Frederique Stref

10/12/2025

“When you set out toward Ithaca, wish for the road to be long, long enough to open itself to encounters, detours, tremors of experience; long enough for adventure to loosen its knots within you. And do not fear the Lestrygonians or the Cyclopes, nor the tempests of Poseidon. Nothing of that sort will truly cross your path if your thought remains elevated, if a rare emotion, one of those that tightens both spirit and flesh, governs your advance. Lestrygonians, Cyclopes, the irascible Poseidon: none of these will appear unless you carry them within your own soul, unless it is your soul itself that calls them forth.
Wish for the road to be long, for many to be the radiant summer mornings when, with a quiet joy, you will discover harbours unknown until then. Linger in the Phoenician markets, accept their offerings of precious goods, amber, coral, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and gather, without restraint, their intoxicating perfumes. Visit, too, the cities of Egypt, as many as your steps can bear, and let no opportunity pass to learn from those who hold knowledge.
Keep Ithaca always in mind — not as a goal to be seized, but as the horizon that gives shape to your movement. Yet never hasten the voyage. Better that it lasts for years, and that you reach the island only in old age, enriched by everything the road will have bestowed upon you, expecting nothing further from Ithaca itself. Ithaca has already offered you the gift of departure, and without it you would never have taken the road. There is nothing more it can offer, and even in its poverty it has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, shaped by the long labour of experience, you will have already grasped, almost without needing to formulate it, what all Ithacas signify.”
Constantin Cavafis
Translated by Frederique Stref

09/12/2025

"WHO KIDNAPPED SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK?

Let us imagine, for a moment, that Slavoj Žižek had not so cheerfully sunk into postmodern “progressivism”, a consequence, among other things, of his cowardice toward Lacan’s teaching.

What delightful little joke, of the kind he once handled with such mischievous mastery, might he offer today to unfold before our eyes and ears the complexity of the current situation, which has been going on for nearly two years now?

Let us imagine:

“Do you know the joke about the antisemite who meets an Orthodox Jew on a train?

I love this joke because, like all good jokes, it obviously relies on clichés (racist, sexist, etc.). And you know quite well that one way of bonding with a stranger is to tell them racist jokes about their ethnic or religious group and yours.
Why does this work so well?
I could perhaps explain it later using Lacanian theory… but first, let me tell you this excellent joke:
The scene unfolds on a train between Vienna and Salzburg. A young Austrian man finds himself seated beside an elderly Orthodox Jew. Slightly embarrassed, he manages to overcome his timidity and addresses the religious man:
- Good morning, sir… Sorry to bother you… Are you… are you Jewish?
- So it seems.
- May I ask you a question?
- That would already be the third… but yes, go ahead.
- This may sound inappropriate, even racist, but I have always wanted to know whether what they say about Jews is true… is it… is it true that all Jews are rich?
- This rumour has some basis…
- Ah! So, it’s true! I knew it! But… tell me… do you have a secret? A method, perhaps?
- Of course. But the method is tedious to explain, and I fear it may bore you terribly…
- I promise I have all the time in the world! Even if it takes the entire journey!
- Are you quite certain…?
- Yes! Absolutely certain!
- Very well… you must know that this method, this ancestral secret, I should even say, is reserved for initiates… but for you, I am willing to make an exception, provided you give me five euros.
- Five euros? Only that? If that’s all this ancient secret that can make a man rich is worth, then take them! They’re yours!

After a long silence, face closed and lips sealed, the old man began to speak. He told a marvellous story, full of splendid detours, delicate circumvolutions, anecdotes of exquisite humour. The tale reached back into the night of time, into the forgotten memory of humanity… and suddenly the old man fell silent.
- What? That’s it? But you didn’t explain anything! cried the young Austrian.
- Do not be so impatient, said the religious man calmly. This is only the beginning. If you want to hear the rest, you must pay five euros.
- All right, all right! Here! Please continue!
The old man resumed his tale, which grew more marvellous and eventually even exhilarating. But again, he stopped halfway through a sentence. Almost automatically, the young Austrian handed him other five-euro note, and the man continued. This sequence repeated itself until the train pulled into the station, precisely the moment when the Austrian could no longer pay, having spent his last cent. And thus, the two men parted.

You may be surprised, but I believe the current situation, namely, the management of the coronavirus epidemic, has exactly the same structure as this joke. In place of the young Austrian, we have the people; in place of the Orthodox Jew, we have the government; and in the place of money stands liberty. The government weaves its narrative about the virus and first demands a tiny, seemingly insignificant gesture from the people: wear a mask. The people tell themselves that if this small concession can restore their freedom, why not. Then the story continues, and a new demand appears: now it is time to lock down. Then, later, to present digital identification everywhere one goes. Digital identification obtained only by accepting a medical procedure. And so on, until, in the end, the people, believing they are recovering their freedom by sacrificing it, just as the Austrian believed he would get rich by spending his money, have produced a new social reality and find themselves caught off guard, having handed the government all the means necessary to occupy precisely this position.

You will, of course, recognise in this little joke and in its parallel to epidemic management what psychoanalysis calls the superego.

The superego is the real gap between the imaginary ego-ideal and the symbolic ideal-of-the-ego, a gap the subject attempts at all costs to fill, mostly by sacrificing themselves, by paying for that gap.
It is a vicious circle, for the more one obeys the superego, the more guilty one feels.
Like the Austrian who keeps paying, or the people who drift ever further from “the life before,” even as they believe they are approaching it by sacrificing ever more freedom.

