Part 2: The funeral

“ My dear Ismene. I come this morning to tell you that I took care of everything. I took the same undertakers for our two brothers. I couldn't choose and since our brothers didn't leave any last wishes, I took matters into my own hands to get it sorted out as soon as possible. I still ordered embalming so that they are presentable. If you want to go see them, they'll be ready around 3 p.m. You do not have to. Well, if you can take ten minutes, that might be fine. It may be better to keep an image of them happy, children for example. I took the same urn model for both. A priest will come to the funeral home and give a short speech before the cremation. I ordered him to come to the funeral home. You see, I took care of everything. Eteocles will be buried in the cemetery which is located about thirty minutes from Thebes by taking the national. For Polynice, it is more complicated with the law of our uncle, Creon. I decided to scatter his ashes on the battlefield as the king does not want him buried. Makes sense, right? Tell me what you think, I'm not stopped on this point. This portrait of Antigone living in the 21st century delivering the remains of her brothers to the funeral director summarizes the rite of funerals today. The family has since the Industrial Revolution been rendered unproductive. Funerals are no longer part of the family tradition. The modern world is reassured by using the formula make sense , as the translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression is heard today, and as it is so comforting to repeat it to oneself without it really having any… sense, because what what are these mini-senses found on the ground almost by chance, what are these skin-deep that invite themselves in almost without our being there for nothing, if not the residues of a past sense, a common sense, a good sense sculpted by the centuries? Through the destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning, create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not not have totally given up. Deceit is backed up by ignorance, and on this point too, trickery is not new. The meaning given by death within the family, this meaning almost completely forgotten nowadays, is recalled by Antigone in Sophocles' play where she stands as a guardian of the values ​​that liberate, because they protect man from death. 'animal. Antigone reaffirms what man can and cannot; it takes hold of a force destined to protect us from our will to power and to teach us the time of responsibility; a time nowadays entrusted to specialists replacing the family, the people who compose it and the tenuous links woven between them over time.

That morning, Antigone hears the law promulgated by Creon, she speaks to Ismene terrified by all this history. Antigone cannot fail according to the admirable formula of Pierre Boutang. Antigone cannot avoid burying her brother. It cannot but go against this iniquitous law. She cannot fail to offer a real funeral rite to her brother and thus part with him with dignity. Since Antigone cannot help but act, since after having spoken to her sister she has not received the desired echo, she decides to cross the city at daybreak when it is not yet too hot. She dreaded this moment as much as she expected it. Certain moments concentrate all the emotions, even the most contradictory. Antigone is apprehensive to see her brother dead. Antigone crossed the town, few stalls were open, human activity was slowly set in motion. The dead rain down every day and the world continues to turn, but for those who lose a loved one the world stops. He flees. He slips away. It turns into an endless vanishing point. Sorrow engulfs the world. There remains only the dread which astonishes, which marks a new time, a new era, a time where one enters without knowing anything about it, without knowing anything about it, but apprehending it like a child who stands up for the first time on both legs. When Antigone arrives at the gates of Thebes, the guards look at her, her legs falter, and she walks out of the city. The now stronger heat of the sun reminds Antigone that she must hurry. The body will decompose. Suddenly, around a small mound in the distance, she sees Polynice's corpse. Antigone assumes a distracted air, operates as if she hadn't seen him. But, deep down, she knows it's her brother. This inanimate form… it can only be him. She catches her breath. Her gaze sweeps all around her to give herself some strength. So it is now. “You have to look at him,” his conscience whispers to him. " He's waiting for you… ". Antigone inflates her lungs, but cannot bring herself to look at the corpse as she approaches it. This meeting, these reunions, she has called for them since the moment she knew that her brothers had committed suicide. Now the idea of ​​being in front of him paralyzes her. Antigone forgets to distinguish dream from reality. She keeps the trouble going. She is being duplicitous with herself. Is this "know thyself"? To know the other in his death? Is this the limit drawn by the Ancients? And suddenly exhausted from not looking, she turns her head, she faces her fear, bravery is her ally, she knows it, she just has to grab it again, it's within reach. She sees her brother. She hits a wall. His hand comes to rest on his face. Tears escape from her eyes that she can't hold back. The imagined image and the image of reality come together. Polynice lies in front of her, her face contorted with a grin of regret that she knows him well. His sword is a few centimeters from his hand which seems to be calling for him, the sword is stained with blood, his body is dislocated.

