Marcel Gauchet

Religion, Tradition and Modernity

If we are overwelmed by the "psycho-dimension" of social transformation,
communicated through "confused minds", who would hasten to declare social
transformations as psychosis, I think it is worth it to refer to some clear minds
like Marcel Gauchet, who may tell us more on the subject of the matter.

Besides this book several essays of Gauchet along the theme of religion and the collective conscious of modernity, are illustrations of clear minds.....

While reading Gauchet's paper -Redefining the Unconscious- for instance, the grain of truth and its clarity may just keep you smiling, depending on your conceiving dimension and experience. Why?....It is because things and concepts which touch the truth are, I think essentialy relaxing and comfortable fitting to our immanent nature and environment..

His point on "The experience of otherness" is an illumination for the mind. see M. Gauchet, Redefining the Unconscious, p. 17 ff.

Gauchet's set of thoughts, could all be seen as embedded in the body of the other recent French intellectuals like Merleau-Ponty, C. Lefort, M. Freitag etc.
If one is acquainted to the latter, Gauchet's challenging "new" approach can be better appreciated.
Useful discussions on religion, state, democracy, law, power and the autonomous individual (the "last drop") etc. are all highly relevant to understand the texture of the Social in a modern community and modernity at all...and Gauchet has a lot more to say on the source of religion , its role and perspective in modernity. I like it very much, though, I presume, it may be difficult to follow, if you have not that primordial "religious" touch, which is deep in everyone's urge for being a Being. "Being There"...(cf. Heideggar's DASEIN)

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