3rd part: destiny

The man comes down from the tree. Man, like a 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 fruit that is more or less beautiful, more or less good… 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.

What is the family for? At the antigone factory. Without family, no Antigone. If we had to find a reason for the tragedy of Sophocles, this one sheds light on the origin. To understand, the origin is essential, but here, there is no need to listen to the trunk of Antigone's family to dream of never meeting such a brood. You almost have to be persuaded of this, as her individuation progresses, Antigone becomes Antigone without ever denying her family for its faults or its ugliness, on the contrary, she draws the strength of her individuation from her family ties. Contrary to what is often said or believed, it is not enough to declaim: “family, I hate you! to become someone. This little Antigone could well have thrown her family's burden overboard. What a nuisance this origin! Faking accident about one's origin, hiding behind a false identity, accepting cowardice as an escape from jeers… All this gossip, all this story about identity is so much like a struggle of egos; envy as a panache. To deny the origin, it is possible to pretend that the existence of past facts is not proven, or better that it is an accident, an accident amplified by gossip, it is here that the attenuation often turns out to be an effective subterfuge, because it does not force one to deny and takes pleasure in relying on a share of honesty, but if escobarderie allows one to extract oneself from a lineage, allows one to recover some strength to face the ghosts of its origin that we want to hide from the public under the veil of ignorance, it only feigns the outside, the people around it, it does not offer escapes inside, during an encounter with oneself. It often represents the cornerstone of a fear of intimacy. Because intimacy reveals. Because unassumed fear anesthetizes and compartmentalizes a fear of oneself while denying it. How many of our contemporaries live thus harnessed to their fear of disclosure? This way of pretending declines cowardice in all its forms. A cowardice which beats the measure of silence, which creates balance and bases it on a forgetfulness of self, therefore on a loss of self, then a negation of self. The fear that does not die and does not rise again in bravery announces the victory of the end of freedom. The reign of robots. Ismene hides the outrage of Creon. Ismene has already lost her freedom. She lost it on purpose. She traded it for a little comfort. She is afraid to see herself, which would force her to assume everything, even and above all the worst. Ismene "leads her little way" as the popular saying goes, which means that she merges with her destiny; destiny exists when we abandon what liberates us and by exchanging this lost freedom for what alienates us. Do we not touch here what the majority of men want through comfort? Not to mention comfort's younger sister: retribution. If Ismene were asked what law Creon enacted, she would say, “I'm not sure. “The king thought it was best for the city. “My brothers got what they deserved by killing each other. All this for power, always power. She would dodge. However, dodging that is not offensive opens the door to cowardice. Ismene cringes at the enactment of the law, because she only wants one thing, and that is that they don't ask her the question, that they leave her alone. It is an understandable cowardice, it is a cowardice that gives the impression of being protected; cowardice based on forgetting turns out to be a powerful remedy from the psychotropic family. Ismene is the subject of her own empathy, she "feels" all the calumnies, all the reproaches received by her family. She wants to silence them. All these voices that slander and gossip and make fun of her, of her father, of her sister, of her brothers… All these voices, she keeps hearing them, they spin and spin in her head, they don't want to stop , they do not want to be silent, ah! What would Ismene give to keep them quiet, to shrink a little... After all, she deserved it, she can ask for it, she has suffered so much, doesn't she deserve to to be able to rest? Can't she be quiet? “Fear is nothingness that becomes ideal. as Ernest Hello puts it perfectly. Concealing allows silence by offering it as food as in an infamous game of cards where one would play his most precious possession by taking a casual and arrogant air. Antigone stands up. She doesn't stand up to tell people to stop gossiping, she stands up because a boundary has been crossed. She loves her family, simply because it's her family and we're not ashamed of those we love. So she stands up, out of duty, therefore out of love. Duty and love have gone together for better and for worse. Does a branch of the tree decide to leave to live its life? Antigone rejects the possibility of being separated from her family and the possibility that her life could be a consolation prize, or that we could feel sorry for her life. Antigone never feels