Where the dead is, the funeral rite resides. Antigone knows it. She crossed the wall that separated her from the world of the dead. She recovers her senses after the tears and the shock, not that the tears and the shock have an end, but they fade away as life resumes its journey. She now details the body: she recognizes him, the clouds are dissipating, she sees him now with clarity, they are face to face, it is indeed him, this dear brother, her hand brushes his cheek, already cold despite the ambient heat. , she recognizes the texture of her skin, the touch remains so silky, so alive; is the skin lying? Would the touch so delicate deceive her? She bends down, lays her head on her brother's body, she cries again, the pain is a backwash, she comes back to the hieratic rock, she submerges it almost every time and when she doesn't tame it, it's for better fake it and hug it next time. Antigone sits up. She thinks that if she had been there, she could have stopped this massacre. She blames herself. She imagines the ignoble knot of resentment that threw Eteocles against Polynices. A lump of stink. A craving to feel superior when one believes oneself to be devalued; a memory that kicks back and threatens, a geyser of the past; force as possibility and solution. Antigone looks at this lamentable result of men, her brothers delivered to the sole will to power. There is something so human about believing yourself strong; strength pushes you to believe you are always stronger. A few centuries later, Saint Paul will teach that man is strong when he is weak. Antigone already knows that, she precedes him and apprehends him. Her weakness, since she is a young woman, since she is unmarried, since she has no power, since she belongs to a brood, is her strength against the body of her brother, against Ismene. , facing his uncle Creon, facing the gods. Its weakness is in no way akin to idealism, its weakness is to represent authority against power; that is to say, not much here below, in terms of strength. With Antigone, two conceptions of force clash: the force of authority which protects and the force of power which attacks. For a few minutes, she probes the place, she goes back in time. She sees the reciprocal sword stroke, she guesses the trace of Eteocles, she sees them fighting, caparisoned to their hatred, Polynice turning around, applying the sword stroke which he believes to be fatal, she sees Eteocles moving on his right, thinking he had the upper hand when it came time to strike. The two brothers, surprised when they thought they were stronger than the other, fall at the same time. In a last look for each other. And was that grin of regret on Polynice's face shared by Eteocles? When it's time to die, what does hatred and resentment weigh?

