Pain designates the “negative” sensation in the aggression that affects the being by the body. We use the word for localized aggression, in variable vivacity, reserving “suffering” for the test of the whole being, reached in its depth, in its personal being.
An ethics for medicine. From medical liability to moral obligation . Editions Fayard.
There is no greater vertigo than your exposed face (…). It is there, at the edge of this barely half-opened abyss, that we discover how close the flesh is to the soul.
Advance in deep life , Ad Solem Editions.
We have our secret, which we first make a mystery to ourselves.
Marcel Jouhandeau, in Elements for an Ethics . Editions Grasset.
… Sounge i felibre esteba… I'm thinking of the Félibres… It's characteristic of the good artisans of the Divers, to turn it over like this end for end. Would it ever be achieved? It is ruin, death. It is always reborn: suddenly behind, when in front you hold out your arms to it.
However, there, Boissière writes: The Buddha, Cemetery of Annam, etc.
In 96, a year before his death, admirable verses of reverse exoticism:
Today, tired of waiting for the kiss of the Sirens — My weary Flesh returns to the native village — where the echo of the world still fascinates me...
Over there, wandering, smoke twists: They are old desires , old sins that burn….
Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, An Aesthetics of Diversity , Editions Fata Morgana.
I don't know, if like me, hearing the word diversity (which has replaced the word Other ) causes you to start feeling nauseous. Victor Segalen is an author who acts as a remedy for this gagging.
Fine example that Jules Boissière who, Provençal, felibre, wrote his most beautiful felibrian verses in Hanoi.
Here is the diversity, which plunges into itself to welcome the other. The speeches of politicians who only have the word diversity in their mouths push a great void in front of them and shake it all the more audaciously as they try to convince and convince themselves, but they have lost their conscience that they denature and violate it as soon as they pronounce its name.
It is only possible to speak of diversity by listening to oneself, to one's intimate being. This is what it means to be sensitive to diversity. Those who gorge themselves on diversions without making this effort are only internationalists in disguise.
Victor Segalen, Essay on exoticism, an aesthetic of diversity. Editions Fata Morgana.
12th century monastic prayer
Teach me, Lord, to use the time you give me to work well…
Teach me to unite haste and slowness, serenity and fervor, zeal and peace. Help me at the start of the work. Help me in the heart of the work… And above all fill up the gaps in my work yourself: Lord, in all the work of my hands leave a grace from You to speak to others and a defect from me to speak myself.Keep in me the hope of perfection, otherwise I would lose heart. Keep me in the impotence of perfection, otherwise I would lose myself in pride...
Lord, never let me forget that all work is empty except where there is love...
Lord, teach me to pray with my hands, my arms and all my strength. Remind me that the work of my hands belongs to you and that it is up to me to give it back to you… That if I do to please others, like the flower of the grass I will wither in the evening. But if I do for the sake of good, I will remain in good. And the time to do well and to your glory is now.
Amen
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.
Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (7/7. Love)”
Only those who possess a strong Individuality can feel the Difference.
By virtue of the law: every thinking subject supposes an object, we must posit that the notion of Difference immediately implies an individual starting point.
That such will fully taste the wonderful feeling, who will feel what they are and what they are not.
Exoticism is therefore not this kaleidoscopic state of the tourist and the mediocre spectator, but the lively and curious reaction to the choice of a strong individuality against an objectivity whose distance it perceives and tastes. (The sensations of Exoticism and Individualism are complementary).
Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation; is therefore not the perfect comprehension of an outside oneself that one would embrace within oneself, but the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.
Let us therefore start from this confession of impenetrability. Do not flatter ourselves that we assimilate customs, races, nations, others; but, on the contrary, let us rejoice in never being able to do so; thus reserving for us the durability of the pleasure of feeling the Diverse. (It is here that this doubt could be placed: to increase our faculty of perceiving the Diverse, is it to shrink our personality or to enrich it? Is it to steal something from it or to make it more numerous? No doubt: it is enrich it abundantly, with the whole Universe. Clouard says very well: “This naturalism, we see that it is not our abasement, nor our dispersion, nor an advantage that nature would obtain at the expense of the human personality, it is the enlarged empire of our mind over the world.”).
Victor Segalen , Essay on exoticism, an aesthetic of diversity . Editions Fata Morgana.
Hence this obvious conclusion, that the State is a fact of nature, that man is naturally a sociable being, and that he who remains savage by organization, and not by the effect of chance, is certainly, or a being degraded, or a being superior to the human species. It is indeed to him that one could address this reproach of Homer: “Without family, without laws, without hearth…” The man who would be by nature such as that of the poet would breathe only war; for he would then be incapable of any union, like the birds of prey.
If man is infinitely more sociable than bees and all the other animals that live in herds, it is obviously, as I have often said, that nature does nothing in vain. However, it grants the floor to the man exclusively. The voice can well express joy and pain; also it is not lacking in other animals, because their organization goes so far as to feel these two affections and to communicate them to each other. But speech is made to express the good and the bad, and consequently also the just and the unjust; and man has this special thing, among all the animals, that he alone conceives good and evil, right and wrong, and all feelings of the same order, which in association constitute precisely the family and the family. 'State.
It cannot be doubted that the State is naturally above the family and each individual; for the whole necessarily outweighs the part, since, the whole once destroyed, there are no more parts, no more feet, no more hands, except by a pure analogy of words, as we said a hand of stone; for the hand, separated from the body, is just as little a real hand. Things are generally defined by the acts they perform and those they can perform; as soon as their previous aptitude comes to an end, they can no longer be said to be the same; they are only included under the same name.
What clearly proves the natural necessity of the State and its superiority over the individual is that, if it is not admitted, the individual can then be self-sufficient in isolation from the whole. as well as the rest of the parties; now, he who cannot live in society, and whose independence has no needs, he can never be a member of the State. He's a brute or a god.
Nature therefore instinctively drives all men to political association. The first who rendered the institute an immense service; for if man, having reached all his perfection, is the first of the animals, he is also the last when he lives without laws and without justice. There is nothing more monstrous, indeed, than armed injustice. But man has received from nature the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which he must above all employ against his evil passions. Without virtue, it is the most perverse and ferocious being; he has only the brutal outbursts of love and hunger. Justice is a social necessity; for right is the rule of political association, and the decision of the just is what constitutes right.
Aristotle, Politics . I.9-13
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.
Continue reading “Antigone, rebellious and intimate (5/7. Authority)”