7th and last part: Love

Antigone's desire is family, she does not want to leave her brother unburied; Creon, he wants to assert himself as king and show his power. Antigone favors family ties that embody love and reveal a being. Creon establishes his power by signing an act of law which must establish his authority. The same word characterizes their action: desire. But desire does not recognize desire in the other, one might believe, especially if one is tempted to worship desire for itself, that desire dubs any desire it encounters. Between Creon and Antigone, it is the measure of the desires that counts. Face to face, Antigone and Creon will increase the measure of their desires to the adversity they encounter. But is the source of Antigone's desire still understandable today? Indeed, Antigone's desire, this desire which is based on justice, justice done and returned to the remains of her brother and to the gods, this desire takes on its full meaning, because it is communal, it is part of a city ​​and in a family, reduced vision of the city, and in a belief, Antigone leans against the gods to challenge Creon. Antigone does not express a personal desire, she defends an eternal law, she defends her duty to say it, to claim it before any power that thinks itself above her. Since when do we no longer hear anyone standing up in the public space to claim their duty at the cost of their life? The worst ? We have become accustomed to this silence, this resignation, the transcendental laws no longer tell us much, so nothing comes to overhang and therefore correct the laws which pass in front of us and encircle us like rubbish in a stream of water. The communities that fortified the individual within a space that protected him and allowed him to grow were shattered. The individual now looks like a crazy electron who can only build himself up from gusts of wind that constantly exhaust him and confuse him and erase even the taste for the meaning to be given to his life. Social life is based on law and law alone, but in a place without geography made up of people above ground, all rights are equal and crushed in an odious shambles. Creon has the power. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus. At a time when it is no longer a question of having, of possessing, of acquiring, Antigone weighs—since it is necessary to evaluate—very little. The methodical destruction of all metaphysics is akin to a crime against humanity. Perhaps the greatest the world has ever known. Since with one click, I can acquire everything, I only need to know my desire to satisfy it. We also understand that this individual desire that nothing protects from his appetite accepts no limits and especially not those set by others; then comes into play envy, debased, debased desire.

Being is not necessarily opposed to having, if having allows reflection linked to this possession. The voice that enters the pores of the skin, nourishes being, knowledge, allows you to have another relationship with yourself and therefore with others. Knowing the other without self-knowledge is similar to an exoticism, and this discovery will remain at the stage of having it, it will signify the inauthentic and will tell of a rape, a news item of which there are so many, the rape of the other because he is different. The more we reject the idea of ​​being, the more this idea torments us, we only have our magic wand, the technique, to hope to settle his account once and for all. The fight is fierce, we think we are making progress, a hitherto unknown fact surprises us. We move quickly like a snail. All our decisions seem null and void, we can train hard to run to be hit with a heart attack. All the advice seems to be addressed to others than us or at the wrong time. Our balance is precarious and we pretend to forget it to let our pride flourish. Only the technique can save us and we believe that the NBIC will come in particular under the name of transhumanism to solve the equation of life. But already the rebellion of nature reminds us and all those who by ideologies had banished even the word nature, that man renders accounts and will never stop rendering. The world without God inaugurated our omnipotence or our desire had to be satiated until it was no longer thirsty; this power so decried in tragedy is always punished by the gods with complacent cruelty. Nothing harmonizes us anymore, and we are like a musical instrument of detuned value. "You will be like gods," said the serpent to Adam and Eve, eating the fruit of knowledge, of unbridled knowledge, of knowledge that makes you believe God to knowledge that kills God. “Know thyself” “But not too much” respond to each other like an echo of the two snippets of quotes from Delphi. Narcissus will be happy "if he doesn't know himself" predicts the diviner. The knowledge of good and evil, this “face-to-face” knowledge of which Saint Paul speaks cannot take place during our lifetime, otherwise we will be consumed by its burning fires.

