Tag: antigone

Why this hatred of authority?

Published on by Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti 7 comments

Authority resembles those secret agents dear to Graham Greene who conceal their identity so as not to lose it further during a bad encounter. She still has a few admirers who love her and deploy treasures of ingenuity to define her, redefine her, so that she is understood in her time. To do this, they bring her closer to tradition, to honor, to hierarchy, to natural law... they constantly give her a cane, crutches, a tripod, so that she can still get out of his hiding place and get some fresh air. The words to which they attach authority resemble bandages, cautery, which, in the end, hide it a little more. The disenchantment has been pronounced for a long time and is increasing. Nothing can save authority, everything that it inspires brings to mind old things that we know how to do without. It is of no use. It is of no use.

Authority, in its Latin sense, comes from auctor which means “one who increases”, and from auctoritas , which has “power to impose obedience”. Authority is equated with power, which we forget when separating power and authority. On the other hand, it is a power without power, it does not constrain. Its field of action is born from ethics, knowledge, belief... Because it requires obedience. This is where we begin to stumble over its meaning, because the times do not like obedience. And, as the era no longer appreciates belief, it denigrates authority. It devalues ​​it, it identifies it with cowardly and blind power. She gives him a nickname that has become an implication: authoritarianism . As if to reveal what she hides under her mask of leniency: a brutal, violent and unstable character. It must be unmasked. She must be slandered. Above all, we must no longer understand anything, and what is not understanding anything if not a new form of belief? Authority imposes limits that no one wants anymore, which oblige and prevent us from being what we want. The era believes that it is by being what we desire that we will be what we deserve. Individualism reigns supreme, and unchallenged. No one knows better than you what is good for you. Let’s take it for granted! As it was necessary to ignore limits and hierarchy, the era threw authority aside after having put it on the picket line. Authority catalyzed modernity. She had to be subdued.

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Antigone, rebellious and intimate (7/7. Love)

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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.

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Antigone, rebellious and intimate (5/7. Authority)

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Part 5: Authority

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

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Identify

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Identity is divided on the one hand into a base which is in us without our being able to derive any particular merit from it, our nature and the education we have received, and a movement constitutive of life which discovers elements which are not listed by our nature or upbringing, but must be read up to our nature and upbringing. Much of this process happens without our even having to think about it. It is however essential, essential and obliges us to the permanent revision of this nature and this education, just like with the permanent revision of these new elements through the prism of our nature and our culture. Balance, here again, is essential. There is no question of forgetting or worse of not being aware of our nature, of forgetting or worse of losing the benefits of our education, to approach the shores of novelty, or else we will be nothing but one threadbare flag in the wind, we will have no criteria for judging novelty and we would risk seeing in this novelty only novelty, and only liking it for that.

What is it to be above ground?

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The most illuminating example of human nature is found in the New Testament when Peter and Jesus Christ talk together and Peter urges his master to believe his devotion to be completely sincere. Thus, Jesus announces to him that the rooster will not have crowed that he will have denied him three times. The first place every man talks about is this: his weakness. Taking into account the limits of each, not always to resolve them, but also to overcome them, obliges to reason from what one is and not from what one believes to be. Any man who does not know his weaknesses, who forgets them, who does not take them into account is above ground, as we are used to saying nowadays. Above-ground meaning that we are nourished by a pasture that is not ours, that we renounce our pasture to find any other pasture than our own, better because it is different. Above ground also means that the comments received could be obtained anywhere else in the world without this posing a problem, these comments being rootless, translatable into any language and exportable as a computer “framework”. The formula "above ground" forbids answering the question "where are you talking about?" » and the first formula likes to taunt the second as identity or « far-right ». By dint of having wanted to dodge this question, we destroyed it. In the future it will no longer be possible to ask where we are talking about, because we will have reached such a level of abstraction and uprooting that this question will no longer even have any meaning.

Antigone, rebellious and intimate (4/7. Freedom)

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Antigone did not come to life at dusk. Antigone is born with dawn. It is at daybreak that Antigone becomes anti , which means facing and not against . At the reflux of the army of Argos, Antigone emerges from the shadows where she could have resided all her life, not to solve the riddle of the sphinx like her father, not to solve the riddle of the stages of the life, but to fill the space between each of them. Oedipus tore off his skin, his nails, his knuckles. Dusk describes an uncertain state in the morning as well as in the evening. Antigone rises with the day, with the dawn, when freedom takes life, and therefore body.

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Funerals

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Funerals are used to point with diabolical precision a dart that comes to burst the abscess of pain to let it flow out gently and smooth like the infusion of a patient, it hydrates those who remain on the edge of the bank of the alive, it brings him the comfort of always being a little with the missing person, but at the same time, it reminds him of his absence… It is difficult not to revel in it and not to hate it at the same time. The loss changes the whole layout of the living because he sees the imprint of the dead everywhere, some rooms are adorned with flowers when they have never been... The dead imposes a prism on the living who sees him in places where the latter has never set foot. The mental image makes it possible to remember and to imagine and frantically intertwines the threads of one with the threads of the other in a mad saraband that intoxicates and hoarse until we are no longer able to differentiate what which is true of what we invent. Time does nothing, or rather knits this confusion. But do we still want to separate memory from imagination?

We don't mourn someone, it's mourning that shapes us, it's the loss of a loved one that shapes us.

The Meaning… of Funerals

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The contemporary world is thrilled by using the formula, make sense , a perfect translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression, make sense . It is comforting to repeat this expression to yourself without it actually having any… meaning, so we pick up little things that make sense, but what are these mini-meanings found on the ground almost by chance? What are these skin of sorrow meanings that Through the methodical destruction of the family, transmission between generations is lacking, the meaning of our actions is lost, so we have to invent meaning , we have to create meaning, we have to give ourselves the illusion of still living, of not having abdicated. 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.