Politics and Religion

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

When we talk about religion today, what are we talking about? In order to provide answers to this question, the importance of which is evidenced by the presence of the theme, and the confusion that prevails around it, both in political and media (but also often scientific) discourse, Of the religious not as such, but as an indicator which, contextualized, appears capable of constituting a remarkable analyzer of the recompositions of the contemporary. Turning away from the "indigenous theories of specialized sociologies," to use Jacques Commailles's formula, it will also be a question of re-enacting religion at the heart of a general sociology. We shall start from the double observation of our inability to identify in all its extent the effects of a tendency, as heavy as a universal one (hence not limited to the societies of the developed West) A relation to meaning, on the one hand; And on the other hand the limits to which the "traditionally" analyzes concerning the religious are confronted. Hence the need to rethink new costs, from the perspective of a "believing" approach, and from a conception of putting it into practice (or, to put it more properly, in " The clutch of a saying about a doing "), the relation maintained by our societies to the belief, and to disengage from this reflection a tool renewed intellectual and performing. The central hypothesis explored stems from Certeau's observation that when politics falters, the religious returns. But if he comes back, it is certainly not as such. Its primary function is to underline a deficit in politics so cruel that it would miss the political words to say. Hence the recourse to the religious, as a register of articulation, in a situation of generalized floating of landmarks and markers, of the urgency and the simultaneous impossibility of establishing a renewed relation to a totality. And this against the background of the exhaustion of the credible or even more than that of the religious, is the credibility of politics which is today questioned.