sorry, at most she lets out a murmur in line 905 of the tragedy about her status as a woman-girl and about the truth of family ties, about these unbreakable and irrefutable ties. Antigone acts differently. For a modern, it is edifying. She does not reject her parents, she does not overwhelm them. She doesn't use them as an excuse for failure in her life. She does not reject where she comes from to hope "to become the one she dreams of becoming" or better still, like an advertising slogan, "the one she deserves to be", "the one she is worth be ". As Christopher Lasch reminds us, with the new lifestyles induced by the Industrial Revolution, the cult of individualization was advocated and was to sweep away all the foundations like a cyclone and leave only crumbs for the family. We understand first the abandonment, then the disdain, and finally the hatred of the family which emerged in the 1960s: the family prevents me from being, prevents my expression, my development, the family is a brake on my expression … The family shaped by the centuries, circumscribing the will to power, protected like a shield was devalued, mocked and even reviled. The strength that protects is based on humility. But humility became ridiculous, incidental, meaningless, although it always proved to be docile to effort and refused to react. As soon as the rascals stormed the family, as soon as they held the family in their hands, that they thought they possessed it, then like any man intoxicated by envy, the will to power possessed them forever. their turn and turned them into beasts. Contrary to what is often said or believed, man descends from other men, he cannot invent himself. If he invents himself, he becomes an acorn again. Contrary to what is often said or believed, inventing what one is is more about individuation than individualism. Let's look at the sap that circulates from the roots to the edge of the leaves… Who in the tree would have the idea of ​​a break in this marvelous circuit? Only death intervenes to separate the branch from the trunk and the source of death resides as much in a part of the trunk as in the branch or the leaf. Is man's worst enemy self-knowledge? The Greeks said it at Delphi, no one could ignore it, and everyone cultivated this prophecy in silence: Know thyself... But not too much... Like an iceberg that defends its secret, its submerged part, our weakness to understand the ins and outs and therefore to grasp the meaning of our life shimmers and betrays our lack of depth. The family is the origin, it designates the porch of our memory. The porch of our memory delimits us and sets a standard. The porch of memory sinks into oblivion. When can I say: “memory, open up and tell me”? Memory does as it pleases. Memory says nothing of value. If there is a way to make memory speak according to a good will, this means must be preternatural, linked to the lost genius of man. Are the preternatural gifts, the lost gifts of the earthly paradise, gone forever? Do they remain within our reach, but veiled. Do these gifts appear as epiphanies in the family? Do they make themselves accessible within the family through dazzling epiphanies and without our realizing it? Antigone put up with everything from her parents, and for them, and she did it because they were her parents and she hadn't chosen them. The life that takes shape after a tabula rasa resembles a life of ghosts; a life where ghosts keep springing up and tormenting, twirling around and haunting, that's not life, it's even the exact opposite of life, it's prison.

The sap connects the roots to the fruits through the trunk. It circulates, undulates, diffuses, gives itself entirely to all. The study of the sap shows what a permanent and benevolent equality brings, not an equality of consequence, but an equality of cause. Giving every child the same will never make every child the same. No tree is the same. No family is alike. What differentiates plant life from human life? Desire. Has one ever seen a leaf claim from another its due or at least what it had not received and which it saw in the other? The human family does not prevent envy, it channels it. The sap circulates, the sap is life; there is a sap in us which constantly circulates, the Greeks called it pneuma , the breath of life which continually sows and animates us. In ancient Greece, there was only one kind of fate: that dictated by the gods. Men did not decide their fate; they could not imprison themselves; the ideology of individualism did not yet corrupt their decision. Antigone stands up, because she has not received any contrary directives from the gods. She interprets the law of Creon as an outrage against divine laws. Antigone puts on the tunic of humility, she merges into the role of the messenger, if the divine laws do not authorize a man to refuse the funeral, a man cannot condemn her for having performed this funeral, and if he allowed to do so, he would be damned. Antigone is the double messenger: of her family, from whom she learned respect, and of the gods, because she recognizes their authority and reads in their silence.

