Humanity:

“Fragments of a Consciousness”

By Aude Volny-Anne

￼An image containing Font, Calligraphy, Graphic, Black and White Auto-generated description

Humanity: Fragments of a Consciousness

￼

Legal Notice / Copyright Humanity “Fragments of a Consciousness” © 2026 Nayunbae. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except for brief quotations used in journals or scholarly works.

This work is a philosophical reflection and expresses the point of view of its author.

ISBN: 9798191017570

Cover design by Nayunbae

Translation From French / Original title: De L’Humain “Fragments d’une conscience.

For more information, visit: www.audevolnyanne.com

Enter my head, …

Those who judge quickly have often asked me, pejoratively, what was inside my head, as if to underline some presumed madness, because they do not understand my silence. For a long time, I believed I had to answer with concepts, definitions, and certainties. Then I understood that my thought did not fit into drawers: it breathes, it moves, it bumps up against the borders of the world. I write as I live: in several languages, with several doubts, several nuances, and several births of ideas. I am not trying to teach anything. I am only trying to understand what makes us human beings. Why we think, why we see, why we feel, why we keep on loving despite everything. This book is not an answer to every ill. It is a crossing of reflection, mine, and perhaps yours; in a world where laws pile up and cancel each other out, where identities are reduced to clichés and blur together, where truths crumble, where borders stretch, twist, and sometimes lie. I do not promise intelligence: it is subjective and is not measured by knowledge alone. I promise only the honesty of a thought in motion, falling, getting back up, doubting, and starting again.

A thought that seeks to look at humanity without putting a mask on it. If you enter here, it is not, at the bottom, to learn who I am. It is to listen to what becomes of the spirit of a woman when she refuses to be reduced. When her spirit agrees to think, to see, to feel, to live, and this despite all the world’s failings; she chooses to love without conditions.

At what point does what I think become a lie, a deception, or as Freud would surely have called it a “hysteric’s whim”? I do not think one can speak of lying when I am mistaken. Error is human, and it is my capacity to recognize my errors and correct myself that makes me the thinking being I am today. I also know that doubt is not lying, because doubt is the second step of Cartesian thought, the one that gives consciousness its full efficacy. However, I know I am lying when I know I am lying and I look away out of human will.

The lie begins the precise moment I separate what is true from what is just. When I polish the facts, so they stand up in an acceptable narrative. When I prefer an explanation that reassures over a truth that disturbs. When I tell myself “it’s more complicated than that” when, no, it isn’t. A true fact does not need to be embellished. It only asks to be looked at without cowardice. What I recount becomes an escape when words serve to avoid rather than to name.

When I speak to sidestep, to dilute, to make believe that the real is negotiable, and when I turn pain into a concept, injustice into a debate, violence into a nuance. Escape from the truth is not just staying silent. Escape is also speaking too well so as to no longer hear what is screaming.

The limit is not written; it is not drawn with a moral ruler nor with a neatly arranged logic, but it appears in the body at the exact moment when something in me knows that if I continue this way, I will betray. Betray a fact, someone, or myself.

This line is so alive because it moves with life, it breathes, trembles, sometimes bleeds, and because it tolerates neither closed systems nor tidy answers. It is alive because it forces me to remain present. Not to hide behind ideas. Not to survive at the price of the false.

My thought is not a universal truth, it only has its ambition; it is not a morality, nor a thesis, it only has their form. It is an attempt not to lie, to the facts, to the pain, nor to that fragile point where the true and the just must walk together, on pain of making life uninhabitable. Entering my head is not seeking to understand me. It is agreeing to stay there, at the edge of the line, where my thought commits itself, where recounting forces one to read or listen, and where living is no longer negotiable.

Entering my head is not adopting a thesis. Nor is it seeking a definitive truth. It is agreeing to look at a world that believes itself healthy while it runs on an ancient fear. I did not enter philosophy out of love for systems.

I entered it through disagreement. Disagreement with a society that claims to bring people together, but which always starts by sorting them. Disagreement with a political thought that speaks of order, without ever questioning what it destroys to obtain it. Very early on, I understood that the problem was not only visible racism, nor declared domination, nor even direct violence. The problem is deeper. It is structural. We live in a world that has inherited a simple and terrifying idea: that humanity would be a body. A body to protect, a body to balance, a body to defend. And in this body, everyone must have a legible place, an identifiable function, an acceptable role.

Whatever is not immediately recognized becomes suspect, whatever does not integrate naturally becomes problematic, whatever does not match the codes becomes worrying. We no longer say, “you have no place here” but we say, “you are not integrating.”

This phrase has become the modern form of exclusion; it appears gentle, but it carries an intact violence. It assumes that society has a correct shape, and that the individual must bend to it in order to exist. Yet I have lived the opposite: I was born in a place, I respected its laws, I shared its space, but more was asked of me, I was asked to love certain symbols, to consume certain cultures, to correspond to certain aesthetic and social expectations.

I then understood that nationality was no longer a right, but an artistic and aesthetic performance, and that identity was no longer a personal narrative, but a proof to be supplied, and that refusing this staging was to become an anomaly. This is where my break with the very foundations of modern political thought begins.

For to think of humanity as a body is to accept the idea that there exist useless organs, growths, dysfunctions. It is to open the way to a violence that no longer names itself, but which acts ceaselessly. Today, the danger is no longer targeted; it is everywhere, blurred and diffused. So, the social body attacks blindly, confusing differences with threat, plurality with disorder. Peoples, diasporas, multiple consciousnesses seek to exist, not to dominate, but to be recognized as useful functions, and this simple claim becomes, in a Hobbesian world, an act of symbolic war. The body is sick, but it never questions its own model. It prefers to look for enemies.

Entering my head is refusing this trap. It is not denying cultures, nor erasing histories. Nor is it dissolving differences, but it is refusing that they become prisons. I do not believe that humanity needs to be homogeneous in order to be stable. I believe it needs to be conscious. Conscious that order is not an absolute value. Conscious that identity is not an essence. Conscious that peace is not born of conformity, but of the simple recognition of what is useful.

If this book disturbs you, it is not because it attacks a particular ideology; it is because it calls into question the very framework in which we learned to think, and perhaps that is the only possible beginning.

As long as humanity thinks of itself as a body, it will look for enemies. On the day it thinks of itself as a conscious plurality, it will stop devouring itself…

 Contents

Enter my head...

Chapter 1: Obedience

A Metaphysical Dialogue

Chapter 2: Freedom by Form

Point of view from France

Chapter 3: Justice

Chapter 4: Treatise on Mixed Heritage

 	The Violence of Hair

Chapter 5: Theological Treatise

God, Satan, and Man Between Them

Chapter 6: A Small Treatise on the Veil in Church

Between Tradition, the Sacred, and the Submission of the Heart

Chapter 7: Requiem

For a Woman Who Took Her Own Life

Chapter 8: Treatise on Love, Sex, and Science

Chapter 9: The Perception of the Real

Between Lies, Imagination, and Humanity Regained

Chapter 1

Obedience

A Metaphysical Dialogue

The Temple of the Insiders…

There exist architectural beauties invaluable in the eyes of men, for appearance has dared to sublimate matter reworked by the hand of man, and man could take pride in his work. But there is no exterior beauty unless, inwardly, it reflects the soul of its creator. Thus, among the greatest judges and sages the world has produced, Solomon, in his lifetime, left an incomparable legacy and created a building accessible to men whose inner beauty is only palpable through initiation.

This temple was structured in three circles, representing a progressive initiation.

The Courtyard opened onto the world of men. One entered it laden with dust, business, and contradictions. It was life as it appears to everyone: imperfect, noisy, confused, and yet necessary. There, people spoke loudly, negotiated, and judged. Nothing there was pure, but everything was alive.

Then came the Hekhal, that sanctuary one entered by function and by discipline. The space there was filtered, regulated, ordered, and the lamp rested on the table like a guide: everything in its place, every gesture measured. Here, one learned to hold one’s tongue as much as one’s role. This was no longer the world as it is; it was a world governed by rule.

Finally, at the heart of the temple, was the Naos, the Holy of Holies. A perfect cube. A space without images, without statues, without words. This place was empty by requirement, for what was meant to dwell there could not be manufactured. One entered it only once a year, and never without trembling. The Naos is not conquered: it is received, and sometimes it remains closed for an entire lifetime.

This is not a failure, but one question left open. For building a temple has never prevented the fall, nor the destruction, and it is here, precisely, before the fall, that this discussion takes place. Three men were gathered: Matthieu, the Legalist; Georges, the Theologian; and Shandra, the Scientist.

Word had reached them that certain consciousnesses, in the world of men, were asking themselves a dangerous question: is obedience to orders only an excuse?

As the question was uttered, fine dust fell between two stones of the ceiling. No one noticed the phenomenon right away. And yet, in the silence that followed, the temple seemed to be holding something back.

Each of them, according to his function and his field, had already run up against it. Each had had, one day, to obey or to refuse. But one still had to know how to define what an order is, what obedience is, and from what point it becomes an excuse.

It was this question, simple in appearance and formidable in its consequences; that would crack the temple that day. A silence settled in, different from the silence of the Naos, for that one belongs only to inner trembling; but a more fragile, suspended silence, in which each weighed the weight of the words to come. For asking a question is never trivial, and some, once spoken, can no longer be withdrawn.

“Is obedience to orders only an excuse?”

They repeated to themselves, over and over, to check the question for traps. For of course, before answering it, one still had to agree on what was at stake. Was it obedience, itself, that had to be questioned, or the nature of the order to which one submits? Was it a moral fault, a social necessity, or a survival strategy? And above all: does an excuse explain an act, or does it justify it? Each of the three men knew that no discussion was possible without prior clarification. One does not argue over poorly defined words; one does not judge without knowing what one is judging. It was therefore decided that, at first, each would set out his understanding of the question, along with the thesis he drew from it, without being interrupted. Not only out of courtesy, but above all out of intellectual discipline, for in the temple, speech is not seized; it circulates.

The first to speak was Matthieu, the Legalist. His function had accustomed him to order, to hierarchy, and to the continuity of institutions. For him, defining obedience amounted to defining what allows men to live together without destroying one another. When he spoke, no one interrupted him. He rose first, seeking neither effect nor persuasion. He spoke as one state a rule, with that sobriety proper to those who know that the law does not seduce, but that it preserves an order.

Matthieu, the Legalist — Before answering the question that brings us together, I believe it necessary to recall what I mean by order and by obedience. An order is a decision issued by a recognized authority, with the aim of organizing common life. Obedience, for its part, is the act by which an individual conforms to this decision, not out of inner adherence, but out of recognition of the structure that surpasses him. A society does not survive without orders.

As Matthieu spoke, a thin line appeared behind him on the wall of the Hekhal. It slowly made its way down between the stones, almost straight, as if the temple itself were hesitating between stability and rupture.

Matthieu, the Legalist — It does not maintain itself without obedience. Where each person reserves the right to judge the order he receives, the collective dissolves into the rivalry of consciences. The law is not perfect, but it is necessary; and it is precisely because it cannot wait for moral unanimity that it imposes itself. Obedience is often blamed for abolishing responsibility. I maintain the opposite: that obedience is a responsible act when it is inscribed within a chain of decisions that exceeds the individual's objective. He who obeys does not act for himself, but in the name of an order that precedes him and will outlive him. He is not the ultimate author of the act, but its legitimate executor. One must also recall something too easily forgotten. Many of the freedoms we enjoy today were born of the disciplined obedience of men who agreed to submit to a hierarchy, to a strategy, to a chain of command. People do not free themselves through generalized indiscipline, but through organization, and all organizations rest on obedience. Hence, asking whether “obedience to orders is only an excuse” seems dangerous to me. For to refuse this excuse is to risk turning every executor into an absolute guilty party, and every institution into an illusion. Obedience explains the act because it displaces its origin: primary responsibility belongs to him who gives the order. I do not deny that unjust orders exist. But if every individual makes himself the ultimate judge of the justice of the order he receives, then no order is possible anymore. The law ceases to be a law and becomes one opinion among others. Thus, I maintain that obedience constitutes a legitimate excuse, not because it makes the act morally good, but because it inscribes the agent within a structure that limits his individual responsibility. Without this excuse, society demands of man that he be at once subject, judge, and sovereign, which is not humanly sustainable.

Thus, Matthieu sat back down, and the temple remained silent, making way for Georges the theologian, but he did not rise immediately. He seemed first to want to weigh the weight of what had just been said, as one assesses a stone before laying out the first chisel blow to carve it, then he spoke.

Georges, the Theologian — I do not dispute the necessity of order, nor even that of obedience. What I dispute is their claim to the absolute. For an order subject to nothing, but its own authority becomes a blind force, and the obedience that submits it without discernment becomes a fault. There is an essential difference that legalist discourse tends to erase: that between legality and legitimacy. A law can be valid without being just.

The floor has not yet split. But beneath the feet of the three men, the stone vibrated faintly, as if the temple recognized a truth it refused to admit.

Georges, the Theologian — An order can be enforceable without being wise. And when obedience is exercised against what conscience recognizes as superior, call it moral law, divine law, or the demand of wisdom; then it ceases to be an excuse. The ancient traditions, so often caricatured, never advocated blind obedience. On the contrary, they framed obedience with a higher demand. Man does not obey because he is ordered to, but because the order is supposed to serve a good that surpasses him. When this link is broken, obedience becomes a violence exercised against the soul. We speak of social survival, but we forget inner survival. Obeying an unjust law may preserve the body, but it destroys that invisible principle which makes man a moral subject. Between the prison of the body and the death of the soul, some choose the former, not out of heroism, but out of fidelity to what they know to be just. It will be objected that this position is dangerous, that it opens the door to anarchy. I answer that it simply recognizes a limit: no human authority has the right to command the soul. An order can demand action, but it cannot demand inner renunciation without becoming tyrannical. Obedience therefore ceases to be an excuse the moment it demands that a man act against what he recognizes as superior to himself. This is not a comfortable position. It exposes one to sanction, to exclusion, sometimes to death. But it preserves that without which man is nothing but an obedient instrument. I am not saying that he who obeys is always guilty.