How did Antigone live after her father's death? Waiting for his brothers, in the heartbreak of seeing them argue, quarrel, fight and kill each other. She who had always wanted to be the balm that soothes pain and passions. She, who will always have had an acute awareness of the curse weighing on her family. This is how Hémon evokes the figure of Antigone who always illuminates the city of Thebes: "Me, I am allowed to hear in the shadows what is said, the pain of the city about this child. It is said that, of all women, she is the least deserving of an ignominious death, given the brilliance of her actions. She is the woman who did not allow dogs that devour raw flesh nor any bird of prey to destroy the unburied body of her blood brother, who fell in a slaughter. Doesn't she deserve this woman, to receive a golden reward? The city of Thebes loves Antigone. She is the daughter of Oedipus and, despite all her misfortunes, her legend lives on further. Oedipus is not a usual victim. Is he really a victim? He struggles, he struggles, he never ceases to scrutinize his soul, even when disaster envelops him. Antigone survived. How did she do it? All of Thebes prides itself on Antigone's life force. All Thebes laments that an iniquitous law strikes it, because all Thebes knows that Antigone remains faithful to what she is, she who has nothing left but herself. This commands respect from the people of Thebes. Antigone does not need to talk at all costs so that the people of Thebes understand the meaning of her existence, everything she does, all her actions are guided by this fidelity which is only the expression of love she has for her family. And her last gesture expresses this love to perfection, love cannot perish, Antigone does not want her memories, all this love accumulated in her family despite the curse, despite everything, to evaporate and no longer want to say anything. . Antigone wants to be faithful, entirely faithful, she pant of this fidelity which is all her life. You have to see in it the outward appearance of a profound inner life.

Antigone has collected her childhood memories, her joys and her sufferings; she knows that there resides the truth of her being which allows her to achieve this coincidence of self to self, this concordance of body, mind and soul and the appeasement of the latter. Like Ulysses who never leaves the memory of Penelope or rather Ulysses leaves him sometimes, but then it's the memory that comes back to haunt him. The inner life proves to be a remedy for all defeats, all humiliations, all damage. The similarity with the hero of Ithaca can also continue: like Odysseus, Antigone is nobody, meaning by this that her identity is always to come, that her appearance, her external life illustrated by her name is nothing. in comparison with her interior life, to also note that with the name one would soon have cataloged her as the daughter of Oedipus and that's all. No one opens the door to an infinity which can be an immense shore where one will lose oneself forever, or else one where one will find oneself intact, but tested. Antigone finds herself burying her brother against the law and in defiance of his life. What Antigone means is summed up in this gesture. Ulysses, a little more numbed, will have to wait to meet Penelope's gaze to completely coincide with himself. In both cases, Antigone and Ulysses weave and reweave their traditions, they are faithful to what they are and to the idea they have of what they are. This rare and eternal moment can only be explained in the history of all humanity by love. Nobody, like the mask of tragedy. Nobody is not being nothing, but rather something other than what one is. Prosopon means the face in Greek, and the persona in Latin, the theatrical character. This word reveals with hindsight, the passing of the baton from Greece to ancient Rome. In the tragedy, the actor puts on a mask so as not to reveal any of his emotions to the spectators and so that his words and actions alone define his identity. In ancient Greece, we hide what cannot be seen. I am nobody, because I have no face and I challenge my interlocutor: "Are you going to be able to talk to me and only let yourself be guided by my words and my actions". A mirror separates Greece from ancient Rome. The birth of a monster is nothing other than the seeing of the other self, for it takes on the features of the most profound and indelible humiliation. When Ulysses replies to the Cyclops: "my name is nobody", he resolves to use this subterfuge, because he is playing a role, he embodies someone, someone he is no longer quite. He plays his part, what the Cyclops does not know is that Ulysses says: “My name is Nobody” with a capital letter; Person, is a name! He does what Ulysses would do, but with hindsight, with the knowledge and acceptance of not being himself, but him. It is Odysseus fallen, lost, lost, far from home, far from everything, lost by the gods, that is, he takes the responsibility to be King Odysseus and to act in his name during the confrontation with the Cyclops. There remains a bit of Ulysses in Ulysses, and from this bit, Ulysses will draw the strength to be himself again. Odysseus' greatest ruse lasts most of The Odyssey. Declare to be another to be better oneself. Because being yourself is not nothing. Many flee this possibility in the intoxication of our time. Baudelaire loved to praise drunkenness for drunkenness. He would have hated our era, which never knows sobriety again. Drunkenness only has taste in the breathing of sobriety. Odysseus can only put on a mask, his mask, by having an acute knowledge of what he is. He is no longer king, he is without a family and without a country and almost without hope. He wears this mask vis-à-vis his men too, not that Odysseus wishes to deceive them, but he does not want them to lose hope for anything in the world, Odysseus must therefore be Odysseus in their eyes. This compassionate