So many stories about identity! The word does not appear in Greek epic or tragedy. Identity at the time of Antigone is based on lineage and belonging to a city. Identity was impregnated with rootedness. The family and the city brought together under a virtual banner all of what the other was to know about himself during a first meeting. During antiquity, no one proclaimed his identity or promulgated it, and no one decided on his identity. It wasn't about putting on a costume. Men depended on their identity. Identity was like a charge, we had to be worthy of it. It established being and becoming. The modern era has made it an issue, because it has transformed identity into having, a sort of asset which one can dress up or discard. In its modern fantasy of believing that we can choose everything all the time, the modern age has relentlessly replaced being with having. Yet this logic, this ideology has its limits: some things cannot be acquired, among them: otherness. Living one's identity, being what one is, inhabiting one's name , allowing intimacy and therefore the knowledge and deepening of one's being, these are the sine qua non conditions for an encounter with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone is located in this precise place, the ground on which the fight is built, Antigone preserves anchored in her this gift of the elders, of the gods, this rootedness which defines the authority to which she leans for stand up to this man, his relative, the king, who espouses the will to power and finds himself blinded by it to the point of hearing only his own voice, its echo.

The modern world demands self-murder, it posits it as a condition; a new form of sacrifice, a new holocaust. Rid of oneself, everything is permitted. Self is the enemy. The shifting of values, their pure and simple inversion, obliges us to stop for a moment on their consequences. The proposal turns out to be simple: suffer once and for all, destroying what nature has made of you, and live your life to the full. A religious feeling immediately recognizes the language of the Evil One, the voice of seduction, advertising. Nature made you a man, wake up the woman inside you! Nature made you ugly, surgery will transform you and make you an object of desire! Nature didn't give you the memory you wanted, an app on your phone will follow you everywhere to give you the glow you deserve! Everything will be given to you, moreover, because you are worth it. Who still hears the echo, the murmur, after the slogan: "Because you are worth it!" »? You have to prick up your ears and then clearly, you hear: "You will be like gods!" Under the fallacious pretext of offering freedom without self-examination and without the inherent difficulties, the modern world sells a cloud of smoke, and smoke and mirrors. The feeling of power of the time will be reproduced with each sale, with each transaction, and will feast on this perlimpinpin powder sold at a price of gold and provoking an addiction so strong that it swells with pride by moving away a little more every day the man of himself. The formula of Georges Bernanos: "We understand nothing of modern civilization if we do not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all kinds of interior life" reveals the attachment of the modern world to omitting the man in man; it is better to push man beyond himself; the only worthwhile attitude resides outside the walls; far from oneself and one's condition: because it is no longer possible to live this fight with one's nature, this fight no longer has any meaning, it is obsolete, out of date, out of time, so old-fashioned when everything is possible, everything is possible, everything within reach. This first memory which is so quickly erased, so quickly labeled as obsolete, archaic, even ancient, and that is to say here what ignominy we are witnessing, this first memory is swept away, they spit on it in order to show the infamy which characterizes; this shame, this attachment, this prison, this chain to oneself when one can be everything! When you can be everything.

The tragedy of Antigone prophesies our modern era by denouncing the struggle between individualism and individuation. Did Sophocles feel that man would become estranged from his nature? If we still vibrate for Antigone, if she continues to resound, to thunder at our door, it is because she expresses an urgency, the safeguarding of freedom and the freedom of man can only be individual, it is also collective, because man is a political animal, as Aristotle said. Men suffer from their sight, which becomes numb between near and far. The space between these two destinations is the same as between the call and the response. Balance remains the most perilous exercise for man. Forgetting the past, killing memory, always amounts to forgetting our relationship to ourselves. Many call the forgetting of the past the name of pragmatism and thus lay down criticism with a clear conscience; pragmatism becomes a sesame, a law. Indeed, Antigone constantly oscillates between conservatism and innovation. The anarchist likes a clean slate, Antigone has nothing of an anarchist; the anarchist would always like to reinvent everything. Creon embodies the anarchist. He denies what is not him. He “creates” laws. He "is" his laws. All anarchists have thought it and all dictators have applied it. Is there an identity without memory? Identity unites, it should never exclude. Identity establishes the conditions of an encounter. Paul Ricœur summed up the condition of the encounter by saying: “To be open to the other than oneself, there must still be a self. »

