Antigone did not come to life at dusk. Antigone is born with dawn. It is at daybreak that Antigone becomes anti , which means facing and not against . At the reflux of the army of Argos, Antigone emerges from the shadows where she could have resided all her life, not to solve the riddle of the sphinx like her father, not to solve the riddle of the stages of the life, but to fill the space between each of them. Oedipus tore off his skin, his nails, his knuckles. Dusk describes an uncertain state in the morning as well as in the evening. Antigone rises with the day, with the dawn, when freedom takes life, and therefore body.

“My blood, my sister, my darling”. Antigone does not try to appease Ismene, she delivers her heart. It revives the memory. Even if the translation of blood turns out to be imprecise in French and a more faithful translation would have preferred, siblings. "My blood", it is about the blood of the brothers, "my blood", you Ismene and Eteocles and Polynice, all equally brothers and for this reason all knowing the same blood which flows in all the veins of each one of them. “My blood, you are my blood, and you my sister, my blood too, my dear sister. Antigone doesn't coax anyone, she's boiling. His blood boils in his veins. “You know all the misfortunes that Oedipus bequeathed to his family. Antigone comes to save memory, she comes to say what is known, or should be known, but could have been forgotten, buried, put away... In this introductory dialogue, Antigone wants to strengthen the ties, even if she does not believe not that it is necessary in the sense that it is so obvious, so certain… but her blood boils, because everything that constitutes her, everything that makes Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, shudders from the rape in progress, the decree of Creon . “You know all the misfortunes that Oedipus bequeathed to his family. But do you know a single one that Zeus doesn't want to consume here even in our lifetime? Antigone slaps her decision in Ismene's face and it seems quite certain that she doesn't understand the incredulity that is etched on her sister's face. It must be believed that Ismene does not yet know about Creon's decree. She looks like it. And it would be intolerable to begin the tragedy with a trial of intent. Ismene was unaware of the decree prohibiting paying funeral honors to Polynices. Antigone therefore teaches him. Ismene doesn't know. Didn't she hear anything? Didn't she want to hear anything? It is the same for her, she is only too aware of her family's misfortunes and she has no need of Antigone to remember them. But Antigone prepared her effect, she snatched Ismene from under the first light of the palace of Thebes, she took her away almost by force, she reminded her of what united them and therefore also had to bring them together, to finally deliver to her the decree of Creon, this new shame for the family of Oedipus, this insult, this calumny, this outrage. Antigone's blood boils, for the outrage on earth resounds among the gods. “You know all the misfortunes that Oedipus bequeathed to his family. But do you know a single one that Zeus doesn't want to consume here even in our lifetime? Zeus and the ancient gods appear in the second line. Antigone confronts Ismene as the guardian of lightning. No word, no adjective is strong enough to show his sister how the gods are outraged by this decree and that it must therefore be fought relentlessly. “For Polynices, this poor dead man, it seems that citizens are forbidden to give his corpse either a tomb or a lamentation: they will leave there, without tears or burials, a magnificent prey offered to the hungry birds in search of game. In ancient Greece there already existed, in the form of an eternal rest if not a heavenly place, the marvelous and soothing idea of ​​a place after death which is not yet a consolation; an idea of ​​which our modern world is so lacking. Antigone specifies this consolation in each of her verses, this idea will give her the strength to fight step by step with the new king without feeling the slightest fear. Antigone would like to find the same boldness, the same audacity, in her sister's eyes when she finished explaining the situation to her. “And that, I am assured, is what the noble Creon would have thus forbidden us, you as well as me — I mean, me! He would even come in person to expressly proclaim his defense here, for those who are still unaware of it. Ah! It's because he doesn't take it lightly: he promises the rebels death, stoning in the city! You know the facts: you will, I think, show us without delay whether you are worthy of your blood, or whether, daughter of the brave, you have only the heart of a coward. Antigone's words to her sister are meant to be definitive; they will only find an echo of relativism; envy in its modern form.

