Antigone between Ethics and Politics: Lacan's Antigone flees the state and its moral dictates to take refuge in an ethics of 'pure desire'. Antigone's resistance to Creon represents a resistance to the political as such.
It was without any doubt Kierkegaard who pushed to extreme this divine parallax tension, best encapsulated in his notion of the "teleological suspension of the ethical." In "The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern," a chapter of the Volume I of Either/Or, [1] Kierkegaard proposed his fantasy of what a modern Antigone would have been. The conflict is now entirely internalized: there is no longer a need for Creon. While Antigone admires and loves her father Oedipus, the public hero and savior of Thebes, she knows the truth about him (murder of the father, incestuous marriage). Her deadlock is that she is prevented from sharing this accursed knowledge (like Abraham who also could not communicate to others the divine injunction to sacrifice his son): she cannot complain, share her pain and sorrow with others. In contrast to Sophocles’s Antigone who acts (buries her brother and thus actively assumes her fate), she is unable to act, condemned forever to impassive suffering. This unbearable burden of her secret, of her destructive agalma, finally drives her to death in which only she can find peace otherwise provided by symbolizing/sharing one’s pain and sorrow. And Kierkegaard’s point is that this situation is no longer properly tragic (again, in a similar way that Abraham is also not a tragic figure). - Furthermore, insofar as Kierkegaard’s Antigone is a paradigmatically modernist one, one should go on with his mental experiment and imagine a postmodern Antigone with, of course, a Stalinist twist to her image: in contrast to the modernist one, she should find herself in a position in which, to quote Kierkegaard himself, the ethical itself would be the temptation. One version would undoubtedly be for Antigone to publicly renounce, denounce and accuse her father (or, in a different version, her brother Polynices) of his terrible sins OUT OF HER UNCONDITIONAL LOVE FOR HIM. The Kierkegaardian catch is that such a PUBLIC act would render Antigone even more ISOLATED, absolutely alone: no one – with the exception of Oedipus himself, if he were still alive – would understand that her act of betrayal is the supreme act of love… Antigone would thus be entirely deprived of her sublime beauty – all that would signal the fact that she is not a pure and simple traitor to her father, but that she did it out of love for him, would be some barely perceptible repulsive tic, like the hysteric twitch of lips of Claudel’s Sygne de Coufontaine. This tic on Sygne de Coufontaine’s face no longer belongs to the face: it is a grimace whose insistence disintegrates the unity of a face. - ANTIGONE: Only a Suffering God Can Save Us
Ethical?: CIA Director William Burns announced a series of organizational changes intended to hone the agency's focus on key national security challenges, including the launch of two new mission centers, one focused on China and another dedicated to transnational and technological threats. The China Mission Center "will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government," Burns said in a statement on Thursday. - CBS “News”
Seeing our world through the eyes of a migratory bird would be a rather spooky experience. Something about their visual system allows them to 'see' our planet's magnetic field, a clever trick of quantum physics and biochemistry that helps them navigate vast distances.
Cryptochromes are found in the cells of many species and are involved in regulating circadian rhythms. In species of migratory birds, dogs, and other creatures, they're linked to the mysterious ability to sense magnetic fields.
Since this correlation can't be explained by ongoing physical connections, it's purely a quantum activity, something even Albert Einstein considered 'spooky'. In the hustle-bustle of a living cell, their entanglement will be fleeting. But even these briefly correlating spins should last just long enough to make a subtle difference in the way their respective parent atoms behave. - Ideas <> Quantum Activity
Even mobsters are okboomers clinging to power: Old NY mobsters reportedly fear handing over reins to phone-obsessed, soft millennials
Italian Mafia groups, particularly ‘Ndrangheta, the country’s strongest and most powerful criminal syndicate, are growing more and more attuned to modern tools like cryptocurrency and the deep web, the Italian Anti-Mafia Directorate (DIA) said in their latest report covering the first half of 2020. - OCCRP