I am saying that obedience does not automatically absolve. It, too, engages a responsibility: that of not having resisted when resisting was necessary.

Georges in turn fell silent, and the silence, this time, was denser. Shandra was the last to speak; he looked at neither Matthieu nor Georges, but seemed to address the space itself, as if the question surpassed the men who formulated it.

Shandra, the Scientist — I will speak neither in the name of the law, nor in the name of faith, but in the name of a practice that advances only through rupture. Science progresses precisely where obedience fails.

If men had always obeyed the authorities of their time, many truths would have remained untouchable dogmas. The great discoveries were not disciplined extensions of established order, but enlightened disobediences. To obey is to repeat. To disobey is to explore.

A stone fell somewhere in the Courtyard. None of the three turned his head. And yet, for the first time, the temple no longer seemed merely cracked: it seemed to be answering.

Shandra, the Scientist — This does not mean that all disobedience is legitimate. But it means that obedience is never a criterion of truth. An order can be false, even if it is unanimously respected. And history shows that authority often errs with confidence. From where I stand, obedience explains an act but does not justify it. It reduces freedom but never abolishes it entirely. As long as an individual is capable of understanding what he is doing, he remains responsible for his acts, even under constraint. I see danger in both preceding positions. The first turns man into a cog, in the name of stability. The second risk is making every law suspect, in the name of an incommunicable inner demand. Between these two pitfalls, I propose a simple distinction: obedience is a factual given; responsibility is a moral given. To confuse the two would amount either to excuse the inexcusable, or to condemn the inevitable. Obedience becomes a partial, conditional excuse, never absolute. It explains why an act was committed, but it does not erase the question of whether it should have been. And it is precisely this question, however uncomfortable and persistent it may be, that founds the moral dignity of man. A world where obedience absorbs everything is a dangerous world. A world where no obedience is possible is unlivable. It remains to be seen where to draw the line, but above all who has the right to draw it.

Shandra in turn fell silent, and the temple was no longer intact, and the silence did not last. Georges was the first to break the balance. His voice was no louder than before, but it was sharper, stripped of all caution

Georges, the Theologian — Matthieu, your discourse rests on a selective amnesia. You speak of order, of chain of command, of debt to the dead, but you willfully forget one essential thing. Certain orders were precisely broken so that humanity would not bury itself under its own obedience. You invoke the stability of societies, but what do you make of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves, snatched from Pharaoh’s hands, under the reign of Seti? There too, there was a law. There too, there was a recognized order, ancient, structured, sanctified by power. Should one have obeyed that law because it existed? Should the slave have been considered guilty of disobedience because he refused to die slowly under a legal authority? Moses did not negotiate an administrative reform. He disobeyed, killed a man, and this disobedience was not an individual whim, but a radical moral rupture. If the slaves had followed your reasoning, they would have died slaves, disciplined, organized, and morally annihilated. You say that obedience shifts responsibility onto the one who gives the order. But history shows exactly the opposite, for it is always the executors who are judged afterward, and rightly so. For he who acts, even under order, remains the one who performs the deed. Obedience has never saved people, or conscience. It has kept it in order. What saves is rupture, at the precise moment when order becomes oppressive. Through this moment, no institution recognizes it on its own.

Georges paused, then his words struck the walls of the temple hard enough to make them tremble.

Georges, the Theologian — You speak of society as a fragile organism that dissolves without obedience. But a society that demands obedience at the price of the soul is no longer a human society. It is a mechanism. And a mechanism has no wisdom.

Matthieu straightened up abruptly. This time, he did not remain seated.

Matthieu, the Legalist — You simplify history to serve your thesis, Georges. The exodus from Egypt is not the example of an anarchic individual disobedience, but that of a new, redirected obedience. The Hebrews did not stop obeying; they changed authority. They passed from one order to another, and this new order was even more demanding than the old one. You speak of Moses as a heroic disobedient. But Moses immediately imposes a law, rules, prohibitions, and strict discipline. The people who free themselves immediately become people subject to stricter laws. Proof that man cannot bear the absence of order. You denounce obedience as a moral abdication, but you refuse to admit that disobedience itself produces new orders, and often even more constraining ones. The freedom you glorify is never lasting without structure, and this structure always rests, sooner or later, on obedience.

As for the responsibility of the executors, you are playing a dangerous game. If each person must judge the order he receives against the yardstick of his personal conscience, then law becomes unpredictable, and justice impossible. You replace the arbitrariness of authority with the arbitrariness of consciences.

Then Matthieu approached and whispered in his ear, more coldly and harshly.

Matthieu, the Legalist — You think you are defending the soul, but you are letting the social body come apart. Yet a man without society no longer even has the means to exercise his conscience.

Seated, Shandra raised his hand, not to calm their speech, but to shift the ground.

Shandra, the Scientist — You are both prisoners of the same scheme, and that is precisely what makes your confrontation sterile. One sanctifies continuity; the other sanctifies rupture. But neither order nor disobedience is a value in itself. Georges, my brother, you idealize founding disobedience.

But you forget that for one successful liberation, how many aborted revolts, how many blind disobediences have led to even more oppression? Rupture is not virtuous by nature. Whereas you, Matthieu, my brother, defend obedience as the condition of society. But you refuse to see that systematic obedience produces perfectly organized catastrophes. Modern history is saturated with them. The problem is not obeying or disobeying. The problem is knowing when obedience ceases to be rational, and from what point of disobedience becomes necessary; not heroic, necessary.

From his chair, Shandra turned slowly toward Matthieu.

Shandra, the Scientist — You say that without order, there is no society. Granted. But without the capacity for rupture, there is no truth.

Then Shandra addressed Georges with a hint of condescension.

Shandra, the Scientist — And you... you say that obedience destroys the soul. Sometimes, yes. But permanent disobedience destroys the common world, and without a common world, there is no longer a soul to preserve, only moral solitude.

The debate had ceased to be theoretical. Words no longer circulated in the temple like offerings, but like stones, and already, without any of them yet knowing it, the temple was beginning to crack under the impossibility of reconciling what now refused to fall silent. Georges took up his argument again.

Georges, the Theologian — Shandra, my brother, I hear your thought but let me answer our brother Matthieu first. Matthieu, you have just proven exactly what I accuse you of. You constantly confuse legality and legitimacy, as if one necessarily implied the other. You speak of law as a raw, indisputable fact, whereas all of human history shows that law can be profoundly unjust while remaining perfectly valid. You say the Hebrews changed authority. Certainly. But what you refuse to see is that this change did not happen through institutional continuity, but through a radical rupture founded on a demand superior to the law in place. Pharaoh’s law was not only constraining, but it was also devoid of wisdom. It demanded obedience at the price of the negation of man. And that is where your reasoning collapses, for you assume that authority suffices to justify order. Yet it is precisely this assumption that turns man into an instrument. You want to preserve society, but you forget that society only has value if it does not destroy those who make it up. A law that demands obedience against conscience does not found order, it founds fear. And fear has never produced anything but docile dogs or cunning vipers.

The voices continued, but the space itself seemed to have shifted around them. The Hekhal seemed narrower than before, as if the walls had drawn closer together to contain thoughts that had grown too vast. Fragments of dust now fell with every silence. Matthieu clenched his jaw and gritted his teeth. Irritated by these last metaphors, he cut him off.

Matthieu, the Legalist — And you, Georges, commit the opposite error. You invoke a higher law without ever agreeing to specify its criteria other than through faith or supposed wisdom. You ask man to obey an inner voice that no one but him can hear. How can a society survive if everyone claims an incommunicable absolute? You speak of conscience, but which conscience? That of the just man as much as that of the fanatic? You open the door to a performative contradiction: by refusing all human authority in the name of a higher law, you make all collective life impossible. For there exists no rational way to decide between two consciences that both claim to be equally well-founded. You say that obedience destroys the soul. But what you propose is a permanent war of absolutes, and that war saves no soul; it consumes them all.

Then, more coldly, Matthieu threw out a sentence without looking at his brothers.

Matthieu, the Legalist — An imperfect law is worth more than a multitude of absolute truths that ignore one another.

But Shandra intervened again, this time with unusual harshness.

Shandra, the Scientist — Matthieu, you speak of stability, but you refuse to name what that stability concretely produces. The man you describe — the one who obeys without judging — is not a responsible citizen. He is a survivor, for he acts out of self-preservation instinct, not reason. When obedience durably suspends moral judgment, man abdicates his rationality. He ceases to act as a subject and becomes an executor. Let us call things by their name, for this is dehumanization. The obedient man becomes what society expects of him: a well-disciplined little dog. And Georges, do not rejoice too quickly. Your position is not without fault. You make faith an organ of conscience, indubitable for the one who lives it. Granted. But this position rests on a premise unverifiable by others. It is internally coherent, but it cannot find a common norm. You ask society to respect what it can neither measure nor share. You refuse obedience in the name of faith, but you provide no criterion for distinguishing inner fidelity from subjective arbitrariness.

Georges smiled, for he had hoped for this remark about faith from one of his brothers, and he did not retreat, though he had thought this remark would come from the legalist.

Georges, the Theologian — I have never claimed that my position was comfortable, nor universalizable. And this is precisely where you are both mistaken, for you demand that truth be votable. Faith, for the one who lives it, is not an opinion. It is a lived certainty, on the same footing as the Cartesian cogito.

One does not prove to a man that he exists; one observes it. Likewise, one does not demonstrate faith to someone who does not live it. But one cannot demand someone who lives it that he acts against it without asking him to renounce himself. Obeying an order that demands this renunciation is not a compromise; it is an ontological amputation. You speak of society, Matthieu, but a society that survives by demanding that some cease to be themselves is no longer a human community.

The Naos remained intact. And yet, in its perfect darkness, a brief crack resounded, almost intimate, as if something had just given way there, beyond the sight of men. Shandra observed them one after the other, satisfied to see his own words untouched by any criticism from his brothers. He addressed the void.

Shandra, the Scientist — So here is where we stand, in this temple: Matthieu defends an order that saves society at the risk of losing man. Georges defends man at the risk of making society impossible.

And I... I see that obedience becomes an excuse precisely when it allows one to avoid the question no one wants to face: how far am I responsible for what I do, even under constraint? Obedience explains but does not absolve. Disobedience sometimes liberates but never sanctifies. The danger lies not only in the unjust order, but in the man who hides behind the order so as no longer to answer for himself.

The temple was resounded with a dull crack. It was not the sound of a stone giving way, but that of a certainty. Each of them then understood that no one would emerge victorious from this discussion, and that the question could no longer be closed. The silence that followed Shandra’s words was not an acquiescence but a time of measure before Matthieu began speaking again.

Matthieu, the Legalist — Shandra, your position is seductive because it speaks from a protected place. The science you embody can afford rupture because it does not directly govern men. It explores, it experiments, it fails, but it is rarely entire societies that collapse with every scientific error. You speak of fruitful disobedience, but you forget one essential thing: most men are neither discoverers nor pioneers. They live, they work, and they raise children. For them, obedience is not an epistemic question, but a condition of stability. You say that obedience suspends moral judgment.

But your permanent disobedience suspends on something else: predictability. And an unpredictable society is unlivable. You claim rupture as a principle, but generalized rupture does not produce truth; it produces chaos. You make science a universal model, but society is not a laboratory. One cannot subject men to successive hypotheses without assuming the human damage this implies.

Matthieu paused to reflect, then concluded his speech more harshly.

Matthieu, the Legalist — The disobedience you glorify is a privilege. It assumes that others keep obeying while you explore.

Georges continued, without giving Shandra time to answer Matthieu.

Georges, the Theologian — Shandra, my brother, thank you for your patience in our exchanges, but you speak of truth as if it were sufficient unto itself. Yet you confuse technical truth and moral wisdom. Science can say what is, sometimes how to do it. It never says whether it should be done.

You criticize faith because it is unverifiable, but you forget that science too rests on first postulates that no one demonstrates: the regularity of the world, the reliability of reason, the value of proof. You refuse religious absolutes, but you practice methodological absolutes. You say that obedience is not a criterion of truth. Granted. But truth without moral orientation becomes a blind power. Recent history shows that science obedient to the State has produced catastrophes, and that disobedient science without wisdom has produced others. You want to save man’s moral dignity by refusing obedience. But if the truth you pursue destroys man, what use is it?

Then he approached Shandra and declared softly.

Georges, the Theologian — A truth that does not listen to the soul becomes a violence.

Shandra frowned. For the first time, his voice lost some of its neutrality.

Shandra, the Scientist — You are ascribing to me intentions I do not have. I never said all disobedience was desirable, nor that science should govern. I am only saying that without possible disobedience, no correction is conceivable. Matthieu, you reproach me for speaking from a protected place.

But it is precisely because science tore itself away from authority that it was able to become a counter-power. What you call chaos is sometimes the only way to avoid a lasting error. Georges, you accuse me of lacking moral wisdom. But wisdom without confrontation with the real becomes a dogma. Faith that tolerates no testing turns into closed certainty.

He paused, then added, rising from his chair.

Shandra, the Scientist — My brothers, I am not saying science saves man. I am saying it prevents certain authorities from proclaiming themselves infallible.

But Georges concluded, in a calm but irrefutable voice.

Georges, the Theologian — And that is precisely your limit, Shandra. You know how to destroy idols, but you refuse to recognize a new one: your own. You believe you stand outside the sacred, but you sanctify criticism itself. Science can contest authority. It cannot tell man why he should risk his life, his freedom, or his soul. Yet that is precisely what obedience and disobedience sometimes demand. You can measure the consequences. You cannot carry the meaning.

