1st part: the family

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

Antigone does not change with the law of Creon. Antigone reminds the tyrant of what precedes him and what follows him, what goes beyond him. Antigone does not submit. This is the case of women in antiquity, they always refuse submission, and always recall the same obligation to freedom. Antigone also says that the difference between submission and servitude is called truth. She is satisfied with obeying her duty. It rises by doing so, for it adorns itself with the attributes that the centuries have crafted with sapience. Antigone's act has always existed, he lurked, waiting only for the right moment. His gesture does not depend on Creon, it depends on the intrusion. Insubordination requires the refusal of intrusion into intimacy. Jean-Louis Chrétien writes in L'Effroi du beau : “modesty is not frightened by proximity, but by the abolition of distance which would cause proximity to be lost. Intrusion is shamelessness, rape. But the rebellious, before being rebellious, carries within him, sometimes ignoring it, the qualities of insubordination. Shame violates it and reveals it. Antigone reveals her insubordination with a simple gesture, a gesture inherited from eternity, a gesture that separates man from animal: the burial of the body of a loved one. If this gesture comes after Creon's decision, if it seems to be a reaction, it is rather an action: the deployment of a force known for a long time which comes to protect what cannot undergo sacrilege.

Contrary to what is often said or believed, Antigone represents a traditional animal and frees itself from any revolutionary spirit. She assumes a genealogy. His name means anti , "against", or "in place of", and gonê , "offspring". Antigone lives with its time, its past. She accompanied her father until his last days. She was his eyes in Oedipus at Colonus , when he kept moaning and feeling sorry for himself. Antigone learned that self-pity is always a reaction. She heard him declaim: "O my children, where are you?... Over you too I weep... When I think how bitter your life to come will be and what fate people will do to you... When you reach the hour of marriage, who will, who will dare to take on all these opprobriums made to ruin your existence, as they did for my own parents? Is there a missing crime? Your father killed his father; he fertilized the womb from which he himself had come; he had you from the very one from which he came… Who will marry you from then on? No one, oh my children, and no doubt you will then have to consume yourselves in sterility and solitude…” Oedipus' selfishness is frightening. He always seems so weak. He dwells, mopes, feels sorry for himself all the time. He tires. He undergoes. Oedipus though he is, by what right does he deprive his children of any future? Or is it a prophecy or a curse? Either way, he blames his crimes on his children. And he will continue even later by damning his sons, the real source of Antigone's action. As if she had never left her father's service, even after his death. Isn't there a beginning of understanding? It is rare to say of a family that it is a brood. We don't choose it. The family is not a group. It is not a rally or a riot. Nothing of mob psychology applies to it or else it is no longer a family, but a mafia. It is not up to fathers to decide the future of their children. Fathers are there to avoid pitfalls, not to announce or predict them. Oedipus has fallen into the trap of reaction. As soon as he returns from Delphi, he never leaves. It is his prison. He just reacts. He says to himself “what must be done”. He loses all sense of action. He no longer trusts himself. When there is a will to explain fatality, it is important to remember that it is born and nourished by reaction. It is impossible to explain Antigone without mentioning her father. It is the passage from Oedipus to Colonus to Antigone . The girl as a child should talk about her mother, but she is absent, and for good reason, how can we talk about her mother who is her grandmother? Aristotle replies: "Not to signify a single thing is to signify nothing at all, and if names signified nothing, one would ruin all exchange of thought between men, and, in truth also with oneself: for one cannot think unless one thinks a single thing; and if possible, only one name can be assigned to this thing. » ¹ . The mother is the natural link where the father is the social link. Antigone does not know how to speak of her natural bond since this bond reminds her of sin, the incest of Oedipus. Antigone had everything to become revolutionary rather than traditional, but it lacked an essential attribute: envy.

Antigone is never an individual, she is always a person. It does not fit into this modern duality, into this modern virtue which asserts itself in possession alone, believing that possession determines and supplants having, and taking any contrary opinion as a permanent scandal.
