Thinking in Dark Times

Abstract

An examination of the role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century requires us to question ourselves about the value of our work, its place in the world today and its future?possible or impossible?in a world sub ject to the automatization of minds by technology and to wars of religion that encourage archaism and terrorism. The work we do daily cannot be disassociated from this vast horizon, a horizon that brings me to consider three questions: What power do the humanities wield today? Do today's religious conflicts discredit humanism, or, if they are accelerating its re construction, what would be the role of our disciplines in this possible resurrection? Finally, has the "French model" gone up in flames? The "intellectual" evoked in the title of our forum is a figure from the Enlightenment of which the prototypes date back to the French ency clopedists Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot. In the aftermath of the cri sis of religion to which the encyclopedists are connected, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to new forms of thought that were to become the human and social sciences. These disciplines progressively