The tragedy of Antigone teaches the qualities and failings that men constantly relive, often by undergoing them, as if they were new. It is thus that it would be wrong to place oneself in a camp, to snub the shortcomings of one or the other, to think of oneself even for a moment as superior. Hierarchical societies had the primary objective of preventing this, by all sorts of complex mechanisms they built and reinforced the dike protecting against envy. Between Antigone and Ismene, it is not a question of choosing. Moreover, Sophocles excels at playing with mirrors that reflect and both, each character who meets thus finds a form of double in front of him which reminds him of himself and makes him feel the breath of what it is, of what it could have been, of what it will become, and the reader does not escape this exercise. Ismene, cornered by her sister, first plunges body and soul into denial. We cannot know whether it is justified or not, but let us take the side that it is justified. Ismene doesn't know anything, for a bit she would almost resemble the three little monkeys. And the more Antigone presses her, the more she retracts. It is not because one expects something with all one's will that its realization does not surprise. Far from it. Once again, this is a ruse, a blasphemy. Intellectual comfort turns out to be the most hideous of comforts, because the mind that stops confronting itself takes pleasure in its achievements and so much to fall asleep on them, that is to say, it becomes soothing; some kind of ideology. Ismene, until that precise moment when Antigone comes to take her by the hand and draw her away from the ears of the palace, lived in intellectual comfort. She had found refuge, during the first sounds of fighting, within the city. She had known, they had told her, they had sneered, that her two brothers were fighting, one with the army of Argos, the other in the name of Thebes. For power. Ismene claims not to know what Antigone is talking about when she asks him about the edict of Creon. She shows a sadness that cannot be faked. She mourns her brothers, but she mourns them inside. In the private sphere ,  which is only an emanation of individualism. Ismene is sweet, she cries for her brothers in her heart of hearts; she doesn't want to show her pain outside. She does not want to suffer the meanness of others. She reminds Antigone: “But no! Of those we love, I myself have heard nothing, Antigone, nothing that appeases or heightens my sorrow, since the hour when we both lost our brothers, dead in a single day under a double cut. Ismene is surprised or pretends to be surprised, and curls up like a hermit crab. Antigone reveals to her the law of Creon and ends with this sentence with an undisguised threat: "You know the facts: you are going, I think, to show us without delay if you are worthy of your blood, or if, daughter of the brave, you you're just a coward's heart. Antigone thinks she leaves no escape for her sister. Antigone refuses any compromise, she thunders, because urgency calls. But she moved away from her sister. Ismene not feeling pain like Antigone. Ismene feels the pain as an additional pain hoping that there is no more, that it is enough. Ismene dreams of a perfect calm where nothing would ever again make the wind rustle, shake the branches of the trees, curl the surface of the water. Ismene believes that life is a disease and its medicine is akin to comfort. Ismene is not a coward, or at least not as Antigone tells him. Fear is not the first engine of his way of life, perhaps the second, what drives him, this search for peace at all costs, this desire to avoid conflicts, to put an end to noise and the odious character of his life and his name is resolved in his feeling of powerlessness. Ismene even traces the thread of their story by denouncing all the crimes suffered by their family. She invokes all the forces that stand between them and the act: she does not have the strength to face the king, her family has already suffered so much opprobrium that it is necessary to think of forgetting everything, even burying everything, for it is the acts of the father that have brought us to where we are… “For me in any case, I beg the dead under the earth to be indulgent, since in fact I yield to force; but I intend to obey the established powers. Vain gestures are foolishness. It also takes courage to face Antigone. Ismene confesses her philosophy: she yields to force and attracts the wrath of Antigone who recognizes no force except that of the gods. It is at this moment that Antigone imprints the idea of ​​life after death in her speech: Ismene thinks of the terrible death, the stoning, the punishment of Creon, she does not want for anything in the world to add insult to outrage, she wants to stifle outrage in the bud; Antigone is already thinking of the afterlife, of eternal rest: "Shouldn't I please those down below longer than those here, since it's over there that forever I will rest? Act, you, as you please, and continue to despise all that is taken from the gods. Ismene then confessed to feeling unable to act and to challenge her city to be told that she covered herself with this pretext . For Antigone, Ismene is afraid, she no longer wants to talk to someone who is afraid, because Antigone has overcome her fear for a long time and she sweeps before her everything that closely or remotely resembles it. Antigone places herself outside the fear that she never lets show through again, because she uses her fear to act, her fear is absorbed in the act to act, she is the engine, perhaps also the fuel. .