Antigone is and a. Antigone has a body and a spirit, but she is also this body and this spirit. This observation extinguishes the desire to appropriate his body. It is not possible to possess what one is. At the very least it radically changes the very idea of ​​possession because it brings the idea that one is possessed by what one possesses. With the drama of her two brothers being killed, Polynices attacking Thebes and Eteocle defending it, Antigone seizes the event and takes up the cause. Antigone is one with her past and her present. The expression “to form a body” tells us something about Antigone, because it inaugurates and therefore exposes itself, reveals itself, even displays itself. Sophocles tells us nothing of his physical appearance; it is easy, perhaps too easily, to imagine her petite. Antigone embraced duty very early. She guided her father. She experienced his pain and also his immurement. She was his eyes. She, who had a mother-grandmother, took care of her father who is therefore also her half-brother like a grandfather in the twilight of his life. It is easy to see how modern the tragic or what is called as such is. At the beginning of the tragedy, she still wants to act with her sister Ismene. She works it on the body. Everything Antigone does is intense and physical. Irène Papas in Antigone's film therefore works on the Ismene body, she explains to him what is at stake in the situation. We imagine her reaching out to her sister. Small people can thus have a physical presence that considerably exceeds their size. Antigone seems like a rampart before her sister, a rampart armed from head to toe, a rampart whose strength is beyond comprehension. Ismene bends and bends before this presence. Antigone puts all this force that thunders behind this rampart which is her body and which is one with her body, she seems immense, gigantic, surreal, one would say she is possessed, only asking to yield, it is a rampart who can no longer contain all this thundering force. Antigone: He's my brother — and yours, whether you like it or not.
I mean that no one has the right to say that I betrayed him. Ismene: But, unhappy, if Créon opposes it!
Antigone: Creon doesn't have to keep me away from my people.
Ismene continues with a speech of lamentation over the misfortune that has always struck their family. Emptiness guides Ismene. Emptiness is liquid, it insinuates itself everywhere, insidious and sure of its devastating force. Ismene is in the register of his father, Oedipus. Antigone pushes her away. Antigone knows that Creon does not have the authority to separate her from his people. Ismene confuses power, potestas , and authority, auctoritas . Power frightens her and she takes it for authority. It is the art of tyrants to know how to hold their only power like an authority hidden behind the opaque smokescreen of fear, the weapon of the devil. Antigone knows that authority belongs to the gods like lightning to Zeus, and that kings can only invoke it, refer to it, but above all comply with it. Antigone allows herself to be guided by her duty. Duty proves impervious to whining and secretes effective medicine against fear. Vocation ferments on duty. And that is what Antigone is all about, vocation. This is what deceives Atropos, the moire. When Antigone proclaims: "I am and I have". I play the instrument that I am. Union of body, mind and soul. Aware of this individuation and its power, Antigone emerges from the chrysalis and becomes a butterfly. It is possible to consider that this is the first rebellion of Antigone; rebellion in the sense of producing the unexpected within the established order, respecting this established order but mocking the few qualities of those who are in charge of this order by displaying their weaknesses so that they correct themselves ; as a conversion, therefore.

