Part 5: Authority

In ancient Greece, men know each other and recognize each other in the eyes of their family, their loved ones, their community. Women reserve the mirror for themselves, which started with beauty, femininity and seduction. Reflection is everywhere. “There is no place that does not see you” writes Rilke. Can we exist without reflection? Can we be aware without knowing ourselves? Man should not see himself in the mirror for fear of being absorbed by his image. This image that manages to make us forget that we are there. If we think what we see, we hear it, it resonates in us, and we dream it too. Our image escapes us as soon as we see it. Thus the woman adjusts herself in the mirror when the man could lose his foundations there. The dream, binomial of memory, conceals time and numbs it. What did we see and when? The gaze and the reflection and the imagination interpenetrate and cannot be dissociated. To see and to know oneself merges among the Greeks. To see, to know oneself... but not too much, because if man is a marvel, in the sense of an incident, of a fascinating fracture, he also conceals his own terror, he exterminates and tortures himself, and he is indeed the only “animal” in this case.

Authority represents this limit, this invisible frontier, this surprising force which holds man back from ceasing to be a man, for there is no greater sin for the ancient Greek than to succumb to savagery, to call for it, to let oneself be guided and led by it, to take a liking to it . The amartia will soon become the sin, continuing to be the fault, the error, the failure. To know oneself, but not too much, constitutes the mask of identity at the time of ancient Greece. You have to know yourself, approach yourself, define yourself and "individuate" yourself in order to be; but what does it mean to be? if not discern, adjust and combine his nature with his education. In our time that judges the past, it has become almost forbidden to say the link that binds us to the ancient man. To know each other, but not too much, what does that mean? Adjusting nature and culture, balancing the balance between what we are, what we are becoming and what we were. Why the past? Because we are a concentrate, and we are less, a priori, than the elements that constitute us. Too often this equation is omitted these days, or minimized, which amounts to the same thing. The mechanisms specific to our time exonerate man from his memory, after all, doesn't he have the technique, immeasurable memory? What does a memory of its own need? If the need seizes us to want to remember, which is equivalent to wanting to know, it is only necessary to type in a search engine. Practical, easy, simple, fast; memory and its multiple ramifications cannot compete for a single second, not to mention that our memory is never sure to remember or what it remembers! I am talking here about the memory that we build up for ourselves, the one that is given and sifted through our nature and that is sedimented over the course of our lives. If I am not armed with this own memory, only equipped with the memory of others, generously or profitably offered on the Internet, what meaning can my life have? A borrowed meaning in every sense of the word. Meaning, or lack of meaning, arises from the interpenetration of nature and culture. The two never cease to gaze at each other and coax each other, to give themselves to each other the better to blame each other for their respective existence. The negation of nature by technology gives modern projects, and this for the first time in the history of man, power and authority. At least he thinks so.

Creon dominates and masters his role as soon as he is enthroned. At least he thinks so. In fact, Creon's power wanes the moment he becomes king. How many politicians have thus gone astray believing they have arrived? The much-desired power could begin to devour them. The world is not based on having, but on being. Creon will only find out at the very end of the play. Antigone knows this from the first word of the tragedy. It is not enough to have in order to become. It even turns out to be useful not to possess in order to be fully. Possession forces us to move into another dimension and dispossess us of our inner wealth. The metamorphosis is not necessarily positive. The modern project, which never ceases to delight in the progress of technology, does not realize that there is no enchantment there. Thus man believes he has discovered a secret when he is the secret, and he forgets that he is when he discovers it. Can we sketch an explanation of the formulas of Delphi? Thus the transmission has become an option to check since my possession cannot be shared. But, oh miracle, I can share what I am. There is an amazing moment in every man's life: the crossing that leads us to ourselves. As if you had to cross a membrane to be yourself, to get closer to yourself, to establish an intimacy with yourself; to get an idea of ​​who we are. Our life is another life; like a parallel life. We can see how much we would have had to react differently to understand for a moment; how our life has changed; that everything we cling to is hanging by a thread. A membrane separates us from another life, from the other life, from our life. What belongs to us matters less than what we are and we are wrong to believe, under the wing of envy, that what belongs to us can define who we are. We are always a becoming. This is how the son always respects his father who is more than him, even if he has infinitely less. Becoming commands respect. But becoming obliges us to dispossess ourselves, because it forces relaxation, it refuses the reaction which is an extraction from the social and only offers communitarianism, and it lives its identity by supporting what precedes and apprehending what comes. The future is Hémon, here he comes face to face with his father who condemns his fiancée to the death penalty for having buried his proscribed brother. The corypheus announces it: “Here is Hémon, the last born of your children. Is he coming because he mourns the fate of Antigone, the tender child who was to be his wife, and he suffers intolerably from being cheated out of this marriage? Hémon arrives by crossing the membrane, that is to say, he takes it upon himself; it is difficult in our time to understand that self-control, the endorsement of the fault that one does not think of oneself, but of the other, and which necessarily is also one's own, necessarily because I have already committed this kind of fault, this fault is not unknown to me, this endorsement of the fault which, even if it is not of oneself, could have been, the endorsement therefore, of the possibility of the exposure of my weakness, a moment of intense and prodigious humility, transgresses my ego and obliges it to come out of its comfort, this endorsement provokes, without my even having to call for it or seek it, the crossing of the membrane, this metamorphosis that allows me to be a little more than me. Hemon didn't want to run away. He is courageous and fought well for the liberation of the city. He never had any bitterness towards his father. It is easy to understand that he is a good boy, an attentive son who has never posed any particular problem. A son who comes to plead the cause of his fiancée in front of his father whom he respects more than anyone. Creon, enamored of the force he believes he holds in his hand, provokes him immediately. He will never again have a friendly interlocutor: “What was going to be your wife, aren't you there to lash out at your father? » And then this astonishing sentence, showing Creon between two waters, not quite king, still father: « You, at least, are you not bound to me in all circumstances whatever I do? A premeditated sentence; prescribed by the father to the king: "You, at least, are you not bound to me in all circumstances, whatever I do? A blank check. Creon continues to be desperate, from the beginning to the end of the tragedy. He is with people distant from him as well as with people close to him. It is the fact of people who are afraid, who have traded freedom for power, they are constantly afraid of their shadow and they think of forging links, creating intimacy with the first comer or the closest relative, shamelessly, because they are helpless. Creon turns out to be terribly fragile. Hémon arrives, the Coryphée, a nice organizer, announces it cautiously, and Créon begins to defend himself, that is to say to attack. The reaction is everywhere. We are robots, not only Creon, not only the corypheus, not only Hémon… We are all robots! We know nothing and we brag about everything! Ah, there is no marvel except men, but what marvel? Who are we ? To become who we are, to pass the membrane, does not require revolution, but metamorphosis. Skipping the membrane constrains the passer. The membrane compels it to endorse another self. And this other is a completely other; far from the other idealized exotic. Passing the membrane verifies the metamorphosis that swells in each man often without his understanding and affirming it.