I stayed so many hours facing the phrase of Saint Paul: “We see as in a mirror and in a confused way, but then it will be face to face. To see each other, to know each other, to be known… Odysseus is known only to Eumeus and his dogs. Is it by magic? No, one can only give in to fidelity by having experienced fidelity; experiencing fidelity also means stepping back from it even and especially if this stepping back is not voluntary. This confused way, this mirror, this face to face, it is only about self-awareness, and this self-awareness is nothing but love. The question to ask: "Am I doing things for love?" Does love guide me? But what is love? A requirement above all. And this requirement intercedes with love. The requirement wedges itself against love and lavishes this balance, this quest, this thirst, this self-knowledge. Who am I ? I am this requirement, this desire to be oneself and therefore to be open to others. Being oneself deserves, accredits and even claims the encounter. I allow myself to meet. What could this encounter be? Oedipus meets his father and kills him, but he is not himself . All Oedipus in Sophocles indicates the pursuit of the self. All Antigone in Sophocles indicates self-acceptance.

The past gives courage and allows understanding. Isn't meaning lacking in modern times? Memory consciousness bestows a force that moves mountains; and the first mountain to move is our ego. Lacan, in his crazy study of Antigone sees desire, only desire and nothing but desire, but Lacan feels that there is something else, something that escapes the factual and the analysis. Tossing and turning the concept of amartia , the Greek sin, fault, is not enough. Antigone does not infringe out of a taste for risk. And the reductio ad desiderum does not explain everything. It does not say otherness. Lacan forgot the event, the one that conditions everything. For Antigone, the death of her brother. Isn't Antigone locked into her habits before this event? The people of Thebes barely paid attention to her. She wandered among them aimlessly. She was living her life, as the saying goes. And this double outrage comes as yet another curse from the gods against his family. The two brothers who kill each other. You have to accept the yoke of the gods, don't you? But a man stands in the midst of the gods. Creon believes he is invested with a mission, that of restoring order and dictating everyone's conduct. He knows it, it is his destiny, he will take Thebes to the pinnacle, make it a model city. Creon will instead allow the butterfly to emerge from its chrysalis. Antigone will be transformed. We don't become another when we metamorphose, we become ourselves, but different. It is often a surprise for the people around you. It is not one for the person concerned. Antigone is never surprised to become herself otherwise she would ask her about what to do. She would hesitate, mumble… This metamorphosis marks an otherness, a change of perspective. It's a lesson from Antigone, knowledge of the other passes through knowledge of oneself. From the loss of self, due to the cult of the self, nothing healthy is born, it is necessary to confront oneself, to cultivate oneself with what disturbs in oneself, to accept and live the metamorphosis which results from it to meet and love the other. Antigone makes it possible to requalify the identity. If anyone wanted to tell Antigone's identity, they'd be tackling a never-ending task; it turns out to be almost impossible to define the identity since it is constantly evolving; some will say then that identity circumscribes the background of a personality, but how can character be neglected? How to pretend that the character and the personality cease to interpenetrate and form a new collusion after an event? An identity that no longer feeds on its encounter with the other is doomed to suicide; the timeline indicating the date of his death began to tick away. Identity is based on the past and therefore, on a certain idea of ​​transmission, if identity becomes narcissistic, it dies; if identity becomes egotized , it dies; without transmission, not an identity, but an epitaph. Identity must thirst for the other; otherness contains the secret of a fulfilled identity by allowing the sap of life to circulate; otherness can suffer from the same ills as identity: it can be narcissistic, seek encounter for encounter, seek to get drunk in order to forget oneself , to be the other, to have the impression of becoming other, in this case no possible encounter, because the encounter with the other is a matter of vertebrates.

