas une supplique. Elle ne cherche pas à être reconnue comme femme aimée, ni même comme femme comprise. Elle marque un point d’arrêt.
Elle semble déjà ailleurs, légèrement en retrait, quelque chose a été saisit avant d’être formulé et prend un statut d’acte. Sa parole n’est pas une réaction affective, elle est une prise de position intérieure. Et cette position surprend : elle ne supplie pas, ne rivalise pas, ne s’offre pas davantage. Elle se tient.
La lettre de Félix, telle que Natalie la reçoit, est une lettre pleine, saturée de souvenirs, de figures féminines, de morts, d’absentes. Freud a mis en évidence que l’attachement à la perte peut devenir une forme de jouissance. Il semble que Félix ne parle pas d’un amour terminé, mais d’un amour figé, devenu norme intérieure, serait-ce une fixation libidinale ?
Natalie semble entendre autre chose que le récit, que tout est déjà occupé, déjà écrit, étouffé, sans air, sans tremblement possible. La place que Felix semble lui proposer serait celle d’une femme aimée à travers d’autres, mesurée à des idéaux, convoquée pour réparer, consoler, apaiser, comme un objet idéal de réparation, l’objet perdu qui n’est pas lâché mais incorporé au moi. Elle refuse cette place sans colère. Il y a dans sa lettre une phrase qui résonne comme un savoir du corps : je ne veux pas mourir comme elle. Ce n’est pas un reproche, Et cela suffit. Elle n’en fait pas une tragédie. Elle écoute ce qui, en elle, dit non.
Serait-ce l’illustration de : « ne pas céder sur son désir » ?
Si l’amour vise l’Un, l’illusion, la complétude imaginaire, le désir suppose la séparation. Félix rêve d’une synthèse impossible ; Natalie, elle, accepte la disjonction. Elle ne cherche pas à être tout pour l’autre. Elle ne cherche même pas à être aimée à ce prix. Elle choisit de préserver un espace où le désir ne serait pas écrasé par l’idéal, ni sacrifié à la fidélité aux morts.
Ce qui touche, c’est la manière dont elle se retire. Sans fracas. Sans scène. Elle ne détruit rien. Elle laisse une parole claire, puis s’efface. Ce retrait n’est pas une fuite ; c’est une éthique. Elle ne cède ni à la compassion qui efface, ni à l’amour qui exige. Elle reste fidèle à quelque chose de très simple : ne pas se perdre.
Elle marque une limite. Elle se retire, non pour se soustraire à l’autre, mais pour ne pas s’y dissoudre. Ce geste est discret, presque imperceptible, et pourtant décisif. C’est précisément là que quelque chose se joue.
Freud a montré que le désir naît du manque ; Lacan a insisté sur l’impossible à combler. Natalie ne cherche ni à interpréter cet impossible, ni à l’adoucir. Elle l’accepte. Elle lui fait place. Elle incarne, dans cette lettre, une position que Freud et Lacan n’ont cessé de travailler : celle qui consiste à ne pas répondre à la demande, à laisser l’autre face à son désir, sans l’adoucir ni l’aggraver.
Ce que la lettre de Natalie semble montrer serait une tenue subjective. Une manière de consentir au manque, de respecter l’impossible, et de faire le pari que c’est seulement à cette condition que quelque chose de vivant peut encore advenir, que le désir circule.
Et cela, pourrait relever d’une éthique analytique.

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