Hémon arrives, he may have ideas in mind, he curses against his father, because he has been informed of his plan against Antigone, but Hémon does not want to give in to what he has been told, he comes to see his father, because to confront one's father is to see one another, to know one another and to understand one another. He is coming. “Father, I am yours. You have excellent principles that show me the path I will follow, because I will have no reason to prefer another marriage, since you are my wise guide. Hémon is the youngest of his siblings and he immediately shows, from his first sentence, his love for his father, his deep respect, his acceptance of his decision. Creon could then, reassured, talk to his son, lay down his arms and have a peaceful discussion, on the contrary he will show his true face, not that of the loving father, but that of the dictator: "there is indeed my son , what your heart must be filled with: follow your father's decision in every way without flinching. Creon continues treacherously: "Because of the pleasure you take with a woman, know well that the embrace is cold, when a wicked woman shares your bed in your house." What more serious injury than having the disease at home. Creon then excites another quality, but this time unwittingly: "Throughout the town, she was openly disobeying, I'm not going to judge myself in front of the town, as if I had lied." Pride suffocates Creon. Would he really lose something by accepting that he was wrong? Couldn't he pass for an intelligent and benevolent king by acknowledging his error? Creon is like the fish that has just tasted the bait, he struggles and tears half of his jaw out of fear, and envy; for fear of the opinions of others. Out of a desire for a model king who directs everything with a masterful hand without ever listening to anyone. “I will put her to death. That on top of that, she sings a hymn to Zeus, the family blood god! Creon dreams of order, of an order that has never existed, either in Thebes or elsewhere. An order of robots. He ends his diatribe with the place of women in society: “And never at any price have the underside in front of a woman. Because it is better, if ever necessary, to fall from the act of a man. Rather than passing for less strong than a woman. Hémon responds to his father, always armed with the deepest respect and not wishing to intervene or take sides. He tries to place the debate on another plane. He wants to give a new perspective to the dialogue. He wants his father to understand that the people do not agree, that the people would like to see a little clemency in their king, that the family laws to which Antigone responded are also worth existing and being. taken into account, and above all, he told his father that one does not govern alone: ​​"Don't keep a single idea in your head: that nothing is right except what you say, as you say it. Anyone who thinks of himself that he alone is reasonable, or that he has a language or a sensibility that no one else has, those, when you open, you see that they are empty. Hémon seeks to offer an alternative to his father by letting him hear the noises of the people. of his people. He does it with elegance and sobriety. Creon has become too intoxicated with his anger and Haemon says so to him: “Give scope to your anger, allow it to overturn! Even the Corypheus begins to sway in the direction of Haemon and opens up to Creon the possibility granted to him and intimates him to seize it. But as Creon persists, the rest of the dialogue with his son becomes tumultuous. Hémon will get carried away in front of the hardening of his father. Creon will be more stubborn. "I could well see you governing an empty country on your own." Creon: “this boy is obviously fighting for his wife”. Hémon: “If you are the woman. It is you that I worry about first”. The dialogue is intrepid, it varies, but never in intensity, what is happening there is immense, because it is about the love of a son for his father whom he no longer recognizes. "I could well see you governing an empty country on your own." Hémon knows very well what he is talking about. The tyrant does not govern the people, the tyrant governs a crowd, which he directs to the right or to the left, to the left or to the right. This crowd is equivalent to a vacuum, nothing really separates them. Creon by his edict already begins to lead an empty country, empty of personalities, the people begin to hide, they murmur, they are afraid. Creon is an angry man. Anger contaminates, like a cancer, it spreads everywhere and prevents thinking. How could he hear his son pleading with him? “Give scope to your anger, allow it to overturn. Hémon echoes the people, the little people. “The people of this Thebes, who make the city, are of a contrary opinion. And Creon submits this revealing answer: “So the city will tell me what order I must give? The city of Creon responds to the people of Hémon who want to bring Creon back to Earth, to put him back close to the people. Without listening to these people, these little people, this people, demos, and explains to his father that he is going to cut himself off from those he must guide. Hémon walked the streets and alleys of Thebes, thinking and ruminating on the best way to face his father: we should present ourselves before him, meet him and speak to him with infinite respect, for that Hémon should not force himself, because he loves his father or at least nothing indicates the contrary, but Hémon would also have to stand up to his father, that he stands up and positions himself, that he anchors himself in what he knows: he is a loving son, the people of Thebes feel sorry for Antigone's fate, wish that the blood would stop flowing... Hémon will take root in his certainties, his own and those he picked up while walking the streets of Thebes. Anchored, rooted, Hémon addresses his father, he wants to establish a bridge, he begins: “Father, I am yours. Throughout the first part of the dialogue, he does not wish to appear weak, defending a woman amounts to showing a certain fragility at this time, even if it is his fiancée. So Hémon anchors himself, takes root, but he can't help but be a little askew; he fears that his father only sees his certainties, because he has now made them his own, rests on a patchwork, that there is a hitch. And how could his father not see him? Who knows Hemon better than Creon? Where is the child talking about? First from his parents. The little child who begins to live appeals to his parents for almost everything. Hémon becomes like all children again, a small child in front of his father. Like all children, he cannot escape the shadow of authority which rises invisible behind every parent and obliges the child to a perpetual humility which may be felt by some as a humiliation. Authority becomes denser and really exists in the reciprocity of those who submit to it, of those who use it. What differentiates humility from humiliation? Acceptance, therefore docility. Family authority brings together all forms of authority and concentrates them, renouncing it, refusing it, rebelling against it, will produce a headlong rush whose appetite will never be satiated. Identity is also at the heart of authority, the first identity will reveal itself in acceptance or revolt against authority. All the special and specious mechanisms, which we will make, borrow, rent, often from others, from our parents without remembering them, represent nothing or would turn out to be quite different if, originally, we had followed the path of humility rather than that of rebellion. It will still be possible to change your attitude after reflection and return to a simpler or more rebellious attitude, as you wish... the search for your own identity is similar to a quest that ends with life, because throughout his life, the gentleman will try to find ways to refine the self-expression in his life. Can't we further enlarge the field of vision, wouldn't the story of a family be in a way a quest for self-expression? Can we not see through the various ramifications that the same stock deploys the expression of an identity revealed precisely by its multiple facets? But that it proves difficult to take a step back, to deviate from our hobbies even for a while, to reach the height of view necessary to see our smallness? We are too obsessed with certain facets of the kaleidoscope which intoxicates us, but leaves us idle. Hémon would like to bring his father to gain height. The son asks the father to put under a bushel this terrible anger which animates him. Anger forms a crystallization which always represents an obstacle to gaining altitude. “Give scope to your anger, allow it to overturn! (In Paul Mazon's translation: "Come, yield, to your anger grant a little appeasement."). Hémon wants his father to agree, because he loves his father and he loves Antigone. Far from the love often tinged with a tearful empathy that has become commonplace these days, a battle is being played out around the meaning to be given to one's love. Here nobody wants to give in, because no sign of love is less important than the other. The battle between Hemon and Creon unfolds with a bang around the law he has enacted. Hémon underlines the issue to his father whom he wishes to force to consider his location, from where his son speaks to him with the same filial respect that he has always shown him, but also with the firmness of who knows he is handling a question. conditioning existence. Creon refuses to move. He refuses to grant Hémon what his son has come to implore. Hémon's attitude is the same as Antigone's, with that extra mixture of respect and love that should have made Creon bend, but Antigone took him out of his hinges, he doesn't lose his temper, and the anger sets in. nourishes pride, terrible hubris, condemned in an intangible way by the gods.