Jacques Lacan in his mad enterprise to grasp, to touch Antigone's desire with his fingertip, noted that Aristotle allows himself a funny play on words between habits and tradition ¹ . It could also be the subtitle of the Book of Job. The tradition represents an identity and must make it possible to evolve and grow in contact with it. These are guardians invented by men to pass on their knowledge, so as not to forget. It is a human and singular work. Perhaps the most beautiful of all. But often tradition can become like a kind of habit, it can even be confused with it because people forget, and the difference between habit and tradition is the lost meaning. Meaning can easily be lost, especially if one believes the keeper. Antigone possesses nothing but love, and she deceives it to Creon: “It was not to share hatred, but love that I was born. She does not believe herself to be the guardian of tradition. She does not defend her identity. His encounter with the other takes place in the negative. Creon embodies this other who forces him to stand up. Antigone leaning on what she knows, what she believes, what is immutable, and what has allowed man to stand upright since the dawn of time, picks up the thread of a lost or forgotten tradition or on the point of being; she says that despite her age, this tradition has not aged a bit and continues to be a safeguard. Antigone discovered her vocation by grasping her past, her memory, her tradition which are all one and waving them in the face of Creon who strikes down and forces Oedipus' daughter to become Antigone; there is no doubt that Antigone finds herself struck by this announcement; she panics at first, loses all bearings, finds herself distraught, with dimmed vision. It is then that she thinks of her father, that she sees her two brothers again, and her thoughts allow her to recover her senses and start breathing again. The air she breathes gives her new life, she feels the sap of life rush into her. She thought she was dying seconds earlier, as if Creon were ripping her heart out. And as she relives, she thinks, she reviews her thoughts, everything is mixed up and tangled up, although little by little a clearing crosses her ideas which obstruct her mind, and in this clearing, she distinguishes Zeus enthroned, and as the king of Olympus gathers around him the other gods, Antigone ends up resembling her ideas, what she knew, what she had been taught, what her father taught her, what her childhood with its moods shared lists of love and hate; the clearing continues to advance, and suddenly the elements of her mind each take a place, as if they fit together, and Antigone understands that everything has its right place, that it is important to keep this natural place, because it hides a force that protects.

Isn't becoming oneself always becoming someone else, but what can become of someone who doesn't know who he is? A wreck, an eternal drift, a grounding? This one can sink into all forms of submission, such as the will to power or cowardice; there is nothing that can temper it, caress it or control it. It is a question here of having the same requirement as in writing: joining as closely as possible, as closely as possible, the style and the subject. Succeed in uniting to become one. Operate and accomplish the metamorphosis to get out of oneself, to be oneself. Contrary to what is often said or believed these days, the perpetual encounter with the other, also called interbreeding, is only a subterfuge, a hysterical zapping, a means of noticing, of glimpsing and camouflage this vision under an ungrateful, anemic and amnesic make-up. Here continues to move the hysteria of the modern world to create new needs at the insatiable source of dissatisfaction. The modern world only takes into account the consequences without ever worrying about the causes. Otherness does not imply jouissance, in any case not immediate. It involves a dive into oneself, an odyssey, an exploration and an understanding of oneself. You need borders to know your country, removing borders does not abolish nationalities, rather self-awareness in your space. The atomic and pleasurable "I" has lived by authorizing the ephemeral and self-forgetting. The intimacy, the scrutiny of the self, the anxiety of the self, the fever of the self, not narcissistic, but desirous of placing oneself in the world in relation to the other, brings a completely different contentment. The modern world flatters, it only invests the field of humor, because it knows that humor is queen, that it reigns supreme over the daily life of man. The modern world, like a good sociologist, has only dispensed with man's best enemy, the one that sharpens his envy, the instinct of property, and he has founded his empire on it. Envy and property represent an infernal and devastating couple where man is consumed and extinguished. The will to power, the class struggle, communitarianism, all these forms of social disorganization all drink from the source of envy.