Fear is everywhere. It inaugurates word, thought, act... It decides what robot material we will be modeled from. We keep stiffening, looking sideways, reacting; we only act for a fraction of a second per day, per month, per year, per life… The reaction imprisons us and guides our steps towards the scaffold of freedom. Such a waste ! As fear enlists us under the influence of inspired action, we no longer see how we are prisoners, and we have lost the desire to go upstream to find the causes. Antigone expresses this taste, not to lose that of transmission so as not to live between a present resembling a permanent daily life and a future tinged with a halo of magic, governed by technique therefore, desiring to be ever more promising. You have to face the fear. He should be frightened. Because fear is fear. Fear displays as a hologram of evil; facing her is like facing her, looking her in the eyes and telling her to take her place back in the amusement park. Our mind imagines evil, thus acclimatizes itself to its presence to make it, in thought, vulnerable, comfortable, harmless, and evil projects its trump card, its hologram, fear. You don't have to be strong or smart or rich, there is only one way to defy fear, and that way is rooted in self-awareness. Identity plunges into the heart of fear, should we throw the dice to make it positive or negative? This mirror that Sophocles holds up to each of his characters, which allows him never to judge the man whether he lowers himself or rises, because each can rise or lower himself, each can reveal himself, and at the the most unexpected moment, this mirror also reveals the slightest faults, the slightest scars, the slightest flaw... everything passes through a sieve, through the sieve of events and this is how the one who is led by events believing he is directing them, the reactionary , may harbor invaluable quality that it will spoil… no insurance offers a guarantee in the face of fear. Because fear also seduces. A fanatic will defy fear and even laugh in its face. He will taunt her. The fanatic will find all the expedients to brave fear. Worse, he will revel in it. It is in this that he is recognizable, he is possessed. No one laughs at fear except the fanatic who partakes of fear. He who bases himself on what he knows of himself faces fear because he has to, not because he wishes or because it excites him, he defies fear and the abyss that arises. opens up to follow him because he is inhabited by the immoderate taste, the intoxicating essence, the duty to serve, to defend what he believes to be right: freedom. This quality which will never disappear from human radars, this quality which is always obsolete, always useless in a way, which is worth nothing in the modern sense that it brings nothing, this quality on which the history of humanity is nevertheless based . The fanatic tramples freedom underfoot, and he is also recognized by this gesture. Those who act guided by self-awareness know that freedom is the best and only way to approach the divine. Finally. Again.

The two sisters face each other from one side and the other of the double-sided mirror. Antigone sees the remains of her brother delivered to wild beasts. Ismene is stoned by Creon. How to tell the wrong? How to accuse? From the comparison with the tree, there is an important difference: rooting in man is not equivalent to being planted. The man moves. Where the tree knows its square right from the start and will not move from it, man never stops discovering space and transgressing it. Ismene is planted, because she planted herself! She has found a precarious balance and she does not want to move. She assumes that she no longer wants to move, she refuses the risk. Yet it is not a question of defying life for love of risk or adrenaline, it would only be another form of misery. Ismene was tossed about. Perhaps she suffered the most in the family? Who knows ? Following the ordeals, Ismene has turned her back, she has melted into the landscape, she only wants anonymity; become a kind of ghost. Isn't there something admirable in becoming a ghost while alive? Master the art of concealment to become invisible. The man who is no longer a creature, emancipated from his creator therefore, seeks his words, he mumbles definitions of his condition which form so many prisons. Ismene is close to happiness when she is close to anonymity, calm, rest. Ismene fought in her daily life to achieve the life that is hers. Ismene does not only embody a coward. Fear plays its part and is an exemplary factor through the loss of property. The loss of a status or a social level is stronger. Ismene got used to her social level, she fought to reach it, she couldn't separate herself from it, she couldn't give up everything. The dialogue between Ismene and Antigone boils down to a quarrel between being and having; quarrel so many times repeated for a similar result each time. Ismene believes that she can stand out from her family and the brood she represents, as if it were a trunk that she could open, but above all keep closed at leisure. Antigone assures him that she is one with her family, that she cannot choose what suits her and abandon what does not suit her.

Antigone embodies rebellion.  The rebel stands against comfort and against tyrants. "He can not not" according to the beautiful expression of Pierre Boutang. Nothing is impossible for man and this is what constitutes his marvel, as the chorus will say during the tragedy. Antigone stands up to what tries to suffocate her. Knowing the heart of man, the infinity of his condition (which is not knowing the infinity of his abilities, but rather considering the depth he can reach) forces us to always stand up to defend him. Forgetting the possibility of man makes it possible to stop moving and to remain seated to watch the massacre as if it were a spectacle while delighting in the private sphere of not being in the arena. Giving an explanation of the world without allowing the unexpected and the irrational, not to say the spiritual, amounts to giving power the first role, the main role. The rebel hates more than anything “theories that aim to give the world a logical and flawless explanation. ¹ Antigone , standing up facing Creon, whipping Ismene, finds herself alone, an abyss beneath her feet; this chasm, this precipice, this abyss, prefigure freedom. “A rebel, therefore, is anyone who is put by the law of his nature in relation to freedom, a relation which leads him in time to a revolt against automatism, and to a refusal to admit the ethical consequence, fatalism. ² If the rebel can thus have one or two companions, his act isolates and cuts him off . Antigone stands alone, standing up; she becomes a recluse, in which case no punishment from Creon can frighten or worry her. Ismene, caparisoned with her comfort and her fear, cannot understand anything about her sister's approach, any more when she refuses to do so than, later, when she tries to cling to it, understanding despite everything that something essential is played there which restores the heart of man by drawing from it an unsuspected force to change the face of the world.

