Abstract

This article presents an enquiry into one aspect of Michel de Certeau’s intellectual project: to make Christianity intelligible in our epistemological situation. I seek to demonstrate how this epistemological and theological question shapes many of his historical and anthropological works, which seek to elucidate the re-composition of the human sciences and Christianity from a particular reading of modernity. The matrix of his thought is configured by the irruption of mystical experience in otherness and strangeness and the questions this poses to the claimed uniqueness modern reason, heir to the Aufklärung. We will inquire about the fundamental theoretical tools that support the political discernment made by Michel de Certeau in the cultural crisis of May 68. Then we analyse the place of the nominalist rupture in the process of desontologization of language and the passage from the religious system to the ethics of Enlightenment as a way through the notion of “the formality of practices”. Both are preludes to his particular reading of secularization.