Matthieu nodded briefly.

Matthieu, the Legalist — A society is not held together by truth alone. It is held together by what men agree to obey or to disobey for.

The debate now seemed complete. None of the three came away unscathed, and none could take refuge behind his function. And in the temple, grown too narrow to contain so many incompatible truths; something was brewing; a separation. The debate had ceased to be an exchange; it had become a stripping bare, a brutal return to the Courtyard, crushing the temple from within. Georges turned to Matthieu, without anger, but without concession.

Georges, the Theologian — You speak of order as a vital necessity. I’m speaking to you of legitimacy. For obeying is not a neutral act; it is an act that engages the soul. You say the man who obeys is only an executor. I say the man who obeys blindly abdicates his rationality. He no longer thinks, he survives, and when a man acts out of survival instinct, he no longer acts as a man, but as a trained animal.

He paused before continuing.

Georges, the Theologian — Call him a citizen if you like. I see in him a submissive dog, rewarded for his silence.

Matthieu stamped his foot, cracking the floor of the Naos, opening it onto the world.

Matthieu, the Legalist — And you... you idealize disobedience as if it were pure. But tell me, Georges, how many innocents have paid the price of heroic consciences? You oppose the prison of the body to the death of the soul. But what is a soul worth without a body, without a world, without a society to welcome it? You speak of wisdom, but you refuse to assume the human cost of your demand. You prefer an inner purity to an imperfect peace. I say this: better an imperfect law than a world abandoned to competing absolutes.

He raised his voice and broke through the walls. In a loud, declarative voice, he said

Matthieu, the Legalist — The faith you invoke may save the individual. But it does not govern people.

Shandra spoke again, harder than before.

Shandra, the Scientist — You are both proving exactly what I fear. Matthieu, your order produces men who obey because they are afraid. Georges, your absolute produces men who disobey because they believe themselves chosen. In both cases, man disappears behind the posture. I say it again, plainly: blind obedience suspends moral judgment.

And when it suspends it too long, man acts out of survival instinct. He no longer chooses, he executes, and a man who no longer exercises his judgment abdicates his humanity.

Georges straightened up and grew heated.

Georges, the Theologian — And yet, Shandra, you refuse to see that certain orders demand precisely this abdication. You speak of residual responsibility, of partial freedom. But there are orders that demand more than an act, for they demand renunciation, and there, I am inflexible. Faith is not an opinion, it is not a hypothesis, it is not a supplement to the soul, it is an immaterial organ of consciousness. To ask me to obey against it is to ask me to cease to be. One does not ask a man to amputate what constitutes him and then hold him morally accountable for his acts.

He stared at Shandra, filled with anger.

Georges, the Theologian — You say this position is incommunicable. I answer you: the cogito is no more communicable to a dead man than to a living one. Lived evidence has never needed a vote.

Matthieu replied immediately.

Matthieu, the Legalist — And there is the heart of the problem. Your position makes every human law suspect on principle. If every conscience proclaims itself inviolable, no order is possible anymore, and no collective responsibility exists anymore. You want to save their souls. I want to prevent society from collapsing. For a society in which everyone obeys only what he recognizes inwardly is an impossible society.

Georges, the Theologian — But rape is a violence.

Shandra concluded, in a low voice.

Shandra, the Scientist — Then let us say things clearly. He who obeys blindly survives biologically, but abdicates his humanity, and he who disobeys becomes a criminal in the eyes of men but remains a moral subject. Obedience becomes an excuse when it allows one to avoid the question of responsibility, and it is precisely this evasion that makes catastrophes possible.

He looked at the Naos.

Shandra, the Scientist — My brothers, the true danger is not an order; it is not faith nor science. The true danger is the man who hides behind one of them so as no longer to answer for himself.

The temple did not yet collapse, but none of them could any longer claim to speak there without trembling. The tone between them changes. Georges took a step forward, as if leaving the abstract debate to enter the flesh of examples.

Georges, the Theologian — You speak of obedience as an abstract principle. I speak to you of tired men. It is written that the crowds were like sheep without a shepherd — not rebellious, not violent, but exhausted. Exhausted from receiving contradictory orders, from no longer thinking for themselves, from obeying too many authorities who risked nothing for them. The sheep is not a symbol of purity. It is a symbol of moral dependence. When a person becomes a sheep, it is not because it is humble. It is because it has stopped judging.

He looked at Matthieu.

Georges, the Theologian — And your modern order manufactures exactly that: docile men, but empty of conscience and of humanity.

Matthieu replied immediately.

Matthieu, the Legalist — You romanticize exhaustion, Georges. People without direction are not free; they are lost. Sheep without a shepherd are not models; they are in danger. You confuse moral fatigue with political legitimacy. It is not because an order is heavy that it is unjust; sometimes it is simply necessary.

Georges did not retreat from his biblical citations.

Georges, the Theologian — Precisely, there is another passage from scripture. My sheep hear my voice, and they follow me. Yes. But on one condition you refuse to see. The shepherd gives his life to his sheep. There is the fundamental difference you are all dodging, for obedience is only legitimate when the one who commands agrees to die for those he commands. This is not an obedience to an order. It is obedience to a responsibility assumed unto death. So, tell me, Matthieu, which modern state dies for those it governs?

Shandra intervened slowly.

Shandra, the Scientist — So you are asking for the obedience of sheep… without a sacrificial shepherd. That is a high-risk social experiment.

He paused in silence.

Shandra, the Scientist — The sheep obeys because the shepherd dies. Modern man obeys because he is afraid. That is no longer faith; it is survival.

Matthieu clenched his fists.

Matthieu, the Legalist — A society cannot function if everyone judges the order he receives against a sacrificial ideal. You are asking for the impossible. Power cannot die at every decision; it must endure.

Georges continued, without transition.

Georges, the Theologian — Very well. Let us then speak of submission. It is often quoted: Wives, be submissive to your husbands. But we forget what follows. The husband must love his wife as his own flesh. This is not a hierarchy; it is an ontological unity. The woman does not submit to a man; she entrusts herself to a shared flesh. Obeying him is only possible if he cannot harm her without destroying himself. Remove the flesh, keep the submission, and what do you get? Obedience without incarnation, ontological violence.

Matthieu, the Legalist — A society cannot function if every act of obedience depends on perfect love.

Shandra answered, curtly.

Shandra, the Scientist — Then stop speaking of moral submission. Speak of functional obedience. But do not borrow from the sacred what you refuse to assume in reality.

Georges continued, citing Ephesians.

Georges, the Theologian — And the child? Children, obey your parents. Yes. But immediately after: Parents, do not provoke your children to anger. The text explicitly recognizes that authority can become destructive. The child’s obedience is only required because the parent is supposed to never abuse it. As soon as authority humiliates, provokes, destroys, it ceases to educate. Its conditions, and no sacred text sanctifies conditioning.

Shandra, the Scientist — There is the common point you refuse to accept, Matthieu. In tradition itself, obedience is never absolute. It is always framed by the responsibility of the one who commands — without incarnation, without sacrifice, without restraint. Obedience is no longer a virtue; it becomes an excuse.

The temple trembled under the weight of coherence, for what circulated between them was no longer an opinion, but a question that had become impossible to ignore: who can demand obedience without risking his own loss? Silence took hold, not as a defeat, but as a conclusion. Georges was the first to speak, no longer to convince, but to observe.

Georges, the Theologian — Solomon knew something we pretend to ignore. Building a temple has never prevented either “the” fall, or “the” destruction.

He raised his eyes to the stones. The Temple finally gave way. Not in a sudden crash, but in that slow exhaustion of human works that believe they can contain the infinite. The Courtyard opened onto the Hekhal. The Hekhal split open all the way to the Naos. The walls fell one after another, as fall certainties carried too long. And yet, amid the dust and broken stones, two columns still stood: Jachin and Boaz. As if the collapse of the Temple had never been the end of the passage, but only the end of the illusion that man could enclose truth within walls. The Temple was destroyed, as were certainties, as were empires, and as were men too sure of themselves. Matthieu did not protest; he no longer defended the law; he acquiesced.

Matthieu, the Legalist — What we wanted to fix in stone did not withstand time; the law did not either. It is interchangeable, and neither did order, for it is not immutable.

Shandra then stepped forward, slowly, from the debris.

Shandra, the Scientist — But the principle of the Naos has not disappeared; it has not been destroyed, it has migrated.

He placed his hand on his chest.

Shandra, the Scientist — It has moved into the initiated man, the one who accepts doubt, transmission, and slowness.

Georges concluded, in a calm voice.

Georges, the Theologian — The Naos is not a place to be conquered; it does not impose itself; it is received, and sometimes it remains closed for an entire lifetime. This is not a failure; it is a fidelity.

Matthieu spoke in turn, without rigidity.

Matthieu, the Legalist — Then obedience ceases to be an excuse at the precise moment when conscience is engaged, not against the law, but above it.

Shandra closed the circle.

Shandra, the Scientist — The real question is therefore no longer where is the Temple? The answer has been given, for the Temple has fallen, but the Naos remains.

The only thing left to man is to know what he allows to enter or leave his inner Naos.

They spoke no more, because conscience, this time, had spoken to the end. And even Solomon falls silent.

Chapter 2

Freedom by Form

Point of view from France

I begin here, at the point where all humans are equal, because nothing justifies that they should not be. I am free. Free to go, to move about, to choose my work, to contribute to society through my hands or my thoughts. Free since the chains of serfdom and slavery have fallen. Free to choose my religion, my spouse, my country, my homeland. But in truth, I am chained with a mere piece of paper. A letter, a visa, and authorization. Like the freedman once given a certificate, fragile proof of his right to exist. A paper says where I can go and who can come. A paper hides, behind laws, the true face of a global racism.

For what is racism? It is classifying, separating, ranking human beings by their color, their origin, their language, their country, and the new master-executioner is the government. It is the government that decides who comes in and who stays outside. Which people will have the right to open borders, which others will break themselves against closed barriers. So, I lie. I say I am going elsewhere to reach the country that interests me. Just as the freedman had to go through the intermediary of a white hand, a church, or a charity, for his road to finally open. No, I am not free. For my new chains are visas. For I am on the red list of employment. For even if I choose my profession, society closes its doors to my skin, my voice, my writing. A white face is preferred over my words. No, I am not free. For within families the bitter root of racism is still cultivated, people choose whom to marry according to ethnicity, religion.

For I do not have the right to sit at certain people’s tables. No, I am not free. For if I state my choices, society files me into a nonexistent box, a façade it calls “tolerance,” and seals with a lie: “Racism no longer exists.” No, I am not free.

For even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, proclaims:

Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

And yet this primary right is flouted. By the very ones who claim to embody freedom and equality NATO, the EU, the BRICS. A domino effect sets in

“You don’t come to me; I don’t go to you.”

So, racism recreates itself, repainted, displaced, but very much alive. I am speaking here of a freedom that has become decorative. A freedom framed, stamped, suspended from authorizations that claim to protect people while mainly organizing their movement. It no longer presents itself as a visible chain, but as an administrative courtesy.

It speaks the language of rights while producing the old reflexes of suspicion.

Modern borders no longer say openly:

You are not one of us.

They say:

Fill out this form...justify your presence, ...

Declare the person you love.

Rejection no longer needs to be brutal to remain real. It only needs to be procedural.

We have replaced walls with procedures, and the old exclusions with protocols. Yet the mechanism remains identical: classifying human beings according to their origin, their nationality, their supposed usefulness, or the risk they symbolically represent. It is no longer man who freely crosses the world, but the administration that decides which body may circulate without arousing suspicion. Modern freedom then resembles a conditional promise; it exists as long as it does not disturb the established order.

We claim that men are free because they can, in theory, leave, love, welcome others, work, cross borders. But this freedom remains abstract as long as it stays subject to prior permission. A freedom that depends on external validation ceases to be fully a freedom; it becomes a tolerance granted by power. And tolerance is not a Right. It can be withdrawn, suspended, or monitored. This is where freedom reveals its true location. It is not a slogan inscribed on the pediments of institutions.

It begins in the simplest of spaces: a house, a table, a door one opens, a face one lets in without having to explain oneself. Modernity claims to have liberated the individual, but it endlessly extends the administrative gaze into the intimate.

The contemporary state no longer wants merely to govern crowds; it wants to understand bonds, observe closeness, register presences. It symbolically enters the home before the guest does.

Then freedom becomes strange. It is no longer a natural experience of human existence, but a space negotiated with structures that present themselves as protective.

One may welcome someone, but under conditions. One may love, but within recognized categories. One may travel, but according to the geopolitical value of one’s passport, one may travel. Thus, a silent hierarchy is built among bodies, some cross borders like tourists, others like suspects.

I am not speaking here, then, of a total absence of freedom, but of freedom reduced to an administrative function. A freedom so hemmed in that it ends up losing its human self-evidence.

For the real question is perhaps not

Are we free?

But rather:

How many more authorizations does a man need before he can simply live as a human being among others?

The outer world has visible borders where modern freedom is nothing, but an administrative decor placed on a monitored house, and where the mandatory declaration to host a Russian citizen at home carries an incredible power, because it strikes precisely where no one is looking: in that sanctuary of the intimate. The state sets itself up here as a family prison, closing the door of intimacy to anyone wishing to be seen in their own home without the authorities; here, the freedom to love and to be is flouted. The procedure, moreover, resembles words for words that are asked of me for a dog at the vets:

Identification, Surveillance, Responsibility.

To receive a Russian friend in my house, I must write a declaration and file it at the town hall to obtain the approval of the state’s representative.

This declaration, stamped with governmental agreement, must include the name, first name, date, and duration of the stay. As if I were bringing an exotic animal into a French enclosure. The procedure requires identification, the length of the stay, and the host’s liability. Everything is planned for, recorded, and validated.