illusion is well known to leaders and, if it should not last, it turns out to be essential and allows the leader to see if these men continue to adhere to the image of the leader which is as important as the person of the leader. himself. In command, the prosopon and the persona remain essential. To put on the mask of Ulysses, to draw his character amounts to shouting in the face of the world that Ulysses is not dead. This is the identity of Ulysse, the Ulysse as today's advertisers would say. Concerning Antigone, the situation is different. There is no known Antigone brand and Antigone acts alone which makes its action even more stunning. As Antigone is a woman, she uses the mirror. She is nobody in front of the king even if he is her uncle, even if he is her future father-in-law, she is nobody by her family tree which is only shame, and she is nobody, because this are his brothers who cause chaos in Thebes. And it is precisely because it turns out to be so easy to think that Antigone is nothing that she is transformed into a person. But she is this mirror for Creon that the new king will never see, because he will never understand the reflected image, his own. For Antigone comes face to face with Creon as a person, one person among others and mixed with others, living or dead, to come or present; the person as tradition, place and binder, individual and nation, who confronts the king to tell him what everyone must know: the laws of the gods, the unwritten laws take precedence over the power of the king. Antigone could say to Creon: “I am nobody and it is in this capacity that I come to educate you” that we would find nothing wrong with. Antigone is nobody, but in the form of a mirror, because it is precisely because she is nobody that Creon should be alerted to what is going on. Creon when Antigone appears in front of him, brought by the guard, does not understand that he is facing an enantiodromos, and that by choosing pride, the punishment of offense, psychorigidity, without taking the time to hindsight to know what is at stake there, fails to be a true sovereign. Antigone sends back this image so subtle, but so striking at the same time, I am nobody and for this reason you must understand that I can be your freedom or your destiny. Creon chooses fate.

Dispute germinates from betrayed love. Nothing worse in the history of the world than a spurned lover. All revenge, all wars, all dramas come from a bad love or from a lack of love. And the nice organizers of the modern era have understood that from this irreversible process a new and refreshing and above all insatiable need for recognition will be born. How many revolutions would have been nipped in the bud if they had been prevented by a caress or a smile? How many revolutions find their source in a slap or a contempt? From this observation, coming from good souls, which is very different from beautiful souls, because the good soul feels a little self-love to be what it is which disturbs its vision and increases the confusion of it , whereas the beautiful soul knows almost nothing of itself, sometimes nothing… It is unaware of itself and humbles itself in this ignorance from which it therefore derives its first virtue. Good souls would like to be in love with everyone, because you have to love, because we realized how much contempt or disdain could create animosities... but can we only understand a situation by its action and its reaction? Isn't this precisely forgetting the soul which presided over this situation? Because if we stop at the observation of the action that initiated this situation and the reaction it provoked, we are incontestably, inevitably, unsurpassably reactionary. One can judge here the always growing number of reactionaries or demagogues or populists, it is according to these qualifiers indicating only that a group of people get along like harmful with the public debate and must be singled out as such. But it is impossible to think, to dialogue, because the soul is missing both in the dialogue and in the analysis of the situation. If the challenge germinates from betrayed love, it must be understood that it is possible that nothing could have avoided the reaction, or that any attempt would only have allowed the reaction to be delayed. Can the reaction be natural? I mean inscribed in the heart of a man in spite of himself? Evil does not belong to man. Evil creeps into him. If the contestation, and the reaction which is the acquiescence of the contestation, germinates from betrayed love, from a feeling of rejection, from the wound of not feeling loved as one thinks it deserves, there is no remedy but 'in the uprooting of the root of envy. So in the opening of the tragedy, when Antigone addresses Ismene in an extraordinary plea against any form of envy: “I wouldn't push you into it; and even if you wanted to act again, I would not enjoy seeing you do it with me. Know what you decide. I am going to bury him. It seems fine to me to die doing this. I love him, I will be lying next to him, who loves me. My crime will be piety. I have to please the people down there longer than those here. There, I will be lying forever. If that's what you decide, go on, dishonor the gods. » « My crime will be piety » therefore the love of the divine. Antigone is moved by the force of love and her love is so vibrant that she fears nothing and no one. This love will shake everyone in its path and cause Creon to be amazed. Throughout the tragedy, Antigone balances the world above and the world below, but always explains that love is an indestructible bond that surpasses the earthly idea of ​​good and evil. Antigone who will end up declaiming her gospel: “I am made to share love, not hate. But a love of authority above all else, a love of family, a love of unwritten laws, a love of the gods. Unconditional love. Not so easy to understand these days where any limit is taken for pettiness or a totalitarian temptation.

