Category: Work in progress

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (6/7. The vocation)

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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!

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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...

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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.

The quest for identity

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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.

Based on the values

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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.

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (1/7. The family)

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1st part: the family

From the first reading of Antigone, an ambiguity settles in the mind of the reader. Does Antigone embody action or reaction? What moves Antigone? The reaction never exists by itself whereas the action needs no one, it legitimizes itself in the act. Action always inaugurates something. Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone does not wait for Creon to be Antigone. Like Electra for revenge, Nausicaa for hospitality, Penelope for fidelity, Antigone embodies duty. It is action, because it serves: it is accomplished in duty. It is accomplished in servitude (are we pretending 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 the law of Creon pushes it to action, and if this one can seem a reaction, it is only on the surface, by simple chronology.

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Hannah Arendt on human life

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Modern theories whose raison d'être is to blur the nature of man and thus give him a superabundant belief in his person maintain this permanent blurring. This permanent jamming uses the thought of Simone de Beauvoir on human life. Permanent scrambling, uprooting, infantilization… Man must be told that he is strong in order to weaken him, push him to succumb to all his desires in order to enslave him. Uproot him to allow him to believe himself sole master of his destiny. Vanity and pride will do the rest of the work.

"It is only insofar as he thinks (…), that he is a 'he' and a 'someone', that man can, in the full reality of his concrete being, live in this gap of time between the past and the future. »*

* Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of Culture .

Unamuno on human life

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“I don't want to die, no I don't want to, nor want to want to; I want to live always, always; and to live me, this poor me, that I am and I feel myself to be today and here, and this is why the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own, tortures me. »*

The strength of Unamuno's assertion is that it expresses the desire for human life beyond the slightest thought of pleasure. We are here in the presence of a quote that asserts itself as a challenge to the modern world when the theory of action as meaning can be used by all modern ideologies.

*The Tragic Feeling of Life.

Simone de Beauvoir on human life

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“To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be won.*”

Tremendous declaration of impotence draped in an expression of the will to power or how envy must regulate, rule life. This sentence is of course a revolutionary manifesto. Simone de Beauvoir defines the class struggle and all the actions of the left since the French Revolution: envy as an act of faith. Envy is always the daughter of immanence. Simone de Beauvoir tells us: “God is dead, let us now know that we are masters of our lives and that they are fulfilled in action. By acting in this way Simone de Beauvoir ignores religion but also ancient philosophy, she affirms that permanent struggle is the only way. This permanent struggle is maintained by envy; envy has this unstoppable force, it feeds on its defeats as well as its victories. It is the evil force par excellence. She faces life.

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy of life is adulescent, as Tony Anatrella would say, and in fact it is a negation of life because it denies its quality and its thickness in order to resolve it into a permanent and pathetic struggle.

We also see the form of modernism. This action immediately becomes a negation of the inner life. Or rather it wants to be a replacement for the inner life because it is common to hear, by a spectacular reversal of meaning, that action is the inner life of the militant. We also understand that this declaration in no way wishes to find a solution, appeasement would be its end. She only delights in noise and violence.

*An Ethics of Ambiguity.