Antigone sees the body of this young man who died too soon. She looks at this face too young to be inert. A new wave of sorrow overwhelms her, she begins to learn to live with this rain of tears that has settled in her, which calms down, but which does not stop threatening to return, which looms. Antigone talks to Polynice: she tells him about her morning conversation with Ismene, the iniquitous law of Creon, how the city awoke this morning after the battle... She talks to him gently as one would talk to a sleeping person whom one would not want not quite waking up. She just wants to cover her silence. But, little by little, the complaint rises in her which she does not want to hear, which she schemes to ignore, which she wants to stifle: Polynices does not answer. He won't answer. He will never answer again. Antigone shows a feminine quality prized by the Greeks, sophrosynè , decency. We proceed by riddles with the story. It is impossible to know the intimate thought of the Greeks at the time of Pericles. We assume. So many details escape us. What is clear to us is the will of humanity, to say the human at the heart of the universe. The Greeks did not say “it is raining”, but “Zeus is raining”. The relationship of the Greeks to the gods was revealed in intimacy. Being able to rest in the shadow of an authority offers real comfort, responsibilities are established and take their place. It's hard to get bogged down in a confusion of loads. The contemporary world is resting in the shadow of technical power, this has nothing in common, because technical power has no authority, it is a decoy that man has invented to exonerate himself from 'authority. The contemporary world has delegated all the human paraphernalia of funerals to professionals to make them technical. Antigone rests in the shadow of authority. She contradicts Creon out of duty, out of love, which comes to the same thing for her. Duty and love are the fabric of his life. In this ancient Greece, it is out of the question to abandon a dead person, to look away from a deceased member of his siblings. For the Greeks, dignity often comes down to this way of facing death. Nowadays, it is good practice to forget death. Or at least to do everything for. Shortening life is a way of forgetting death, since thus modern man has the impression of mastering the last second of his life. While waiting to no longer be able to die, one must shorten one's life. The social bond so strong in all periods of humanity between the dead and the living is gradually disappearing. The cemeteries are emptied of the living, the free concessions multiply, the ashes go to dust… Technical discoveries make it possible to ignore death a little more each day. But isn't the anguish of death different in our time? At all times, man wanted to postpone death? Hide this death that I cannot see and death itself will eventually disappear. Napoleon Bonaparte thus gradually drove the cemeteries out of the cities. The invisible death, death had better watch out. Créon turns out to be an impeccable modern. What can we say about the time not so long ago when “In the bedroom of the deceased, the shutters are sometimes still closed, the clocks are stopped, the mirrors are covered with a black veil. The dead man is on his bed, dressed in his best costume. His hands, crossed at the height of the abdomen, hold a rosary. Until the 19th century, it was customary to expose the deceased at the door of his house, sometimes lying on straw. Balzac mentions it in Le Médecin de campagne : At the door of this house (...), they saw a coffin covered with a black sheet, placed on two chairs in the middle of four candles, then on a stool a copper tray where dipped a boxwood twig in holy water ”? ¹ If humanity gets rid of its fear of death, if it succeeds, thanks in particular to the NBIC ² , in no longer dying or rather in always living, it will have no more humanity except in name. Of course, humanity cannot live without humanity, of course substitutes will be found, but thus uprooting traditions and the meaning of things only really allows one thing: to make human beings vulnerable and to deliver them to the forces of profit. Our little Antigone of the 21st century who spoke to Ismene earlier, what does she tell us that we don't already know? It is moved by its time, tossed about by the furious winds of change for change's sake. It does not express anything deep about our humanity, about life, because it is only a subterfuge. She does not live or else it is to believe that the dead leaf knows how to fly. It is only the sum of its mimetic mechanisms. No need to be frightened by these robots from Asia who seem ready to conquer our place, because the robot is in us and it is watching us; he watches for this point of no return where the man stripped of all humanity will exhibit his corpse believing he has defeated his worst enemy. The loss of know-how vis-à-vis death has gone hand in hand with the loss of the rite: almost nothing any longer accompanies the dead to Hades, almost nothing any longer frees the living from the dead and the dead from living. The gravediggers of humanity grant importance to the rite only to mock it or harm it without grasping the liberation it procures through the meaning it reveals.

It is the deaths of her family that allow Antigone to become Antigone. She succeeds in the process of individuation: she becomes aware of her vocation and assumes her metamorphosis; she finds within herself the resources, the culture, to agree to put on the new clothes of one who does not allow her life to be dictated. The “Know thyself” expresses nothing other than this decision to be satisfied with what one is and to fight for the fulfillment of this vocation. Transfiguration which takes on its meaning in large part thanks to the closure of death. Transfiguration which aggregates all the knowledge that Antigone has stored in contact with the living and the dead of her family and which secretes the resounding around 450:

In my opinion, Zeus did not proclaim this,

Neither does Justice, who dwells in the abode of the gods below;

They have defined what in this area is law for men;

I didn't think your proclamations

Had such strength that one could, being a man,

To override the unwritten and infallible laws of the gods.

Because the laws exist from time immemorial, not from today,

Neither yesterday, and no one knows where they arose.

