Philippine E-Journals

The Religious Factor in the Global World: Indicator and Modality of Management

Patrick Michel

Discipline: Religion

 

Abstract:

Our point of departure is Michel de Certeau’s statement that when the politics weakens, the religious returns. However, when it returns, it is not the same. The first function of its re-appearance is to emphasize such a severe deficit of politics that it cannot, so to speak, be expressed. Hence the recourse to religion as is shown in the situation of the generalized fluidity of signifiers and markers by the articulation of simultaneous urgency and impossibility to build up a renewed relation of totality.

This central problematics (the religious factor as indicator and management mode) will be explored through certain hypotheses considered to be particularly important:

• the production, via religion, of an individuation that is compatible with the process of globalization that is taking place in the contemporary world;
• the management, through religion, of the re-articulation of the changing relations between the individual—community—universal;
• the establishment, through religion, of a renewed relation to politics.