Creon divides his interlocutors into two clans, those who are with him and those who are against him. He no longer negotiates and threatens those who oppose. Force controls it, when force must never serve except to protect, and it is always so with those who give themselves up body and soul to the will to power. To handle force as power is to believe that fear is the engine of power and establishes authority when it is more like the caress of a parent on the cheek of the child after an act of stupidity. If power reigns in practice, it must always be a morning of authority where it will believe to be sufficient unto itself. Creon no longer knows where he is talking about or at least he is talking about an imaginary place where he has just arrived and which did not exist before his arrival and which was created by him for him. As if being king, Creon was no longer made up of the same elements of flesh, bone and genetics as the day before his coronation. Creon embraces and gives himself the identity of a king who forgets where he comes from and what he owes to his past which is erased by his coming to power. If identity proves to be a search and partly a construction built by one's tastes and choices, a whole foundation of identity exists, even pre-exists, in us before us. Too many identities are written these days, crystallizing on this background or only on research, when balance presides over identity.
Date: April 7, 2017
The enantiodromos, the fork of life
Creon transforms into a tyrant. He becomes what he imagines he should be. It is the enantiodromos , this moment and this place among the Greeks, which tells the true nature of a man when, at the crossroads, he must confront the choice of the road to follow. The enantiodromos is the fork where the one who becomes is born… Like an upstart taking possession of the thunderbolt of Zeus, Creon lacks the education and understanding of his power that can only be given to him by the 'authority. Creon thinks in terms of right when he should first think in terms of duty. Being oneself is never a habit, identity is a search and an affirmation, a enantiodromos , like a state of siege, who am I? Where am I going ? You have to constantly question yourself and explore the mystery of life, but caparisoned with what you know about yourself and with the world's self-agreement, that is to say that there are some certainties, there cannot be nothing, otherwise there is no Antigone...
Take on yourself, a transfiguration
It is difficult to understand in our time where individualism reigns that the action of taking on the fault that one does not think of oneself, that one thinks of the other, but which necessarily is also of oneself, necessarily, because I have already committed this kind of fault by action or omission, this fault is not unknown to me, the action of endorsing the fault which, even if it is not of oneself, could have to be, therefore to endorse the possibility of the exposure of my weakness, a moment of intense and prodigious humility, transgresses my self and obliges it to come out of its comfort; this gesture provokes, without my even having to call for it or to seek it, the crossing of the membrane which separates me from another in me that I still do not know, another that surpasses my nature, can -to be another lending-natural, the transfiguration that allows me to become more than myself.
To be and to Have
What belongs to us matters less than what we are and we are wrong to believe, under the wing of envy, that what belongs to us can define who we are.