Nothing is missing, except perhaps this forgotten fact: this is not an object to be declared, but a human being to be welcomed. I believed that everyone’s home was the last space withdrawn from institutional oversight, a private place. I discovered that it is a discreet extension of the State’s administration: a small cell with curtains.

We speak of freedom of movement, but in reality, we circulate like declared, monitored, weighed parcels, where we no longer receive human beings; we fill out forms. One can no longer love freely without notifying the State. One can no longer open one’s door without asking permission. Intimacy becomes a conditional space that only opens if the authorities are willing, like that shampoo brand’s slogan, “L’Oréal, because you’re worth it.”

The state gives itself more value than man, yet it is man who makes the state, proof that humanity has not understood that it is its capacity to be human that gives it value, not its compliance with archaic rules for governing its fellow beings. How strong that little bundle of paper bound into a book, called the Civil Code, seems to be. What use is the freedom to be, if I cannot welcome those I love without the State asking me why? We live in an overly intrusive uncle-state.

An uncle who opens our doors before we do, checks our guests, and asks us why we are receiving this or that nationality in our home.

Perhaps we should invite the State to dinner, since it already wishes to be present at the table. Let it finally see what no form can grasp: that a meal, a language, a look, an affection, or simply a human presence are not administrative data. If it wants to invite itself all the way into my living room to check who’s coming in, let it at least bring something. If it is so curious, it might as well come along with our dinner.

I would ask it to chip in financially; that would teach it the concept of mixing better than its forms, and while it’s at it, let it bring a bottle along the way. Wine relaxes, soothes the nerves, softens the edges… perhaps with a good red or rosé, it will be a little less stupid in its decrees. A state that drinks may be a state that understands. A state that eats with us may be a state that stops rummaging through our lives. I prefer a thousand times over a civil servant carrying a still-warm dish to an authority carrying a rubber stamp.

Between the authorization needed to host a foreigner at home and certain salons’ inability to touch hair they do not understand, I recognize one and the same silent logic: the modern difficulty of welcoming whatever escapes its habits. It is not only a fear of the other, but a fear of the living when it presents itself in an unexpected form; a fear of contact, of intimacy, of whatever forces one out of categories laid out in advance.

Behind the forms, as behind certain ordinary refusals, I see the same attempt to make the human simpler, more legible, more controllable, in order to avoid the discomfort of a real encounter.

Chapter 3

Justice

Justice is a posture, …

It is at once a concept and proof of moral and human integrity. A posture that engages conscience, summons truth, and places the one who judges under the same gaze as the one who is judged.

The judge is judged at the same time as the accused. There is no “outside” possible. Often mistaken, justice is perverted by strategies of moral manipulation. These mechanisms cause the mind charged with rendering justice to lose its sense of rectitude. Truth is no longer measured at the right angle of action, and the circle of life, hidden in its darkness, becomes unbalanced. One does not do justice to darkness by justifying the present act. Justice is rendered by judging the fault, in order to restore fairness and balance. The one who renders justice always occupies a double and dangerous posture. He must look at the fault without himself becoming blind to his own capacity for error.

As with Solomon, true justice does not always seek first to punish. The first verdict is not necessarily meant to be carried out; it can be a trial, a stripping bare of consciences.

The sword does not serve only to strike. As in the rite of knighting, its point reveals, consecrates, separates. It distinguishes the true from the false, love from possession, dignity from the instinct of domination.

Authentic justice does not merely unveil acts; it reveals what beings are prepared to sacrifice or destroy in order to preserve their power over the living.

He who knows his fault rarely seeks to look it in the face. He piles up justifications, disperses responsibility, covers his act with the faults of others, so as to avoid being alone before his own conscience. And yet the fundamental law remains simple: he who begins by robbing another of their humanity often ends up gradually extending his violence. For when no real limit is set against him, the desire for domination tends to grow until it seeks to dispose of life itself.

Crime does not seek only to act in the shadows; it often seeks to be recognized. What was first concealed then demands the light, as if transgression had to become an affirmation of power. Faults then cease to be experienced as inner ruptures and sometimes become trophies, glorified narratives, a staging of power exercised over others.

Where conscience should lead to trembling, the criminal sometimes ends up turning his own moral disorder into a work of art, a Caligulan exaltation that he exposes to the gaze of the world.

Conversely, one who knows himself innocent does not seek to distort his thought in order to survive judgment. He protects himself neither through cunning, nor by shifting the blame. Even wounded by injustice, he remains before it. He holds within that pain without seeking to corrupt reality in order to absolve himself.

For true innocence does not consist in avoiding the suffering of judgment, but in not giving up one’s conscience in order to escape it. He who judges unjustly, however, also enters into the judgment he pronounces.

No authority can condemn without exposing itself to a measure higher than its own function.

Pontius Pilate embodies precisely this inner fracture of the judge. He does not merely condemn an innocent man; he represents the moment when power seeks to morally separate itself from its own decision. By washing his hands, he believes he can escape the posture of judgment while retaining the authority of the sentence. And yet this gesture does not absolve him: on the contrary, it reveals one of the oldest of human temptations: to wish to exercise power without bearing the moral weight of its consequences.

Pilate carries out a sentence demanded by the religious institution in power at the time against Jesus Christ, but he refuses to fully engage his conscience in the act he authorizes.

Yet no one can entirely delegate his responsibility to a crowd, an institution, or a law without mutilating himself inwardly. Washing one’s hands does not erase the fault; it merely reveals the human desire to escape the light of judgment. Thus, Pilate does not truly render justice: he gives up inhabiting the very posture of the judge.

The guilty man, when judgment resists his justifications, often seeks to destroy the one who throws his fault back at him. He no longer merely wants to escape the truth; he wants to silence the one who carries it.

Thus, petty theft can become violence, then murder, when conscience refuses to be stopped by a limit it did not choose for itself.

Solomon’s judgment already reveals this logic. The false mother prefers to see the child split rather than alive in another’s arms. Jealousy then becomes stronger than life itself. She no longer seeks truth, but the destruction of what she cannot possess. This is why true justice cannot always remain hesitant.

As long as no real limit opposes the criminal conscience, it advances, justifies itself, shifts its fault, and gradually extends its power over the living. But firmness also requires a rightness of measure, for an authority incapable of measure in turn becomes destructive.

Rigor without wisdom ends up breaking not only bodies but also minds.

On the road of Christ’s Passion, justice appears in its barest form. Everything is already contained there: the silence in the face of the violence inflicted on the flesh, the dignity that refuses to negotiate with humiliation, and that inner strength which does not seek to win through domination but to remain upright in the midst of injustice.

True justice does not always triumph through visible power; it sometimes holds only in the manner of passing through suffering without becoming like that which destroys.

Further still, the judgment of King Solomon reveals another essential dimension of justice. The true mother prefers to give up her child rather than see it split by the sword. She accepts the pain of loss in order to preserve life itself. Her innocence is not proven by an argument, but by an inner posture. Where words can lie, true love ends up revealing itself in what it is prepared to give up in order to save the other.

Thus, justice is neither pure nor comfortable. It always involves a risk.

He who confronts a criminal with the truth may become the target of his violence. But he who refuses all firmness also abandons the innocent to destruction.

 Between the sword and renunciation, he who renders justice walks, then, along a narrow line, sharp as a blade, where no decision leaves the soul untouched.

Between these two pillars, the one who judges never comes out unscathed. For truly rendering justice demands a rare thing: agreeing to be exposed to the same light one directs at another.

Chapter 4

Treatise on Mixed Heritage

 	The Violence of Hair

Hair was never just hair…

It is biological matter, social memory, a cultural sign, sometimes even political territory. For centuries, human societies have projected onto its ideas that go far beyond aesthetics.

A texture becomes discipline or disorder. A curl becomes a sign of savagery or a symbol of sensuality. Smooth hair becomes proof of seriousness, mastery, and civilization.

Thus, what naturally grows on a human being’s head ends up carrying meanings that no hair fibre in fact contains within itself. The whole of humanity is mixed. Peoples have never stopped meeting, mixing, exchanging their languages, their cultures, their features, and their bodies. Hair itself tells this ongoing story of diversity. No texture morally belongs to a superior civilization. Science confirms this simply: kinky, wavy, or straight hair is only a biological variation of human life.

But societies never look only at biology. They look at what they want to control. And hair, because it is visible, intimate, and immediately legible, often becomes a silent border between what would be acceptable and what would not.

The violence of hair begins precisely there: at the moment a texture ceases to be natural and becomes a judgment.

Humanity was built through displacement, crossing, and mixing. Mixing is not a recent exception born of modern globalization; it constitutes the natural state of the human species.

From the earliest prehistoric migrations to contemporary blending, peoples have never stopped exchanging their biological and cultural heritage.

Rigid identity borders are thus largely political and historical constructions rather than natural realities. And yet, human societies have constantly tried to simplify this diversity in order to make bodies more legible. Skin color, eye shape, or hair texture became markers used to classify individuals. And here, this need for classification goes far beyond biology; above all, it reflects a will to produce social order out of visible appearance.

Hair occupies a particular place in this logic. Unlike skin color, it can be modified, disciplined, straightened, hidden, or transformed. It then becomes a space for controlling the body.

Straightening one’s hair is not only about changing a texture; it is sometimes an attempt to bring one’s appearance closer to a socially valued norm.

And this norm is never neutral.

In many Western and postcolonial societies, smooth hair was long associated with the idea of mastery, cleanliness, seriousness, and respectability. Conversely, kinky or very curly hair was often perceived as excessive, disorderly, or unprofessional.

Thus, perfectly natural biological characteristics were gradually loaded with moral meanings.

This ranking is profoundly absurd from a scientific point of view. Hair texture depends mainly on the shape of the hair follicle, the organization of keratin, and complex genetic factors.

None of these elements contains any cultural or intellectual superiority. And yet human societies constantly project onto bodies symbolic narratives that go beyond simple biological reality.

The problem, then, is not hair itself. The problem begins when physical appearance becomes a vehicle for social and moral interpretation. Contemporary forms of violence are rarely as direct as they once were.

They shift into ordinary gestures, polite refusals, repeated clumsiness, and silent exclusions. In the case of hair, this violence often takes an administrative or professional form: refusal in certain salons, remarks at work, implicit demands to appear “more presentable” or “more serious.” The brutality of these situations comes precisely from their banality. These are not spectacular historical scenes. They are small daily humiliations that quietly remind certain individuals that their body remains perceived as outside the dominant norm.

For a long time, I believed the problem came from my hair itself. Then I understood that it mainly revealed the cultural limits of those who looked at it.

When professionals refuse a hair texture that is nonetheless taught in a national diploma, this is no longer merely a technical question. It is a symbolic inability to make contact with a difference that has become uncomfortable. The most ironic thing is that this fear often hides behind the language of competence. People claim to lack training, even though the knowledge exists. Ignorance is turned into an acceptable justification.

Thus, discrimination becomes soft, almost administrative.

It no longer says:

Your body has no place here.

It simply says:

We don’t know how.

Yet the border between inability and cultural refusal is sometimes extremely thin. Behind certain technical claims lies, in reality, a deeper difficulty: touching the other, understanding a different texture, accepting that the living is not uniform.

This fear of contact goes far beyond the question of hair. It reveals a society that prefers bodies that are legible, predictable, and conforming to majority habits. Hair then becomes a silent indicator of how a civilization handles human diversity.

Hair straightening, as a chosen hair practice, occupies a complex place in this history. It would be simplistic to reduce it merely to colonial alienation, just as it would be naive to entirely ignore the historical weight of European norms in its massive spread within Afro-descendant societies. For centuries, human beings have modified their hair. European women have straightened their curls. Asians have developed sophisticated straightening techniques. Societies around the world have used oils, heated irons, chemical treatments, or elaborate hairstyles to transform hair’s appearance.

The desire to modify one’s appearance is universal, but in societies marked by slavery and colonization, straightening sometimes took on a more painful dimension. It was no longer only about aesthetics, but about social integration. Smooth hair became closeness to the dominant norm, while kinky hair remained associated with the historical stigmas of racial inferiorization.

This reality explains why some Black women still today experience their relationship to straightening as an inner tension.

On one hand, it can represent a free aesthetic choice, a personal pleasure, or a cultural habit. On the other, it sometimes carries the unconscious memory of a historical pressure toward conformity. And yet no absolute position resolves this question. True freedom does not consist in imposing natural hair as a new mandatory morality. It consists in finally making possible a choice free of shame.

I am beautiful with or without my relaxer, …

My hair should never become a permanent political referendum on my identity or my human dignity. True violence begins when society believes it has the right to turn a hair texture into a moral, cultural, or intellectual indicator. For no hair has ever contained a civilization. Only a variation of human life.

Hair has never carried a civilization within it. It contains neither intelligence, nor morality, nor human worth. It simply grows according to the discreet laws of the living, as trees grow, as grasses grow, or as the infinite variations of the human body grow. And yet societies have projected entire hierarchies onto it. One texture became discipline. Another became disorder. A single curl has sometimes been enough to push a human being toward the invisible margin of social normality.

The violence of hair, then, does not lie in the hair matter itself, but in the gaze, societies lay upon it. This gaze classifies, simplifies, ranks, until it turns a biological variation into a symbolic border. The problem has never been kinky, curly, or straight hair. The problem begins when man believes he can read a human being’s worth in what grows on their head.

The paradox is immense: the whole of humanity is mixed. Peoples have been mixing since the beginning of the world. Hair itself tells this permanent circulation of bodies, genes, and cultures.

No hair is pure. No people are pure.

And yet societies continue to produce norms that claim to distinguish acceptable bodies from bodies that are too visible. Unfortunately, for a long time, I believed the problem came from me. Then I understood that my hair mainly revealed the cultural limits of those who looked at it.

