Against the Robots

Part 1: The Family

From the very first reading of Antigone, an ambiguity arises in the reader's mind. Does Antigone embody action or reaction? What drives Antigone? Reaction never exists on its own, whereas action needs no one; it is legitimized by the act itself. Action always inaugurates something. Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone does not wait for Creon to be Antigone. Like Electra for vengeance, Nausicaa for hospitality, and Penelope for fidelity, Antigone embodies duty. She is action because she serves: she finds fulfillment in duty. She finds fulfillment in servitude (do we pretend to forget that servitude means "to be a slave"?). Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone is never an individual. She never stands alone. If Creon's law pushes her to action, and if this may appear to be a reaction, it is only on the surface, by simple chronology.

Antigone does not change with Creon's law. Antigone reminds the tyrant of what precedes him and what follows him, of what transcends him. Antigone does not submit. This is the case of women in antiquity; they always refuse submission, and always reaffirm the same obligation to freedom. Antigone also says that the difference between submission and servitude is called truth. She is content to obey her duty. She elevates herself by acting in this way, for she adorns herself with the attributes that centuries have wisely crafted. Antigone's act has always existed; it has lain dormant, waiting only for the opportune moment. Her action does not depend on Creon; it depends on intrusion. Insubordination demands the refusal of intrusion into the intimate. Jean-Louis Chrétien writes in *The Terror of Beauty* : "Modesty is not afraid of proximity, but of the abolition of distance that would cause us to lose proximity." “Intrusion is an act of shamelessness, a violation. But the rebel, before being rebellious, carries within him, sometimes unknowingly, the qualities of rebellion. Shamelessness violates and reveals him. Antigone reveals her rebellion through a simple gesture, a gesture inherited from eternity, a gesture that separates man from animal: the burial of a loved one's body. If this gesture comes after Creon's decision, if it seems to be a reaction, it is in fact an action: the deployment of a long-known force that protects what cannot be sacrilege.”

Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone represents a figure of tradition and is free from any revolutionary spirit. She embraces a lineage. Her name means anti , "against," or "instead of," and gonê , "descendants." Antigone lives within her time, her past. She accompanied her father until his last days. She was his eyes in Oedipus at Colonus , when he never ceased to whine and self-pity. Antigone learned that self-pity is always a reaction. She heard him declaim: "O my children, where are you now?... I weep for you too... When I think how bitter your future life will be and what fate people will inflict upon you... When you reach the hour of marriage, who will want, who will dare to bear all these infamies designed to ruin your existence, as they did to my own parents? Is there a crime missing? Your father killed his father; He impregnated the very womb from which he himself sprang; he had you from the very one from whom he came… Who, then, will marry you? No one, my children, and doubtless you will then have to waste away in barrenness and solitude… Oedipus's selfishness is frightening. He always seems so weak. He broods, mopes, and constantly pities himself. He is tiresome. He suffers. Oedipus though he is, by what right does he deprive his children of any future? Or is it a prophecy or a curse? In any case, he makes his children bear the burden of his crimes. And he will continue even later by damning his sons, the true source of Antigone's actions. As if she had never detached herself from her father's service, even after his death. Isn't there a glimmer of understanding here? It's rare to call a family a breed. You don't choose it. Family isn't a group. It isn't a gathering or a riot. Nothing about crowd psychology applies to it, or else it's no longer a family, but a mafia. It's not up to fathers to dictate their children's future. Fathers are there to help avoid pitfalls, not to announce or predict them. Oedipus became trapped in the cycle of reaction. As soon as he returned from Delphi, he couldn't escape it. It was his prison. He did nothing but react. He told himself, "I must act." He lost all sense of purpose. He no longer trusted himself. When there's a desire to explain fate, it's important to remember that it arises from and feeds on reaction. It is impossible to explain Antigone without speaking of her father. This is the transition from Oedipus at Colonus to Antigone . The girl, as a child, should speak of her mother, but she is absent, and for good reason: how can one speak of a mother who is also her grandmother? Aristotle answers: “To not signify a single thing is to signify nothing at all, and if names signified nothing, all exchange of thought between men, and indeed also with oneself, would be ruined: for one cannot think unless one thinks of a single thing; and if one can, only one name can be assigned to that thing.” ^The mother is the natural bond, whereas the father is the social bond. Antigone does not know how to speak of her natural bond since this bond reminds her of sin, of Oedipus's incest. Antigone had everything to become revolutionary rather than traditional, but she lacked one essential attribute: envy.