To obey well, it first comes first to love. Love weaves the bonds in us that will allow us to agree to do something that we have not decided and that we have no objective reason to carry out if not the goodwill of a third person . Love therefore turns out to be the key to authority since authority rests on obedience like an old person on his cane. Let's go back to the source, Hémon wanders the streets of Thebes, he refuses to anger, yet it boils in him, he expects his grievance vis-à-vis his father to find a favorable outcome, and he listens to the good people of Thebes, he hears them and wants them to be heard by his father. Hémon is armed with the same force which splits into two bundles: love for Antigone and love for his father. He wants to bring these two beams together. He thinks that one never loves unnecessarily and that love remains the best extinguisher of anger. At this moment in the afternoon, everything is determined. If Hemon has doubts, the corypheus and Creon also have them when he arrives. Hémon respects his father, it is the demonstration of his love, especially at a time like that of ancient Greece where tenderness and affection were not yet values ​​that men claimed. What Hémon knows well and this is very noticeable from the start of the dialogue, is his father's angry character. But anger obstructs transcendent issues. Anger inhibits by suggesting that it disinhibits and blocks the way to reconciliation. When he appears before Creon, it is Haemon's only fear. But it is a mountain. Hémon fears this anger and his presentiment will turn out to be correct. Creon's anger will, as anger often knows how to do with great talent, feed on itself. But what Hémon does not know yet is that anger will diminish his father's authority over him, as well as its corollaries which are therefore love and respect. Sophocles will circumscribe authority by letting power emerge, pierce and hatch.

What concept does Creon handle upon his accession to power? Strength. Thebes emerges from a fratricidal war. The city thought it would succumb under the battering of Polynice's army. Creon would take it into his head to be lenient in order to restore the unity of his subjects, especially since it was his children who fought each other. But no, Creon having come to power thinks only of his power. He is immediately intoxicated by this strength. Creon is intoxicated with power, it is a virus that seizes many men as soon as they sit on a throne. Creon becomes king and imposes his power through a law that he has weighed, but not enough, that he may have found without looking, which seems to him to carry all the power of his charge: he decides that the vanquished will be delivered as food for ferocious beasts, without burial therefore. There exists between the power and the people the same gap as between the power and the authority, to want to satisfy too much obliges to cause an imbalance. If you must not please or rather seek to please anyone, you must not decide without auscultating, without probing the hearts. Creon must have thought of that. We are talking about a man who has reigned in the past, who is no stranger to power, he does not discover it, so he knows the pitfalls, the trapdoors that open on the path to power. He proclaims his law and commits a fault: he forgets that a king manifests the authority of the gods. Although Jesus Christ has not yet clearly drawn the line between power and authority, Creon knows that his power is not unlimited. It is terrible to see Creon, the prince, who tests his power by confusing it with authority. This feeling does not leave the reader of the tragedy and imposes an aspect of Creon that Sophocles obviously put there to be seen. Creon tests and tests itself. He wants to look like a king as soon as he wears the crown. His surprise on learning of Antigone's misdeed knocks him on his feet, because, secretly, inwardly, Creon hoped to lay an iron fist on Thebes. Creon provokes and establishes the imbalance between the forces represented by power and authority. Creon surrenders to the power of force and forgets to question the superior forces, the transcendent forces, the gods. Not that the gods would have answered him, but the search for a solution higher than oneself, independence vis-à-vis power, therefore vis-à-vis force, are lacking in the government of Creon.

