On a year that is ending, we often cast a furtive glance. Don't linger too long. You never know how many things you've forced yourself to bury in memory might pop up again, like those impromptu, rude and irritating pop-ups on the Internet. The exercise that can be performed is to concentrate very strongly to extract the important events; the events that will make it possible to understand why they mattered so much; how they turned out to be decisive. It is also important not to lose sight of when the event occurs.

Man's vision rarely goes beyond the tip of his nose. At best, she can appreciate its length. But life is history. Written and to be written. How to explain that man has such a limited vision of his life? Because of the limit imposed by life, it will be said. Pride also plays a prominent role. The man thinks he knows. Because he believes he knows, he envisions the prospect of a road by the end of that road. He thinks he has accomplished what he does not know. Forgetting, and therefore recalling this humanity, forces us to reconnect with original sin, an extraordinary factor in understanding human life; forever tool forever. The weakness of man, the heart of his humanity, incarnated, felt, transpired by the original Sin, dispenses the true strength of man when he considers himself wronged by this concept. The man thinks he sees his weakness in his strength. Its strength is its weakness. Man's weakness could, should, become his “augmented reality”; as we say in computing, a product which, in addition to offering you a basic function, gives you associated services depending on the date or the place where you are. Augmented reality is not a magic concept as its name suggests, it is rather a kind of concept in reduction of life, applied to machines. Life and technique have always been linked since the creation of the world — what is trickery if not technique? And the scales on which life and technology rest have never ceased to oscillate according to the weight that one or the other granted itself. Life is made up of pure life—qualified as nature—and technique. Or is that what they are trying to make us believe? Indeed, the year 2011 was marked by a deep dispute that has been going on for a long time and is not ready to end between culture and nature. This time, it takes the form of textbooks and a theory, that of gender. In 2011, a “vital” question was indeed at the center of the discussions, which in itself has something invigorating. With the theory of gender, we have replayed an essential question: what in life comes from nature and culture? In other words: can we separate nature from the technical part of our life (technical being what is not natural, we can throw education, instruction, civilization, etc. into it pell-mell). The question is, what remains of human greatness when we have thrown away even the three examples that I quote in the preceding sentence? Gender theory is a technique. A technique that wants to discover the human and clean it of its technical tinsel. Like a snake biting its own tail. Like an ideology. Gender theory provides interesting insights when confined to studying exogenous populations integrating into a new country. In particular, there are studies on the societies of Indian women in North America that are quite edifying. There are fascinating studies concerning the cultural conditioning applied to indigenous or exogenous populations by dominant civilizations. Studies that will certainly constitute a beneficial and fertile background for other researchers or for writers who will build the foundations of their work on them. But that these studies lead to believe that everything is corrupted by culture shows once again, if necessary, that man believes himself far too easily to be all-encompassing and all-powerful. Researchers forget a determining criterion: the soul. It is neither nature nor culture that make civilizations, it is the soul. The combination of nature and culture, or rather the alchemy of nature and culture. I use the term alchemy because the unknown part is so important that it is in no way a recipe. A being is neither a man nor a woman says gender theory, not wrong. A being is the alchemy of a nature and a culture which intertwine, nourish each other, entangle each other and become so tenuous that it is impossible to say what is one or the other. Therein lies the essence of life, summed up in one terribly fashionable word: organic. So alive. A being is neither a man nor a woman, because it is incredibly more. It is what completely escapes us. We understand that pointing out the weakness of man is not here to lessen or belittle him, but to take him in all his splendor, in his entirety, if indeed that is possible since he is in the image of God, and that we must never forget him. There are so many studies of man that without even realizing it removes man from their research. Intoxicated by technical finds that will not withstand time. If we want to qualify life, and therefore man, we must say that he is as weak in resisting the temptation of Evil as it is possible for him to reach “supernatural” heights. This big difference could be considered as a fatality if the man did not have in his possession an immeasurable force: the free will. Free to choose the path he takes, he can decide what is good for him. He can be wrong. He may regret. He can blame himself. He may feel guilty. He can hate himself. He can forgive himself. He can recover. He can get up. He can live again. He can start over. He can succeed... He can live. Oh this life that we could talk about endlessly without ever beginning to define it! Researchers, whoever they are, like too much to delimit it by a technical framework, that is so reassuring. Almost the entire philosophy of this blog (and of course of “La France contre les robots” Bernanos' book) is thus contained in this struggle between the technical framework and life, life which never ceases to pulverize science. . There is an age-old fight at stake here.

In 2011, there were many embezzlements against life. As always since the dawn of mankind. Nothing too abnormal. Centuries have seen man destroy himself, exterminate himself, attempt to stifle life for good. But life is reborn the following season. Shaken sometimes, often groggy, flabbergasted, feverish, always curious. Life will always elude all theories of its kind, because theories are life seen under the microscope. And life is not looking at itself, it is… living. In 2011, there were embezzlements against life, but there was life too. Embezzlements against life are part of “manishness” as someone said. In 2011, there was life through death too. There are deaths I have written about on this blog. Of people frequented or not. Important people always. The dead we talk about or mourn, whether we know them personally or not, are always fellow travelers. After a certain age, “in the middle of life's path” as Dante said, deaths write history which shrinks. I did not mention Montserrat Figueras and Valdimir Dimitrijevic who I will miss. Dimitri will always be there, present in the DNA of “L'âge d'Homme”. And I will continue to intoxicate myself with the voice of Montserrat Figueras as long as a breath runs through me. I cannot really estimate the contribution of Montserrat Figueras to my life. If I hadn't known her, I wouldn't have died, but if I hadn't known her, I wouldn't be the same. Nature and culture? With Dimitri, over the course of a weekend, I discovered Serbia, Belgrade nights, Dobritsa Tchossitch, a certain heterodoxy from within… Indelible memory. Lots of life.

What is a year that ends if not the revelation that nothing changes? And isn't this revelation based above all on the observation that life continues to flow between all the living parts like blood in its bodily continuum? And for the Catholic, life is still infinitely stronger since it continues to live even through the dead in the communion of saints.

But as surprising as it may seem, if I take a brief look at the past year, two memories come to mind. From 2011, I remember the death of Steve Jobs, an abandoned mestizo (mestizos are often abandoned) who was born in a world that does not recognize him, that does not want him, and that he will calligraph to his intuition . In 2011, I remember “Tree of Life”, the quivering filmed poem which gives the definition of two paths of life: that of nature and that of grace. Nature and culture, you say?

PS. With this article, I inaugurate a new category: “Theory of life”. In response to gender theory, the ideology of life.