Yes! I am beautiful with or without my relaxer, so I choose, and if I choose, it is because I am free, and if I can choose, then my hair ceases to be public territory where everyone comes to project their aesthetic, political, or racial fantasies. It does not belong to you.

People talk about universal freedom, inalienable rights, equality among human beings.

Then I walk down a French street, and I get refused entry to a hair salon, then another, then in another city another salon, and yet another, until I am advised to go to a salon “for Black people,” which they call an “Afro salon,” because of my hair.

This is not recognized as a historical tragedy, no! It is a small modern slap, a contemporary segregationist fashion. A slap unfortunately received without a witness.

For years, I was bounced from salon to salon. Starting in 2010, several hairdressers refused to style my hair. My hair seemed to become, in crossing the Atlantic, a professional anomaly. Then in 2012, a woman simply styled it. She looked at her colleagues, who were looking at my hair like some strange animal, almost surprised at their own response and attitude, and told them there was no difference between their North African clients’ hair and mine.

This hairdresser had a fiancé from the Caribbea. The reign of the bedroom had already broken down, in her mind, certain borders that the Republic claims to have been abolishing for decades without always succeeding.

Yes, sometimes sexual intimacy accomplishes, faster than grand institutional speeches, what societies still refuse to fully live: making the other banally human.

And that is what struck me. Some Black bodies cross into beds more easily than they cross ordinary mental borders. As if sleeping with the other opened a symbolic permission that mere human coexistence still continues to refuse.

From that moment, I understood that my hair was not the problem. The problem was the fear of contact, and racism disguised as technical incompetence. A discreet fear, almost administrative, which turns difference into an acceptable professional pretext.

Here we leave grand political speeches to enter everyday life, where modern forms of violence become almost invisible: in the hair salons that refuse certain hair, in the looks that rank textures, in the ignorance that politely disguises itself as professional competence.

For if styling hair called “Afro” really requires a skill too complex for certain hairdressers, then one should have the honesty to draw all the consequences and advantages from that.

In any other profession, a professional who masters fewer techniques, serves fewer clients, and covers a narrower field of competence is considered less qualified.

Why would this logic suddenly become problematic here?

Whereas here precisely, the problem goes beyond hairdressing itself. What appears in these ordinary refusals is not merely a technical limit; it is an imagined hierarchy among bodies, a silent way of designating certain citizens as more natural, more standard, more immediately legitimate than others.

Thus, hairdressing becomes a tiny but brutal indicator of the contemporary social body. It is no longer merely a question of hair. It is a question of human closeness, of the capacity to touch the other without immediately turning them into an exception.

The hairdressing diploma is, however, national. What is taught in Martinique is taught in Brittany or in Strasbourg.

My hair did not, then, suddenly become impossible.

It only revealed the cultural limits of certain gazes. It was not a technical inability; it was an imagined hierarchy of bodies disguised as ordinary practice, foolishness elevated to the level of professional practice.

And if styling Afro hair really were AN EXCEPTIONAL SPECIALTY, then it should be said clearly. This skill should be compensated as such, and it should be recognized that certain salons offer an incomplete service. In any other profession, fewer skills mean a more limited professional capacity.

Why does this logic suddenly disappear when it comes to certain bodies?

Because, at bottom, the problem goes beyond hairdressing. What is at stake here is not merely an aesthetic question.

It is a society’s capacity to touch the other without immediately turning them into an exception.

Where the French Republic says:

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

Certain salons still answer:

We don’t do that type of hair.

And between these two sentences hides, perhaps, one of the most silent fault lines of French modernity.

Guess which of the two speeches is lying!

Chapter 5

Theological Treatise

God, Satan, and Man Between Them

I have never believed in a world as simple as men like to tell it…

Good perfectly pure on one side, evil perfectly identifiable on the other. Human stories rarely work this way. They speak less of monsters than of conscience, less of absolute darkness than of poorly directed desires, less of foreign creatures than of profoundly human flaws. For centuries, religions, myths, and traditions have tried to give a face to whatever pushes man toward his own fall. Certain figures have become symbols of evil, of temptation, or of corruption. But behind these names, these fallen angels, these demons and these apocalyptic tales, there exists perhaps a far more troubling question: why is the human being so easily fascinated by what threatens to destroy him? Evil rarely acts through immediate brutality. It seduces first. It promises, flatters, opens up possibilities, feeds pride, the desire for power, self-fascination, or the will to go beyond one’s own limits. Man, rarely falls because he is forced to; he often falls because part of himself wants to look behind the forbidden door. This is why the ancient texts describe evil less as a simple external force than as a presence capable of revealing what already exists in the human heart. The figures of Satan, of Azazel, or of the fallen angels then become less legendary monsters than spiritual mirrors held up to humanity.

One breathes desire, another transmits knowledge, another still pushes man to believe he can become greater than his own condition. Thus, this treatise does not seek to demonstrate the literal existence of demons, nor to construct a closed theology of good and evil. It seeks rather to understand why man so easily turns beauty into domination, knowledge into power, freedom into pride, and sometimes even the sacred into spectacle. For the real question is perhaps not whether the demon exists. The real question is understanding why man so readily listens to what turns him away from himself.

Part 1: Satan, the Angel of Light and Music

For centuries, Satan has been depicted as the prince of hell, the absolute enemy of God and the perfect figure of evil. And yet, when we return to the ancient texts, the Torah, the biblical Scriptures, certain apocryphal or mystical traditions, his image becomes far more ambiguous. Satan does not always appear there as a sovereign opposed to God in an equal war. He remains a figure close to the celestial: accusing, tempting, but still bound to God. He speaks with him when the other fallen creatures seem to have lost even that closeness. This is precisely what makes his figure disturbing.

Satan almost never acts through direct force. He suggests shifts, seduces, and observes. Where the fallen demons plunge entirely into their own destruction, he remains on the threshold, like an enfant terrible still seated near God, playing with man without ever fully dirtying his hands. Certain traditions describe him as a creature of light bound to celestial beauty and music.

Not because music would be evil in itself, but because it holds immense power over the human soul: it can uplift as much as it can seduce. In the book of Ezekiel, through the figure of the king of Tyre, later interpreted as an image of Lucifer, appears the idea of a being marked by original perfection:

Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.

Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God…

(Ezekiel 28:12-13, KJV)

Certain traditions also evoke the tabrets and pipes prepared for him from the day of his creation. Religious tradition has seen in this the image of an angel bound to celestial music. Music then becomes more than an art: a power capable of directly touching the human soul, of bypassing reason, and of opening invisible doors within the mind.

In Isaiah, there then appears the figure of the bright star who falls through pride:

How art thou fallen from heaven,

O Lucifer, son of the morning!

(Isaiah 14:12, KJV)

Lucifer, named the light-bearer, does not fall because he is external to God, but precisely because he wants to rise up to him. His fall is born of a desire for absolute greatness.

And yet he never entirely breaks with the celestial. In the Book of Job, he still converses with God:

Whence comest thou? ...

From going to and for in the earth,

and from walking up and down in it.

(Job 1:7, KJV)

This scene profoundly changes the traditional figure of the devil. Satan is not merely a monster cast into some far-off hell; he acts as an ambiguous presence left at the edge of the human world. He accuses, provokes, tests. He opens doors and watches who will choose to walk through them.

In certain rabbinic traditions, his pride is born when God asks the angels to acknowledge man, formed from clay. Satan refuses to bow before an earthly creature. The symbol is powerful: he refuses to accept that the divine could dwell in something so fragile, carnal, and imperfect. Where man is dust crossed by breath, Satan considers himself bound to a purer light. The serpent of Genesis already illustrates this logic. It does not create Adam and Eve’s desire; it reveals it. It merely shifts their gaze toward the possibility of becoming more than what they already are. This is Satan’s true function in the ancient tales. He does not create evil, but he pushes man toward his own capacity to choose it.

If certain traditions have associated Satan with celestial music, it is also because beauty holds immense power over human consciousness. Music touches a zone that reason has trouble controlling it soothes, exalts, unites, seduces, or destroys. In the book of Samuel, David plays the harp to calm the tormented Saul. Elsewhere, the prophets denounce songs that have become instruments of idolatry or human glorification.

Music then becomes profoundly ambivalent. It can lead toward the divine just as it can feed pride, fascination, and self-worship. The danger lies not in music itself, but in the shifting of its destination. Praise ceases to rise toward something beyond man; it turns back toward the human ego. Satan does not, then, destroy beauty. He diverts it.

As in the garden of Eden, he does not create desire; he shifts it. And it is precisely for this reason that he remains bound to light rather than to mere monstrosity. The brutal monster frightens. But beauty seduces freely. Thus, Satan appears less as a king of hell than as an ambiguous figure of human fascination. A voice that still speaks with the light, all while pushing man to forget what that light was meant to lead him toward.

Part 2: When Music Becomes Temptation

Why does earthly music still bear the mark of the fall? Perhaps because beauty itself remains ambiguous as long as the world stays governed by the desire for power, seduction, and human glory. Certain ancient traditions associated Satan with celestial music. Not because music would be evil, but because it holds an immense power over the human soul. It passes through the mind’s defenses, directly touching the body, the emotions, desire, memory, and fascination. It can uplift man as much as it can lead him astray. Scripture often announces a future restoration of celestial song, a new canticle that will belong fully to God. But this song seems, precisely, always still to come. The present world remains marked by the fall. Flesh, image, the stage, and the cult of the artist still dominate earthly music, and this is the true sign that Satan still holds the key to music in this world.

For modern music no longer mainly glorifies the beauty of the Word, contemplation, or what surpasses man. It now glorifies man himself. His body, his image, his staged suffering, his desire to be looked at, loved, admired. Even certain religious music sometimes takes part in this same logic, where the stage replaces the altar, the artist becomes the center of attention, and praise ends up turning back toward the one singing instead of rising toward something greater than himself. The fall of music does not, then, lie in the sounds themselves, but in the shifting of their destination. It is no longer God that is contemplated through art; it is the human reflection turned into an object of adoration.

The work ceases to be a passage and becomes a narcissistic mirror in which man contemplates his own image until he loses himself in it.

And this is Satan’s true laughter. Not that of a monster brutally destroying humanity, but that of a being who watches man exalt himself without even needing to push him any further.

As if he were saying to God, with an almost childish irony:

Look at them. I don’t even need to promise them anymore that they’ll be perfect by your standards. They’ve made their own. They worship themselves now.

Then Satan would not have destroyed music; he would simply have turned it back toward the human ego. As in the garden of Eden, he does not create desire, he shifts it. He pushes man to worship what was only meant to lead him toward something greater than himself. This explains why music remains profoundly ambivalent. It can still soothe, console, open silent inner spaces. David played to calm Saul. Certain songs still resemble discreet prayers lost amid the noise of the world. But at the same time, music can become an instrument of emotional domination, of collective seduction, and of modern idolatry.

As long as the world remains fascinated by image, flesh, and self-glorification, music will therefore still bear the mark of this fall. The true temptation is perhaps not loving beauty but ending up believing that this beauty belongs to us.

And perhaps God still hears, in our songs, something profoundly sad, like the broken nostalgia of a music that once was meant to open the heavens, but which now mostly seeks to make man shine.

Part 3: The Book of Enoch and the Revelation of Secrets to Men

The collective unconscious often associates forbidden knowledge with Satan. And yet, in several ancient traditions, notably in the Book of Enoch, this role belongs above all to Azazel.

Where Satan seduces, shifts desire, and pushes man to exalt himself, Azazel transmits something else: the concrete means of domination. Azazel appears as a figure of fallen knowledge. Not a simple grotesque demon, but a being bound to knowledge that men were not meant to possess. In the Book of Enoch, he teaches humans the making of weapons, the working of metals, breastplates, knives, but also cosmetics, ornaments, and the art of modifying the body’s appearance. This detail is essential. Azazel does not transmit only war; he also transmits artificial seduction and the transformation of the living. He teaches man how to dominate through force, but also how to dominate through image.

Thus, in these ancient tales, Azazel becomes less the master of evil than the bearer of a knowledge without wisdom. The problem is not knowledge itself, but the use man makes of it once it is separated from all spiritual conscience. Weapons become conquest. Metals become power. Beauty becomes manipulation.

The Book of Enoch then recounts that Azazel is chained in the desert by the archangel Raphael. Unlike Satan, he does not dialogue directly with God. He is condemned to silence. And yet his influence remains active through what he has already transmitted to men.

Even chained, Azazel continues to act through human structures themselves. Modern societies still carry this ambivalence. Technical progress heals as much as it destroys.

The sciences produce medicines but also weapons capable of annihilating entire peoples. Technologies bring men closer together while increasing their mutual surveillance. Even beauty becomes an industry. The human body itself ends up turned into an object that can be modified, optimized, commercialized. Azazel then becomes a symbolic figure of knowledge detached from all inner limits. Where Satan pushes man to worship himself, Azazel gives him the tools to turn that worship into concrete power. One breathes desire; the other supplies the means to fulfill it.

This is why these two figures answer each other without being identical. Satan belongs to fascination, to music, to image, and to seduction. Azazel belongs to weapons, to techniques, to power over matter, and to sciences that sometimes forget why they exist. But the ancient texts also remind us of something essential: Azazel is never presented as equal to God. Even forbidden knowledge remains limited. The apocalyptic tales do not recount the final victory of the fallen angels, but rather humanity’s inability to use knowledge without falling into domination.

Thus, understanding Azazel does not consist in naively believing that a demon secretly governs modern technologies. It consists rather in recognizing a more troubling truth: human knowledge becomes dangerous when it stops serving the living in order to serve only power, control, and human pride.

This is the true forbidden knowledge: not knowledge itself, but the illusion that man can possess immense power without ending up taking himself for a god.