Contrary to what is often said or believed, tradition obliges a permanent conversion. There is only a living tradition, and to live is to take the risk of living. Antigone never wants to stop belonging to her family, but within it, she decides to exist, it is precisely the vocation of the family: to provide a setting that allows the fulfillment of a life. Shouldn't that be the case with everyone in a family? How does this necessity reveal itself? Vocation and duty are linked. The modern era, by dint of muzzling duty and its benefits, has extinguished vocation. Antigone fell so in love with duty that a vocation only had to show up. We are still missing the minutes of this conversion. Sophocles does not give them to us. Let us never forget that we are orphans of the work of Sophocles. Sophocles wrote a hundred tragedies of which eight have come down to us. Sophocles wrote a lot and so little remains to us. Like these inscriptions in Delphi: "Know thyself", or "Nothing too much" which is partly erased. What were the Greeks warning us about? Humanity is orphaned by so many texts, so many things have been divulged to then be forgotten, lost… So many things are shown to us and we have no interest in them or are unable to distinguish them. Let us think thus of Jesus Christ writing in the Gospel of John (8, 2-11). Who can imagine Jesus of Nazareth drawing meaningless signs on the ground? Especially since he comes back twice. As the scribes and Pharisees bring him a woman caught committing adultery, they try to put him to the test to find out what he advocates by recalling that Moses ordered stoning for such a crime. And Jesus, unexpectedly, bends down and, with his finger, traces signs on the ground. The verb used is grapheion . So the scribes and Pharisees, encumbered by this almost nonchalant attitude, insisted and were answered: “Whoever among you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at him. And then Jesus bends down again to write on the floor. John again using the same Greek word to define the action of Christ. What did Jesus write on the ground? Did he draw the sky? Did he challenge Satan? Has he composed a divine poem? Did he list the sins of the scribes and Pharisees as St. Jerome thought? Is it thinkable that Jesus made meaningless signs on the ground? Or would this incomprehensibility have been the source of a new understanding? Jean does not tell us. Perhaps Jesus told him never to bring back his writings. We remain as orphans of this divine knowledge. Facing the abyss of loss. What are the minutes of Antigone's metamorphosis? In the absence of Sophocles' hundred missing tragedies, which perhaps deepened the bonds of this uplifting family, we grope. We imagine Antigone. What she was. Antigone finds virtues in her. Virtues that are not absent from his father. But Oedipus gets entangled and lost in his destiny. Oedipus only suffers and when he decides to stop suffering, he suffers even more. Oedipus illustrates misery. He is an anti-word. Antigone does not suffer because Antigone is an adult where her father constantly shows himself to be infantile. What does adulthood mean before modern times and its cohort of specialists created to avoid conflict and diminish decision-making; to undermine authority, and empower power ² ? All the men in this family are infantile. Only Antigone is an adult. Ismene evolves both in an uncertain, frightened state. Oedipus, Polynices, Eteocle are children in the hands of the Moirai, they play with them and manipulate them as they please... Perhaps they don't even need to intervene, these characters if they are the most numerous in the course of life, require little attention as they manage to tangle and intertwine without needing any help. The Moires know men, they know very early that those who want to escape their parents make good prey. They wish not to be so perfect or imperfect; they want to be the opposite, something else, far from the idea that their parents have of them: the problem lies in the mental image that one and the other creates of the others and of each other; we are pursued by the mental image, phantasmata in Greek and phantasma in Latin. The moires love the mental image. They know that it imprisons and delivers their victims bound hand and foot. The parents place an ideal image where the children respond with a repulsive image. The two mental images almost never juxtapose, which causes languor and conflict. Often in families reigns either conflict or dead calm. And just as often, the family passes from one state to another in a great and inescapable pendulum movement. Sometimes driven by action, but more often by reaction. And the action which arises from an action is not equivalent to the action which arises from a reaction. The manual part and the automatic part of life appear in the family, constantly crossing and uncrossing. The manual part and the automatic part are independent of the state of nature and the state of culture and they turn out to be at least as important. Nobody takes into account the unpredictability, no "specialist" is interested in it as the central motor of life, because there resides the incalculable part of life; the specialist lives only on statistics. The part which is not of this world, this part which escapes our world, works and shapes the individual, his will and his action. The organic fabric of the family is based on the difficulty of articulating these two dimensions: individual and person. The family has this essential role of showing that the individual exists in the person and that the person does not cease to exist in the individual. Interests clash, team up, distrust, challenge, seduce each other... The modern era hates the family because it wants to be the daughter of Hegel, ideologue and severe, where power never stops wanting to impose his authority to this embryo of rebellion. The modern era identifies the family as the place where the individual must hide, refuse, or even eradicate his own will. The individual is malleable. Society does what it wants. All the revolutionaries of the whole world and of all eras have always considered the family as an island of resistance to their will to power. Two worlds have always clashed: those who understand the family as the elementary natural environment for learning to become a person and those who see the organic relationships of the family as a calamity to be destroyed by all means, because it carries germs and disease, the first of which consists in the imprisonment of individual freedom. Do not confuse the root and the rhizome. One cannot live without the other. The rhizome is a form of root from which it takes its name. The link between the root itself and the bud. The stems of the rhizome often turn out different small or large, giving many buds or few. The rhizome symbolizes the family wonderfully. None of its stems is the same, but all attach themselves to the horizontal and strong rhizome which carries its little world from root to budding. The family brings three consciousnesses of belonging: the link with the past, the link to come, the link that cannot be broken. The family therefore brings with it the idea of ​​tradition which can be defined through these three states of consciousness.