Authority must come from a higher order, because it rests on acquiescence, reciprocity, and in respectful dialogue to define a common course of action between the order and the obedient. Authority, the will to accept authority, is also based on an aspiration to become more than one is, whether through the example of the elders, the errors of the past, the long term and the elevation sight; we must live this past and not look at it. Creon does not choose this path, he decides to stick to his only feeling which urges him to immediately assert his power in order to derive from it an authority attested to by all. Antigone will come out of his law to remind him that we always depend on someone, that there are transcendent laws, which he has pretended to forget. Here the notion of balance is highlighted by Sophocles, this notion as old as the world, continues to govern the world. The notion of balance is verified everywhere at all times and this notion is never better verified than by Christianity, because the only real desire for the balance of things is based on the desire to identify and circumscribe envy in a zone. where it turns out to be useless. To eradicate envy amounts to preventing man from destroying himself under the pretext that he is a man like the 20th century, the century of envy if there is one, has shown and attested to. Créon is not guilty of not having listened to the people, or should he have held a referendum in order to know the opinion of his population. Creon tests, because he imposes his law and seems to wait for a reaction to crush him and show his strength, but we are not sure, because he shows great surprise when the guard comes to tell him of the disobedience to his command: "I'll tell you. Someone recently buried the dead, he sprinkled the body with dry earth, then he left after performing the customary rites. A new facet of Creon's character comes to light after the guard's revelations: he develops a paranoia that will not cease to well up in him throughout the play, in a delicate way, but without preventing its intensity. Creon's accession to power locks him in and isolates him from himself. If the syndrome is well known to people who come to power, it never ceases to amaze, because it strikes systematically and men come up against it just as frequently. Creon will be offended. He is stung by Antigone's attitude. He is disrespected. In any case, does he put Antigone's conduct on the account of disrespect when it is true that Antigone disobeys and shows himself irreverent towards his king; it expresses a defense that must be heard. Creon only hears it forced. For him, disrespect comes first. For Antigone, the law of Creon had to be broken, because it was based on a fallacious presupposition. Antigone experiences self-to-self coincidence when Creon separates from Creon by ascending the throne. Creon separates from himself and renounces the coincidence of self to self by donning the costume of king. He becomes a character, he forgets himself and believes he is becoming a little more than himself, whereas to increase himself one must learn to obey, or Creon thinks that king, he will only have to command. So he uses force. Creon transforms into a tyrant. He becomes what he imagines he should be. It is the enantiodromos, this moment and this place among the Greeks, which tells the true nature of a man when, at the crossroads, he must confront the choice of the road to follow. The enantiodromos is the fork from which is born the one who becomes… Like an upstart taking possession of the thunderbolt of Zeus, Creon lacks the education and understanding of his power which can only be given to him by authority. Creon thinks in terms of rights when he should first think in matters of duty. 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 can't be anything, otherwise there is no Antigone… Creon's first words express his dismay at Antigone's crime: “And you dared to go beyond such a law? Creon does not understand that his order has been flouted, he must strike without pity whoever has acted against him, that is to say against the king. Pride plays an essential role in the character of Creon, he is vexed, he cannot bear that he has been disobeyed, that his edict has been flouted in full view of the entire population of Thebes. Thereafter Creon will refuse to change his mind for fear of passing for a madman or an immature in the eyes of his people. His reflection brings more than his actions to his eyes, because they are foggy, "narcissized". Creon divides his interlocutors into two clans, those who are with him and those who are against him. He no longer negotiates and threatens those who oppose. Force controls it, when force must never serve except to protect, and it is always so with those who give themselves up body and soul to the will to power. To handle force as power is to believe that fear is the engine of power and establishes authority when it is more like the caress of a parent on the cheek of the child after an act of stupidity. If power reigns in practice, it must always be a morning of authority where it will believe to be sufficient unto itself. Creon no longer knows where he is talking about or at least he is talking about an imaginary place where he has just arrived and which did not exist before his arrival and which was created by him for him. As if being king, Creon was no longer made up of the same elements of flesh, bone and genetics as the day before his coronation. Creon embraces and gives himself the identity of a king who forgets where he comes from and what he owes to his past which is erased by his coming to power. If identity proves to be a search and partly a construction built by one's tastes and choices, a whole foundation of identity exists, even pre-exists, in us before us. Too many identities are written nowadays, crystallizing on this background or only on research, when balance presides over identity. The permanent return to the concept of nature and culture obsesses and revolts at the same time. There is a force of agony in “identifying”, because the risk of reaction exists, the risk of crystallizing and of no longer allowing life to circulate within us. Identity is divided on the one hand into a base which is in us without us, our nature and the education we have received, and a movement which is constitutive of our life which discovers elements which are not listed by our nature or our education, but which must be read at the height of our nature and our education. Much of this process happens without our even having to think about it. And yet, it is essential, primordial and obliges us to the permanent revision of this nature and this education, as well as to the permanent revision of these new elements. Balance, here again, is essential. There is no question of forgetting or worse of not being aware of our nature, of forgetting or worse of not having received our education, to approach the shores of novelty, or else we will be nothing but one threadbare flag in the wind, we will have no criteria for judging novelty and we would risk seeing in this novelty only novelty, and loving it only for that. What a pity ! A novelty could be created endlessly by sneaks or manipulators to always replace what exists with a new form of law or governance and we would no longer even be the pennant in the wind, but the dead leaf never knowing where it is going to arise, because no longer having any consciousness of itself, because dead. Creon acts as if he no longer wants to hear about Creon, but only about the king, in this case he forgets that the king is nothing without Creon. The agony of identity consists in struggling with oneself, in always seeking the coincidence of oneself with oneself, in questioning authority to admire its arm which unfolds without violence, without noisy force, and which helps my efforts and directs my consciousness by allowing it to access a higher level. The memories, the memory must help not to commit what we condemned in the past or what shocked us. But Créon forgets himself when he comes to power, he will thus push amnesia to the point of no return.