Part 4: God and Satan, a Betrayed Love?

The most troubling question is perhaps not why Satan opposes man, but why God continues to speak to him. In the texts, Satan does not always appear as a creature entirely rejected, locked away far from heaven and cut off from all divine speech. Satan is not treated like Azazel. He is not condemned to silence in the desert, nor handed over to an archangel to be chained in darkness. God speaks to him. God lets him answer. God even accepts, in a way, that man becomes the site of this tension. This is where Satan becomes a terribly ambiguous figure. He has fallen, but not like the others. He disobeys, yet he still knows the order. He tempts, but he knows how far he can go. He accuses, but he does so before God. He still seems to run along the margins of heaven, beautiful, intelligent, perfect in his artifices, like a spoiled child whom God has not entirely cast out of his presence. His strength is not to do evil in men’s place. His strength is to push them to choose it themselves. Satan never dirties his own hands.

He breathes an idea, stirs up a jealousy, flatters a desire, then watches man justify himself.

He does not need to kill when man agrees to kill for him.

He does not need to rebel any further when others take disobedience upon themselves.

He plays and even sings every work to the glory of God. And men, often, believe they are winning.

Azazel, for his part, represents something else. He gives weapons, metals, artifices, the knowledge that allows one to dominate the world. Satan, for his part, gives the inner movement: jealousy, pride, the desire to be preferred, admired, raised above the other. One transmits the tools. The other whispers why they should be used. This is the true triangle: God creates, Azazel arms, Satan seduces, and man, a single point at its center, chooses. In Zechariah, Satan still accuses. God rebukes him but answers him. This maintained speech is crucial. It shows that Satan is not merely a demon among demons.

He is a wounded relationship, a closeness turned to poison, a love perhaps betrayed but not entirely erased. And this is what makes him almost unbearable, for he knows he is still heard. He knows that God speaks to him when others are reduced to silence. So perhaps he laughs, not because he truly reigns, but because he knows his strange place.

He is not the absolute master of hell; he is the enfant terrible who can still walk into the Father’s room. Satan therefore has no need to defeat God. It is enough for him to show that man, created in his image, can prefer pride to love, domination to truth, jealousy to gratitude.

He could almost say to God:

Look at them. I didn’t force them.

I only showed them a door.

They are the ones who wanted to walk through it.

Thus, man becomes both the plaything and the stake. Created to carry the breath of God, he lets himself be instructed by Azazel and seduced by Satan. He receives knowledge without always receiving wisdom. He receives desire without always keeping love. He receives freedom and sometimes uses it to fashion his own fall. To recover the lost unity would perhaps mean ceasing to believe that evil acts only from outside. It would mean recognizing that Satan never wins alone.

 He wins when man agrees to become the executor of what he has only suggested.

Chapter 6

A Small Treatise on the Veil in Church

Between Tradition, the Sacred, and the 		Submission of the Heart

I do not look at the veil as a mere piece of fabric placed on a woman’s head…

I look at it as an ancient sign, crossed by several traditions, several readings, several ways of standing before the sacred. And yet, in the contemporary world, this sign has been almost seized by a single reading. As soon as a woman covers her hair, many no longer see a believer, a wife, a penitent, an Orthodox woman, a Catholic, a Jew, a woman of tradition, or simply a soul in prayer. They immediately see a Muslim woman.

And this reduction is a violence. It is a violence against Muslim women, because it turns their veil into a permanent problem. But it is also a violence against all the other women who, in other religious traditions, cover their heads out of faith, modesty, heritage, or love of the sacred. As if their gestures no longer existed. As if the entire history of the veil had been erased to leave only a single image, a single fear, a single category.

The veil does not belong to a single religion. It runs through the monotheisms like an ancient thread.

In the Christian Church, particularly in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, the wearing of the veil by women is rooted notably in the first epistle to the Corinthians.

There Paul speaks of the woman who covers her head when she prays or prophesies, “because of the angels.” This phrase remains mysterious, almost vertical. It cannot be reduced to a social rule. It speaks of a body placed before God, not in order to disappear, but to acknowledge that it stands before something greater than itself.

In Orthodox Judaism, some married women cover their hair with a Tuchel, a sheitel, or other forms of head covering. In Islam, the hijab takes several forms and is part of a reflection on modesty, the body, and the sacred share of the intimate. In Eastern Christianity, and among some Catholics attached to tradition, the mantilla recalls that the church is not an ordinary place. The veil, then, exists before our modern tensions, before our televised debates, before our lazy shortcuts.

The problem is not only that the veiled woman is judged. The problem is that we no longer know how to read signs.

We see a piece of fabric, and we lay onto it a collective fear.

We no longer ask:

Why does this woman veil herself?

Within which tradition?

With what intention?

With what freedom?

We decide for her. We give her an identity before she has even spoken.

Yet the veil can say many things. It can say modesty. It can say mourning. It can say marriage. It can say consecration. It can say humility. It can say prayer. It can say family tradition. It can also say nothing more than an intimate choice between a woman and God. In church, the veil can become a sign of respect. Not a humiliated respect, nor a social submission imposed on the woman, but a way of saying that the sanctuary is not a stage. One does not enter it to be consumed by the gaze. One enters it with something of oneself that accepts silence. The veil then marks an inner border between the world that exposes and the soul that withdraws into itself.

Veiling oneself in church is therefore not necessarily submitting to man. It is, when the gesture is free, placing oneself before God. The woman who veils herself does not hide her beauty as a shame. She can consecrate it.

She can say:

My beauty exists, but it does not belong to you. It is not always available. It is not obliged to be offered to the public gaze in order to be real.

This is where the veil becomes almost subversive in a world that wants to see everything, comment on everything, classify everything.

It reminds us that the body is not only a social surface. It is also an inner place. It reminds us that modesty is not erasure, but sometimes a quiet sovereignty.

But a clear line must be held: an imposed veil can become a prison. A chosen veil can become an offering. The same fabric can be violence or prayer, depending on the hand that imposes it or the heart that wears it.

This is why both simplifications must be refused: the one that sanctifies every veil without questioning freedom, and the one that condemns every veil without understanding its history.

Perhaps the veil would be seen less as a garment problem of exclusion if we agreed to look at it in the whole of its history.

If Christian, Jewish, Orthodox, traditional Catholic women, or simply women attached to a spiritual modesty, could cover themselves without being immediately catalogued, then perhaps the social gaze would stop reducing the veil to a single fear.

Perhaps we would finally see that a piece of fabric is not always a threat.

Sometimes, it is only a gentle border between the world and the sacred.

So no, Islam does not hold a monopoly on the veil. And no serious society should hold a woman in contempt by believing it can guess her entire faith, her origin, her thought, or her freedom from a piece of fabric placed on her hair.

The veil does not always darken. Sometimes, it illuminates the poverty of our gaze…

Chapter 7

Requiem

For a Woman Who Took Her Own Life

She stood before the door, a key in her hand. A few seconds were enough: she slid it into the lock, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. Behind it, there was nothing. Nothing but a house without life, empty. Her steps made the floor creak, each sound resonating like a moan in the silence. A place without breath, without warmth, where lived a woman who no longer belonged to anything. She had lost a child, her motherhood, her femininity, and nothing mattered anymore.

Everything was dull, extinguished. The bitter saliva of her stolen, violated, torn-away femininity weighed on her whole being. So she went into the kitchen, and she opened the cupboards, then closed them again, opened them again, over and over, and with each swing of a door came back the memories, the last dance, the last embrace, the last ... “I love you, Mommy” she would never hear again.

She sat down at the table; her eyes lost in emptiness. From her trip to the kitchen, she brought back a memory, a memory for eternity, and as the world had silenced her all her life, she slit her own throat...

Her head fell onto the table and the warm blood spread beneath her. She slowly drowned in it, and then came the last tear, a single one, ultimate, free and anonymous.

The tear of a woman who knew, as she died, that her body would never again bleed each month in hope of a man, nor for a child she would never see again. A tear mixed with blood, as proof that even dying, she remained human.

The days passed and the mail piled up behind the door; no one knocked, no one called. When the lock finally gave way, it was not out of concern, but out of obligation. They did not see the body first, they smelled it. The slap of the heavy, acrid odor.

The odor of loneliness turned to rot. Then came the questions, without compassion, but with embarrassment:

Who calls, who cleans, who handles this?

The body was no longer a person, just a problem. The police arrived and no one spoke her name. At this stage they say:

The corpse, the victim, the case.

One more file marking their sighs, their irritation:

Another one. Why like this.

Do you realize the amount of work?

Her blood became a stain to photograph, the knife just a piece of evidence they would keep in a cabinet, and her body, a load on their backs, a weight in a black bag. No tears, no silence, only disgust, disguised as duty, then came the sanitation crew with their gloves, their masks, and toxic but deodorized products, and beneath the gloves and masks, words fell:

Crazy. Selfish. Deranged.

Unbalanced. Another nutcase.

They scrubbed, washed, disinfected, not with care, but out of the habit of paid work, and when they left, the floor was clean, the air sterile, the silence eternal.

Then came the family, not yet to weep but to empty, to clean where the blood had not flowed, and to sign papers. The cupboards opened again, not out of grief, but for inventory, and the clothes ended up in trash bags, the notebooks, journals, and books thrown out, the drawings crumpled, and the memories, erased. At that moment came the questions:

Who’s keeping this?

Is it worth anything?

Throw it out, it’ll be simpler!

Then the bills started arriving, the coffin, the cremation, the debts; her whole life turned into figures, and her humanity disappeared little by little behind numbers her family could not help commenting on with heavy blows of intergenerational reproach:

You did nothing for her. I paid more than you.

It was your problem. I’m the one who took care of it …

The voices clashed, like blunt knives, no pause, no remorse. No one questioned themselves, ever, and yet, when she was alive, everyone told her:

Question yourself.

As if it were a curse, as if her pain came from herself, as if it were her fault. For in the end, they lived very well. Their words still smelled of hatred, the kind passed down as an inheritance, when they spoke of her matters of the heart:

Too many whites, whites who stink, dirty, arrogant whites,

and in the same breath, her family envied their world, their skin, their calm; that same world that had rejected her. To the men of the community, they had assigned her to, she was nothing but a

Négropolitaine, a Black woman

who thinks she’s white,

a whore, a slut, a Sellout to Whites…

and other contemptuous Creole words used to categorize a woman who does not choose them. All while forgetting that her mixed heritage was already French, Russian, Malagasy, and Caribbean-born; her tan took precedence over her origins.

Hypocrisy sat at their table as the only guest, and the child; the vanished child, faded into the noise. Her name, rarely spoken, and her memory, exchanged for bills. No one asked why. No one sought to understand.

If they had been there, the house would not have rung so empty. The mother’s footsteps would not have creaked alone in the void every day, and the hum of the electrical wires would not have been her only voice. The flat silence of six in the evening, when the shops close, would not have been her last companion.

For the police, it was a “case.”

For the family, a “burden.”

For men, just a:

woman who wasn’t getting laid enough,

a tramp, a sellout to whites.

Because that’s always said of women alone:

A slut, a madwoman,

She must not have been getting laid enough,

No one wanted her.

But that was not it, not just the gaze of men, not even the failings of her family, never just that. The truth was simpler and more tragic. There had been a child. A child who cried, far from tears of whim but deep tears, sharp as knife blades, the kind that carve the face and salt the soul. To the child, the mother’s act made no sense, and it was not a choice but an absence, her own. Every tear became a memory, that of the police reports, of the government’s inquiries, of the lies, and above all, that of her “mommy.”

So here is the paradox of this story, for in dying, the mother left behind a memory made of love and pain. The love that would keep growing like a wound in her daughter’s heart, and where the pain would age along with her. The little girl would grow up without her hands to guide her.

Without her voice to advise her. Without her mother to see her dance, laugh, put on makeup, love.

Every joy would ring false, and every celebration would have an empty chair. The mother died without a witness, but she had created one. The only witness who would remember her with love, the truth of their life, the truth that had been denied them, and this witness would be condemned to weep.

But this paradox would not exist if the child had stayed, if her voice still whispered “mommy” and if her small hands still touched her face. The knife would have stayed in the drawer. The head, on her shoulders. The blood, in her body.

As long as the child existed, there was neither emptiness, nor death, nor silence. The mother was reproached for living only for her daughter, as if it were a crime to live for one’s child. As if building one’s life on maternal love rather than on a man were a fault. But that was her truth, and the only one, for even as a single mother, she was, in the eyes of men:

The cast-off one,

A slut, a madwoman,

She must not have been getting laid enough,

no one wanted her.

As if the ex’s word were the only valid witness to her reputation as a woman, and the child was her anchor, her breath, her tenderness, and the only gaze that saw her, all of her, even under the blows and manipulation of the man who caused all her losses.

And this love was reciprocal, for the child loved her mother with the same intensity. Every tear, every memory, every gesture was proof of it. No insult, no debt, no man’s gaze could erase that. Not even death.

For a mother who lives for her daughter and a daughter who mourns her mother together carry the most indestructible memory, that of a love that asks for nothing, and remembers everything.

In this final paradox, the woman who was said to be lost, mad, incomplete, remained, despite everything, a mother who had been pushed to the edge of the abyss.

I write in the name of a living woman, just before the act. She thinks, she slips, she imagines the after. This vision of the nauseating threshold that shakes, overturns, opens wounds, and yet… it announces the end.

For after all, the woman is me...