Antigone is never an individual; she is always a person. She doesn't fit into this modern duality, this modern virtue that asserts itself solely through possession, believing that possession determines and supplants having, and taking any contrary opinion as a permanent scandal. Antigone is and has. Antigone possesses a body and a mind, but she is also that body and that mind. This realization extinguishes any desire to appropriate her body. It is not possible to possess what one is. At the very least, this radically changes the very idea of ​​possession, for it leads to the idea that one is possessed by what one possesses. With the tragedy of her two brothers killing each other—Polynices attacking Thebes and Eteocles defending it—Antigone grasps the event and takes up the cause. Antigone becomes one with her past and her present. The expression "to become one" tells us something about Antigone, for she inaugurates and thus exposes herself, reveals herself, even displays herself. Sophocles tells us nothing of her physical appearance; it is easy, perhaps too easy, to imagine her as petite. Antigone embraced duty very early. She guided her father. She experienced his pain and also his confinement. She was his eyes. She, who had a mother who was also a grandmother, cared for her father, who is therefore also her half-brother, as if he were a grandfather in the twilight of his life. It is easy to see how modern the tragic, or what we call such, is. At the beginning of the tragedy, she still wants to act with her sister Ismene. She works her over. Everything Antigone does is intense and physical. Irene Papas, in the film of Antigone, thus works Ismene over, explaining to her the stakes of the situation. We imagine her reaching out to her sister. Even petite people can possess a physical presence that far exceeds their size. Antigone appears as a bulwark before her sister, a bulwark armed from head to toe, a bulwark whose strength defies comprehension. Ismene bends and bends before this presence. Antigone channels all this thundering force behind this bulwark that is her body and is one with her body; she seems immense, gigantic, surreal, as if possessed, ready to give way, a bulwark that can no longer contain all this thundering force.
Antigone: He is my brother—and yours, whether you like it or not. I intend that no one should have the right to say that I have betrayed him.
Ismene: But, wretched woman, what if Creon objects!
Antigone: Creon has no right to separate me from my family.
Ismene continues with a lament about the misfortune that has plagued their family since time immemorial. Emptiness guides Ismene. Emptiness is fluid, it seeps everywhere, insidious and certain of its devastating power. Ismene is in the mold of her father, Oedipus. Antigone rejects her. Antigone knows that Creon has no authority to separate her from her family. Ismene confuses power, * potestas* , with authority, * auctoritas *. Power frightens her, and she mistakes it for authority. It is the art of tyrants to know how to wield their sole power as an authority concealed behind the opaque smokescreen of fear, the weapon of the devil. Antigone knows that authority belongs to the gods as lightning belongs to Zeus, and that kings can only invoke it, refer to it, but above all, submit to it. Antigone allows herself to be guided by her duty. Duty proves impervious to lamentations and secretes an effective remedy against fear. Vocation ferments within duty. And that is precisely what Antigone is about: vocation. This is what deceives Atropos, the Fate. When Antigone proclaims, "I am and I have," she is playing the instrument that I am. Union of body, mind, and soul. Becoming aware of this individuation and its power, Antigone emerges from the chrysalis and becomes a butterfly. It is possible to consider this Antigone's first rebellion; rebellion in the sense of producing the unexpected within the established order, respecting this established order but mocking the lack of qualities in those in charge of it by exposing their weaknesses so that they may correct themselves; like a conversion, then.

