The session ends on a humorous note with this young woman, full of inner resources, who had arrived very angry. Playing with both languages, she puts her finger on something essential: the difference between having a body and being this body.
This seemingly light comment touches on something decisive: the way je suis sticks the subject to a signifier, as if her being were fused with a bodily attribute or adjective. By choosing to say I have a fat body rather than je suis grosse, she immediately introduces a distance between herself and her body, and quietly questions what we might call a naive ontology of the subject: that spontaneous belief that one is, in one’s very being, whatever comes after “I am / je suis”.
In French, je suis grosse / petite / grande looks like a simple statement of fact. Yet the use of être to describe bodily traits creates a dangerous shortcut: it suggests that the imaginary attribute of the body says something about the very being of the subject. The body becomes the support of a definition of self, as if the subject were one with this image, this measurement, this volume.
English, with its I have a body and I have 160 cm height, opens up another possibility: the body as something one has, rather than something one is. What emerges here is not only sadness about the body, but also sadness at the prospect of having one’s being assigned by a signifier. By choosing English, she is already, in her own way, loosening the knot between being and attribute.