An antisemitic reading of this joke would claim that the Jew exploits a naive man’s ignorance to enrich himself, but that would overlook the essential point: the Jew is not merely telling the Austrian how to become rich, he is showing him.

It is up to the Austrian to understand it. This may help us approach the distinction, in linguistics, between statement (énoncé) and enunciation (énonciation).
Will the young antisemitic Austrian learn anything from the lesson the Orthodox Jew has just given him? Or will he persist in his antisemitism, positioning himself even more firmly as the eternal victim of the avarice he attributes to Jews an avarice he himself produces through his relation to that community?

Likewise, will the people position themselves as the eternal victims of their government, which they suppose surely with good reason, but that changes nothing corrupted by financial powers and serving private interests at the expense of the common good?
Or will they, as La Boétie suggests, finally realise that what the government possesses beyond the people are only the means the people themselves provide, enabling it indirectly to destroy them?
“We always have the government we deserve.”

Unfortunately, Slavoj Žižek will never make this joke, nor this parallel, for he is too busy firing volleys at those who refuse to feed this super egoic, sacrificial logic he stupidly labels “the anti-this” or “the anti-that.”

We can no longer count on him; we can only fall back on the wise Hopi adage:
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Written and published by Rudy Goubet Bodart
www.rudygoubetbodart.com
Translated by Frederique Stref

Rudy Goubet-Bodart practices psychoanalysis in French and in English, practicing in Singapore with adults, teenagers, and children in Singapore.

08/12/2025

"To be a psychoanalyst is not a profession, nor a social function, but rather an ethical way of assuming a kind of social su***de.
The social bond produced by the Analyst’s Discourse frees one from any need for belonging or group identity; its dialectic rivals the doctrinal force of religions, and the notion of faith appears there once stripped of its religious foam and residue.
Lacan once said: “I am the one who has read Freud,” and, shortly before his death in 1980, he added: “(…) I never claimed to surpass Freud, as one of my correspondents accuses me of doing, but to extend him.”
This is what authentic psychoanalysis amounts to: its achievement lies in making use of the misapprehension that is structural, and in bringing about, at its limit, a revelation that can only ever be a revelation of fantasy.
“The analysand is the one who manages to realise his ‘I think’ as alienation, that is, to discover fantasy as the engine of psychic reality, the reality of the divided subject. He can do so only by returning to the analyst the function of (a), which the analyst himself could not be without immediately vanishing.”
There is no more internal contradiction in Freud’s writings than in the twelve thousand pages of Lacan’s teaching only a logic set in motion, in which theory does not oppose practice, as in the banal discourse that circulates today, but instead recovers its original meaning from the Greek theôria: a form of sight grounded in practice, illuminating its concrete modalities. Lacan remarks: “Be mindful that theôria, whose term arises in the same epoch however contemplative it may claim to be (and it is not simply contemplative, as the Orphic praxis from which it emerges makes clear) is not, as our modern use of the word ‘theory’ implies, the abstraction of that praxis, nor its general reference, nor the model, in any sense one might imagine, of what could be its application. At its very emergence, theôria is that praxis itself: theôria is the exercise of the power of to pragma, the essential affair.”
Christian Dubuis Santini
'école impossible de la psychanalyse
www.lecoleimpossibledelapsychanalyse.fr
Traduction Frederique Stref

Psychanalyste n’est pas une profession, ni une fonction sociale, plutôt la façon éthique d’assumer une sorte de "su***de social". L'École impossible de la psychanalyse démontre qu'il n’y a pas plus de contradiction dans les livres de Freud que dans les 12 000 pages de l’enseignement de ...

06/12/2025

And this verb “to touch”, which can stand on its own or take “to be” as naturally as “to have” as an auxiliary, keeps unfolding its ambiguities.
And all those hours on trains, those journeys, my parentheses, suspended between one of my 1001 lives.
On the Eurostar bringing me back to London yesterday, there was a need to return to a brief earlier moment, so piercing in its intensity.
The tear came without warning, warm against my frozen cheek,a tiny pocket of warmth against the cutting cold, and something in me began to crack.
The body was speaking before I could, as it so often does.I placed my hand on my cheek, a simple gesture, almost instinctive, yet so precisely attuned that it suspended everything around it: the street noise, my scattered thoughts.
All that remained was that single point of contact: the palm, the skin, the warm trace of a sudden emotion.There was everything there: the subtlety of the tear, the depth of the hand responding to it, a slight trembling, an unexpected refuge. Something in me gathered itself, almost imperceptibly, like a breath quietly recovered.
And in that second held between two temperatures, two sensations, a language began to awaken in me, one I have known all along:the language of touch, of skin, of bodies that speak before words, of gestures that narrate the story one does not dare to tell. An ancient knowledge, buried in the flesh, was quietly returning to claim its place. The train sped on and, carried by that fragile warmth, it became clear how much there is to say about this particular touch, about skin, about bodies, about the ways they brush past one another, recognise one another, offer themselves in trust, receive, and quietly heal.
As though that tear had opened up an entire continent, carnal and luminous, that I had been carrying without quite touching it.
A place where I am breathing, I am living, giving, discovering, taming, writing, sensing, and respecting , naturally.
So the moment was allowed to inhabit me, and there was a need to write, so as not to lose that infinitesimal tenderness that came, for the span of a single breath, to bring me back to that touch and its treasures.

02/12/2025

Rainer Maria Rilke: Am Strande, 1902

Ahead of the flood waters.
It's still brewing.
Wild waters and above
Stern an Stern.

Guess who saw it,
O selig Land,
Like the wave to you
Overcame.

It's still brewing.
The night wind is bringing
Memory and a wave
In love with the sand.