First Edition: Lieu Commun, 1982
New expanded edition, Tel Gallimard, 1994
How is modernity born? Modern man has always believed that modernity was built on the clean slate of the past and tradition. But where does it come from? In a philosophical and erudite investigation, Shmuel Trigano suggests that it is in the negative theology of the Middle Ages that we must find the moment when traditional society and thought wavered and opened up to the logic of modernity. In short, it is in the history of what men have said about God, and in their efforts to perfect their conception of the Divinity, that we can read the evolutions that ultimately led to the constitution of a world from which God is resolutely absent…
Through an analysis of the Jewish philosophical project, as embodied in the three pivotal authors Maimonides, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, Shmuel Trigano shows how, at the heart of the theological debate specific to religious philosophy, modernity emerges.
Thus, behind the universe of Reason, an unsuspected spiritual and religious issue emerges, whose analysis helps us to read the wanderings, but also the repression and successive returns, as well as the power of reviviscence. Is this not the great issue at stake at the end of the XXᵉ century?
Translations of La demeure oubliée: the religious genesis of politics
In Italian, ECIG, 1999
Alle radici della modernità, genesi religiosa del politico