Author: Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (7/7. Love)

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7th and last part: Love

Antigone's desire is family, she does not want to leave her brother unburied; Creon, he wants to assert himself as king and show his power. Antigone favors family ties that embody love and reveal a being. Creon establishes his power by signing an act of law which must establish his authority. The same word characterizes their action: desire. But desire does not recognize desire in the other, one might believe, especially if one is tempted to worship desire for itself, that desire dubs any desire it encounters. Between Creon and Antigone, it is the measure of the desires that counts. Face to face, Antigone and Creon will increase the measure of their desires to the adversity they encounter. But is the source of Antigone's desire still understandable today? Indeed, Antigone's desire, this desire which is based on justice, justice done and returned to the remains of her brother and to the gods, this desire takes on its full meaning, because it is communal, it is part of a city ​​and in a family, reduced vision of the city, and in a belief, Antigone leans against the gods to challenge Creon. Antigone does not express a personal desire, she defends an eternal law, she defends her duty to say it, to claim it before any power that thinks itself above her. Since when do we no longer hear anyone standing up in the public space to claim their duty at the cost of their life? The worst ? We have become accustomed to this silence, this resignation, the transcendental laws no longer tell us much, so nothing comes to overhang and therefore correct the laws which pass in front of us and encircle us like rubbish in a stream of water. The communities that fortified the individual within a space that protected him and allowed him to grow were shattered. The individual now looks like a crazy electron who can only build himself up from gusts of wind that constantly exhaust him and confuse him and erase even the taste for the meaning to be given to his life. Social life is based on law and law alone, but in a place without geography made up of people above ground, all rights are equal and crushed in an odious shambles. Creon has the power. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus. At a time when it is no longer a question of having, of possessing, of acquiring, Antigone weighs—since it is necessary to evaluate—very little. The methodical destruction of all metaphysics is akin to a crime against humanity. Perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. Since with one click, I can acquire everything, I only need to know my desire to satisfy it. We also understand that this individual desire that nothing protects from his appetite accepts no limits and especially not those set by others; then comes into play envy, debased, debased desire.

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essay on exoticism

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Only those who possess a strong Individuality can feel the Difference.

By virtue of the law: every thinking subject supposes an object, we must posit that the notion of Difference immediately implies an individual starting point.

That such will fully taste the wonderful feeling, who will feel what they are and what they are not.

Exoticism is therefore not this kaleidoscopic state of the tourist and the mediocre spectator, but the lively and curious reaction to the choice of a strong individuality against an objectivity whose distance it perceives and tastes. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary).

Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation; is therefore not the perfect comprehension of an outside oneself that one would embrace within oneself, but the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.

Let us therefore start from this confession of impenetrability. Do not flatter ourselves that we assimilate customs, races, nations, others; but, on the contrary, let us rejoice in never being able to do so; thus reserving for us the durability of the pleasure of feeling the Diverse. (It is here that this doubt could be placed: to increase our faculty of perceiving the Diverse, is it to shrink our personality or to enrich it? Is it to steal something from it or to make it more numerous? No doubt: it is enrich it abundantly, with the whole Universe. Clouard says very well: “This naturalism, we see that it is not our abasement, nor our dispersion, nor an advantage that nature would obtain at the expense of the human personality, it is the enlarged empire of our mind over the world.”).

Victor Segalen , Essay on exoticism, an aesthetic of diversity . Editions Fata Morgana.

Man and animals according to Aristotle

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Hence this obvious conclusion, that the State is a fact of nature, that man is naturally a sociable being, and that he who remains savage by organization, and not by the effect of chance, is certainly, or a being degraded, or a being superior to the human species. It is indeed to him that one could address this reproach of Homer: “Without family, without laws, without hearth…” The man who would be by nature such as that of the poet would breathe only war; for he would then be incapable of any union, like the birds of prey.

If man is infinitely more sociable than bees and all the other animals that live in herds, it is obviously, as I have often said, that nature does nothing in vain. However, it grants the floor to the man exclusively. The voice can well express joy and pain; also it is not lacking in other animals, because their organization goes so far as to feel these two affections and to communicate them to each other. But speech is made to express the good and the bad, and consequently also the just and the unjust; and man has this special thing, among all the animals, that he alone conceives good and evil, right and wrong, and all feelings of the same order, which in association constitute precisely the family and the family. 'State.

It cannot be doubted that the State is naturally above the family and each individual; for the whole necessarily outweighs the part, since, the whole once destroyed, there are no more parts, no more feet, no more hands, except by a pure analogy of words, as we said a hand of stone; for the hand, separated from the body, is just as little a real hand. Things are generally defined by the acts they perform and those they can perform; as soon as their previous aptitude comes to an end, they can no longer be said to be the same; they are only included under the same name.

What clearly proves the natural necessity of the State and its superiority over the individual is that, if it is not admitted, the individual can then be self-sufficient in isolation from the whole. as well as the rest of the parties; now, he who cannot live in society, and whose independence has no needs, he can never be a member of the State. He's a brute or a god.

Nature therefore instinctively drives all men to political association. The first who rendered the institute an immense service; for if man, having reached all his perfection, is the first of the animals, he is also the last when he lives without laws and without justice. There is nothing more monstrous, indeed, than armed injustice. But man has received from nature the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which he must above all employ against his evil passions. Without virtue, it is the most perverse and ferocious being; he has only the brutal outbursts of love and hunger. Justice is a social necessity; for right is the rule of political association, and the decision of the just is what constitutes right.

Aristotle, Politics . I.9-13

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (5/7. Authority)

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image

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.

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Identify

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Identity is divided on the one hand into a base which is in us without our being able to derive any particular merit from it, our nature and the education we have received, and a movement constitutive of life which discovers elements which are not listed by our nature or upbringing, but must be read up to our nature and upbringing. Much of this process happens without our even having to think about it. It is however essential, essential and obliges us to the permanent revision of this nature and this education, just like with the permanent revision of these new elements through the prism of our nature and our culture. Balance, here again, is essential. There is no question of forgetting or worse of not being aware of our nature, of forgetting or worse of losing the benefits of our education, to approach the shores of novelty, or else we will be nothing but one threadbare flag in the wind, we will have no criteria for judging novelty and we would risk seeing in this novelty only novelty, and only liking it for that.

Splitting according to Creon

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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.

The enantiodromos, the fork of life

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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

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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.

Desire for recognition

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The loss of all recognition in modern times, combined with frenzied individualism, pushes everyone to crave any form of recognition. Everyone dreams of a moment of glory, the media form being the most sought after, whether through television or social networks, because it appears as an ultimate form of recognition; the mirrored form, I am admired and I admire being admired. The ephemeral reigns in absolute condition, this uneasy immediacy, because it prohibits recollection, the intimate, the inner life by replacing them with suffocating din, the procuring crowd, perverse indecency.