What explanation can be given for Ismene's fear? Ismene forbids Antigone to bury their brother, to therefore defy Creon's order for fear of the reprisals that this new sovereign would exercise in return. Is it fear that commands, through the dread of punishment, or is it the fear of losing the intellectual comfort that Ismene has? We must be wary and not believe that only the rich feel the loss of material or cultural goods. What we beat, what we assemble, what we fought for, even in a modest way, is engraved in us as the result of titanic struggles won in defiance of danger. At all levels of society, the loss of comfort won causes an upheaval for which no one is prepared. The golden destiny which is announced under cover of technique cannot suffer any affronts. The modern project wants us to believe that what is acquired is acquired, even though we live in a world where the ephemeral reigns. The opening dialogue of Antigone between the two sisters tells the genesis of Antigone who also stands up to her sister's anomie, and shows an Ismene whose yes will never be a yes and whose no will never be a no ³ . Ismene never gives herself the possibility of being Ismene, she never stops swaying, or at least she runs after an image of herself, tossed about by events like a raft on the ocean. Ismene enumerates the misfortunes of his family to retain the arm of Antigone demonstrating before the hour that the same argument can have two causes and announcing the advent of relativism: “Ah! Think, my sister, and think of our father. He ended up odious, infamous: being the first to denounce his crimes, he himself, and with his own hand, tore out both eyes… Vain gestures are foolishness. Ismene refuses no details. And she goes on to say to Antigone, “I won't gain anything from it. Ismene's observation is correct: there is nothing to gain. It's not about winning anything. It's about not losing, not continuing to lose, not losing everything. Antigone understood this well. It's about knowing who you are. It is true that after all this enumeration of the offenses of each other in this family of Labdacides, it is legitimate to ask: what is the point of continuing? Why persevere? This is in summary what Ismene expresses when she says that she will gain nothing. Indeed, it turns out to be legitimate to ask the question if we weigh, if we compare… popular belief liked to remind us that comparison is not reason . She seized upon examples of life by saying that, because she conjured up the desire to be silent, to die out. At all times, heroes and saints and the popular sayings linked to them have forced envy to fall into line for the common good. Ismene thrives on comparisons. Ismene takes pride in what she is saying, because there is something irrefutable in what she says, so she clings to it like a shipwrecked man to his plank of wood. The saying, comparison is not reason , obliterates that: this irresistible power of envy which animates the one it possesses to reveal by its words a sure and certain and obvious truth. For Ismene, after all that her family has been through, she owes, she owes herself to secrecy, discretion, almost disappearance. Everyone has heard way too much about them. It is urgent to put out the fire as soon as it starts again, and always, tirelessly, it wants to break out. These two brothers who have rekindled the fire do nothing to help Ismene, but she straightens up, sweeping them away with the back of her hand; if she mourns her brothers, that is in the private sphere; no one should think that she is in line with her family, or if that were the case, it would be to express a different line, an understanding of her horrible filiation: she thus stands out from her brothers, from her dad. And now about his sister. His sister who will stir up the crowds and renew the slander. Ismene can't take it anymore. That is enough. Any means of escaping the rumors, the gossip is good. Ismene never ceases to balance her scales, she counts, she inaugurates statistics, what is useful, what serves, what can be measured, estimated… here is a verb whose meaning has changed. Self-esteem only exists through others, self-esteem has become the esteem of others. The idea of ​​oneself, the idea of ​​what one is, where one comes from, no longer means anything...