In the family, the vision is like in a mirror. Saint Paul taught us what the mirror is in the Christian life: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. Having become a man, I put an end to what was proper to the child. Now we see as in a mirror and in a confused way, but then it will be face to face. What does it mean to see as in a mirror, confusedly? Obviously it is difficult to know the mystery that surrounds this formula, otherwise so many things would be surrounded by a halo of knowledge. As Saint Paul continues: “Now my knowledge is limited, but then I will know as I am known. (1 Cor, 13 12). This mirror view is the result of the loss of Paradise. Paul of Tarsus tells us that it is a lost vision that we are going to find. The mirror represents the instrument par excellence of spiritualities, because it allows us to see what we already know without recognizing it, and it is the instrument that allows us to see and to be seen. Thus Athena comes to the aid of Odysseus when he wakes up in Ithaca spreading a cloud which sometimes makes him invisible, but above all Athena "enjoins him not to look any human being in the face" as if invisibility could only be fully acquired. 'on condition that you don't meet anyone's gaze on the way. Thus Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux ³ continues her comment: "Between seeing and being seen, the reciprocal is so rigorously imposed that the best way to escape someone's sight is not to try to unmask them either. same: so that the eye of others does not risk piercing the cloud of darkness that envelops you, to remain ignored even in his presence, the best thing is to avoid directing the glare of his own gaze towards others, to become blind to those who, seeing you, should not "know" you! To see is to be seen! In the same vein, note that St. Paul saw when God blinded him on the road to Damascus. “I know a follower of Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — I don't know if it was with his body or if it was a vision, only God knows. This man whom I know well was taken up to paradise — I don't know if it was with his body or if it was a vision, only God knows — and this man heard inexpressible words, which were has no right to repeat. (2 Cor. 12 2-4). Saint Paul is a witness to our “dark vision in a mirror”. Oedipus “knows” his crime and is blinded. Don't we also find here the Know thyself … But nothing too much ! Know yourself too well blind. It is by wanting to know himself that Oedipus has damaged himself. It is thanks to the ties of the family that Antigone refuses the blindness of Creon. Oedipus learned it from Tiresias, the divine blind: "You who scrutinize everything, O Tiresias, both what is taught and what remains forbidden to human lips, both what is from heaven and what works on earth , you may be blind, but you still know the scourge of which Thebes is the prey. » And Tiresias to answer in a completely clear way however, but certainly too clearly so that his answer can be received without blindness: « Alas! Alas! How terrible it is to know, when knowledge is of no use to him who possesses it! I was not unaware of it, but I forgot it. A little further on, Oedipus will become the arrogant tyrant that he never ceases to repel and to be at the same time: "You only live in darkness: how could you not harm me, as well as whoever sees the daylight? » Tiresias will bring a decisive touch to this long dialogue of Oedipus King : « You see the day. Soon you will only see night. Oedipus thus continues to spread himself against Tiresias and against all those who confront him in order, finally, to become clairvoyant: suffered, nor that which I caused; thus the darkness will forbid them henceforth to see those whom I should not have seen, and to know those whom, in spite of everything, I would have wanted to know! » But this is not completely enough since later, he will implore: « Quick in the name of the gods, quick, hide me somewhere, far from here; kill me, throw me into the sea or at least into places where I can no longer be seen…” Where Oedipus chooses to be immured within himself, Antigone will agree to be immured alive. Where Oedipus blinds himself, Antigone will seek by all means not to be blinded by anyone in the discernment of his vocation. Antigone ends up immured, which is a living burial, for having wanted to bury her brother, Polynices, who was dead. Oedipus and Creon will both push blindness to remarkable heights. Polynices and Eteocles will blind each other in their struggle for the power of Thebes and will kill each other. There is hardly a person in this family who does not see their reflection in the other at one time or another. René Girard constantly wanders into Greek tragedy to nip Hegel's Phenomenology in the bud with his theory of mimicry which frees the being from envy. No one is by nature or culture corrupt or perverted. But this reflection that the characters do not see in the other, they do not see it because their vision is imperfect, veiled, obscured, often by narcissism. Everything is similar, but nothing is the same. Details cause the bond