In its mad quest to make people believe that we can choose everything all the time, the modern era has methodically replaced being with having. Yet this logic, this ideology has its limits: some things cannot be acquired, among them: otherness. Living one's identity, being what one is, inhabiting one's name , allowing intimacy and therefore knowledge and deepening of one's being, these are the conditions for an encounter with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone is located in this precise place, the ground on which the fight is built, Antigone preserves anchored in her this gift of the elders, of the gods, this rootedness which defines the authority to which she leans for stand up to this man, his relative, the king, who espouses the will to power and finds himself blinded by it to the point of hearing only his own voice, its echo.
Author: Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti
Based on the values
Authority has lost its letters of nobility along with humility. Authority has become synonymous with implacable order, reckless force, tyranny. What an inversion of values! While authority according to Antigone prevented tyranny! The modern age has this impression of authority because it has been trampled on by men who have used it; while serving authority. But has authority been damaged by these disastrous experiences? A value cannot be damaged by a man. Fidelity unfolds above Saint Peter without his being able to do so. Loyalty unfolds above betrayal because it encompasses it. Loyalty asserts itself in betrayal. Betrayal carries with it no meaning except its own satisfaction. Any value also speaks of indecision and uncertainty within man. All value is a guardian and a shelter. No need to choose, value adapts to our weakness since it precedes our uncertainties. The modern world confuses authority and power by making them bear the same wounds and the same pains. God had to be taken out of everything. Neither the ancients nor the contemporary would understand, but that didn't matter, they counted for nothing now. If ever God did not leave, he would have to be killed. The 20th century wanted to be the time of the death of God. He will have killed only the death of his idea. Above all, he will have created a new anthropology based on suicide.
Unamuno on his quixotic quest
My work – I was going to say my mission – is to break the faith of each other, and even of a third party: faith in affirmation, faith in negation and faith in abstention; and that by faith in faith itself. It is to fight all those who resign themselves, either to Catholicism or to agnosticism. It is to make everyone live worried and oppressed.
Will it be effective? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate, apparent efficacy of his work? It is very doubtful...
Unamuno on Don Quixote
I feel like a medieval soul and I have the idea that the soul of my homeland is medieval, that by force it passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Revolution, learning something from them, either, but without letting touch his soul, preserving the spiritual heritage of these so-called foggy times. And Quixotism is only the most desperate focus of the struggle of the Middle Ages against the Renaissance which emerged from it.
Afterword (by Georges Mathieu)
If the “misfortunes of France are exemplary”, it will take us thirty years to recover from the last: that of the laxity of the right combined with the sectarianism of the left. For nearly half a century, we have been subjected to the terrorism of an intelligentsia plagued successively by Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, socialism, social democracy, without forgetting corrupt capitalism, to which has been added since the artistic terrorism which has placed subversion, provocation and derision at the heart of its credo in an attempt to crush values based on beauty. As long as there is not a total reversal of the purposes of our activities, as long as our rulers persist in considering economic expansion as a supreme objective instead of granting the primordial concern of their concerns to the aesthetic dimension in our lifetimes, there will be no true civilization.
Afterword:
This afterword by my dear friend Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) to his book, Le massacre de lasensibilite , published by Odilon Média in 1996, keeps coming up…
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (3/7. Destiny)
3rd part: destiny
The man comes down from the tree. Man, like the tree, is defined both by its roots and by its fruits. Man, like the tree, depends on external and internal elements to reach maturity. Man resembles this trunk sculpted by hardship, leaning on its roots and bearing more or less beautiful, more or less good fruit… The resemblances between the plant world and man are endless. From the water that nourishes the roots, to the sun watering the fruits, to the oxygen exuded by the leaves, all this life that rushes in and circulates reminds us in an irremissible way of the human condition. The tree is a metaphor for the family. From the seedling to the fruits and leaves, a metaphor for the history of man and the family develops. Which evil fairies presided over the birth of the Labdacides family from which Antigone descends? Any fine conscience these days would see it as a calamity and a pathological explanation for Antigone's decisions. How does this little Antigone become this heroic fruit by being born on a trunk so full of stigmata and bruises? Destiny blows and guides this family in an uninterrupted and obtuse way and, suddenly, Antigone frees herself from this straitjacket, frees her whole family from this straitjacket, she undoes the straitjacket, and completes the dismissal of destiny. What a miracle! From a distance, clinging to their branch, two leaves always seem identical, yet you just have to approach to see how much they differ. Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (3/7. Destiny)”
News from Ernest Hello about fear and its perfections
Fear in general therefore has perfections which evil does not have.
