Abstract

The desacralization of Western social institutions and practices over the last few centuries, partly brought about by the conquests of science, has changed the functioning of society and individual thinking. The literary representation of Western societies in three contemporary French novels depicts a materialistic world that represses the spiritual dimension that forms part of the human condition. L’Anomalie (2020), an apocalyptic account of a cosmic crisis that confounds scientists and philosophers, illustrates Jean-Marc Ferry’s “post-secular” perspective according to which recent scientific discoveries, far from solving the enigmas of the universe, are uncovering its thousand mysteries, rendering the idea of the supernatural less and less implausible. Jean Brun describes humankind’s sense of alienation from the mystery of existence as an “ontological separation.” Humans try to abolish this separation and conquer time and space through science. In Sérotonine (2019), medical science succeeds in keeping the depressed protagonist alive temporarily by regulating his hormones, but his emotional and spiritual crisis takes over in an individualistic world devoid of communal rites. Le Voyant d’Étampes (2021) traces the efforts of a failed academic to navigate a world governed by constantly changing normative rules prescribed and described by the social sciences. In societies where neither traditional religion nor the sciences provide solutions to existential crises, these contemporary novels turn to various forms of resacralization: love as secular spirituality, the subliminal nature of poetry, and the new doctrines of woke ideology.