The child applies the enacted rule, or not. In both attitudes, the rule dictates and directs. By learning or refusing the rule, the child constructs himself. The child builds his adult life in action or in reaction. It thus lays the foundations. For a long time, I wondered about the sentence of Saint Paul: “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. And Paul of Tarsus links this childish state to the mirror and to confused vision: “Now we see as in a mirror and in a confused way, but then it will be face to face. Now my knowledge is limited, but then I will know as I am known. Why is there such a big difference between the appreciation of children in Saint Paul and in Jesus Christ? And if also resided in this place the demarcation between authority and power? Soldiers are well aware of this dividing line between rank and function. A corporal will not yield an inch of ground to a colonel if the latter does not have the necessary accreditations. Power and authority derive their strength from their authority and their power. Authority and power are articulated, one could almost say that they are organized, better still they are “organized”. But power is temporal, earthly when authority has no place, it is everywhere. This last comparison provides important insight and challenges St. Paul's words. The law exists to allow us to grow, to strengthen us like a child, but what distinguishes the child from the adult lies in his capacity to believe and especially in the marvelous. Who has never seen the eyes full of stars of the child to whom a story that goes beyond the senses is told has never seen anything. The child believes and likes to believe, because he revels in the marvelous and the extraordinary on a daily basis. It is the child of Christ, it is certainly Antigone in her childhood, we imagine a little Antigone teasing and not letting herself be counted, it is the common of Saints and Saints very often, animated by the wonder of everyday life. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them; for the Kingdom of Heaven is for such as they are. Because they are not yet robots perverted by a jumble of false beliefs only intended to reassure him. Man wraps himself up so quickly with so many reassuring and sterile layers. The first robots are embodied in men clad in their habits. Saint Paul sees another facet of childhood: the little man never stops learning — and he learns by rubbing shoulders with the law — Saint Paul wants the child who belongs to the letter to become an adult who will embrace the spirit , because he will have digested this food of his childhood and will dispose without thinking of it of all the law; in short, acculturation, when education becomes natural. Saint Paul has as incarnation of this success, Jesus Christ, who will never abandon the old law and, on the contrary, will explain it to the doctors of the law, but by completing it with an understanding which escapes them. This understanding is the mind. Antigone's vocation belongs to the spirit. The vocation cannot grow in the letter, it freezes and withers. The hoped-for man must free himself and grow in spirit while recognizing the imprint of the law in him.

Humility lodges in the heart of man, and man pretends to ignore it moved by the demon of pride which propels the will to power. Authority has lost its letters of nobility along with humility. Authority has become synonymous with implacable order, reckless force, tyranny. What an inversion of values! While authority according to Antigone prevented tyranny! The modern age has this impression of authority because it has been trampled on by men who have used it; whereas one cannot, one must, one must serve authority. But has authority been damaged by these disastrous experiences? A value cannot be damaged by a man. Fidelity unfolds above Saint Peter without his being able to do so. Loyalty unfolds above betrayal, for it always embraces it. Loyalty asserts itself even in betrayal. Betrayal carries with it no meaning, except its own satisfaction. Any value also speaks of the uncertainty within man. All value is a guardian and a shelter. No need to choose, value adapts to our weakness since it precedes our uncertainties. The modern world confuses authority and power by making them bear the same wounds and the same pains. Because it was necessary to remove God from everything. Neither the ancients nor the contemporary would understand, but that didn't matter, they counted for nothing now. If ever God did not leave, he would have to be killed. The 20th century wanted to be the time of the death of God. He will have killed only the death of his idea. Above all, he will have created a new anthropomorphism based on suicide. If each generation secretes its own morality, can we go so far as to replace morality with authority? What to believe and what to say. It was the beginning of the reign of relativism. Thus under the term authority have we amassed everything we hated. We needed an outlet. How many flowers have we seen fail at the loss of their guardian? What tree can survive when its trunk deteriorates? To deny the laws of nature is to deny life. Life is ebb and flow, balance, vigilance, so many men don't understand that when they were fine a while ago, they feel close to the abyss. Because that's how life fluctuates. Some things are easy for us and then difficult without anything making them harder than the passage of time. Understanding this state requires humility, which is a weapon, because humility requires a relationship with oneself on all occasions. Humility comes alive with acquiescence, docility to events, trust, unconditional love, wonder...