Contrary to what is often said or believed, the sap is not fate, but life. Fate is the confinement of life. Freedom is the instrument with which life is best expressed, but it is not the easiest. Antigone heard, supported and defended the destiny from the mouth of her father. She has been bathed in destiny since birth. She knows no other environments. Oedipus had locked himself in a logic of fatality. Let's go back in time: Laios, biological father of Oedipus, refugee with Pelops after the capture of Thebes by Amphion and Zethos, kidnaps the son of his host, Chrysippus. For this crime, Apollo punishes Laios: if he has a son, he will kill him. Do we ever hear Oedipus cursing his father? What makes fate drive Oedipus? The reaction. Oedipus does not stop reacting. Because young people of his age made fun of him, he goes to Delphi and consults the oracle to find out the identity of his parents. What to do? He was raised easily by his adoptive parents, he lived a pleasant childhood if it was not these children who laugh at him because he does not know his biological parents. Envy guides him by the tip of his nose. By his approach, he sets destiny in motion. Hearing that he was going to kill his father frightens him, he gives in to his fear and decides not to go home. The reaction is the daughter of fear, the gauntlet of which has not been taken up. The oracle is a plague. She tells the truth nothing but the truth, but hidden under a veil. It's never the truth face to face, it's the truth in a mirror; otherwise it would imply the intimacy of intuition. By deciding not to return home, Oedipus completes the fulfillment of his destiny, as is commonly said nowadays; even and especially if it means nothing. We do not fulfill our destiny, our duty at the limit, but our destiny, we submit to it, we submit to it by slamming the door in the face of freedom. There are consents which are equivalent to revolutions. Oedipus lowers his arms in the belief that he is taking his destiny into his own hands. Besides, you don't take your destiny in hand, rather your freedom. Oedipus has a destiny willed by the gods, that of being detached from his biological family to be raised by an adoptive family. By his reaction, he reconnects with his biological family with the consequences that we know. Œdipe à Colone recounts this disenchantment wonderfully. Oedipus no longer wants to see, he saw like a blind man, he continues to react, he blinds himself with his own hands in the hope of finally seeing again. The walling is his own, but he has with him his daughter Antigone who affirms her loyalty to her father and shows herself to be clairvoyant for two. Oedipus' destiny is earthly, his faith is not tarnished, the gods offer him an apotheosis. Loyalty weaves precious links with freedom. Antigone refuses the destiny offered to her by Creon, even if she is going to accomplish it. She acquires her freedom by remaining faithful to the gods, the only ones with authority. She gets rid of the bonds of society, bonds of submission to affirm what she believes. Antigone must get rid of the bonds of society. She could bring herself to this filiation made up of failures and opprobrium and let the boat go with the current. At the Ismene. She could agree to obey Creon's edict without saying anything. Freeing oneself from social ties in order, on the one hand, not to raise one's head, in order to blend into the group and into one's family (neither Ismene nor Eurydice stand up). Antigone is free and it is in this that she proves to be elusive. Antigone abolishes destiny. It slows down time and gives it a new tempo. She eternizes every moment of the end of her life.

The great awareness of her life, Antigone derives it from death. That of his father and that of his brothers. The gods wanted these dead. Outrage is the possibility of the gods. Men do it willy-nilly. Edmond Jabès wrote: “To compare one suffering to another suffering even if they are both caused by a common evil is arbitrary; because one cannot prejudge the capacity to suffer of a being. We see him in pain, but what we see is not the pain, it's him struggling with it. And again: "At the height of the pain, the cries of the victims are also the cries of children." The man puts on a grotesque face when he confronts another's pain; suffering is loneliness, all the more so when it resembles another suffering already experienced, like all suffering. Each suffering is based, asserts itself, believes in the singularity. “I know, it hurts” or “I know how you feel” don't express anything. The verb to know which comes up all the time to show clearly that nothing is new? So there is nothing more to learn? This one does not suffer or else his own pain is recurrent, echoing. He has no empathy or compassion except for himself in some way. He thinks that his pain surpasses other pains or that the pain of others cannot wait, much less erase this pain that is presented to him. He is driven by envy, because he is satisfied with this evil that he is no longer alone in living or having lived. Antigone, after all her suffering, is very aware of the singularity of suffering. Faced with her brother's body, Antigone comes to understand that life is like a river that no dam can stop. Life circulates and enters