Migrations du croire chez Michel de Certeau

This study investigates the concept of believing in Michel de Certeau's writings. My thesis is that a connection exists between his analysis of believing and an attitude of migration, displacement, voyage and existential quest. This connection concerns even his personal life in so far as he moves from one discipline to another. My study tries to reconstruct and discuss this complex of migrations of belief. The investigation is carried out on four levels. It begins in the middle of Certeau's life with my analysis of an article which appeared in 1969 during the events of May '68, entitled «Les révolutions 'du croyable'». The analysis of belief in the first part of my thesis furnishes criteria for the continuation of the investigation, not only as regards the choice of texts to be studied, but also the specificity and the guidelines of my research. Second, I discuss the early texts by Certeau. These are of three types: erudite research on the history of mysticism, discussions of spirituality, and notes of journeys or reports of religious activities. The first two groups present the mystic life or the spiritual life without analyzing the nature of the act of belief. However both are already characterized by an attitude of migration that Certeau later reveals in «Les révolutions 'du croyable'», i.e. in the heart of his analysis of belief. As for the texts of the third type, they closely connect the cultural to the religious, showing the former to be the main factor of the mutations of the latter. Third, Certeau's later texts are analysed, i.e. a series of articles and theological works written under the immediate influence of the crisis of May '68, which have an ecclesiological orientation and where Certeau is engaged in systematic analysis of the language of faith, the authorities which regulate it, theological discourses which develop it, and communities of believers who practice it. The last part of my investigation follows Certeau laying the foundations for an anthropology of belief, where he is interested in how and why human beings naturally resort to belief - an act of trust - which appears in many of the daily acts of the individual: in the empowering word, in most common gestures, even in the act of walking, and also in the knowledge which calls one to believing, and finally in the institutions which try to persuade individuals and communities to believe (faire croire). I conclude my investigation with the aim of opening his analyses to the migrations of belief which arise in current Swedish contexts with regard to religious practices and religious languages. A short overview of recent Swedish literature on this subject demonstrates the continuous challenge to the interpretation of believing which emerges from the thinking of Michel de Certeau.