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

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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Based on the values

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; while serving 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 because it encompasses it. Loyalty asserts itself in betrayal. Betrayal carries with it no meaning except its own satisfaction. Any value also speaks of indecision and 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. God had to be taken out of 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 anthropology based on suicide.

News from Hyppolite Taine

He is a pedant, the pedant is the hollow and inflated mind which, because it is full of words, believes itself to be full of ideas, enjoys its sentences and deceives itself in order to dictate to others. He is a hypocrite who thinks he is sincere, a Cain who takes himself for Abel.

 

In this shrunken brain, given over to abstraction, and accustomed to herding men into two categories under opposite labels, whoever is not with him in the right compartment is against him in the wrong one, and in the wrong compartment between the rebels of all flags and rogues of all will, intelligence is natural. […] Every aristocrat is corrupt and every corrupt man is an aristocrat.

 

The left which is born with the Revolution displays a totalitarianism which, if it is sometimes hidden, is not less always present; it rests on the hatred of what does not think like it.

Hyppolite Taine in his Origins of Contemporary France described Robespierre in this way. But if instead of Robespierre, we put Hollande, Valls, or even worse Taubira, this portrait would fit them like a glove. Especially since pedant is masculine and feminine, he thus places everyone on an equal footing, this notion so dear to these… pedantic.

Charlie's Fate

soldier drawing

"The enemy therefore limits you gives you your form and founds you". This sentence of Saint-Exupéry expresses our condition fairly well at the end of this first week of 2015. The enemy forces me to evolve according to his codes, within a space he has circumscribed. I am first prisoner. He chooses the field and is trying to stay confined to it. Of the two immutable human data, space and time, it takes me space. Remove the space in time is a bit of Laurel to Hardy. The other unit continues to live, but it is disfigured. She lost the balance offered by the otherness of her spouse. Time is not the same following the space in which it evolves. Geography performs fate with a measure as precise as the hourglass. Read the continuation of "The fate of Charlie"

In the heart of darkness, life

The-Tree-of-Life

After seeing "Tree of Life", I have long forbidden myself to write about this film. Two forces clashed in me. Subjugated by poetry, by the state of bliss in which I was plunged, I was afraid of disturbing the surface of this work. I got so tangled in the mystery of this film that I did not understand the negative reactions and was unable to have a critical mind 1 . "Tree of Life" is based on a book from the Bible, "Le Livre de Job". And this dark book speaks of the life and relationship of man to God. Which is present in many books in the Bible. But Job's book begins with a dialogue between God and Satan who play man. The impression that this inaugural dialogue leaves us is strange. Of course, the start dialogue would not be entirely from the same era as the central story. No matter in fact, the impression left is during the book. How can God play with his beloved creature? A hasty conclusion reports on the improbable of the situation. In truth, once the bark has been removed, Job's book delivers the heart of the relationship between God and man. And "Tree of Life", the film of Terrence Malick, has this same ambition.

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What is Steve Jobs the name of?

"Steve Jobs 1955-2011", could be read on the Apple website on October 5, 2011. Until the end, this unique signature, minimalist, elegant and efficient. His signature. The noise created by the death of this American business leader took the world by surprise. A little, and the comparison has been made, as for Lady Diana a few years ago. Yet the comparison stops there, Lady Diana had ended up embodying the face of the oppressed in the face of a nomenclature; true or false, this portrait took more pleasure in a dream of a broken princess with evocative power but without any real connection to reality. The death of Steve Jobs is in no way the fate of the oppressed. The death of Steve Jobs is essentially about intimacy and therefore modesty. The death of Steve Jobs resounded with planetary noise. The life of Steve Jobs is an ode to intimacy.

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A year that ends...

Over a year that ends, we often take a stealthy look. Do not dwell too much. You never know how many things that we forced to bury the memory could once again appear, like these impromptu, malpolated and irritating "pop -up" windows on the internet. The exercise that can be carried out is to concentrate very strongly to extract important events; The events that will understand why they have counted so much; How they proved to be decisive. It is also important not to lose sight of the moment when the event appears.

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Newman and Socrates

The links between ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity are numerous. The most famous of the Greek precepts: Gnothi Seauton , "Know thyself", inscribed in Delphi retains a certain mystery. Another end of the sentence has stuck with us: “But not too much”… Know yourself… But not too much! Plato leads Socrates to reflect on the Delphic formula in the Philebus :

SOCRATES: In short, it is a species of vice which takes its name from a particular habit, and this part of vice in general is a disposition contrary to that recommended by the Delphi inscription.

PROTARCHUS: It is a precept: know thyself, that thou speakest, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Yes, and the opposite of this precept, in the language of the inscription, would be not to know oneself at all.
"Know thyself" in order to improve yourself, to erase in you what hinders your development. Not knowing himself is already a fault for Socrates. "But not too much", because man so easily believes himself much more than he is, son of Adam, man is the plaything of his presumption. “But not too much” so as not to take yourself for a god.
This is one of the foundations of Greek culture, the idea of ​​knowing oneself, the idea of ​​wisdom, of advancing in wisdom, but also the feeling that if you dig too deep, surprises can arise, and not necessarily good. The Greeks were very aware of man's weaknesses, his shortcomings. The Greeks are even, with the Christians, those who have most highlighted the possibility of human weakness, it is also what makes them so close to us. The weakness of man is expressed in their gospels, the tragedies. Pity and terror are the two pillars. Know yourself… but not too much.

original fault

Despite Shûsaku Endo's doubts as to the true Christianity of the Japanese evoked in the admirable "Silence", it also seems to me that the Japanese have a real fundamental point in common with the Christian in the ease with which they the place of the other. Is this not one of the founding bases of Christianity, one of these archetypes of the Discourse on the Montage, to always think that our effort has not been important enough, pronounced enough, for the understanding emerges? Of course, I see the weakness of the reasoning: the Japanese tirelessly try to put themselves in the place of the other culturally; he also wishes to make himself better understood; he does not know guilt, but shame… The Christian must put himself in the place of the other because he thinks that the fault comes from him, which does not mean that he has committed the fault, but rather than the lack of attention to the other caused him not to work hard enough to prevent the fault.

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Emmanuel Todd or intellectual vulgarity

Emmanuel Todd was on France Culture the other morning to give us his good word. Emmanuel Todd is a prophet. He's got it. Above all, he claims it. He doesn't have the honesty. Indeed, one cannot be a prophet and an ideologue.

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