Creon begins by summoning the old men of the city. He wishes to assert himself with the elders as the new leader. Very quickly appears in his speech the desire to make a clean sweep of the past war and to open a new era. Mastery is rooted here as well as the will to power. Any man who arrives at office adorning himself with the finery of the providential man who comes to improve or even straighten out or rectify what precedes him, places himself as judge and party and rejects the humility which nevertheless should always protect him. Creon recalls the better to forget the foundation that he is king, because he is the closest relative of the dead. Of the two dead: Polynices and Eteocle. But Creon forgets Oedipus. Voluntarily. Creon erases Oedipus when he is its last offshoot. Thus Creon does not come to power by chance. It can be based on a rich experience which, from Laios to Oedipus, deserves that we bend over for a moment and study it in order to be inspired by it. Creon is going to know his first misdeed, from which all the others will continue to be born and swarm, by eying this tradition, by placing himself above it, by overhanging it, by gauging it with haughtiness and by being persuaded to do better. Here is the mechanism of envy in action, an organization chart which is put in place and unfolds its consequences without anyone being able to change anything about it, without being able to reverse this process, for the essential reason that we have forgotten the source, as soon as the source of an action is forgotten, as soon as the amnesia of experience and the ontological void acquired, all actions become circles in the water. The law is anchored in experience, or it is not, or it sinks into the will to power. Creon, after having shown contempt for Oedipus, accedes to the throne and wants to part with the experience, that of Oedipus, that of his sons… He issues a decree which imposes it by its force, its singularity. He refuses Polynice his burial, because the latter attacked his city (in fact his brother, Eteocles, king of this city which he had to share). When envy kicks in, everything goes awry. Envy takes everything. Envy arises from judgment. As soon as Creon compares, in thought, what he wants to do and what he wants to avoid, as soon as he takes Oedipus and his sons as a scarecrow, then the mechanism of envy is set in motion. Disharmony begets Evil. Envy causes disharmony between thought and action, it disorganizes being by making it doubt. Doubt is the devil. “Let your yes be a yes, let your no be a no. Disharmony is everything else. You have to have a good self-awareness, but not too much... to know yourself, to succeed in approaching this self-to-self coincidence represents the bet that every man, whatever his responsibilities, must take and win... But the separation between the experience and its ally humility, which results from it, is built on the will to power which forces us to forget experience, to place ourselves above, above and finally beyond, without faith or law. At the source of this separation, a tiny choice, I mean that the bifurcation which pushes to pass from one state to another is not even noted, is not even noticed, but irremediably changes any being who borrows it .

The story of Narcissus illustrates failure through lack of humility . That day, Narcisse went out early. Narcissus loved to hunt when night and day entwined with melancholy and the chiaroscuro drowned the shadows of men. The young man was the son of a river and a river.
Liriope was his mother, as she asked Tiresias what her child's destiny would be, the diviner replied: "If he does not know himself". Narcissus was so handsome that he attracted everyone's desire. Even the nymphs wanted the young man to look at them for a moment. But no, Narcissus reserved his fiery beauty, his sinuous and sensual lines, the fire in his eyes for the stags of the forest. Echo was a pretty nymph. Her destiny changed the day she met Narcisse's gaze. She was never the same again. She dreamed of uniting with Narcissus, of marrying her beauty and making her her own. Hera had chastised Echo, who was the most talkative of the nymphs. She had taken away this gift of speech and now the pretty nymph only knew how to repeat the last words she heard. One day, Echo follows Narcissus. She wants to meet this gaze whose memory continues to haunt her. She hides behind a tree when Narcissus finds himself alone in the middle of the forest. He calls his hunter friends who have moved away. Only Echo responds. Narcissus believes it to be his companions. Echo believes Narcissus sucks her in with all of his being. She introduces herself to him and hugs him. Narcissus pushes her away. Echo runs away. The young nymph will never recover from this affront. The eyes of the one she loved, those eyes she so wanted to see again, this time struck her down and banished her. She lets herself die. Having become dry as a stone, there will remain of her only a voice which continues to be the dream of hearing. Nemesis, the goddess of justice, proved to be preponderant for the ordering of the relationships between men and gods. She heard the cries of the nymphs friends of Echo and of a number of young people repulsed unceremoniously by the proud Narcissus. One could not despise the laws of love, believe oneself above them and above surrounding men without offending the gods in their susceptibility. Narcisse, one day when he had hunted a lot, was quenching his thirst at a spring. He leaned over the wave and stopped short. He plunges his hand into the water, but fails to grasp what causes his excitement. Facing him, for the first time, Narcissus meets eyes that hold him in spite of himself, that he doesn't want to despise, that he would like to pamper. Narcissus is bewitched by his gaze. He falls in love with it until nothing exists around it. - What does he see ?
He ignores her; but what he sees consumes him; the same error that deceives his eyes excites them. Captivated by his gaze, Narcissus can no longer sleep and no longer eats. He has only one desire: to possess what he sees. To possess the object of this possession. Unable to grasp or touch what he is since he does not know himself, since he no longer recognizes himself, he dies of contemplating. Narcissus did not survive his passion. He fell to the ground from the height of his gaze, privileging having over being, going out without having received the consent of his own image, of his being, having forgotten it. Narcissus cannot save himself since he is unaware that he has fallen in love with his own image. Narcissus does not know himself, because he does not meet. Tiresias's vision is sketchy as his predictions often are, but one can also think that if Narcissus had met and recognized himself, he would then perhaps have started to privilege being over having, realizing of what he really was. Closeness and closeness can be opposites and Narcissus experiments with both approaches, but lets his pride interfere and cause repulsion from what might have set him free. The surest and most frequent way to approach the divine is the discovery and understanding of man. Oedipus understood this well by solving the riddle of the Sphinx: it is necessary to pass through man to approach the gods, because man represents the choir of the divine.