The face to face between Ismene and Antigone represents two opposing philosophies. And by philosophy we mean: way of life, even more: way of living better. And as any means is good to escape the lazzis of each other, everything is acceptable in this yardstick. Ismene has all her head when she confronts Antigone. She even seems more sensible, calmer, less agitated… she wears the face of a certain accuracy when her sister seems possessed. However, Ismene is prey to a mania called envy; subjected to this virus, it compares what cannot be compared. Everything in his speech dons the garb of the respectable, yet that speech resonates with the terrible virus that lowers all new speech to the height of comfort and comfort alone. When the quest for comfort intoxicates and always requires more compromises. Antigone affirms that the pain of having lost her brothers cannot be further accentuated by Creon who, king as he is, cannot cause the soul of Polynices to wander for a thousand years along the Styx. Ismene closes her eyes to this law of Creon, because she thinks that her brother acted badly by attacking the city. She gathers votes by saying that. She applies with tact what nowadays we would call the rule of double standards , of a form of injustice, but not just any injustice, not the injustice observed every day which covers with misery those who could not to defend oneself against the power deployed to harm, the comparative injustice which makes it possible to exacerbate greed, harshness and disharmony. Ismene announces the breaking of the dam of common sense, firstly: getting too close to the sin of others, it could reflect on oneself, this fear is the real fear of the other, especially when it is oneself, as here his family; second: everything is valid and those who pride themselves on doing better sin just as much as the others, no one can take advantage of what is really good since at the end of the road everyone will have acted badly at one time or another . The seriousness of the acts comes into play very little, because it would force the hierarchy, the important thing is to make everyone feel guilty: everyone having sinned, everyone is guilty, therefore everyone is innocent. Who are we to judge the weight of each other's sins since we have all sinned? Envy is overwhelming. Sin, the serious act, the amartia in the tragedy of Antigone, becomes an inarticulate, impalpable and anonymous object. It belongs to everyone without exception, which is true, but it no longer has any particular quality, which makes it erroneous. Saint Augustine already announced: “By dint of seeing everything, we end up supporting everything… By dint of supporting everything, we end up tolerating everything… By dint of tolerating everything, we end up accepting everything… By dint of accepting everything, we end up by approving everything! Ismene approves of everything: the death of her brothers for the faults of her father (to whom she finds no extenuating circumstance and of which she only sees the negative) and the law of Creon which is justified by all that has just been listed. Relativism has its source in envy by practicing permanent comparison, that is to say permanent leveling. Relativism is always cozy, welcoming, comfortable; it erases the rough edges, it avoids conflicts and makes people happy, dazed, without certainty. Relativism causes anomie, the progressive loss of the structures that connect the inhabitants of a country and to which they can cling if the need arises. Antigone establishes a hierarchy where Ismene levels. Nothing beats the transcendent laws of the gods. Nothing beats her brother and she will claim it. Nothing beats his family. Nothing beats love. And nothing beats respect for the dead and life after death. “I will bury Polynices and be proud to die doing so. This is how I rested near him, dear to my dear, holy criminal. Shouldn't I please those below longer than those here, since it's there that I'll ever rest? Act, you, as you please, and continue to despise all that is taken from the gods. Ismene is only a pretext in the eyes of Antigone. Ismene becomes a little more by accepting, by legitimizing the intolerable law, the prisoner of her character that she in no way participated in creating. Antigone never stops freeing herself, because you have to be free or have been free to fight for freedom. Antigone represents the active, desired, freed minority. “All comfort is paid for. The condition of domestic animal entails that of slaughter animals. ⁴ Antigone rebels, because she refuses to be afraid and she refuses this automatism which has gone hand in hand with the fear which is its transmission belt. Fear only leads to flight, mental or physical or both. There is a place where freedom can be protected, it is the heart of man who prefers danger to servitude. Antigone wanted to give herself a little strength by acting with Ismene; the refusal of the latter will have strengthened it just as much, otherwise. Antigone invents nothing, she picks up on the ground, the freedom trampled under foot by Créon, by Ismene, and by many others. Antigone picks up freedom because she was initiated into it by her father who, in his pain, never denied her, but also because she knows from his attitude that freedom must be conquered again at any time, that 'it knows no end and that, year after year, it happens that we have to stick with it, endorse it to give it life again and to give ourselves life; to stay alive too. Antigone has recourse to the forests, and her forest contains her intimate being, the one who converses with the gods and the dead, the one who is not afraid of the living; the living count for so little and for so little time. Ismene sails on the ship and from the upper deck, in padded comfort, continues to describe the icebergs without believing for a second that part of them is submerged.

