Pour une lecture marxiste du prophétisme: champ autre et champ outre

Abstract

The Marxist theory of religious phenomena has preferred to emphasize their function in social relationships. An analysis of the phenomenon of prophecy enables us to verify the status of the religious in neutralizing social contradictions ; but, beyond putting dominated classes in place through prophetic practice and discourse. this analysis is an invitation to view the implementation of agencies leading these classes to their death. The prophetic process which ran through the Calvinist religious field in Languedoc-Cévennes for a generation (from the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 up until 1715) allows us to verify this double hypothesis. As a necessary practice in breaking up subordinate classes in order to put itself forward as a social class and thus settle into historical legitimacy, prophecy concurrently brings into play agencies which, pushing the work of negating the dominated classes to the limit, lead to the death of the newly formed field. The violence of prophetic mechanisms which alone allows for leaving the religious field and making the political autonomous plus the excessiveness of these same mechanisms which dissolve any posture of positivity : between these two horizons is a social movement which presents the Marxist sociologist with the question of history and its negative route.