Contrary to what is often said or believed, tradition demands a constant conversion. Tradition is only truly alive, and to live is to take the risk of living. Antigone never wants to cease belonging to her family, but within it, she decides to exist; this is precisely the vocation of the family: to provide a haven that allows for the fulfillment of a life. Shouldn't this be true for every person in a family? How does this necessity reveal itself? Vocation and duty are inextricably linked. Modern times, by constantly silencing duty and its benefits, have extinguished vocation. Antigone became so enamored with duty that vocation only had to emerge naturally. We still lack the details of this conversion. Sophocles does not give them to us. Let us never forget that we are orphaned by the work of Sophocles. Sophocles wrote about a hundred tragedies, of which eight have survived. Sophocles wrote a great deal, yet so little remains. Take, for example, the inscriptions at Delphi: "Know thyself," or "Nothing in excess," which is now partially erased. What were the Greeks warning us against? Humanity is bereft of so many texts; so much has been revealed only to be forgotten, lost… So many things are shown to us, and we pay no attention or are unable to discern them. Consider, for instance, Jesus Christ writing in the Gospel of John (8:2-11). Who can imagine Jesus of Nazareth tracing meaningless signs on the ground? Especially since he returns to this subject twice. When the scribes and Pharisees bring him a woman caught in the act of adultery, they try to test him to find out what he advocates, reminding him that Moses ordered stoning for such a crime. And Jesus, unexpectedly, bends down and, with his finger, traces signs on the ground. The verb used is grapheion . Then the scribes and Pharisees, troubled by this almost nonchalant attitude, persist and are met with the response: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And then Jesus bends down again to write on the ground. John again uses the same Greek word to define Christ's action. What did Jesus write on the ground? Did he draw Heaven? Did he defy Satan? Did he compose a divine poem? Did he list the sins of the scribes and Pharisees, as Saint Jerome believed? Is it conceivable that Jesus traced meaningless signs on the ground? Or could this incomprehensibility have been the source of a new understanding? John doesn't tell us. Perhaps Jesus told him never to reveal his writings. We remain like orphans of this divine knowledge, facing the abyss of loss. What, then, are the minutes of Antigone's metamorphosis? In the absence of the hundred or so missing tragedies of Sophocles, which perhaps deepened the bonds of this edifying family, we grope our way. We imagine Antigone. What she was. Antigone finds virtue within herself. Virtues not absent from her father. But Oedipus becomes entangled and is consumed by his destiny. Oedipus does nothing but suffer, and when he decides to stop suffering, he suffers even more. Oedipus embodies misery. He is the antithesis of the ideal. Antigone does not suffer because she is an adult, whereas her father remains perpetually childish. What does adulthood mean before the modern era and its cohort of specialists created to avoid conflict and diminish decision-making? To undermine authority and give absolute power to the ^second ? All the men in this family are childlike. Only Antigone is an adult. Ismene both live in a state of uncertainty, fear. Oedipus, Polynices, and Eteocles are children in the hands of the Fates; they toy with them and manipulate them as they please… Perhaps they themselves don't need to intervene; these characters, though the most numerous in the course of life, require little attention, so adept are they at becoming entangled and intertwined without any assistance whatsoever. The Fates know men; they know very early on that those who want to escape their parents make easy prey. They wish not to be as perfect or imperfect; They want to be the opposite, something else entirely, far removed from the image their parents have of them: the problem lies in the mental image that each person creates of the others; we are haunted by the mental image, phantasmata in Greek and phantasma in Latin. The Fates revel in the mental image. They know that it imprisons and delivers their victims bound hand and foot. Parents project an ideal image where children respond with a repellent one. The two mental images almost never align, which leads to languor and conflict. Often, either conflict or complete calm reigns in families. And just as often, the family swings from one state to the other in a great and inevitable pendulum swing. Sometimes driven by action, but more often by reaction. And action that arises from action is not equivalent to action that arises from reaction. The manual and automatic aspects of life appear within the family, constantly intersecting and diverging. These aspects are independent of the state of nature and the state of culture, and they prove to be at least equally important. No one takes unpredictability into account; no "specialist" is interested in it as the central driving force of life, for it is there that the incalculable part of life resides; the specialist lives only on statistics. The part that is not of this world, the part that escapes our world, works and shapes the individual, their will, and their actions. The organic fabric of the family rests on the difficulty of articulating these two dimensions: the individual and the person. The family has this essential role of showing that the individual exists within the person and that the person never ceases to exist within the individual. Interests clash, collude, distrust, challenge, and seduce one another… The modern era hates the family because it sees itself as the daughter of Hegel, ideological and austere, where power ceaselessly seeks to impose its authority on this embryonic rebellion. The modern era identifies the family with the place where the individual must hide, refuse, or even eradicate their own will. The individual is malleable. Society makes of them what it will. Revolutionaries throughout the world and across all eras have always considered the family an island of resistance to their will to power. Two worlds have always clashed: those who understand the family as the fundamental natural environment for learning to become a person, and those who see the organic relationships of the family as a calamity to be destroyed by any means, because they carry germs and diseases, the first of which is the imprisonment of individual freedom. One must not confuse the root with the rhizome. One cannot live without the other. The rhizome is a type of root from which it derives its name. It is the link between the root itself and the bud. The stems of the rhizome often vary in size, producing many buds or few. The rhizome perfectly symbolizes family. None of its stems are the same, but all are attached to the strong, horizontal rhizome that carries its little world from root to bud. Family brings three states of belonging: the link to the past, the link to the future, and the unbreakable bond. Family thus carries with it the idea of ​​tradition, which can be defined through these three states of consciousness.