Envy, this metaphysical cancer, gnaws to the bone what remains human in man to bring him closer to the beast by taking away all hope of freedom. Envy forces you to turn within yourself, imprisoned and resigned by the force of attraction and the will to power that it secretes. Relativism embodies envy by mimicking the end of envy. Relativism persuades itself to do well, because it puts on the clothes of medicine while it hides a deeper disease. Looks like a virtue. Relativism has existed in all ages wearing new clothes that allow humanity to move forward or backward. Relativism emerges in Ismene from her first response to Antigone: “But, unhappy woman, if the matter is there, what can I do? No matter how hard I try, I won't gain anything. Everything is summed up there: I can't do anything about , I won't gain anything from it . These two expressions erect moles to do nothing, especially to do nothing. Staying there, doing nothing, not making waves, the world has heard enough about my family and still in bad shape, that's enough … Who is Ismene? no one knows anymore. She herself no longer has any idea or else a vague idea: I am the daughter of Oedipus whose entire lineage is damned and from whom I wish to be detached, from whom I wish to be unknown . Does she still know what she feels? Her two brothers are dead, but she has already buried the very idea of ​​their death, because she only recalls the infamy that scars her family. Ismene wants to be like the others, so that we don't constantly talk about this father who gouged out his eyes, who slept with his mother, of his power-hungry brothers who threw themselves against each other. , their impurity… Ismene's attitude is one of communitarianism. She refuses her filiation with the Labdacides and by this gesture, by this will to depart from her race, she enters another group which, even if it is vague in its contours, exists in antagonism of her family. Ismene doesn't know it, but she is a reactionary. By refusing his family, by burying it, Ismene plunges into envy and declares: “Ah! Think my sister, and think of our father. He ended up odious, infamous…” She recites a litany of grievances, no longer seeing anything positive in the actions of her family, in the actions of her father. It's hard to hate Ismene, because what she says makes sense. It harbors virtues. But virtues gone mad, Chesterton would have said, because detached from each other. Ismene claims a certain freedom, she upsets family and therefore individual thought, because both are impregnated and cannot exculpate each other, by affirming that she can do nothing about it if Créon, the State has decided and that she will gain nothing from it; these two ideas are one and will become the cogito, ergo sum of Descartes more than 1000 years later. This cogito which takes itself for a cognosco , this cogito which forgets being, which reduces when it believes it opens the field of thought. Reduce, mechanise, abort, so many actions that have always had great success in philosophy, especially when accompanied by envy, they pretended to reach new shores unknown until then. All that glitters is not gold. Perpetual novelty attracts man, which would not be a fault in itself if he gave himself the means to return to the source and rediscover the infinite fields of his thought; but no, novelty is not enough for him, he never stops erasing his memory, erasing the path that led him there, to novelty, thus he believes in making each thing new.

Are we to understand that man hates freedom? Centrifugal and centripetal forces confront each other, man can be made for freedom and lose interest in it, the task to be accomplished seems to him too hard or too long... To choose is to be free, but how to choose without knowing or even realize the truth? Relativism transformed truth into illusion, the pernicious mechanism was going to continue its mad race and transform freedom into a golden prison. Ismene will want to be with Antigone when she is detained by Creon after breaking the law. She will come and stand by his side and try to show some determination to be guilty. But Antigone will not want it. Antigone will refuse that Ismene say she is guilty, like her, because Ismene will not present herself at this moment any more than at the beginning of the play as a free woman, yet Antigone only reasons in terms of freedom. Nothing else interests him. Antigone will nag her sister. Antigone acts in her heart of hearts, in accordance with her conscience, because the gauntlet of outrage must be picked up, because she cannot live by accepting that her beloved be delivered to wild beasts and that the law of a tyrant can break unwritten laws. Ismene stands at her sister's side without knowing more about her act: she didn't know why she refused to act, she doesn't know why she is doing it now; out of sentimentality perhaps… Which in Antigone's eyes can only arouse deep disgust.

"Become who you are" as Gabriel Marcel liked to repeat ⁵ after Pindar , which induces deep humility and a pronounced taste for transmission. Nowadays, 2500 years after Antigone, we would rather say: “become what you want” as if everything was indexed according to the yardstick of the will, and of the will alone. Relativism has wiped the slate clean, the individual is about to conquer the world. He doesn't care what keeps him from living his life. God, master, past, dismissed. He relies on the illusion that all is worth, that the great works of the past stem as much from luck as from work as from will, that he can do just as well and even better by reinventing them. If relativism in its beginnings could pretend to mark the end of envy, it has become only an extraction of it. The man who loses sight of the divine moves away from his condition as a creature to imagine his own offspring. Believing oneself capable of anything has nothing to do with freedom, but everything with alienation. When Antigone hears Creon's edict, she decides to act, she asks herself no questions. Why ? Because she knows who she is. In The Odyssey, Ulysses is violently called back to himself during libations. “Now while the glorious bard was singing, Odysseus, taking his large purple scarf in his robust hands, drew it over his head and covered his beautiful face with it, fearing that tears would be seen to flow from his eyes. But each time the divine bard marked a pause, he wiped away his tears, removed the scarf from his head and, from his double-bottomed cup, made the offering to the gods; then, when the bard resumed and the other princes, charmed by his tale, pressed him to sing again, Ulysses