Creon's syndrome corroborates Ovid's phrase: “No one holds his own secret. Creon catches the well-known evil of Narcissus . At a glance, he is lost and swooned over his image, what he represents. What should be done ? To know each other or to ignore each other? The ancient gods did not give an answer either after causing the fall, destruction or, ultimately, amnesia. Does Narcissus conflict with Delphi? Is he the only ancient being not to have to know himself and to have to progress on this path? The darkness of the prophecies weaves a permanent trap for man as if the gods constantly wanted man to stumble and appear as a simpleton. Couldn't we, shouldn't we, weave a link between this prophecy: “if he doesn't know himself” and Pindar's “become who you are”? Why haven't we sufficiently understood the formula “Where are you talking about? which inaugurates time and space and defines the person? The genius of Sophocles consists in saying what time will confirm: human illnesses are timeless. The most illuminating example of human nature is found in the New Testament when Peter and Jesus Christ talk together and Peter urges his master to believe his devotion to be completely sincere. Thus, Jesus announces to him that the sun will not have point that he will have denied him three times. The first place every man talks about is this: his weakness. Taking into account the limits of each, not always to resolve them, but also to overcome them, obliges to reason from what one is and not from what one believes to be. Any man who does not know his weaknesses, who forgets them, who does not take them into account is above ground, as we are used to saying nowadays. Above ground meaning that we are nourished by a pasture that is not ours, that we deny our pasture to find any other pasture better than our own. Hors-sol is also said to be exotic in the manner of Victor Segalen. Above ground also means that the comments received could be obtained anywhere else without this posing a problem, these comments being without roots, translatable into any language and exportable such as a “framework” or a “shared library” in computer science. The formula "above ground" forbids answering the question "where are you talking about?" » and the first formula likes to taunt the second as identity or « far-right ». By dint of having wanted to dodge this question, we destroyed him. In the future it will no longer be possible to ask where we are speaking from, because we will have reached such a level of abstraction and uprooting that this question will no longer even have any meaning. Creon embodies this notion of power. He has uprooted all ancestry in him, he is doing something new, he embodies the new, the new power, but also the only authorized one; he embodies right and duty; he embodies everything. In the question “Where is more talking about? ", time and space, past and present try to be circumscribed and told, because it is necessary to take into account the wholeness of a person at the moment when he speaks, and if the wholeness exists in his words, these same words tell the whole of his being. How to speak without being oneself? By taking oneself for another. Creon suffers from the Narcissus syndrome; the one who falls in love with his image without knowing that it is his, without knowing that it is himself. "Become who you are" is not the same as "become yourself" or "Become what you are worth". We do not count the good or bad actions in order to capitalize our actions. “Become who you are” means sinking into silence, its silence, in the company of what we are, at all times, and which we must by our action help to develop. “Become who you are” defines the vocation by pointing out the education necessary to understand one's vocation.

Narcissism, disease of the time, characteristic of communitarianism and participating in it, announces the decline of a society . When everyone in their environment begins to look at themselves in a mirror that can only be shimmering, all critical thinking is diluted. This complacency is triggered by the loss of bearings, the blurring of one's origin and any form of transmission, but above all everyone thus begins to look at his reflection and the brilliance of the neighbor in a society that has forgotten all form of authority. Recognition is obtained from the comparison of its image with the image of the neighbor. Recognition, which is no longer immediate as it is within communities, is now based on envy and envy alone. Some media such as television have become the main organ. This fragmentation rests and flourishes on the soil of oblivion and relativism when nothing has any more meaning, everything can potentially have some. The confusion that has always existed between power and authority, a confusion wonderfully embodied by Creon from the pen of Sophocles, allows a horizontal and immanent and monotonous vision. The mirror, this tool refused to men in Antiquity so that they do not let themselves be lulled by their image, finds in modern times an additional measure in what should be considered as a perversion, where Narcissus fell in love with his image without knowing that it is him (“if he does not know himself”), the modern man takes a photo of himself, retouches this photo and knows this image perfectly with its truth and its falsity and exposes it people to love him back. Both cheer and take turns almost immediately to incarnate indefinitely the ephemeral of this reflection of glory.

