Part 5: Authority
In ancient Greece, men know each other and recognize each other in the eyes of their family, their loved ones, their community. Women reserve the mirror for themselves, which started with beauty, femininity and seduction. Reflection is everywhere. “There is no place that does not see you” writes Rilke. Can we exist without reflection? Can we be aware without knowing ourselves? Man should not see himself in the mirror for fear of being absorbed by his image. This image that manages to make us forget that we are there. If we think what we see, we hear it, it resonates in us, and we dream it too. Our image escapes us as soon as we see it. Thus the woman adjusts herself in the mirror when the man could lose his foundations there. The dream, binomial of memory, conceals time and numbs it. What did we see and when? The gaze and the reflection and the imagination interpenetrate and cannot be dissociated. To see and to know oneself merges among the Greeks. To see, to know oneself... but not too much, because if man is a marvel, in the sense of an incident, of a fascinating fracture, he also conceals his own terror, he exterminates and tortures himself, and he is indeed the only “animal” in this case.
Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (5/7. Authority)”