The inversion of values ​​is based on a mise en abyme. Few people are inclined to mise en abime because there is an incessant risk of discovering themselves there. Relativism is a sweet companion. Relativism is Abbé Donissan's horse dealer in Bernanos's novel. We can escort with him, he does not bore, he stays in his place and shows unfailing empathy. However, he does not know compassion. Is it a problem ? But no ! It's an advantage, he doesn't contradict me, he agrees with me, more exactly he anticipates my agreement by conceiving it before I thought about it. Relativism is really the religion of the time; he is a natural child of secularism and keeps all religions on his guard. Relativism does not help, it is satisfied only with its role of witness; he acts and acquiesces, he is a technician, an administrator, a statistician's tool. He is not docile, he is not humble even if he sometimes manages to pass himself off as humility, but unlike this, relativism does not force you to question yourself, because he constantly questions everything around him; it reinforces leaning on egotism and immediate satisfaction. When humility pushes to confess one's faults, relativism finds a way to qualify all infractions by claiming the rule of “double standards” which proves to be a very useful master key for good or ill. Humility is a learning of the law to access the spirit. To know how to obey is to learn how to govern. To obey, to live better. To live fully. Antigone gets up, because she obeys. Antigone rises because Creon does not know how to obey. Perhaps Antigone got up when she had been crouching for weeks, waiting for Creon's misstep in the face of the ongoing war. Sophocles does not say so. Perhaps there is nothing unforeseen or provoked (de provo-care , precede the call), perhaps Antigone had been fomenting her revolt for a very long time... Antigone obeys the law and in mind. She leans back constantly and it is from there, verifiable at every point, from where she speaks: leaned against the past. In Antigone, we find an incarnation of the idea of ​​authority formulated by Hannah Arendt ² . Authority brings together these past centuries, this amassed life which is infinitely better than the last idea weighed against the yardstick of relativism. Authority is this rest, this calm. One day, in Delphi, exhausted from having walked for hours, I went down to the temple of Athena, and I sat down against a colonnade, I dozed off in the rising sun in a certain rapture. Antigone, and this is not the least of her promises, offers us divine dialogue, there is nothing relativistic or even comfortable about it. Antigone prepares herself from the first day of her engagement, that is to say from the first day of her conversion, that is to say from the first day of her vocation, to die. Antigone is inspired by her relationship with the gods, especially Zeus. This intimacy with the gods and their edicts which supersede earthly laws is a matter of holiness. The saint bases himself on his dialogue with God and on dogmas to grow again and always in this intimacy. To speak with God is to neighbor him. To refuse authority is to refuse this proximity. We see how the order is reversed, turned upside down and dislocated. Antigone discovers the sacred with the death of her father; with her brother's corpse, she grabs hold of his memory and it shows him that she must choose: honor or madness. She decides the honor. She decides to follow the history of her family with its ups and downs. To do so, it relies on an unwritten law, a dogma: one does not leave a dead person unburied. That's all. The word dogma represents law backed by authority. The dogmas are varied: written or unwritten, like this law that Antigone seems to hold: one does not leave a dead person unburied. Creon seems to discover it, he didn't know anything about it, he had forgotten it, it must be said that he hadn't written it or decided on it. By thus rising before power and slipping her finger into a gap, Antigone inaugurates what the first Christians will do by standing before Rome ³ , speaking the truth of the spirit and confronting it with the law, refusing submission to power temporal, to rethink freedom in all places and on all occasions, because knowing that freedom belongs to man and love belongs to God and that freedom leads man to the love of God. Antigone's action could have remained dormant, but the stumbling block named Creon decided otherwise. Antigone did not revolt against her fate, she even found it conformable. Zeus helped her tell about him. Zeus allowed him to discover a part of the mystery. What Antigone has received turns out to be out of proportion with what Creon can promise her. By entering the mystery, Antigone has finished opening the door that the divinity always leaves ajar. Thus Antigone escapes heresy: the right to choose among dogmas. The written law stands like the course of money. The unwritten and irrefutable law harbors the truth. This law includes and does not exclude. Antigone says: I was made for love … she chose. She chose Zeus ⁴ , that is to say deus, that is to say God, the God who comes and condemns the tyrants. The God who comes to meet her and whom she will soon see face to face.