Let us say first of all what this love could have been if it had not been conditioned, because it is given as some in our time, that love should not be bullied, in any form, and that if it the east, that is the end of its substance; it is all over, love is dishonoured. Would there be then various loves? Do we not express fraud if we consider that there are several loves? Nowadays, each impulse is watched as a sign of love in germ, and the germ is thus confused with the fruit. Evil lies in forgetfulness and confusion. “Now we see as in a mirror and in a confused way”. The confusion ? Pride, envy, oblivion, so many flaws that numb us like Baudelaire's cormorant. Love is born in dialogue and in oath. If love were only a dialogue, it would weaken at the slightest opportunity, it would vanish under the moods of the times, it would disappear at the slightest annoyance. What is a random promise? Love also undergoes the insufficiency or the excess that we bring to it, too much or not enough, since Guénon the quantity is at the heart of our lives and does not stop making us fluctuate like reeds in water. The importance given to the attached adjective or to the word that hides under the guise of love and suddenly wants to be its synonym. The drive thus becomes a love that expresses itself badly, but a love all the same! We can now love each other too much or destroy each other out of love or no longer support each other out of love, or even kill each other out of love! No one knows the meaning of the word love anymore at a time when it has never been used so much. Can we slip here a beginning of definition? “Love takes patience. Love takes care. Love doesn't jealous, it doesn't show off, it doesn't get puffed up, it doesn't do anything ugly, it doesn't seek its own interests, it doesn't get angry, it doesn't entertain enmities, he does not rejoice in injustice, but finds joy in the truth. Love excuses everything, it believes everything, it hopes for everything, it endures everything. Love will never go away. Thus exegetes have shown that it was possible to replace the word love with Jesus Christ in this epistle of Saint Paul without changing its meaning. It does not seem impossible to apply this definition to many saints if we still know any, and to Antigone of course, an ancient and pre-Christian saint, but certainly a saint by her attitude and her piety. The greatest enemy of love is the adjective proper. Self-esteem kills love. Our era, swollen with narcissism, mired in this self-love which is the worst of ideologies, cannot get rid of this permanent mirror which rings again and again the agony of true love. We are all Creon looking at ourselves in the mirror and questioning it like the witch in Snow White to find out if we are really beautiful, if we are really strong, but this image, this reflection is never like in the tale capable of revealing to us the nature of our immoderate fondness for ourselves. We are affected by the vice of narcissism, but much more seriously, we have fallen in love with this vice; and loving a vice amounts to no longer knowing how to get rid of it, because vice marvelously succeeds in becoming one with us until it becomes us. Hémon thus reminds his father several times that he is enamored with his job. Jesus Christ himself has to face this exaltation of self-esteem in Peter, his first disciple, when he implores his master to keep him with him when he is going to be executed, because he cannot live without him. Jesus must bring him back to his senses and tell him what is being prepared and is not glorious: yes, he will experience martyrdom, but not right away, not with him, and above all despite his grandiloquent declarations, he will betray Jesus even before the rooster has crowed three times. Evil hides itself in life sometimes even under good auspices, like the horse dealer facing Father Donnissan, and takes advantage of weakness, anticipates it, participates in it, and interferes and diverts all human feeling, however pure it may be. he. Antigone wishes nothing, she envy nothing, from the first sentence of the tragedy that bears her name, she has already realized her intimate desire. She recalled the limit, the limit that gives form to men, because it is drawn by the gods.