where it wants, life does not contain itself. Antigone buried her brother after her father, sadness succeeding sadness, Creon's outrage seals her decision to no longer be subject to the power of the law which goes against life. Life could slowly die out if death no longer received the respect it deserves. Each death recalls another death. Each death recalls a life. Faced with death, life is told; life is told, but no longer pretends to be a dialogue. Only knowledge creates a dialogue. Parents know their children, but children know things about their parents that they may not be aware of. Knowledge and consciousness feed and mutualize each other. Antigone accompanies her father to Colone. She witnesses his downfall, becomes his sole support, becomes his eyes, his cane, his rhythm, his pulse. From one generation to another, tested beyond all limits, this family through the father-daughter relationship will continue to be humiliated without ever losing its tenderness, its dignity. The father and the daughter never leave each other and Antigone never passes the slightest judgment on her father. Far from the revolutionary figure who, having been unable or unable to improve her family relations, believes that she will change the world by her reaction, Antigone espouses freedom in her family. Tell me how and from whom you are descended and I will tell you who you are. The generations follow each other, the traits, the meaning, the race, flow in the veins of each member of the family; this sap takes on multiple characters, numerous qualities, each traces a furrow in the diversity of its blood formula; some would kill each other if they knew of the existence of the other, others annihilate and resuscitate a little further, a little later... Meaning, filiation, race, lineage are so many words to say the character and qualities of each brewed in the cauldron of permanent experimentation. Imagine what Antigone would answer if asked her identity? Who are you Antigone? Who do you think you are? What constitutes you? What are the parts of your whole? Would she answer: "I am Antigone, daughter of Oedipus"? Antigone wouldn't answer, she wouldn't understand the question. Identity? An overrated modern idea. Identity results from a will to power that does not say its name. She predicts amnesia as she tries to contain life like a dam would. Antigone gives us a glimpse, a beginning of understanding of what life is; and life suffocates in identity. Antigone sheds light on human relations. All its flows which constitute us well in spite of ourselves also come out of us to create relationships between each of us. How to follow all these flows? How to identify them? We touch here directly on intelligence: not being able to absorb additional data, but rather the ability to see their outline, their origin and their direction and to really be part of them. The difficulty in the education that one transmits after having received it is to orient it and distribute it following a path faithful to this origin and this direction. The notions of nature and culture, head over heels! The understanding of the life that is coming (always from behind) and of the life that is coming (always without saying a word) cannot be identified only by our being and our education. We are much more than a simple addition, we are an alchemy. Antigone faced with the remains of Polynice realizes this, she sees the cosmogony of her family, she feels the weight of the past and projects this strength into the future. Nothing can stop him. How to stop the memory? Each gesture speaks of the past and recalls abjection, each gesture speaks of the future with its share of chance and uncertainty. Should we stop at one or the other? Life does not stop. If there is one thing life cannot do, it is to stop. So she continues. And in every life, every gesture can become a backwash of grief. Each gesture, the most innocuous, attacks our good nature and undermines it. It is made up of moments of grace and more innocuous moments. What would the moments of grace be without the trivial moments? A refrain. The backwash is never a catchphrase. No wave is like another… Life passes through us. Believing that we are the owner is a decoy, we are not even the custodian. What a lesson in humility! Antigone espoused this understanding very early on. You have to be yourself, respect yourself. We are the electrical conductor of life, we enable its transition. The key to dignity is at this price. Self, root, leaf, trunk and sap. Faced with the corpse of Polynice, during the funeral rite, Antigone understands this. Antigone is never seized by dereliction, or at least Sophocles does not show it, does not say it; dereliction asserts itself as a synonym of misery: what greater misery than to be alone, absolutely alone, alone for eternity; and a life lasts an eternity when one is alone. With the death of Polynices, Antigone faces this loneliness. Verse 905 is explained here. You have to transmit, little Antigone would have liked to transmit so much, she who benefited so much from transmission, but if there is no one to transmit to? In the face of death, in the face of absence, in the face of suffering, what remains? Loneliness gnaws at the bones. What remains when there is nothing left?

