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.
Travelogue
Splitting according to Creon
Creon divides his interlocutors into two clans, those who are with him and those who are against him. He no longer negotiates and threatens those who oppose. Force controls it, when force must never serve except to protect, and it is always so with those who give themselves up body and soul to the will to power. To handle force as power is to believe that fear is the engine of power and establishes authority when it is more like the caress of a parent on the cheek of the child after an act of stupidity. If power reigns in practice, it must always be a morning of authority where it will believe to be sufficient unto itself. Creon no longer knows where he is talking about or at least he is talking about an imaginary place where he has just arrived and which did not exist before his arrival and which was created by him for him. As if being king, Creon was no longer made up of the same elements of flesh, bone and genetics as the day before his coronation. Creon embraces and gives himself the identity of a king who forgets where he comes from and what he owes to his past which is erased by his coming to power. If identity proves to be a search and partly a construction built by one's tastes and choices, a whole foundation of identity exists, even pre-exists, in us before us. Too many identities are written these days, crystallizing on this background or only on research, when balance presides over identity.
The enantiodromos, the fork of life
Creon transforms into a tyrant. He becomes what he imagines he should be. It is the enantiodromos , this moment and this place among the Greeks, which tells the true nature of a man when, at the crossroads, he must confront the choice of the road to follow. The enantiodromos is the fork where the one who becomes is born… Like an upstart taking possession of the thunderbolt of Zeus, Creon lacks the education and understanding of his power that can only be given to him by the 'authority. Creon thinks in terms of right when he should first think in terms of duty. Being oneself is never a habit, identity is a search and an affirmation, a enantiodromos , like a state of siege, who am I? Where am I going ? You have to constantly question yourself and explore the mystery of life, but caparisoned with what you know about yourself and with the world's self-agreement, that is to say that there are some certainties, there cannot be nothing, otherwise there is no Antigone...
Take on yourself, a transfiguration
It is difficult to understand in our time where individualism reigns that the action of taking on the fault that one does not think of oneself, that one thinks of the other, but which necessarily is also of oneself, necessarily, because I have already committed this kind of fault by action or omission, this fault is not unknown to me, the action of endorsing the fault which, even if it is not of oneself, could have to be, therefore to endorse the possibility of the exposure of my weakness, a moment of intense and prodigious humility, transgresses my self and obliges it to come out of its comfort; this gesture provokes, without my even having to call for it or to seek it, the crossing of the membrane which separates me from another in me that I still do not know, another that surpasses my nature, can -to be another lending-natural, the transfiguration that allows me to become more than myself.
To be and to Have
What belongs to us matters less than what we are and we are wrong to believe, under the wing of envy, that what belongs to us can define who we are.
Desire for recognition
The loss of all recognition in modern times, combined with frenzied individualism, pushes everyone to crave any form of recognition. Everyone dreams of a moment of glory, the media form being the most sought after, whether through television or social networks, because it appears as an ultimate form of recognition; the mirrored form, I am admired and I admire being admired. The ephemeral reigns in absolute condition, this uneasy immediacy, because it prohibits recollection, the intimate, the inner life by replacing them with suffocating din, the procuring crowd, perverse indecency.
What is it to be above ground?
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.
Blanc de Saint Bonnet on contemporary France
In 1851, Blanc de Saint Bonnet said:
When men lose sight of moral necessities, God brings forth the light of necessities of another order. If faith is no longer received by the ear, it will be taught to us by hunger. Christianity will constitute modern society where it will be shattered. The economic facts, before long, will expose the truths. Your laws will have recognized everything, consecrated everything and administered everything; human means will all be employed: never more numerous army, never more complete legislation, never more powerful administration; then, having reached the end of the secondary causes, you will come to break against the first cause! It will no longer be the unrecognized doctrine that will be heard, it will no longer be the unheard conscience that will cry out. The facts will speak their loud voice. The truth will leave the heights of the word; it will enter into the bread we eat, into the blood on which we live; the light will be fire. Men will see themselves between truth and death… will they have the mind to choose?
Hannah Arendt on social science functionalism
I do not believe that atheism is a substitute or can fulfill the same function as a religion, any more than I believe that violence can become a substitute for authority. But if we follow the exhortations of the Conservatives, who at the moment have a fairly good chance of being heard, I am quite convinced that we will have no difficulty in producing such substitutes, that we will use violence and claim to have restored authority or that our rediscovery of the functional usefulness of religion will produce an ersatz religion — as if our civilization wasn't cluttered enough with all sorts of pseudo stuff and nonsense stuff.
Show “But times always come back…” – 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (1991)
Show “But times always come back…” — 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (1991) by Emmanuel Di Rossetti on Vimeo .
On August 31, 1991, the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment celebrated its 150th anniversary during an exceptional cinéscénie, the battle of El Moungar and its return from Operation Daguet, the first Gulf War. 30,000 spectators from Nîmes will attend this event which began during the day with the legionnaires dressed in authentic costumes placed in the conditions and sets of different eras, and which will continue late into the night with the show itself performed by François Gamard, Jérôme le Paulmier and Richard Bohringer 1 in front of the Costières stadium (180 meters from the stage!).
Continue reading “Show “But times always come back…” – 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (1991)”