Everyone dreams of their moment of glory, a form of ultimate recognition, at a time when the ephemeral reigns as an absolute standard, this uneasy immediacy, because it prohibits meditation, intimacy, inner life by replacing them with suffocating din, the prosecuting mob, the perverse indecency . Creon becomes king, he grabs a mirror and likes what he sees. His hubris, his pride strangles his soul and pushes him to forget the existence of the latter. Because it is the soul that balances the person all the time shared between his nature and his culture, the spirit and the flesh in a certain way. Creon, in love with the image of him as a king, begins to imagine not what the king must do, but what he as a king must do, and how the attraction of this madly magnificent image permeates him, intoxicates him. and the header, Creon imagines in his unbridled mind the craziest, most extraordinary actions, because nothing is too good for this magnificent king who inhabits him. Creon no longer knows where he is talking about. He cannot know it, he is now above ground, that is to say he no longer tells us a story, a memory, his own and that of his city, he hardly says a moment more, because the law against the burial of Polynices proves an ignominy and a law which is not in the power of the king. “To imagine in the Christian city a criminal whom the temporal power would like to punish by deprivation of eternal salvation, by precipitation into eternal hell. » .
Sophocles indicates through the character of Creon the impermanence of this defect in man, a defect dictated, enslaved, by pride, prince of sin in Antiquity as in Christianity, accompanied by his faithful aide-de-camp, the 'urge. Narcissus and Creon do not understand that envy strangles them by leading them to pamper and adore an image, an idol. It is envy which, accompanied by power, pushes Creon to decide on an impossible law which transgresses his power by granting himself authority. “Don't keep a single idea in your head: that nothing is right except what you say, as you say it! Anyone who thinks of himself that he alone is reasonable, or that he has a language or a sensibility that no one else has, those, when you open, you see that they are empty. Hémon wants his father to open his eyes. It carries popular common sense with it, it echoes the people, the ethnos people. Hémon will state the observation of his father's way of governing: "I could well see you governing an empty country on your own" and his sentence, reminding his father that there is an authority: "I see you committing an wrong against justice. And again: "Could it be that I am committing a fault by exercising my power?"
"It's because you don't exercise it when you trample on the honors that we owe to the gods."
The dialogue between Creon and his son ends in mad violence. Creon, mad with rage that people do not like the image of him as a king as he does, asks the guards to bring Antigone immediately to be executed in front of Hémon. What terror! Creon goes wild. Hémon flees to escape the ignominy of the scene that is preparing. "If he doesn't know himself" the diviner had predicted about Narcissus. Was it a cause or a consequence? As is often the case with prophecies, they do not serve to say anything, but to urge the recipient to be vigilant. “If he does not know himself” will be exactly what Creon and Narcissus will do, and they will do it in the same way, forgetting each other.

What are the consequences of the confusion between power and authority? What the hell is this confusion? Tyranny, which, contrary to what is often believed, can be exercised in different ways and is not always the result of totalitarianism. Tyranny creates confusion, because it is born of confusion, so it maintains its stock. The tyrant becomes a deviation from himself. No longer “become who you are”, but “become who you think you are”. We continue to ride the arrogant wave of original sin. What characterizes the tyrant: loneliness. Envy isolates by wishing to bring closer what one envy. Thus Polynices and Eteocle were subjected to their envy. So with any man who would like to know himself too well. By wanting to know oneself too well, one hears and resonates, refusing to make mistakes, no longer accepting the failure of research, the precariousness and fragility of being human, but rather believing that the will of man directs the world and that she is sovereign. The unfulfilled craving for god, through dereliction and acedia, pushes man to wallow in the will to power. From what forgetfulness is born the will to power? Lack of humility. It is the most advanced form of envy in man, as it seems to work against the whole human race. The will to power feeds on itself, like any act of human will, it can lead into a rut, because, reverse of the vengeful message that it secures, it forgets its reality, persuading itself to be able to correct that -this. Power causes a doubling of the self, forming a revolution of self by self.

“Become who you are” imposes a docility, because the vocation it implies is part of a limit that obliges and elevates . A vocation is not a path strewn with pleasures to which one indulges without ever thinking of yesterday or tomorrow. Vocation requires mad or impossible efforts or both before you stick to it to overcome them. Vocation implies a close encounter with everyday life, and the latter can weaken us by exposing our incapacity in broad daylight. The vocation says that this incapacity is also temporary, that there is no humiliation from which one cannot recover. Envy does not conceive of failure, it denies it or places it under a bad omen, under a thick layer of pretexts and excuses. Envy refuses failure without doing anything to overcome it but reject it. Envy is therefore a brake on the vocation, because it rejects construction and delights in revenge. Envy can very well promote the other while hating him, because he is a tool for his will to be accomplished. Being oneself and becoming, which means the same thing, require obedience, because we are not alone, but rather the sum of our ancestors and the history of our country. He who only obeys his wishes does not know how to obey, because true obedience is always towards someone else or towards a higher order.

Hatred of the higher law is found in all tyrants. Authority continues to be a check on power, and the tyrant wishes to annex it . Hannah Arendt identifies what defines authority among the Romans, the ancients, the founders and we find this idea in the United States of America even today. Europe and more particularly France has lost this idea of ​​authority, because they no longer love their past, no longer understand its meaning, hate its rough edges. Forgetting one's past, just like inventing one from scratch, often preceded the massacres. Nowadays, it is common to hear of an authority from below, of the people, and the same people who rely on their declarations demand more democracy, thinking that the crux of the problem lies there. But democracy is a power as its name suggests, not an authority, even if it thinks it replaces it very often. Since authority cannot "act" in the world without being irremediably tarnished, it cannot become power. It is a beacon whose light we follow. Antigone understood this well, referring to the unwritten laws, the laws of always, the laws of God that men cannot, must not even study, but only apply without batting an eyelid. This authority is not there to enslave, but to help grow, to bring man to be a little more than himself. The equality so sought after today should face the authority which represents the only real shield against tyranny. Authority could be compared to a gathering of old people who are summoned to have their opinion on the state of the world. Creon is not a bad man, but he forgets these eternal laws, he abandons them more precisely, to indulge in the pleasures of power. This kind of decision taken without reference to authority creates a divide, because nothing unites around her, Hémon reminds her father of this by telling him that popular rumor takes up the cause of Antigone for having defied the law. Creon can therefore only invoke even more power, always more power to feed his right. He reacts to everything that is said to him or everything that confronts him, and each of these reactions is a step forward in strengthening his power: "Don't keep a single idea in your head: that nothing is right but what you say, as you say it. Anyone who thinks of himself that he is reasonable, or that he has a language or a sensibility that no one else has, those, when you open, you see that they are empty. There is nothing humiliating for a man, even a competent one, to educate himself in a thousand things, and not to bend the bow too hard. On the banks of a torrent swollen by the storm, you see that all the trees that give way keep their branches, while those that offer resistance are uprooted with their roots. But also: "It's because you don't exercise it (your power), when you trample on the honors that we owe to the gods." Thus Creon refuses to reassess himself and isolates himself a little more, convinced that we will take him for a madman if he reassesses himself, or worse, a weakling. Strength has become his only landmark. But Creon forgot that real strength serves to protect, not to alienate.