In the family, vision is like looking in a mirror. Saint Paul taught us what the mirror is in the Christian life: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see each other as in a mirror, dimly; but then face to face.” What does it mean to see as in a mirror, dimly? Obviously, it is difficult to grasp the mystery surrounding this phrase, otherwise so many things would be enveloped in a halo of knowledge. As Saint Paul continues: “For now I know only what I know; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). This mirrored vision is the result of the loss of Paradise. Paul of Tarsus tells us that it is a lost vision that we will regain. The mirror represents the quintessential instrument of spirituality, for it allows us to see what we already know without recognizing it, and it is the instrument that allows us to see and be seen. Thus, Athena comes to Odysseus's aid when he awakens in Ithaca by spreading a cloud that sometimes renders him invisible, but above all, Athena "enjoins him not to look any human being in the face," as if invisibility could only be fully achieved on the condition of not meeting anyone's gaze along the way. Thus, Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux ^continues her commentary: “Between seeing and being seen, the reciprocal relationship is so rigorously imposed that the best way to escape someone’s sight is not to try to unmask them yourself: so that the eye of another does not risk piercing the cloud of darkness that envelops you, so that you remain unknown even in their presence, the best thing is to avoid directing the gleam of your own gaze toward others, to make yourself blind to those who, seeing you, must not ‘know’ you!” To see is to be seen! In the same vein, let us note that Saint Paul saw when God blinded him on the road to Damascus. “I know a faithful follower of Christ who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven—I do not know whether it was with his body or whether it was a vision, God alone knows.” This man, whom I know well, was caught up to paradise—whether in the body or in a vision, only God knows—and he heard inexpressible things, which no one is permitted to repeat.” (2 Corinthians 12:2-4). Saint Paul bears witness to our “dim vision in a mirror.” Oedipus “knows” his crime and blinds himself. Do we not also find here the “ Know thyself” ? But nothing in excess ! Knowing oneself too well blinds one. It is in wanting to know himself that Oedipus destroyed himself. It is thanks to the bonds of family that Antigone refuses Creon’s blindness. Oedipus learned this from Tiresias, the divine blind man: “You who scrutinize everything, O Tiresias, both what is taught and what remains forbidden to human lips, both what is from heaven and what walks on earth, you may be blind, but you nonetheless know of the plague that has befallen Thebes.” And Tiresias replied quite clearly, yet certainly too clearly for his answer to be received without blindness: “Alas! Alas! How terrible it is to know, when knowledge is of no use to the one who possesses it! I was not unaware of it, but I have forgotten it.” A little later, Oedipus will become the arrogant tyrant he constantly rejects and simultaneously embodies: “You live only in darkness: how then could you not harm me, as you harm anyone who sees the light of day?” Tiresias will add a decisive touch to this long dialogue of Oedipus Rex : "You see the day. Soon you will see only the night." Oedipus continues to rail against Tiresias and against all those who confront him, in order to finally gain clairvoyance: "Thus he will no longer see," he says, "neither the evil I suffered during his blindness, nor the evil I caused; thus the darkness will prevent them from seeing henceforth those whom I should not have seen, and from knowing those whom, despite everything, I would have wanted to know!" But this is not entirely enough, since later he will implore: "Quickly, in the name of the gods, quickly, hide me somewhere, far from here; "Kill me, throw me into the sea, or at least into a place where I can no longer be seen..." Where Oedipus chose to be walled up within himself, Antigone will accept being walled up alive. Where Oedipus blinds himself, Antigone will seek by all means not to be blinded by anyone in discerning her vocation. Antigone ends up walled up, which is a living burial, for having wanted to bury her brother, Polynices, who had died. Oedipus and Creon will both push blindness to remarkable heights. Polynices and Eteocles will blind themselves in their struggle for power in Thebes and kill each other. There is practically no one in this family who does not see their reflection in another at one time or another. René Girard constantly lurks within Greek tragedy to nip Hegel's Phenomenology in the bud with his theory of mimicry, which liberates humanity from envy. No one is inherently corrupt or perverted, either by nature or by culture. But this reflection that characters fail to see in others, they fail to see because their vision is imperfect, veiled, obscured, often by narcissism. Everything