The loss of the limit causes madness. The first limit consisted of the family, then there was the city. From the family, we have taken away the authority which was the true limit. The city enlarged into a nation still represented a space understandable by its inhabitants, the gigantic ensembles devouring the space around them under the pretext of respecting or making worthy its own space, ended up making men stateless and sleepwalking. No need to look for the immaturity of our contemporaries elsewhere than in the loss of the family and the city. Aristotle noted that "man is a sociable being, and that he who remains savage by organization, and not by the effect of chance, is certainly either a degraded being, or a being superior to the human species. It is to him that one could address this reproach of Homer: “Without family, without laws, without hearth…” The man who would be by nature such as that of the poet would breathe only war; for he would then be incapable of any union, like the birds of prey. Aristotle paints here the portrait of the permanent rebel, a temperament that one finds of course in nature and which is only satiated with its own anger; whether the latter is justified or not changes nothing. The politicians who carry out actions against the family should be wary, the destruction of institutions makes insatiable by the will to power that it engenders; this announces the reign of anarchy which is indeed a reign contrary to what the anarchists claim, because it is difficult, if not impossible, to get out of the rut of anarchy and Creon is the perfect example. "Man has this special thing, among all animals, that he alone conceives good and evil, right and wrong, and all feelings of the same order, which in association constitute precisely the family and the 'State. Man, by departing from what elevates him, departs from his human nature. “He who cannot live in society, and whose independence has no needs, he can never be a member of the state. He's a brute or a god. And Aristotle continues: “if man, having reached all his perfection, is the first of the animals, he is also the last when he lives without laws and without justice. There is nothing more monstrous, in fact, than armed injustice. But man has received from nature the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which he must above all employ against his evil passions. Without virtue, it is the most perverse and ferocious being; he has only the brutal outbursts of love and hunger. Justice is a social necessity; for right is the rule of political association, and the decision of the just is what constitutes right. How do you go from lack of love to disenchantment and revolt? By giving free rein to his moods, by allowing them access to the interior, to the free world, by allowing them propaganda through action. But through mood, only individualism points out! “Mood is what makes our individual particularity, our personal experience. We have bad moods, good moods, fleeting moods. (Julien Freund). Moods will become passions, affections... but the trace of these desires remains deep in civilization. Soon, nothing will have to be said against his moods, because they will embody the identity of the individual. Thus the one who has sinned will answer that he is so, meaning by this that he cannot go against what he is, wanting to speak of his nature. Christianity, which imposed the rule "solitus in excelsis" as an end in itself, will be forgotten and the last dike will break. Because taming your moods means controlling yourself, learning, taming yourself, therefore obeying. The gratuitous violence that we see almost everywhere in our time is only a legitimization of moods. This violence then flourishes and declares itself, gratuitous and obligatory, two adjectives which could seem contradictory, but which are not. Because it is necessary to express the least spite even if it is not anchored in any of the causes of the demonstration; one expresses one's spite in order to express this spite, because one is also valuable through one's spite. The letting go of the emotions has forgotten the error, it is not possible to make an error, if one is oneself. By crossing out error, we are crossing out being, as Socrates says in the Phaedo. The modern world draws the limits of authenticity. You have to be well aware that since all the words, all the meanings, can be turned around and inverted, it is no longer possible to think of a thing without passing it through the sieve of mood. Our elders would have found this an odious triviality. The self and the me become one because the second has disintegrated the first. In this hatred which hides its name, this hatred which wants to catch up with everything without knowing what everything is, but where everything is everything, hatred on the one hand of me because I descend from this conformist and petty-bourgeois family, hatred of this family which simply did not rebel; lack of reaction, hatred of this form of indolence; read: who did not give free rein to his moods, who prided himself on good manners, I hate therefore I live, I hate this family which suffocated me, this father and his artificial authority, this mother and her dubious empathy , his brothers and sisters and their pettiness, their conformist religion, everything that falls into the basket of well-being, know-how… everything that comes up against me! To protect from