Category: Work in progress
The Chief's Sacrifice
“Who is like God? »(1), the book of the army corps general Pierre Gillet, lists in an exhaustive way the qualities of a chief and draws up the Christian virtues necessary to the command. What could pass for an insider's book, a new TTA(1), becomes under the delicate and virile pen of Pierre Gillet, former corps commander of the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment, general commanding the rapid reaction corps - France , a poetry of being, imbued with spirituality, passion, perseverance and dignity.
Be yourself
Being oneself is never a habit, identity is a search and an affirmation, a permanent 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.
The Revolutionary and Forgiveness
The revolutionary has no appetite for forgiveness, because he hates the gift which seems suspicious to him and the other with which he could have sealed the future.
For the revolutionary, moved by envy, the only form of forgiveness that is specific to him passes through the humiliation or the death of his opponent in order to celebrate his deserved victory over a rich person.
Tradition serves to remember
Tradition requires permanent conversion. Tradition is no picnic! Tradition requires constant effort. And even the most important effort: not to forget. Tradition is about not forgetting and requires a repeated effort to remember. It cannot exist otherwise than by this back and forth movement between the meaning it gives and the understanding of this meaning through its actuality.
The will alone or the will alone
Antigone knows that man should not believe in his will alone. There too it is a question of power which swells with its pride. The will alone is perverted, it is corrupted, withered and proud. The will alone, or the will alone which often accompanies it, invests space as soon as a superior power, authority, is forgotten. All those who act in politics without referring to a superior force are mistaken. It is a lesson from Antigone, one of the laws forgotten by Creon that she restores and recalls.
Our secret, a mystery
We have our secret, which we first make a mystery to ourselves.
Marcel Jouhandeau, in Elements for an Ethics . Editions Grasset.
Diversity (continued)
… Sounge i felibre esteba… I'm thinking of the Félibres… It's characteristic of the good artisans of the Divers, to turn it over like this end for end. Would it ever be achieved? It is ruin, death. It is always reborn: suddenly behind, when in front you hold out your arms to it.
However, there, Boissière writes: The Buddha, Cemetery of Annam, etc.
In 96, a year before his death, admirable verses of reverse exoticism:
Today, tired of waiting for the kiss of the Sirens — My weary Flesh returns to the native village — where the echo of the world still fascinates me...
Over there, wandering, smoke twists: They are old desires , old sins that burn….
Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, An Aesthetics of Diversity , Editions Fata Morgana.
Diversity
I don't know, if like me, hearing the word diversity (which has replaced the word Other ) causes you to start feeling nauseous. Victor Segalen is an author who acts as a remedy for this gagging.
Fine example that Jules Boissière who, Provençal, felibre, wrote his most beautiful felibrian verses in Hanoi.
Here is the diversity, which plunges into itself to welcome the other. The speeches of politicians who only have the word diversity in their mouths push a great void in front of them and shake it all the more audaciously as they try to convince and convince themselves, but they have lost their conscience that they denature and violate it as soon as they pronounce its name.
It is only possible to speak of diversity by listening to oneself, to one's intimate being. This is what it means to be sensitive to diversity. Those who gorge themselves on diversions without making this effort are only internationalists in disguise.
Victor Segalen, Essay on exoticism, an aesthetic of diversity. Editions Fata Morgana.
essay on exoticism
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.