Chapter 8

Treatise on Love, Sex, and Science

Judeo-Christian culture, relayed by certain moral figures such as Tolstoy, has long presented sex as a problem. A problem of mastery, of purity, of control. Sex becomes a fault as soon as it is seen as a loss of self, a surrender to desire, a forgetting of the soul. All living beings reproduce. The sexual act, in itself, has nothing spectacular about it. It obeys biological laws, cycles, reflexes. But in human beings, something exceeds the function. Sex does not reduce to instinct, nor to the survival of the species. It becomes language, memory, offering, conflict, bond, wound, reconciliation. It becomes human, and it is precisely this that disturbs. For if one looks closely, no celestial entity has ever envied the animal for its reproduction. The dog mounting a bitch does not scandalize heaven. The horse covering a mare raises no philosophical question. There is neither emotion, nor speech, nor memory there. The act is only passage, mechanism, necessity. But the union between a man and a woman, when it is lived in consciousness, in mutual desire, in deep love, that union opens onto another world.

It is a place of intensity. A place where one does not dominate the other but surrenders to it. A place where glances become more powerful than gestures, where gestures become pacts, where pleasure becomes a shared language.

What a man and a woman can experience together in that moment does not belong to the animal world. It belongs to the human world in what it holds most sacred.

A union that one may call fusion, communion, sacred union, or any other name. But what is certain is that this moment of union, when love is fully engaged in it, is an extraordinary moment. A moment of truth, a moment when masks fall and the ego is silenced, where the other becomes, for an instant, an entire world to explore. Into this moment, no disembodied creature, no cold force, can enter.

It is not sex that disturbs. It is what it becomes when it is fully lived by two human beings capable of loving. It is not the raw, mechanical act that poses a problem. Animals practice it, bodies lend themselves to it, all of nature accommodates it without any scandal in it. What disturbs, what frightens, what is sometimes violently rejected, is the power of the bond that two beings can generate when they give themselves in full consciousness, when they do not merely touch but truly reach one another. When a man and a woman unite in love, sex becomes an act of revelation. The body becomes language, and the gaze becomes divine breath, and pleasure becomes sharing.

The notion of time disappears, and each becomes, for a few instants, a mutual sanctuary where ecstasy leads and consumes itself. This has nothing to do with simple reproduction, nor even with mere carnal desire. Here the sexual relationship is the gateway to the mystery of the other. An experience impossible to live alone.

A truth that can only be approached as two. It is here that the refusal of ancient philosophers and theologians appears, what I call one of the Luciferian complexes.

A rejection of the emotional bond, interpreting the sexual relationship as exclusively animal, an inability to conceive that two beings might rise through union. This refusal is not always conscious; it can translate into a muffled contempt for sexuality, into suspicion toward pleasure, into a glorification of emotional distance as a condition for wisdom or power.

Even among those who consider themselves modern, this idea persists, dressed differently. Freud himself, a major figure in Western psychological thought, diagnosed women as “hysterical” when they suffered from symptoms he linked to a lack of sexual satisfaction.

He even described certain patients as “embittered” or “neurotic” women, implying that they needed, in order to be psychically freed, good sexual intercourse and to be, in his own words, “properly satisfied.”

 This crudeness is not trivial, for it reveals a brutal undercurrent in the masculine reading of female desire. A phallic vision of the man’s sex as a cure for all of a woman’s ills. A reading that is often reductive, incapable of conceiving that the lack felt might not be simply mechanical, but relational, emotional, existential.

In Freud, as in many others, the female body is often perceived as a receptacle that malfunctions when it is not sexually fulfilled, but what he does not say, or says poorly, is that this frustration is not tied to a lack of coitus in itself, or of force during the act, but to a lack of real union, of a bond that fully engages the woman, in her emotions, in her imagination, in her speech, in her body.

What philosophical, religious, or medical systems have trouble integrating is that human sexuality, when fully lived, is not merely an outlet, nor a drive, nor a function, but a profound language, and in women, this language is complex, subtle, rooted in the history of their wounds as much as in their hopes. The pathologizing of female desire is only a form of this fundamental misunderstanding of the sexual bond as a sacred space.

The rejection of sex as a place of elevation is, therefore, in a certain way, an admission of spiritual impotence, and this refusal can disguise itself as moral rigor, as asceticism, as cynicism, or as medical mockery, but it always describes the same thing: the fear of loving in the body, the fear of making oneself vulnerable in a gesture, and the fear of no longer dominating, but of merging.

Whereas in truth, climax is only a signal, a peak of intensity, but the real event is the bond.

It is what this bond transforms in the heart, what it opens, what it makes possible, what it also sometimes breaks, but which reveals the capacity to feel, and in this sense, refusing this experience is to cut oneself off from an entire part of one’s humanity.

It matters little what name is given to it. Whether one speaks of Lucifer in a symbolic sense, or of any other figure who refuses love, it comes down to the same thing, for what disturbs is communion.

True communion, not dogma, not ritual, but the lived experience of love in the body, in gestures, in sighs, in that way pleasure has of being overwhelming, because it engages everything one is. In that instant, one does not dominate, one does not control, one cannot lie, and that is where some stop, where some flee, and where others show contempt. For this place can only be inhabited by laying down the weapons of the ego.

Man and woman, when they make love in consciousness and in respect, experience a mystery that surpasses every institution, every theory, every logical explanation, and this can provoke a form of jealousy or incomprehension in those who cannot bear the bond; either because they have never tasted it, or because they preferred power to relationship.

It is not a matter here of knowing whether the flesh is “pure” or “impure,” nor even of discussing morality. It is a matter of naming an essential fact: human union is powerful, and when it is true, it transforms, it opens, and it deposits within oneself a piece of the other, a trace that does not fade. It is not animality that is feared in sex. It is its capacity to create an indelible bond.

This, some cannot bear, not because they are “evil” to endure, but because they are afraid of not attaining God according to the ideas, they have mentally prefabricated about relationships under the animal schema. For to love, in this sense, is to accept never again being quite the same thinking being alone, but thinking and acting as two, and love, in the body, is its seal.

Here Lucifer is not merely a religious character representing evil, but a symbol of the whole complexity of not being God; that of the will to power, of the refusal of the other, of glorious and divine solitude, of absolute omnipotence. It is the symbol of everything that seeks to be complete without the other. Now, human sex in love is the exact opposite of that: it is chosen dependence. It is the gift of self in total nakedness, it is the admission of need, of desire, and the recognition of the human flaw. It is assumed vulnerability and the acceptance of God as a higher being. It is entire presence to the other, and this, a will to domination can neither understand nor tolerate.

Lucifer’s jealousy, then, is not directed at sex itself. It is not sex that offends; it is the depth it can reach, it is the love contained in the act, it is the beauty of a gaze that trembles before a kiss, it is the tenderness of a gesture that does not seek to take but to receive, it is the human being in its most fragile and greatest form. What Lucifer cannot bear is that two beings can transform one another, that sex can become a sanctuary, and that pleasure can become an offering.

In this union, there is no throne, no overwhelming light, no power. There is a bed, a breath, and two bodies seeking each other and, perhaps, finding each other. There is a suspended moment where nothing else exists, but this shared vibration, and it is there, precisely, that the human mystery reaches its summit. Man and woman, united in love, do not seek to become God.

But through their bond, they touch a form of eternity, and that eternity, no being can access without loving the other.

This is what Lucifer could not bear: not merely that man was created, not merely that woman joined him, but that in their union, something greater than themselves could be born, not just a child, not just flesh, but a moment of grace escaping all control, all logic, all domination. A moment where weakness becomes strength, and where love, through sex, raises beings well beyond what their solitude would ever have allowed.

Tolstoy pushes this logic to the extreme, for to him, sex hinders elevation; it sullies, it lowers, it prevents loving, and love between man and woman, as soon as it becomes carnal, becomes for him compromise, lie, or illusion. For his vision of woman is reduced to a sexual object satisfying his animal desire. He might even be considered one of the precursors of Satanism, insofar as he appeases Satan’s jealousy. But this vision denies a fundamental reality: sex is a language. It can be poor, crude, narcissistic, but it can also be deep, humble, and offered. Sex can be prayer or sanctuary. When a man and a woman desire each other in love, sex is no longer a mechanical act, but a place of total encounter. It engages not only bodies, but gazes, memory, vulnerability, silences. It is a moment when each offers themselves to the other in what is most naked, literally and figuratively.

It is not climax that makes the greatness of this act, it is the bond, and it is in this bond, precisely, that something greater than man and woman manifests itself; a space of presence, a space where each ceases to be a separate entity.

Sex lived in love is not a possession, it is a reciprocal dissolution. There exists a spirituality of carnal union, not mystical in the religious sense, but essential. When two beings unite in consciousness, sex becomes a vertical experience. One is not lost in it, one finds oneself in it, and one is not lowered by it, one is raised by it.

It is in this precise moment that we understand the “God of love,” no longer a distant God, but a God who becomes bond, presence in the warmth of a true gesture.

This experience has nothing mystical in the vaporous sense of the term. It is carnal, sensory, lived. It is immediate, and yet, it surpasses. Sex becomes a place where the sacred manifests in the instant, where the pulsation of bodies enters into resonance with something that escapes us, but that unites us.

The relationship between man and woman is not secondary to the divine. It is not a mere social or reproductive arrangement. It is the trial and the revelation of true love, for it forces one to reckon with real otherness, the other in all their density, their difference, their mystery.

It is in this tension between desire and respect, between need and listening, between pleasure and commitment, that the bond refines and sanctifies itself. Sex, in this context, is no longer the site of the fall, it is the site of passage, a passage from self to other, a passage from the human to more than oneself.

Tolstoy, and others after him, in refusing sex as impurity, attempt an ascetic path to reach God through isolation, through the refusal of the other, through the severing of the body. But to want God without relationship is to want God without incarnate love.

It is to want to be God alone, like Lucifer, and not with woman, as Christ showed, for Jesus never said that man had to remain alone, but his apostles took pride in their celibacy and called on other men and women of their condition to do the same. Just as Jesus did not ever ask to be glorified but invited people to pray in unity.

Those who flee relationship, believing they are sanctifying themselves, forget that the divine manifests through relationship, through the gaze of the other, through breath exchanged, through mutual giving even without sex. Jesus’s contact with the prostitute, whom he let wash his feet, shows that sex does not make one dirty and unworthy: on the contrary, it conferred on that woman an intimacy and knowledge of the male body great enough to approach him.

The union between a man and a woman, when it is sincere, respectful, and invested, is a space of transcendence. Sex is not a fault there, nor a function; it is the highest form of a living language of love. To refuse this reality is to refuse the divine within oneself.

The true scandal is not pleasure, but the absence of bond, the use of sex without presence, or the belief that one can access God without going through the other, since even Mary, his mother, accompanied him, and this until his death, and since Judeo-Christian religion indicates that man leaves his mother and father to take a wife at thirty-three, Jesus was still a son at the moment of his crucifixion.

Carnal love, in its fullest intensity, is no longer a fall, it is an ascension for two. “Man opposes carnal love because he wants to draw closer to God, alone.” This could be the starting point of the essential questioning, in response to the deep tension that Tolstoy stages in his works, for this conflict between instinct, desire, and the aspiration toward a form of spiritual, de-eroticized, almost monastic love. Yet this will power to escape the passion of desire, to master the sexual act as one muzzle a wild beast, is perhaps a rebellion against the human condition itself; that of a being called to love no longer alone, but as two.

In Tolstoy, man seeks the absolute, the divine, the pure. He flees woman, not because he does not love her, but because he fears what she reveals in him: his vulnerability, his dependence, his carnal impulse.

In this sense, he attempts to reach a divine will by his own means. But by trying so hard to resemble God, he ends up embodying another figure, that of Lucifer, who in the ancient texts wanted to set himself up as God’s equal. It is this same tension that inhabits Tolstoyan man, for he refuses carnal love, or control, in order to reach divine love, by his will alone. But the divine is not conquered alone; it is shared and welcomed as two.

According to the biblical reading, man was created alone, then completed by woman, on the animal model, to complete and procreate him. The original void is not a logistical lack, but an existential one. Man, made of clay, is in search of his living reflection.

Woman does not come to take away the divinity he acquired through divine breath; on the contrary, she allows him not to claim to be a God with a Lucifer complex, disembodied, disengaged from the world, unable to procreate beings in his own image.

For if, according to the biblical writings, God created woman for man, it was not so that she would distract him, but so that she would complete him. God created man from clay, breathed life into him, but this man, alone, could not give life to others like him. He did not have the capacity to transmit breath. That is why woman, formed from his rib, became this complementary matrix, not a subordinate, but an extension of himself allowing procreation, the continuity of humanity.

Man without woman cannot transmit life. He is not God. He is called to form a whole with her, allowing the birth of beings in his image, so that, together, they might approach divine love.

This unity is the true human trinity: man, woman, and child. The impulse of their love forms the flesh, but also the soul that crosses through time. The child then becomes the reflection of the Son, and the love that carries him, the breath of the Spirit. But care must be taken not to confuse the child’s biological origin with the spiritual quality of their welcome.

The union of a man and a woman can form a powerful human trinity: desire, flesh, and child. And yet this structure is not sacred in itself. It can carry love just as it can carry violence, abandonment, indifference, or the slow death of a child forgotten in a house that should have protected them.

A father and a mother are not enough to create a home. Two bodies are not enough to create love. A family conforming to old social conventions can be more destructive than a solitary motherhood traversed by fear, grief, or shame. Sex lived in love is a form of bond, but the bond does not depend on sex alone.

This is where science, solitude, and motherhood outside a couple must be looked at differently. A woman alone, whether through widowhood, abandonment, rape, an inability to love again, or a deep choice to give life, is not half a family by default. She can become, for the child, the entire place of welcome.

Not because she would magically replace everything, but because love is not measured by the number of adults present around the cradle. It is measured by real presence, by protection, by the gaze that tells the child: you may live, I am keeping you, I will not hand you over to the world’s cold.

Thus, the child born outside a traditional loving union is not diminished. He is no less whole, no less wanted by God, no less capable of loving or being loved.