Perhaps the crucifixion was felt in a more terrible way in the Garden of Olives than on the cross. For on the cross he was actually felt. In the Garden of Olives, he was felt in spirit.
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (2/7. The funeral)
Part 2: The funeral
“ My dear Ismene. I come this morning to tell you that I took care of everything. I took the same undertakers for our two brothers. I couldn't choose and since our brothers didn't leave any last wishes, I took matters into my own hands to get it sorted out as soon as possible. I still ordered embalming so that they are presentable. If you want to go see them, they'll be ready around 3 p.m. You do not have to. Well, if you can take ten minutes, that might be fine. It may be better to keep an image of them happy, children for example. I took the same urn model for both. A priest will come to the funeral home and give a short speech before the cremation. I ordered him to come to the funeral home. You see, I took care of everything. Eteocles will be buried in the cemetery which is located about thirty minutes from Thebes by taking the national. For Polynice, it is more complicated with the law of our uncle, Creon. I decided to scatter his ashes on the battlefield as the king does not want him buried. Makes sense, right? Tell me what you think, I'm not stopped on this point. This portrait of Antigone living in the 21st century delivering the remains of her brothers to the funeral director summarizes the rite of funerals today. The family has since the Industrial Revolution been rendered unproductive. Funerals are no longer part of the family tradition. The modern world is reassured by using the formula make sense , as the translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression is heard today, and as it is so comforting to repeat it to oneself without it really having any… sense, because what what are these mini-senses found on the ground almost by chance, what are these skin-deep that invite themselves in almost without our being there for nothing, if not the residues of a past sense, a common sense, a good sense sculpted by the centuries? Through the destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning, create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not not have totally given up. Deceit is backed up by ignorance, and on this point too, trickery is not new. The meaning given by death within the family, this meaning almost completely forgotten nowadays, is recalled by Antigone in Sophocles' play where she stands as a guardian of the values that liberate, because they protect man from death. 'animal. Antigone reaffirms what man can and cannot; it takes hold of a force destined to protect us from our will to power and to teach us the time of responsibility; a time nowadays entrusted to specialists replacing the family, the people who compose it and the tenuous links woven between them over time.
Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (2/7. The funeral)”
News from Louis-René des Forêts
On this rainy Sunday, rereading the notes taken on the sidelines of the wonderful Ostinato , this nugget in the middle of nuggets:
Let's not veil our figures with our hands. There is no longer a place to venerate, no act of glory or intelligence to absolve a world seduced by the force spreading its defilement everywhere, and which will have curtly raised its ruins as one refuses the fault with the cunning smile of business. .
News from Hyppolite Taine
He is a pedant, the pedant is the hollow and inflated mind which, because it is full of words, believes itself to be full of ideas, enjoys its sentences and deceives itself in order to dictate to others. He is a hypocrite who thinks he is sincere, a Cain who takes himself for Abel.
In this shrunken brain, given over to abstraction, and accustomed to herding men into two categories under opposite labels, whoever is not with him in the right compartment is against him in the wrong one, and in the wrong compartment between the rebels of all flags and rogues of all will, intelligence is natural. […] Every aristocrat is corrupt and every corrupt man is an aristocrat.
The left which is born with the Revolution displays a totalitarianism which, if it is sometimes hidden, is not less always present; it rests on the hatred of what does not think like it.
Hyppolite Taine in his Origins of Contemporary France described Robespierre in this way. But if instead of Robespierre, we put Hollande, Valls, or even worse Taubira, this portrait would fit them like a glove. Especially since pedant is masculine and feminine, he thus places everyone on an equal footing, this notion so dear to these… pedantic.