Agrégé in philosophy, Robert Redeker is the author of an important work. His latest work, entitled
Les Sentinelles d'Humanite
(Éditions Desclée de Brouwer), is a profound and remarkable meditation on the contribution of the figures of the hero and the saint to Judeo-Christian civilization.
Diego Armando Maradona was not a football player, in the sense taken by this phrase in our twenty-first century.
The words remain the same, but the thing they refer to turns out to be different.
Today, football stars are under the obligation to conduct themselves in life according to the standards of planetary political correctness.
To live smooth.
To speak like parrots, following to the letter the elements of language by means of which one formats their expression.
To read also:
Diego Maradona, the legend of success and excess of the "golden kid"
Their contracts integrate their extra-football image into their profession.
For it is the whole - the game and the outside of the game, the game and the attitude in life - that the global entertainment industries sell on their roaring stalls.
Translated into commercial volapük: a football player is a package.
The contemporary football player is a calibrated product, subject to the injunction to be an example to other men, Maradona was not.
Why then did the great people of the world want to receive Maradona in their home, to be seen by her side?
The kings - from Fidel Castro, Chavez, Kirchner, to all the heads of state, to all the leaders of large companies, who insisted on having their photograph taken in his company, feigning intimate friendship, to kissing him demonstratively braces - know themselves illegitimate.
Kings know they are naked.
They know that they only gain the consideration of peoples by attracting a light on them from elsewhere.
A light that gives them a moment of legitimacy.
Maradona was such a light.
It was not Fidel who crowned Maradona, it was Maradona who crowned Fidel
During their meetings, it was not Fidel who crowned Maradona, it was Maradona who crowned Fidel.
This observation - which far from being limited to a decorative rhetorical figure signals symbolic reality - applies to all the leaders who attracted Maradona to them.
He sacred them.
However, if the great were fooled by this highlighting intended to dress their emptiness, imagining that they were filling their person with real legitimacy through this means, the more subtle peoples were not.
They savored its irony: the great of this world begging, in order to establish their power, a sort of coronation with a man of the people.
And yet, Maradona, who played football so divinely, did not know how to live;
he lived next to life.
He was living sick of life.
Her real life, radiant with beauty and health, prestigious, only flourished on the field, ball to foot;
in life outside the stadium, he was an exile.
Outside the stadium, he wandered like the native of a life other than ordinary life.
Read also:
Diego Maradona, the football demon
A poetic image makes it possible to define this enigma, - the very enigma of Maradona, which was also that of Marilyn Monroe: Baudelaire's albatross.
As "
he is awkward
", this "
winged traveler
", when it comes to living on "
the floor
", writes the author of
Fleurs du Mal
!
How ugly he is, "
he was once so handsome
"!
How awkward and disorderly his life is when he is "
exiled to the ground
"!
The image that arises most naturally in the mind of those who are closely interested in Maradona is that of exile.
More precisely: from metaphysical exile, from the soul in exile in a life that is not his.
Maradona, this soul exiled outside the football fields, which are like his sky!
In everyday life, “
his giant wings prevent him from walking
”.
Few things capture the imagination with as much force as the resemblance between these two icons of popular culture: Maradona and Marilyn
Maradona was an albatross, this "
prince of the clouds
", disguised as a football player, just like Marilyn Monroe was one, disguised as a film actress.
There is a common expression in cinema and football: "to
play fair
".
Likewise exiled in life, one and the other played fair, Maradona and Marilyn, only lived just on a geometric surface: the green rectangle of the football field, the white rectangle of the cinema screen.
At that moment, all eyes, fascinated, are on them.
At that point they are no longer strangers to existence.
They are no longer non-knowing how to live.
Their sickness was only homesickness: as soon as they play, as soon as they appear on the rectangle, they have found their homeland.
Their sickness was nothing but the azure sickness of albatrosses when they walked on the floor: like the sky, this kingdom of albatrosses, Argentina's jersey alternates blue and white, and, the team national is called "
the celestial
".
To read also:
"Maradona told to my daughter ..."
Few things capture the imagination with as much force as the resemblance between these two icons of popular culture: Maradona and Marilyn.
Maradona and Marilyn were both left-handed;
both lived awkwardly, lived side by side, did not know how to lead their lives.
On the ground, under deafening cheers, when Maradona played, awkwardness, this lead, as by an alchemical conversion, mutated into its opposite, the rarest gold.
The clumsy of life became the divine left-hander.
As, in the films and in the photographs of Sam Shaw, Milton Greene, Bert Stern, or André de Dienes, the melancholy actress became the “
divine Marilyn
”.
No, definitely Diego Armando Maradona was not a football player.
He was, exactly like Marilyn in the cinema, an unhappy god fallen from the sky to whom the football field alone recalled his homeland.
In short, he was the opposite of a star: a myth.
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