drew the scarf over him and sobbed. » Démodocos, the bard invited by Alkinoos to sing, recounts the legend of Ulysses without knowing him and while he is facing him. Odysseus, the all-seer, could not be seen and was taken aback by the invitation of the bard singing his wonders. Thus, we see Ulysses called back to himself, caught in the nets of intense emotion. If he is a legend, if we speak of him in the third person, it is because he is dead. The Odyssey opens the way to self-awareness. Ulysses, before Demodocos, is the experience of the “non-coincidence of self to self” ⁶ . What a test! Be like another, but dead. Nothing better to wake up the human being sleeping in the robot that we have become. To become what we are, we must be alive, and what founds the living in the West lies in this sentence of Socrates: "It would be easy to understand that, out of spite in the face of so many false things, someone should not and to despise all talk of being for the rest of his life. But in this way they would deprive themselves of the truth of being and suffer great harm. What a prophecy! The loss of the capacity for wonder, the loss of questioning under the pretext of errors — before arriving at this statement, the book of Phaedo contained a number of erroneous theses — under the pretext of false leads, of dead ends taken , should we deprive ourselves of thinking? So is that it? If we look at the path traveled by the West since Antigone, such a figure is almost impossible nowadays. The freedom that Antigone grants herself conceals almost everything that the West refuses. The thought of God, a theology learned and lived taking precedence over the iniquitous laws which are based on no other authority than that of the leader who institutes them. The modern project is based on these precise points: no longer looking for this coincidence of self to self, gargling old errors, in order to show that the Ancients do not deserve the respect granted to them. The leverage of envy is high. Envy overshadows all ideas and imprisons modern man in a horizontal and sclerotic thought. I won't gain anything from it . Ismene won't gain anything by accompanying Antigone in her funeral rite because the dead are the dead and the living the living, because that won't bring Polynices back, because Polynices looked for him, because Creon is the king and what I don't think I can change that, because I'm afraid of punishment, because down here it's not Zeus who's in charge… Ismene is lounging on a mattress of good excuses. No more argument can reach him: the honor of the dead? The timeless unwritten laws? The unmasked tyrant? Nothing works. Ismene does not realize that she has allowed herself to be imprisoned: she admits that she does not act because her interest is measured and because she is afraid of the sentence. By accepting the atrophy of thought, and even making it a rule of conduct, the modern project has ameliorated Socrates' fear and made the great damage irreversible. The obligation to relativize is a new philosophy preventing and refusing freedom: since religion has made mistakes and acted badly in its history, it does not deserve my respect; since France behaved badly at certain times in its past, it does not deserve my respect, etc. Envy perched on relativism refuses any idea relating to an intelligent past that edifies and that would make it possible to know and build oneself. Relativism is a threat to freedom, to any form of freedom; it is the religion of the secularized society which waits patiently for the magic which has taken on the traits of technology to fill in all the empty boxes and offer, as if by magic, eternal happiness, rid of the tinsel of the past. No more need to be brave, we will take away the dilemma; there is no longer any need for treatment, illnesses will no longer exist; no longer need to fight for freedom, technology frees us; no longer need to bandage the deceased, death will disappear... You will be like gods!

Relativism appears as complacency when freedom is a requirement. “To say, for example, that at a certain level of misery and exploitation, religion in fact risks being used by the exploiters as an additional means of control, is to recognize a fact of which unfortunately there is no shortage of examples; but on the other hand it is radically illegitimate to draw from similar facts a conclusion bearing on the very essence of religion. » ⁵ There is no comfort in being oneself, there is an ambition, an appetite from the depths of the being to always discover oneself in order to always stick a little more to oneself. “The sublime freedom of power that man receives to do good and to have the merit of it. ⁸ Freedom and truth — or at least the search for it — go hand in hand . Saint-Jean thus affirms “the truth will set you free”. Jesus Christ will say: “I am the way, the truth, the life” thus for Christianity, the free man is the saint. Contrary to what is often said or believed, freedom never comes into conflict with the authority which comes to crown it and protect it by tracing the way for its development. Antigone knows only one authority with regard to the dead, these are the gods. She therefore prefers to act in agreement with the gods than in agreement with a tyrant. If it were not about the dead and life after death, and therefore about the consolation of death, if it was about the closing hours of a shop, if it was even about justice towards someone, and even justice towards a member of the family, but as long as the tyrant did not enter the field of intimacy, by transgressing self-awareness with himself , the connection with the gods, that is to say, by entering into contradiction with the unwritten laws, that is to say with the dogma, that is to say with the spiritual authority, because c t is indeed this confrontation between spiritual and temporal in question, then Antigone would not intervene. Not that she wouldn't give a damn about it, but surely she would consider that her freedom, in other words her life, is not at stake. walk in his company by allowing himself to let go, which Antigone does very well by entrusting her action to the gods. Antigone shows self-control as soon as she leaves Ismene; as soon as she appears before Creon, she stuns him with her calm and her mastery: Antigone's freedom is revealed to Creon who is at first surprised, then frightened, he will have no other way out than call it crazy. Through her self-control, a veritable showcase of freedom, self-control which can only intervene on the condition of self-knowledge, Antigone rises up against Creon whose power pales.

