Against the Robots

In its mad quest to make us believe that we can choose everything all the time, the modern era has methodically replaced being with having. Yet this logic, this ideology, has its limits: some things cannot be acquired, among them otherness. To live one's identity, to be who one is, to inhabit one's name , to allow intimacy and therefore the knowledge and deepening of one's being—these are the conditions for an encounter with the other. The first difference between Creon and Antigone lies precisely in this, the ground on which the struggle is built. Antigone preserves within her this gift from the ancients, from the gods, this rootedness that defines the authority upon which she leans to stand up to this man, her relative, the king, who embraces the will to power and finds himself blinded by it until he hears nothing but his own voice, his echo.