of resemblance to be lost. The ties within the family stir up all human feelings with perfect reciprocity. From worst to best and vice versa. The most extreme feelings associated with the most different people force a permanent flexibility, a solid intoxication. Love should be the first link between people and it is the least exploited. Love is what man talks about the most while knowing nothing about it. Saint Paul says it explicitly: obscuration concerns love. "To see face to face" means to see, to know, to understand love; embrace the whole of love. To be born is to join a family and learn about life. It is impossible to learn life without becoming a person; to become a person is equivalent to becoming a social, and therefore political, animal. This is the aspect that Anouilh retained in his Antigone. There are no families without concessions, pettiness, deceit, indecency, vulgarity, animosities, suicides: you have to kill a little of yourself and put your self on part-time to fit into a family. It is possible to give as an example the docility of Asians to learning: for many years, they are brought back to the state of apprentice every second of their existence. No league stands up to this way of doing things, because everyone recognizes that humility is the source from which the foundations of careful work and know-how can spring. And also because this humility will always make you want to put the work back on the workbench, a sign of true craftsmanship. Humiliation is the big word of the family, with humility. A matter of perspective then. Antigone learned everything from her father since she was his eyes. From this intimacy, Antigone learned a lesson: all our acts are perpetrated without knowing the consequences. A radical remedy against the will to power. And the consequences of our actions do not necessarily wait for our life to be revealed! Oedipus could almost be happy for himself and for his family that all his forfeiture had been revealed during his lifetime. Antigone knows that man should not believe in his will alone. There too it is a question of power, which swells with its superb. The will alone perverts itself, it corrupts itself, it takes pride in itself. The will alone invests space as soon as a superior power, authority, is forgotten. All those who act in politics without referring to a superior force are mistaken. It's a lesson from Antigone, one of the forgotten laws that she restores and shines. All those who will want to change inequalities or injustices by their own will (inequality is injustice plus envy) will face the consequences of their actions: that is to say, placing others injustices in place of the previous ones sometimes turning out to be much worse. What is learned as a child does not cease to exist as an adult. What is learned as a child turns into an adult, but it lives on in the adult. Man is the origin of tradition, and the original tradition.

Antigone grasps her intimacy as a remedy for power as an allegory of the interior life. Intimacy weaves a special relationship with femininity? Intimacy belongs to interiority. Intimacy lives in silence, it leans on secrecy, on the depth of the person. Oedipus loses ground, because he no longer has any intimacy, it seems to him that everything about him is known and especially the worst, that this worst will cover with its shadow the parcel of good that continues to exist within it. Violated privacy marks the end of our humanity. Antigone fulfills her duty. She takes care of her aged and weakened father. To dedicate oneself to duty, to serve, imposes and strengthens intimacy. Armed with the humility and intimacy that often travel together, Antigone addresses the gods and maintains a permanent dialogue with them. She does not start flapping her arms and haranguing Zeus to avenge herself for all the insults her father has received… Equality is often the other name for revenge and believes itself to be synonymous with justice; equality replaced equity, which was meant to be an earthly extension of divine justice. Antigone intends to put an end to the din. It is an ode to family, and therefore an ode to tradition. She understands that the sacrifices demanded by the gods or created by her father's arrogant and tyrannical decisions are nothing compared to self-sacrifice, which only he can redeem the entire cursed score. Antigone also knows that the laws of men have no authority, that authority is transcendent when power is immanent. Cain wants to know what he is entitled to by yielding to his will to power, he addresses Satan by asking him if he is happy. Satan answers him: “I am powerful. » ⁴ What Antigone still sees as in a mirror, Creon by confusing authority and power will end up dissipating the clouds. Here is not the final struggle, for men will always forget in order to have to remember, but the final battle. Antigone will embrace her vocation and fight for what is really worth it in her eyes, what she has always lived for without knowing it, what seems most natural to her: tradition; the balance between authority and power. This is how Antigone enters politics.