What founds his dignity is not the conformity of the story of his conception, but the truth of the love that receives him. Biology gives an origin. Love gives a home.

The human trinity is therefore not a social prison. It is an image of the bond when the bond is alive. But when the couple becomes violence, absence, or façade, that image collapses. And sometimes, in the silence of a mother alone who carries, feeds, watches over, and loves, there is more of the sacred than in a household complete in appearance but empty of tenderness.

Science does not destroy this truth. On the contrary, it can offer a passage where nature, violence, or history have closed a door. Donation, IVF, medical assistance does not replace love; they only open a possibility. What turns that possibility into human life is not the laboratory. It is the desire to welcome. It is the inner promise made to the child even before he can speak.

But this construction is not fixed. The divine also lodges in silences, in inhabited solitudes. A woman alone, carrying within her the deep desire to give life, nourishes her child with an original love. The child’s soul is not amputated of anything because it was not born of two bodies in carnal union. On the contrary, it is fully called to exist, nourished by a mother’s gaze, breath, and prayer. The gift of sperm, even without love from the donor, becomes a vector of love the moment it passes through this sincere and powerful desire to create life.

In France and the United Kingdom, this donation is legally free of charge. But this gratuitousness does not always reflect a spiritual generosity; it is an illusion constructed by society. Nevertheless, it is not the man who gives birth to the love, but the woman who chooses to embed this act within an act of creation. It is she who deposits the divine spark. The child thus receives this share of the divine by the sole fact of being loved, desired, carried for nine months in an impulse of transmission.

Science takes nothing away from this; it is a facilitator, but it does not erase the emotional reality, nor the power of the soul. A couple who resorts to science, but who continues to love, lives within the same divine unity as one who conceives naturally.

A woman alone, who no longer lives carnal love, but who vibrates with maternal love, participates just as much in this divine memory. The child who is born is neither diminished, nor less whole. He carries his own path toward love. He will complete his trinity in due time; with those he chooses to love.

Sex, finally, cannot be reduced to an animal mechanism when speaking of nymphomania. When it is linked to the soul and to the will to help the other grow, it is a divine experience, an ecstasy, a sensation of height that one loves to repeat. When the gaze between two beings is enough to give birth to a shiver of eternity, sex becomes a mystical presence. It is no longer about climaxing, but about merging.

It is no longer about taking but about exchanging. This is where man ceases to be an animal and becomes a son of light.

Posterity is not reduced to biology. It is that part of us we leave on earth, that breath that passes through another being and says:

I passed through here, I existed, and I loved.

The ascent toward the light, and this carnal, insolent, and tender vision, opposes Tolstoy without destroying his idea, but reveals what he failed to look at, to my mind. The woman and the man who love, those who desire, those who pray, those who think. I bring together in it all the facets of the human being: parent, lover, scientist, and believer. The return to the living, at the border of the flesh, of desire, and of knowledge.

Chapter 9

The Perception of the Real

Between Lies, Imagination, and

Humanity Regained

Is the madness society decrying not simply its own inability to look itself in the face? …

The hypothesis of a madness of my own mind as author, for at the time of writing I am little read and little followed in my ideas, where imagination lends racism that touch of nuance it conceals behind lies or misunderstanding.

It is simpler for the masses to say that I am mad, alone in my idea, rather than to recognize their own racist behavior toward other human beings. The lie is born with their false propriety, and every time I point it out to them, they launch a mental war between the social lie and individual perception.

At what point does what I think become a lie?

At what point does what I recount become an escape?

Where is the line?

And why is it so palpable?

The real as it is, in my view

The social rejection of my hair depending on the origin of those around me. The phrases “but I’m not racist, come on! … I have a friend from the Caribbea.”

It is simpler to call me mad than to recognize one’s own inconsistency. Simpler to call me excessive than to look one’s own racism in the face.

More comfortable for the masses to reassure themselves: “She’s exaggerating, she’s making it up, she’s getting carried away.”

As soon as I point out the violence, they answer me: “But I have a friend from the Caribbea! He makes good accras!”

At that exact moment, my brain translates: “Me, racist? Come on… I have a little black poodle at home! He’s adorable, very well trained. But my children, of course, will never marry a dog. We love him, but not to that extent.”

In their voices, I hear centuries of domination articulated with a smile, around phrases like “Stay in your place. We decide. You follow. Don’t give your opinion, you don’t understand. We know better than you.”

The real as they believe it to be

They think themselves open to the world, tolerant, modern, exceptional beings beyond the real.

They toss out sentences full of clichés and stereotypes, meant, in their eyes, to say: look, we’ve understood your color. And besides, all people from the Caribbea are happy and friendly. So, why doesn’t it work here?

So, according to them, I must surely have a psychological problem, a thought disorder, an imbalance…

The real as I hear it

Madness, in the end, is perhaps only imagination that refuses to bend to polite lies. So, if I am mad, let it be for telling the truth...

 I am not mad; I am lucid in a world that invents for itself a racialized normal. My inner translation exposes what they hide. They call what I see madness. I call what they tell lies. Between the two of us, there is only one border: the imagination they no longer have.

The collective belief tied to a racialized criterion, which makes people think that a unique personality is hereditarily bound to an origin.

The lie is a SOCIAL PROTECTION. They protect themselves from shame by accusing me of madness. This is no longer imagination. It is an autopsy of the social lie, debased by racist sociology.

THE UNREAL IS WHAT THEY IMAGINE I AM IMAGINING.

The nesting of perceptions, a “we think, therefore you are”, kills morality and individual conscience. Faced with my remarks, I have often been told that I was excessive, or even a bit mad. So, perhaps I am mad to see what they do not want to see, to hear what their presumed good conscience smothers.

It is simpler for them to disqualify the other’s perception than to recognize the violence of their own unbalanced normality.

THIS IS NOT IMAGINATION.

IT IS PHENOMENOLOGY: THE STUDY OF WHAT EACH PERSON PERCEIVES OF THE REAL.

Where is the border, for between lies and perception, imagination is not an escape. It is a spotlight. It is easy, for the masses, to accuse of imbalance the one who sees too clearly. Easy to disqualify the isolated mind rather than face one’s own ugliness. It is more convenient to say, “you’re imagining too much, you’re rambling” than “I am behaving badly.”

For the real, in hindsight, is not what people say; the real is what their words attempt to hide.

The social lie is human conscience refused, so as to reduce it to an animal state. The lie is born precisely were perception tips over. Where the human being chooses excuse rather than truth. Where society, so as not to admit its guilt, invents the reassuring story according to which the other is exaggerating, raving, dramatizing.

It is simpler for them to invent a supposed “madness” in my mind than to recognize the violence in theirs.

Imagination... real imagination, is not an escape from the real to hide a functional disorder of society. It is a flashlight aimed at what society tries to keep in darkness. The capacity to dream.

So, my imagination serves, rather, to help me become the woman I am, rather than the one they lie into being through their perception, in order to hide their own inner disorder.

Nietzsche said, “Become the man you must be.”

But where does this duty come from, to correct what others perceive of me?

Toward which morality does my unconscious let itself be pulled?

To which law must I answer?

And if I ask which law, it is because today’s law overlays yesterday’s, which overlaid the day before yesterday’s?

The law itself is not stable; it is a statistical variable regulating sociology. Morality is not universal; it follows the customs of civilizations. Duty is always manufactured by a social and historical context. If duty changes, then duty is not an absolute. If it is not an absolute, then I owe nothing. Nothing, except being a conscious human being.

If duty comes from a moral system stacked upon other moral systems, then “duty” no longer means anything.

All that remains is the conscious human being.

Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”

I say:

I AM CONSCIOUS; THEREFORE, I CHOOSE.

Descartes reminds me that existence begins in consciousness. So, if I must become something, it can only be this: a conscious being, who thinks, who discerns, who doubts. My duty is not to become an external ideal following society’s lying perception. My duty is to inhabit my own thought without lying to myself.

I will not become the man I “must” become. I will become the being I am capable of looking in the face. For duty is only a layer of laws stacked upon laws, and morality a stack of customs unaware of one another.

I owe only one thing: to be conscious.

The rest is mere rhetoric.

Nietzsche commands me to become. Descartes reminds me to be. And I choose to be conscious before becoming anything at all.

Nietzsche is, in my view, a command that closes off humanity. Nietzsche tells us: “Werde, der du bist” which can be translated by “Become what you are.”

In a world where being is sorted by color, sex, and nationality, this sentence resembles less a liberation than an administrative sorting.

It would still require that I be authorized to say what I am, instead of being told what I am supposed to be: a color, an origin, a sex, a statistical danger, or a culinary folklore.

But what does “being” mean, in a world that catalogues by color, by sex, by age, by nationality, by social status, by appearance, by moral conformity?

In a society where being is constantly labelled, this sentence is no longer a liberation: it is an imprisonment. It becomes: “Become what we have decided you are.”

I am conscious of my animality, it is the animal instinct, the survival mode, the nature, but I am not a classifiable animal. I am a being who thinks, therefore a being who escapes your drawers.

Nietzsche speaks of the fire of being, but never of the match. He speaks of what burns, not of what decides to burn.

The soul, for its part, is the match:

ℵit says I think; therefore, I am

ℵit says I see; therefore, I recognize myself, without a witness.

The conscious human sees his animality, but he is not locked inside it. He is a thinking being who owes nothing to society: least of all his definition.

I do not have to become what the law, morality, or history have classified for me. I only become what my soul sets ablaze. And here, Nietzsche becomes, despite himself, an extension of racism, of sexism, of social normativity. Because as long as he ignores what the world does to identities, his sentence liberates nothing. It reproduces the cage, freeing whoever wishes to selfishly free himself from the criteria that confine him within his classification; like a graft trying to be accepted by a new body by having itself amputated from another.

Scientifically, essence is not the fire: it is fuel. Nietzsche asks me to be my essence, but an essence without a match does not burn. Likewise, loving a soul that the body rejects: is not love, but only the idea of love, fuel without flame. In wanting to tear down religion, Nietzsche gave up human metaphysics.

ℵThe animal-man is instinct, survival, and biology.

ℵWhereas the body-man is emotions, reactions, desire, and movement.

ℵWhile the soul-man is choice, consciousness, and inner fire.

Without these three men, being does not exist. It becomes an abstraction. A dead idea, fuel without a match.

Man becomes real only when he embraces his animality, assumes his body, and chooses the soul that sets him ablaze. Only then can he say: I think, therefore I am, and I see.

Nietzsche’s scientific flaw lies in the fact that essence is not the fire. He speaks of animation but ignores the action that animates. He speaks of being, but not of what chooses being. What Nietzsche calls “essence” does not exist without this triad. It lacks the hand that lights it. It lacks the soul that says, “I think, therefore I am, and I see.” The three men are the metaphysics he erased. Man becomes one and real when he embraces his animality within the soul he has chosen, with his physical body and his emotions.

To give voice back to the Human I am, I will not become what society classifies, I will not become what morality demands, but the morality my conscience dictates to me. I will not become what law stacked upon other laws claims to define, but I will only become what my soul sets ablaze, for that is the only truth that does not lie.

And perhaps modern philosophy must begin here: not in essence, but in the match. Not in given being, but in chosen being. Not in prescribed becoming, but in sovereign consciousness. This is how the world is reopened to humanity.

I think, therefore I am. I see. I express myself, I speak, and you understand me. I feel, so my emotions inhabit me. I live, so I experience, for life is born of breath, within animality. And so, I love, and I love humanity.

In the author’s collection: (available in French, English, and Russian)

Nayunbae Publishing :

Bâtir une Société Moderne : Patrimoine d’aujourd’hui

Love is the Answer: I am

Любовь — это ответ: Я Есть

Nayunbae Studio:

Love is the Answer (Healing Session 2025)

Heart Healing Meditation (2020) formerly Miss Moon Life Coach

Éditions MAIA (only in French):

L’amour est la réponse : Je suis

Forthcoming Books (available in French, English, and Russian)

Humanity: The Cosmic Scale

“Humanity” and the associated visual work, science and sonar program, are protected under USA copyright law (2026) and international intellectual property treaties. These works remain the exclusive property of Aude Volny-Anne. Any unauthorized reproduction, adaptation, digital reprocessing, or use in physical or electronic media is strictly prohibited and may result in legal action. All rights reserved worldwide.

Love is the Answer: I See

Love is the Answer: I Speak

Love is the Answer: I Feel

Love is the Answer: I Trust

Love is the Answer: I Experiment

Love is the Answer: I Know

“Love Is the Answer” ™ and the associated visual mark, comprising a circular symbol with ornamental, radiating petal motifs and handwritten calligraphic lettering, are protected under UK copyright law (2019) and international intellectual property treaties. These works remain the exclusive property of Aude Volny-Anne. Any unauthorized reproduction, adaptation, digital reprocessing, or use in physical or electronic media is strictly prohibited and may result in legal action. All rights reserved worldwide.

Bâtir une Société Moderne : Politique de Demain

Legal deposit: August 2026

For

Nayunbae Publishing

5 rue Du Général de Gaulle

50420 Tessy-Bocage

"The Intellectual and Artistic Property Code authorizes, under the terms of paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article L.122-5, on the one hand, only "copies or reproductions strictly reserved for the private use of the copyist and not intended for collective use" and, on the other hand, only analyses and short quotations for the purpose of example and illustration,  "any representation or reproduction, in whole or in part, made without the consent of the author or his successors in title or successors, is unlawful" (paragraph 1 of Article L. 122-4). This representation or reproduction, by any process whatsoever, would therefore constitute an infringement punishable by Articles L. 335-2 et seq. of the Intellectual Property Code."

Humanity: Fragments of Consciousness

ISBN 9798191017570

Graphic design: Nayunbae Publishing

Copyright©2026

by Aude Volny-Anne

All rights reserved

￼

￼