Godless Intellectuals?: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented

Author: Riley, Alexander Tristan

Brand: Berghahn Books

Edition: 1

Number Of Pages: 308

EAN: 9781845456702

Release Date: 01-04-2010

Package Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.0 x 0.9 inches

Languages: English

Binding: library

Part Number: black & white illustrations

model number: black & white illustrations

Details: The Durkheimians have traditionally been understood as positivist, secular thinkers, fully within the Enlightenment project of limitless reason and progress. In a radical revision of this view, this book persuasively argues that the core members of the Durkheimian circle (Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) are significantly more complicated than this. Through his extensive analysis of large volumes of correspondence as well as historical and macro-sociological mappings of the intellectual and social worlds in which the Durkheimian project emerged, the author shows the Durkheimian project to have constituted a quasi-religious quest in ways much deeper than most interpreters have thought. Their fascination, both personal and intellectual, with the sacred is the basis on which the author reconstructs some important components of modern French intellectual history, connecting Durkheimian thought to key representatives of French poststructuralism and postmodernism: Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.