In the incomprehension with authority crystallize all the evils of our time, and therefore the evils of Creon . It will take Tiresias to call the king of Thebes to order, but it will already be too late. Creon will have flouted the gods and authority too much. Our modern era has thus distinguished itself from authority, seeing in it a violence which, even if it is not always practical, “does violence”, because it obliges. It is the hunt for everything that obliges or limits, and therefore, above all, the hierarchy, because we find there the crux of what prevents us from being ourselves, what we put under this confusing expression individuation with individualism. Authority confronts Narcissus. The Greek gods themselves bowed to good and bad by refusing to repeal a spell cast by another god. The kings of France also continued the work of their predecessors without casting opprobrium on what existed before them. Taking into account what exists to continue the weaving of life is inspired by a recognition of the value of what exists and the challenge of rubbing shoulders with it and shaping a policy that prolongs, but also continues. to support the whole. Europe is still based on this idea of ​​authority even though it forbids it any presence in public debate. Antigone's intimacy with the gods, her very approach to the gods, her closeness to Zeus, turns out to be singular, and, precisely, it is here that Antigone enlightens us the most if we want to go there. see. Antigone reminds us of dogma, the tool of authority that no one can touch unless they are God. Not this horrible thing that constrains and gags my freedom, but an intimacy with God. Dogma gives me freedom, because it forces me to draw from within, deep within me, what defines me and makes me so unique. Dogma is a tradition with which we can shield ourselves with its royal dignity in the event of heavy weather.

Creon freezes, stiffens, and crystallizes his action. Nothing flows through it anymore. Life turns, gravitates around this disoriented puppet king. No doubt the real crime of Creon is a crime against life. He retains it, he believes he possesses it. After having believed to dispose of death by refusing the burial of Polynices, his crime is consummated. Oedipus had his apotheosis, but Creon is mistaken. Oedipus never ceased to make mistakes by misinterpreting the oracle of the gods. He did not foment against the gods nor harbor enmities with them. He did not challenge them. He accepted the unfortunate fate of the Fates. Oedipus never stops talking from Delphi. His origin explains and recounts his whole life. Creon finds in Antigone an unexpected adversary and he will never recover from this surprise. We know that in a fight, surprise is often a decisive weapon. He denies all rights to Antigone because she is a young girl, because she must therefore obey, because she has duties towards him, because she owes him respect and has nothing to say about business. of State. The amnesia of history from which Creon suffers pushes him to confuse power and authority! Authority and power must be complicit even if authority reigns where power presides. Saint Paul summed it up with his sense of the magic formula: "Omni potestas a Deo" (all power comes from God) which means that if someone uses power forgetting God, that power is worthless! This is where the shoe pinches, in this tiny opening, in this mousehole with a human perspective, that Antigone will slip her finger and press until Creon is writhing in pain who, discovering this flaw in his speech, fails he had not seen, had not anticipated, and of which he was even unaware of the existence, a flaw revealed to him by a pubescent and ungrateful young girl who was therefore terrified, he will waver before the evidence placed at his feet: he has no right to do what he does! Great God, what a shock! Creon dreams of making Thebes a perfect city, the perfect city, the one it never was, the one it will never be, but he doesn't know it yet. Creon also shuts himself up in his dream that he endlessly replays a great leader at the head of a perfect city whose measures he would have "fixed and stretched the line over it, from which he would have cut out its boundaries and placed doors and locks” ¹ . Antigone speaks of the place of Oedipus' death, of the place of Polynice's death, she even speaks from the oracle of Delphi juxtaposing two generations. Antigone never leaves her father. She could have lived a woman's life, had children with Hémon, but no, she split off and because she keeps a very special intimacy with her father, because she accompanied him until his last hours, she lives with her memory and this memory continues to strengthen her. It is difficult to assess the considerable imprint of Oedipus in Antigone. Father-daughter relationships are told here on a daily basis in the present. Everything Antigone says is grounded in this place and in this agreement, because it is as much about a place as it is about a relationship. Antigone, equipped with the intimacy she shared with her father, knows that the action of life passes from good to bad in an instant, in a flash which, if she puts on the clothes of casualness, does not nevertheless permeates a whole life and sometimes generations... This intimacy also gives him the strength to face the destiny of the gods and to conform to their authoritarian decisions while not refusing to fight, to fight the events of life and not to relax his guard. If there is one quality that maintains Oedipus in spite of everything, in spite of himself, it is dignity. Antigone drapes herself in it when Creon uses subterfuge such as seduction. Creon saw nothing edifying in Oedipus, he only saw a guy who missed everything. Creon refuses intimacy in each of his gestures. He is afraid of it. Nothing scares him anymore. And when he finally discovers intimacy, it is to use it. Creon uses things, he appropriates them. He does not know how to make himself available to them. Antigone, our little Antigone, has a treasure. Sophocles does not say if she knows this treasure, if she is fully aware of it, but what the poet tells us through Antigone's behavior, which may seem absolutist, is the indissolubility of the father-daughter bond, and therefore of its fruits, in this case dignity, fidelity, justice, respect for authority, therefore for the gods. If we wanted to deprive Antigone of this treasure, we would have to tear out her heart. What Creon will do, because he will find himself helpless. When everyone in the room fears Creon, Creon fears Antigone. He worries about his certainties. If he had been careful to read the story, he might have made mistakes, but he would have assumed his role as leader in a more human way. He wouldn't have locked himself in his own vision. In a crazy and lucid gesture, we imagine him kneeling in front of Antigone and pressing her knees, crying after having recognized the treasure that this young girl had placed before him, this fabulous treasure that is dogma: the sacred envelope of the interior life which gives a nameless, unheard-of, infinite and diffuse knowledge: the knowledge of the divine.