Abstract
The collapse of communism has led, if not to an actual transition to a world in which everything is experienced as relative, then at least to a greater awareness of already living in such a world. Contemporary societies were not prepared for this and feel cast adrift. The so-called transition period ushered in by this collapse is marked by a threefold crisis, analysable as the manifestation of the global redistribution of a relation to meaning, affecting centrality, identity and mediation and testifying to a revelation of the relation of believing through the truth of believing. What is at work here, and what forces us to set aside our traditional categories of analysis, is, beyond the difficulty of expressing a relationship to movement and pluralism (the religious being constantly called upon to participate in the management of this expression), the pursuit of a long process of disenchantment with politics. The lack of a plausible politics in this perspective explains the recourse to religious categories (secularized or not) and the use of these categories in an identitary thematic.