WHAT FUTURE FOR SECULARISM
Etienne Balibar
French philosopher, Professor emerit., Université de Paris-Ouest
The question: What Future for Secularism? Calls for a critical examination of a category that was long considered coextensive with Modernity, and is now considered by some as outdated. The radically new distributions of activities, powers, and populations, created by Globalization, have now generated at the same time a more urgent demand for cosmopolitan shared ideals and a more problematic articulation of cosmopolitanism and secularism, in a world where it is a question of the “return of the religious”, but also of the defense of the common environment, which is quintessentially a rationalist value. The lecture will discuss this aporia on the basis of a renewed critique of religion, where traditional versions of secularism are not left immune.
Moderator: Isolde Charim, philosopher, author