Nothing can make Antigone deviate from what she is. "Become who you are" looks like a formula invented for Antigone, but it also applies to any man who succeeds in his metamorphosis and does not fall asleep for eternity in his chrysalis. Saint-Augustin uses the magnificent formula intimior intimo meo , in the intimacy of intimacy or in the more intimate than intimacy… intimacy already means, etymologically, who is the innermost. Saint Augustine therefore speaks of what is within, of what is most interior. In the deepest, most intimate part of my heart. In the Gospels, we often hear that Mary, the mother of Jesus, keeps events in her heart. It is in his heart, in the depths of his heart, so as not to confuse the intimate with the emotion, that we keep what is really close to our hearts. This action is only possible for people who know each other, who know the evil as well as the good within them, who are able to identify them and learn from them. This intensity frightens, because it seems like a solitude to the man rid of God. Whoever follows his intimate being, without influence, without mania, far from ideologies, cannot be reactionary! Socrates, before Saint Augustine, called this place of intimacy, his daimonion , no other council had so many qualities for him. The intimate must supplant the emotion, it takes precedence; in Antigone, the intimate supplants doubt and the suffering to come when they restrain Ismene! Doubt and suffering fuel relativism. “It is important that whoever aspires to a difficult task form a precise idea of ​​himself. ⁹ An idea of ​​oneself to escape the diktat of fear, to test oneself in this task, to deepen and accept one's freedom . Fear becomes a remedy for lukewarmness; an antidote to the habit that engulfs every bit of humanity within us into a black hole. To draw oneself from oneself, amounts to rising, to moving away from individualism to allow individuation which is nothing other than a communion with oneself; identity, finally.

It is not possible to write Antigone without brushing the finger against freedom, the evidence would like Sophocles to know freedom for having experienced it. Those who have never known freedom will not be able to experience freedom themselves, they will have to be initiated into it, perhaps through suffering and fear, as Aristotle in Politics and Poetics defines the tragedy and catharsis that 'she provokes in the spectators by building up to terror and pity. Man never ceases to oscillate between creation and destruction, and one should not believe that the poet experiences his state of man differently. Sophocles invented a language for Antigone, like a sculptor he sculpted the matter of words to make concepts out of them. The Greek allows this sculpture. Also the language of Antigone has become specific and is modeled around the word αυτος, which “has been attested since Homer throughout the history of Greek” as Pierre Chantraine recalls. “Same” or “the same”, αυτος expresses identity, the coincidence of self to self. From the pen of Sophocles, it means coincidence with oneself as much as with the other, because there can be no encounter with another without awareness and knowledge of oneself. Just as much, with each dive into the intimior intimo meo , we witness a perpetual encounter with the other in oneself. However the meeting with its opposite does not necessarily allow a real meeting, Creon and Antigone show it well. Everyone camps in their character. Sophocles like Jean Racine later shapes the language so that it says more than it should say, so that it touches on this truth which can only be lived. It is the encounter that chisels it, in one direction or another. Créon crystallizes in contact with Antigone, but also with Hémon or Tiresias, not to mention the choir, which has great difficulty in hiding its amazement. It also appears that Sophocles by configuring his language wants to define the meaning once and for all. We must see here more than a signature, a desire to engrave in stone, to make indelible an intimate meaning. “He is my blood, from a single mother and from the same father” says the apocalyptic dimension of the Labdacides family. Creon is touched by the αυτος too, but he never appeals to his intimacy, he sticks to his role which declaims the laws, his laws.

The dialogue between Antigone and Ismene is reminiscent of another famous dialogue, between Jesus and Peter this time. " Do you love me ? » Asks Christ with the verb agapê . Peter is still far from the total love demanded by Christ who will nevertheless found his Church on this stone which still looks like sand. It is far and near. But he does not know when he is close to it and when he is far from it. Jesus sees the potential. He sees through people. Jesus will have to lower his first requirement and use the word philia to express the love that unites them. Vital love, total love, agape , will only come on the roads of Rome, in response to "Quo vadis, dominate?" Antigone, as soon as Creon's law is known, decides her action. She decides it by coincidence with her intimate being which she shares with the gods. She knows, she has seen who she is, and she affirms it. She knows she is walking towards death, but in her heart of hearts, she does not waver and accomplishes her gesture, burying her brother, and defies Creon, not as an anarchist, this role befits Creon intoxicated with his power, but as someone who acts against a state that confuses authority with power.