Debating Secularization: Illegitimacy, Legitimacy or Ambivalence of the Modern Age?

FBK Aula Piccola

Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola

FBK Aula Piccola

Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola

In Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (1966), Hans Blumenberg presented the category of secularization as a “category of illegitimacy” designed to put the Modern Age in a position of unacknowledged “cultural debt” to an alleged religious matrix. In the 1960s, this challenge was aimed at the uses of the category in the field of German history of ideas (Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, etc.), but an opposite challenge appeared in the field of postcolonial studies first in the United States, and later in France. In this view, secularization would have served above all to legitimize the modern project of substituting science for religion as the pillar of society, and thereby to legitimize colonial and imperial expansion by presenting it as an enterprise aimed at liberating peoples from religious archaism. To these divergent readings of the ideological uses of the category, a third perspective can be added, which links secularization neither to a philosophy of decline, nor to a History of Progress. It is rather a matter of seeing secularization as a socio-historical concept with an essentially descriptive dimension, whose normative use would consist rather in defending a vision that is critical but sensitive to the ambivalences of modernity.

Speakers

  • Jean-Claude Monod is professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and head of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). With Michaël Foessel, he directs the series “L'Ordre philosophique” at Seuil and is a member of the editorial board of the journal “Esprit.” Among his books: La querelle de la sécularisation (2002/2012); Sécularisation et laïcité (2007); L’Art de ne pas être trop gouverné (2019). Available in Italian are: Pensare il nemico, affrontare l’eccezione. Riflessioni critiche sull’attualità di Carl Schmitt (Castelvecchi, 2023); L’arte di non essere eccessivamente governati. Le crisi della governamentalità (Castelvecchi 2025). Forthcoming: Il capo in democrazia. Politica e carisma.

Registration

Registration to this event is mandatory.

Register

The event, organized by FBK’s Center for Religious Studies, will be held in English.

The event will be in-person in the FBK Aula Piccola while seats last and online.

Registration by February 20, 2025 at 12:00 a.m. is required in order to arrange the connection.

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