" Who calls ?  Nobody. Who's calling again? His own voice that he does not recognize and confuses with the one that has fallen silent. ¹ Where are you talking about ? I stand at your side and nothing, no one, can ever refuse me that or force me to move. There is a double movement of Antigone, nothing is fixed, there is a permanent movement, because it is perpetually filled with life, the sap which irrigates, infiltrates, circumvents and prolongs. I'm by your side, I'm here, in my place, and nothing and no one can tell me: “you're not in your place” or “you shouldn't be here”. Antigone brings together the figure of mother and sister for Polynices. I stand by your side because I find legitimacy in being there and nowhere else. All of Antigone's approach could be summed up by this formula. She challenges Creon, she honors her dead brother, and she stands before the king repeating the same phrase which is a concept. I am by your side, she said to Polynice, don't be afraid, don't fear the darkness that envelops you, don't think about what you have done wrong or not done, all life conceals unfulfilled promises, reproaches… don't be afraid, don't be afraid anymore. Let life pass through you, let it transform you, you are a ferryman, life came into you, you absorbed it, it continues on its way now that you are dead, let's mark the end with a white stone of your life on earth, the beginning of another life, the beginning of something else. Do not be afraid. I am here… Thus the heart contracts and expands, letting go of this life infusing this character and the qualities that make life cannot come from a reaction, the reaction would block the fires of life. How to receive and transmit without wanting to receive and transmit? How to live in this permanent alterity? This permanent modeling where undoing is as important as doing it. Polynice's death orchestrates in Antigone an absence of self and a self-understanding. Any death provokes an otherness, it forces us to come out of ourselves to be ourselves again, but another. Everything has changed places, nothing means quite the same thing, everything has changed and yet everything is the same. The family secretes this otherness and tends to lead its members to live it and accept it. No cause of rebellion is foreign to the family. Antigone doesn't complain about having an immature or angry or stupid father. Antigone does not pity her father, we do not see her feeling sorry for incest, scandal, outrage... Antigone, after having served her brother's funeral rites, stands up at his side, whatever brother has been, whatever he has done, whatever his faults, whatever he may be reproached for… Love does not impose these kinds of conditions. From its location and its time, Antigone brings together and concretizes the entirety of its lineage. We must accept to have discovered a treasure, to have understood it and accept to recognize that it does not belong to us. This is what Antigone does. She stands next to her brother and if she has accepted the outrages of life, she refuses the outrage of a man. Let us understand, for Antigone, as for the Greeks of her time, the outrages of life bear the signature of the gods. It is possible to revolt against these outrages, but if the gods will, these outrages will be accomplished. Human resources are limited in the face of the gods and all effort proves futile. On the other hand, it is unthinkable that a man, whoever he is, king or beggar, should be able to say what is or is not, what is done or not done. It is unthinkable not to rise up in the face of the outrage of a man, because the outrage is not of man. Or he asks for compensation. Antigone refuses the law of Creon, because this law adds insult to insult, and its nature exceeds the power of Creon. She surpasses her power. Antigone endured the authority of the gods through the stigmata of her family, she stands up to someone who interferes in life, someone who does not live, who seems to live. Creon in support of power has metamorphosed into a kind of automaton. Creon has lost the sense of his lineage, he should remember that he becomes king after Oedipus, that without Oedipus, he would probably never have held this position; he should remember where he came from, as he is of the line of Oedipus and even though the stock was often common in those times, he emerges from a common race in Polynices and Antigone. From this same stock, two branches are born: Creon, who believes in his destiny, who does what he says, who enacts and strengthens society, puts a brake on decadence, obliges everyone in conscience to obey the new rules, but who stops life in a certain way, who believes he is fixing it, doing what he wants with it by the sole act of his will, Creon refuses to identify the different flows by centralizing life. As soon as he takes charge, he moves away from discernment, because thinking of it as an act of will, he horizontalizes the function of leader, he believes himself to be master of everything and everyone. Creon breaks the flow of life by deciding to master it; he enters a tunnel he has built himself, his prison, his immurement, and he convinces himself that he has a destiny… Destiny so easily takes on the traits of identity and the quest for identity those of a mirror to the larks, of a quest for oneself in front of others. Both enclose. It is so easy to give in to the temptation of fate, to feel at ease, comfortable in it. Individualism causes a death of the soul. Prison and freedom turn out to be life options for men. Antigone chooses freedom, that this leads to her death turns out to be an anecdote, because she chose freedom and duty and love, she did not resign herself and, as soon as she understood her vocation , she frightens Creon and freezes him in his destiny. When he will have the opportunity to get out of it, he will no longer know the feeling of freedom. He will secrete his own misfortune which will lock him up alive until the end of time. Antigone, frail and terrible, conquering and humble, standing next to the remains of her brother, her father, her family, stops time. She stands up. It abolishes the mechanical movement that life can sometimes adopt. Antigone is free as freedom is constantly won, it would be more accurate to say that Antigone is freed, because we never stop freeing ourselves, and learning to free ourselves. Freedom is the most repressed gift, because freedom is truth, it is the best interpreter of life. It tames destiny and calls to become more than oneself.