is similar, yet nothing is the same. Details cause the bond of resemblance to be lost. Family ties stir all human emotions with perfect reciprocity, from the worst to the best and vice versa. The most extreme feelings associated with the most different people demand constant flexibility, a profound intoxication. Love should be the primary bond between people, yet it is the least explored. Love is what humankind talks about most while knowing nothing about it. Saint Paul states it explicitly: the obscuring concerns love. “To see face to face” means to see, to know, to understand love; to embrace the entirety of love. To be born is to join a family and to begin learning about life. It is impossible to learn about life without becoming a person; becoming a person is equivalent to becoming a social, and therefore political, animal. This is the aspect that Anouilh emphasized in his Antigone. There are no families without compromises, pettiness, deceit, indecency, vulgarity, animosity, and suicide: one must kill a part of oneself and put one's ego on hold to become part of a family. The docility of Asians to learning can be cited as an example: for many years, they are brought back to the state of apprentices every second of their lives. No league rises up against this way of doing things, because everyone recognizes that humility is the source from which the foundations of meticulous work and expertise can spring. And also because this humility will always instill the desire to return to the workbench, a sign of true craftsmanship. Humiliation is the key word in this family, with humility. It's a question of perspective, then. Antigone learned everything from her father, since she was his eyes. From this intimacy, Antigone drew a lesson: all our actions are committed without knowing the consequences. A radical antidote to the will to power. And the consequences of our actions don't necessarily wait until our lifetime to be revealed! Oedipus could almost be glad, for himself and his family, that his entire treachery was exposed while he was still alive. Antigone knows that man must not believe in his will alone. Here too, it's a question of power, which swells with its pride. Will alone becomes perverted, corrupted, and arrogant. Will alone takes over space as soon as a higher power, authority, is forgotten. All those who act in politics without referring to a higher power are mistaken. This is a lesson from Antigone, one of the forgotten laws that she restores and brings to light. All those who wish to change inequalities or injustices through their own will alone (inequality being injustice plus envy) will face the consequences of their actions: that is to say, replacing the previous injustices with others that sometimes prove far worse. What is learned in childhood does not cease to exist in adulthood. What is learned in childhood is transformed in adulthood, but it continues to live within the adult. Humankind is the origin of tradition, and tradition is original.

Antigone embraces intimacy as a remedy against power, as an allegory for inner life. Does intimacy have a particular relationship with femininity? Intimacy belongs to the interior. Intimacy lives in silence; it leans on secrecy, on the depths of the person. Oedipus loses his footing because he no longer has intimacy; it seems to him that everything about him is known, especially the worst, that this worst will cast its shadow over the last vestige of good that continues to exist within him. Violated intimacy marks the end of our humanity. Antigone fulfills her duty. She cares for her aging and weakened father. Devoting oneself to duty, to serve, imposes and strengthens intimacy. Armed with humility and intimacy, which often go hand in hand, Antigone addresses the gods and maintains a constant dialogue with them. She doesn't start flapping her arms and haranguing Zeus to avenge herself for all the humiliations her father has suffered… Equality is often another name for revenge and believes itself synonymous with justice; equality has replaced equity, which was intended as an earthly extension of divine justice. Antigone intends to silence the uproar. She is an ode to family, and therefore an ode to tradition. She understands that the sacrifices demanded by the gods or created by her father's arrogant and tyrannical decisions are nothing compared to self-sacrifice, which alone can redeem the entirety of this cursed fate. Antigone also knows that human laws have no authority, that authority is transcendent while power is immanent. Cain wants to know what he has a right to by yielding to his will to power; he addresses Satan, asking him if he is happy. Satan replies: “I am powerful.” 4. ^, will finally dispel the clouds. This is not the final struggle, for men will always forget in order to remember, but the final battle. Antigone will embrace her calling and fight for what is truly worthwhile in her eyes, what she has always unknowingly lived for, what seems most natural to her: tradition; the balance between authority and power. This is how Antigone enters politics.