The return of religion in France: from democratisation to postmetaphysics

Philosophical developments in the 1980s lent themselves favourably to what has become known as the theological turn of contemporary French thought (and specifically phenomenology).

But philosophical change was also mirrored in socio-political change, sometimes in paradoxical ways.

Democratisation post 1980 elevated the identity of the individual believer to a positive and credible place in France's socio-political infrastructure.

Phenomenology, on the other hand, 'demoted' the religious subject only in the process to restore him to what Jean-Yves Lacoste calls his appropriate dwelling place of 'naIveté'.

In the transition from the democratisation of the individual as self-sufficient and politically pragmatic to his (anti)philosophical counterpart in a new postsubjectivity, there is a shared narrative of having come through a set of crises (one historical in the name of French republican universalism, the other philosophical in the name of metaphysical ontology).

The Return of Religion in France charts this dual trajectory with the aim of demonstrating how a new religious 'subject' re-emerges as a respective social engineer and a direct inheritor of the event of Christianity.