Secolarizzazione e laicità : come articolare la questione e affrontare le sue sfide

Is it true, as Étienne Balibar once argued, that secularism, which he interpreted essentially as a regime of veridiction with a claim to universality, has nothing to do with secularization? In this essay, it is claimed that this is not the case. For not only is secularization the condition of possibility of secularism, but the split between secularization and secularism is tantamount to and serves the construction of a myth of secularism, that should be understood in the sense in which Foucault spoke of a certain teleological history as a myth for philosophers. Rejecting this myth, however, is not the same as denying some specificities of secularism. Just as Claude Lefort insisted on the irreducibility of human rights to a bourgeois ideology and their status as an uncontrollable hotbed of multifaceted contestations of power and democratic intervention, one admit the irreducibility of secularization and secularism to the power mechanisms in which they have actually settled. [Publisher's text].