Travelogue

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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The identity is divided on the one hand into a base which is in us without us being able to draw a particular merit, our nature and the education (culture) that we have received, and a constitutive movement of life which discovers elements which are not listed by our nature or our education, but which must be read at the height of our nature and our education.

A good part of this process takes place without us even having to think about it. It is however essential, essential and obliges us to the permanent revision of this nature and this education, as well as the permanent revision of these new elements through the prism of our nature and our culture.

The balance is essential: to be at the crossroads of our nature and our culture. Which involves knowing them both. 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 we will be nothing than a flag eliminated in the wind. We will have no criteria to judge the novelty and we would risk seeing this novelty only a novelty, and to enter it for this. There is no knowledge out of oneself that can escape the sieve of our nature and our culture.

Splitting according to Creon

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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

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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

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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.

Desire for recognition

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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?

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The most enlightening example concerning human nature is in the New Testament when Peter and Jesus Christ speak together and that Pierre insists with his master so that he believes his completely sincere devotion. Thus, Jesus announces to him that the rooster will not have sung that he will have denied it three times. The first place where every man speaks is this one: his weakness. Taking into account everyone's limits, not always to resolve it, but also to overcome them, forces to reason from what you are and not from what you think you are. Any man who does not know his weaknesses, who forgets them, who does not take them into account is above ground as we used to say today. Affairs meaning that you are nourished by a pasture that is not ours, that you deny your pasture to find any other pasture than your best, because other. Affairs also means that the words received could be obtained everywhere else in the world without this posing a problem, these words being without roots, translatable in all language and exportable like a "framework" in computer science. The objective is characterized by the desire to reach such a level of abstraction and uprooting that the question will no longer even make sense.

Blanc de Saint Bonnet on contemporary France

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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

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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.