No man's thought could inspire fear in me

Who was going to hire me to be punished by the gods

For it. I knew well that I could, of course,

And even if you hadn't made your proclamation. But, if I have to die

Before time, I still say that I win.

How can we not win by dying

If one lives, as I do, overwhelmed with misery?

So, in my case, being struck by that death

Is a suffering that does not count. On the contrary, if I had accepted that, the son

Of my mother being dead, the corpse was left without a grave,

It would have hurt me. But, there, I have no pain.

If now you think my action is crazy,

Maybe it's crazy that makes me crazy?

The colossal force that the frail Antigone deploys in Creon's face is like a tornado. Antigone's metamorphosis is revealed in the face of death. Metamorphosis, like epiphany, is human strength that defies death. It is also the place where humanity dwells. Antigone proclaims her rights which have existed for millennia and will continue to exist after her. She does not invent it, she is only its depositary, it is an immense task.

Antigone summons all that has been worn by humanity since the dawn of time with this simple gesture: the burial of her brother. Funeral rites mark a boundary between human and animal. With a gesture, she puts Creon in his place, perched on his law and therefore his power. Creon is so modern, desperately trying to exist by legislating. I create a law, therefore I am. Power has its limits that Creon, a technocrat before his time, does not know. Creon believes he has the power to dictate a new law, he has lost the sense of what is beyond him, he believes himself to be the authority; yet it is the oblivion of authority that pushes him to act in this way. By asserting his power, Creon ends up destroying it. Antigone, after having crossed the wall of reality, after having cherished the body of her beloved brother, can face anything. She knows Creon's rights better than Creon himself. Charles Maurras will write this magnificent definition of the policy of Creon: "Imagine in the Christian city a criminal whom the temporal power would like to punish by the deprivation of eternal salvation, by precipitation in eternal hell..." The separation between power and authority does not will become quite clear only with the appearance of Christ who “legislates” for all politicians with the famous answer to the Pharisees: “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God”. Antigone here prefigures the first Christians of Ancient Rome. And Antigone rehabilitates the rite to prove Creon's error. A tradition falls asleep if it is not embodied. The rite offers a point of calcification to all personal appetites to prevent them from spreading like a cancer. The rite unites the natural and the supernatural, power and authority, and prevents them from competing for the better part. Antigone and Creon know this. Créon knows that his law goes against everything we think of funerals at that time, but he dreams of imposing his mark, he swells with pride and wants to submit everyone to his power. Antigone could have given up. Antigone has suffered so much without ever saying anything about her brood. She suffered the jeers, the sniggers, the spitting. What can happen to him? She could have been engulfed in infamy and to make it cease, at least in appearance, to wrap herself in anonymity, to forget her honor, to silence her indignation, to become invisible. But no, she decided to rise from the abyss of shame, because fate is not something that should cause shame, but, on the contrary, should provoke a particular acuteness, a knowledge of men without limits and therefore without fear. Antigone grasps this path, the tradition, the meaning of her life. This meaning, its vocation, consists in having tradition respected, because tradition protects men against themselves. "It's not us who keep the rule, it's the rule that keeps us" writes Bernanos in The Dialogue of the Carmelites . During the funeral rite, it is easy to imagine this little Antigone, this very human Antigone, who seems all of a sudden, collapsing while performing the funeral rite. Funerals act like a stinger that bursts the abscess of grief, which can then flow gently and smoothly like an infusion to become one with the one who remains on the edge of the shore of the living, but to change everything in him, forever. We don't mourn someone, it's mourning that shapes us, it's the loss of a loved one that shapes us. Alone, on the battlefield, Antigone covers her brother with dust; and with a sure gesture finishes separating from the one she loves. The acute suffering felt during the rite, this stirring of all its entrails, this extreme tearing which ends up tearing the dead from the living, traces a second border which, after the announcement of death — social death, one might say — ratifies , seals and makes irreversible and indelible, a sacred boundary that indicates life after death with precision: the boundary of absence.