the self, here is indeed the first function of the family. Aristotle recalls the problem inherent in the loss of family or law, of everything that limits, traces an outline and allows growth, "cauterized" by duty and not only by right: "The man who would be by nature such that that of the poet would only breathe war; for he would then be incapable of any union, like the birds of prey. And he insists: "But man has received from nature the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which he must above all employ against his evil passions." Without virtue, it is the most perverse and ferocious being; he has only the brutal outbursts of love and hunger. Aristotle uses the term aphrodisiac for love; it would therefore be quite fair to speak of sex drugs more than of pure love. Animality and hunger, rape and plunder, in other words. Previously, anyone who wanted to escape his family, his laws, his city, cast off the moorings. He was going for the long haul and escaping his condition, or at least he gave himself the illusion of it. The speed of transport which makes everything accessible immediately has made this impossible. It is no longer possible to flee. This is how intimacy itself is hunted down. Extimacy alone has the right of citizenship. While it is impossible to build on anger, the source of anger always proves a prolific breeding ground. Thus on the feeling of tearing, on this lack or this emotional wound, will germinate a path parallel to civilization, a path where only anger prospers, where only anger bears fruit, where only anger is heard. This is the whole problem of anger, if we were aware of it, it would disappear. Anger abolishes the distance that allows closeness. Anger does not suffer its shadow. She grabs modesty to beat it up, she would kill it if she could, because modesty disintegrates it by forcing it to see itself naked.

How sad to see love, the greatest human feeling, generate sourness, temper, anger! The society that unfolded after the Second World War gradually resumed its pilgrim's staff of individualism and this quest very quickly came alive around the hatred of authority, parents, teachers, everything that oppressed my self, then Western man gave himself up to love for the other. Self-hatred delivered him body and soul into the arms of the other, but not just any other, a virtual other, an idealized other, perfected, loved not for his qualities, loved for his quality of other, a another above ground, neither there nor here, malleable at will because disembodied. This other will form a great populace and colonial exoticism. Individualism takes us so far from man. By fantasizing another ideal because other, the modern world reached a form of apotheosis where the dehumanized man would fight for his moods and his desires which would have been imposed on him without his realizing it. In the search for the other, all that counts is my confusion, my disarray in the face of something completely different from us, but for there to be a me, there must certainly be a self, otherwise there is no of meeting, point of connection between the soul and the body and the spirit, just a stain and a bruise of the first and the two others transformed into a perpetual outlet. Nowadays, the quest for the other resembles the interface of a large database, where everyone is labeled and therefore known and listed. What trouble could well cause in me a being whose label and description I have read before even meeting him? This is the case with all those people who only have the word crossbreeding in their mouths, but who never speak of the crossbreed which is nevertheless and until proven otherwise the humanization of crossbreeding. He refuses to talk about it because interbreeding is not a science of being, where we would be interested in the mixed being and what he experiences, the difficulty of being there and elsewhere, from there and from here, without ever knowing if his choice is right or wrong. Miscegenation is an ideology at the service of people who hate purity and authenticity. It is easy to recognize an ideology: it comes from the mouth of a robot, of a man who has suddenly become a robot because he is reciting a litany or a rosary, but without any intercession of the spirit. Their diversity is one and the same! Warning, deception! Let's draw again from Antigone: how to recognize that something is not oneself if one does not know oneself? “Only those who possess a strong individuality can feel the difference. By virtue of the law: every thinking subject supposes an object, we must posit that the notion of Difference immediately implies an individual starting point. That such will fully taste the wonderful feeling, who will feel what they are and what they are not. Exoticism is therefore not this kaleidoscopic state of the tourist and the mediocre spectator, but the lively and curious reaction to the choice of a strong individuality against an objectivity whose distance it perceives and tastes. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary). Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation; is therefore not the perfect comprehension of an outside oneself that one would embrace within oneself, but the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility. (Victor Segalen). Becoming oneself, becoming what one is is therefore essential to understanding the other. What a great lesson from Antigone!

