The contemporary world gets excited by using the formula : make sense , perfect translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression, make sense. It is so comforting to repeat this expression to yourself without it actually having any… meaning, so we pick up little things that make sense , but what are these mini-meanings found on the ground almost by chance? What are these senses, a skin of grief , which invite themselves without our being there for nothing or almost if not the residues of a past sense, of a common sense, of a good sense sculpted by the centuries? Through the methodical 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 having abdicated. 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 by the passing of time.
Category: Modern world
Like robots facing death
No need to be frightened by these robots from Asia who seem ready to conquer our place, because the robot is in us and it is watching us; he watches for this point of no return where the man stripped of all humanity will exhibit his corpse believing he has defeated his worst enemy. The loss of know-how vis-à-vis death has gone hand in hand with the loss of the rite: almost nothing any longer accompanies the dead to Hades, almost nothing any longer frees the living from the dead and the dead from living. The gravediggers of humanity grant importance to the rite only to mock it or harm it without grasping the liberation it procures through the meaning it reveals.
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)
So many stories about identity! The word does not appear in Greek epic or tragedy. Identity at the time of Antigone is based on lineage and belonging to a city. Identity was impregnated with rootedness. The family and the city brought together under a virtual banner all of what the other was to know about himself during a first meeting. During antiquity, no one proclaimed his identity or promulgated it, and no one decided on his identity. It wasn't about putting on a costume. Men depended on their identity. Identity was like a charge, we had to be worthy of it. It established being and becoming. The modern era has made it an issue, because it has transformed identity into having, a sort of asset which one can dress up or discard. In its modern fantasy of believing that we can choose everything all the time, the modern era has relentlessly 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 sine qua non 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. Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)”
Relativism is the horse dealer!
Relativism proves to be a sweet companion. Relativism is the horse dealer of the Abbé Donissan. You can travel with him. He is not boring, he stays in his place and shows unfailing empathy. However, he does not know compassion. Is it a problem ? Rather an advantage, he does not contradict, he agrees with me. With precision, he anticipates my agreement, sometimes he even conceives it before I have thought about it. Relativism gives the impression of dominating all certainties and has thus become the religion of the time, it is an emanation of the Republic which is itself an emanation of the Monarchy. Relativism is therefore a natural child of secularism, for this reason — it is its duty! — he keeps almost all religions on guard, a little less those who can blackmail him, with force those who would like to reconnect with a lost past. Relativism does not come to help, it is satisfied with its role of witness; he acts and acquiesces, he is a technician, an administrator, a statistician. He is not docile, he does not feel the need. He is not humble even if he sometimes manages to pass himself off as humility, but unlike the latter, relativism does not require questioning. It is certainly comforting, based on egotism and immediate satisfaction. When humility pushes to confess one's faults, relativism finds an excuse for all infractions by claiming the rule of double standards which, as its name suggests, can serve the goat and the cabbage. Where humility is an apprenticeship in the law to gain access to the spirit, the horse dealer proposes to forget law and spirit in order to live . To live with fullness or to live a kind of fullness. Relativism thus provokes death, slowly and gently, because it will erase even the presence of ideas in us, it will dehumanize us with absolute certainty. And we will agree with him. We will become robots. We will agree with him because he offers us immediate comfort, the one we well deserve, that of the impression, the one where the impression conceals the image that Narcissus fell in love with while looking at it, forgetting himself, without knowing himself, hypnotized until the death of himself. The death that befalls us.
Become yourself...
Isn't becoming oneself always becoming another? What can become of someone who does not walk towards who he is? We must constantly bridge the gap between who we are and who we think we are. What can someone who does not know who he is be? A wreck, an eternal drift, a grounding? This one can sink into all forms of submission, in particular the will to power; There is nothing that can temper it, caress it or control it. It is a question here of having the same requirement as in writing: joining as closely as possible, as closely as possible, the style and the subject. Succeed in uniting to become one. Operate and accomplish the metamorphosis to get out of oneself, to be oneself. Contrary to what is often said or believed nowadays, the perpetual encounter with the other, also called interbreeding or diversity or the next fashionable term, is only a subterfuge, a hysterical zapping, a means of s to see, to catch a glimpse of oneself and to camouflage this vision under a thankless, anemic and amnesiac make-up. Here continues to stir an agit-prop concerned with creating new needs and constantly renewing them to always create an unprecedented and endless dissatisfaction and to force the eternal and exhausting quest for the ghost of the self.
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)”