The dictatorship of the other has only grown in the 20th and 21st centuries, in ever different forms but where the essence of exoticism is always found as a foundation. Everyone gargled each other, shamelessly used it as a hobby, as a lawyer and as a prosecutor. As an outlet for self-hatred; the other has excluded every other and has drawn the limits of a love that could only be exclusive. The dictatorship of the other has evacuated self-reflection by replacing the “I believe in” with the “I believe that”, active leaven of a totalitarianism imposing submission. “I believe in” comes from the interior testimony communicated. It is based on the inner life and its lessons. It thrives on self-love which is the opposite of self-love. The inner life explores good as well as evil, and does not hesitate to examine the causes as well as the consequences. It is not possible to depart from yourself so you have to learn to love yourself. Just like parents with their child, just like the finger with the hand, the foot with the leg, it is not a question of departing from what one does not like in order to praise only what one finds itself in keeping with the spirit of the times or the prevailing ideology. It's not about falling in love, but about loving, which requires a certain maturity. “A fine example of Jules Boissière who, Provençal, Felibre, wrote his most beautiful Felibrian verses in Hanoi. To hear oneself, to listen to one's intimate being, is to be sensitive to diversity. In this respect, religion puts in contact with the father, because what could be more different from man than God. Different and closer if we are to believe the Holy Scriptures. Intimior intimo meo, said Saint Augustine, knowing how to open all the layers that one has deposited on one's soul to discover it again and thus get closer to oneself, and by getting closer to oneself, maintain one's inner life which is dialogue with the divine. This distance which is called proximity.

I said the formidable grammar of Sophocles with the use of the prefix αφτο present throughout the tragedy. Sophocles imposes on his characters this process of recognition of the other through oneself. They are free to give in to this grammatical injunction or not. This return to oneself bears witness to the other. The links woven in the tragedy through this permanent "back and forth" and if the poet does not show the research, the interior dialogues of the characters, they appear very present, especially in Antigone who develops all that she knows in her inner self, that is to say of this intense inner life that she has cultivated and made to prosper. It is his inner life that takes away all desire. Antigone is of extraordinary importance in our time as an antidote to amnesiac and individualistic madness. So criticism should always be love, for it compels compassion with good and with evil.

"He has no title to separate me from mine," Antigone replies to Ismene. Creon has no title, that is, he has no authority. To separate me from my people, the edict would have had to come from above, from the gods perhaps. Who else can claim the right to break off love? Antigone continues to advance throughout the tragedy; it alone is in motion; all the other characters mummify on his way. This little Antigone from the first verse made the decision to die for love. The greatest proof of love that we can give to those we love will say Jesus Christ. "So you go away in glory and with a song of praise, to this den of the dead. You have not been struck by a devastating disease and you have not received the reward of a sword stroke, but, the only mortal, you descend into Hades alive, and freely » breathes the corypheus. Antigone gives her life, because she could not suffer the dishonor of doing nothing in the face of ignominy. Antigone cannot fail. Antigone could not have lived without burying Polynices, that is what she means by honor; honor does not serve her to be proud, but rather not to sink under a fathom that she finds unacceptable. Antigone does not dispute Creon's right to condemn her, she does not dispute it because this condemnation precisely comes under Creon's power, and Antigone does not dispute power, she even agrees to it with a beautiful calmness, on the other hand she denies Creon the authority to enforce this law. “Who knows if your borders have any meaning among the dead? she says, sure of herself.

Antigone knows that love defies death. All love wants to ignore natural constraints like separation or disappearance. Antigone's love for her family shows that love doesn't choose, doesn't dissect, it's all or nothing, we don't love halfway, we don't love at times either; love aspires to fullness and Antigone shows that one must love in three dimensions: with the body, the mind and the soul. Why die for a dead person may modern readers wonder? So as not to die oneself, Antigone would answer, to whom this question would seem grotesque. Antigone recalls filiation and therefore transmission, which allows her to have a coincidence between self and self; knowing herself, recognizing herself, allows her to fully appreciate and love everything, ready to face the tragic conflict, from which only love emerges victorious.