162   Prajñā Vihāra

BOOK REvIEW 
The Mark of the Sacred by Jean-pierre dupuy 

By Anders Kølle

In The Mark of the Sacred 
(2013) the French economist and  
philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy sets 
out on a journey across the vast terrain 
of human rites, rituals, sacrifices and 
violence that constitute an essential 
and unneglectable part of human  
history. For Dupuy this history is first 
and foremost a history of limits, borders, 
and transcendence. The sacred is the  
very means by which man searches 
out boundaries and marks out lines 
of demarcation – between what is  
permissible, sayable, and praiseworthy 
on one hand, and what is impermissible, taboo and profane on the other. 
From the perspective of Dupuy there is therefore always something of a 
territorial animal walking its rounds at the very heart of religious thinking. 
As a lion or a wolf meticulously and persistently secures and defends its 
territory from trespassers and intruders, so a religious community fiercely 
protects its domain. The rituals and the rites are in a way nothing but the 
routine repetition of a difference: Between what is inside and what is 
outside, between what properly belongs and what is foreign and external. 
Separation and discrimination is therefore as much the objective of religious 
rituals as it is the aim of the territorial animal-however with one crucial 



Wanpat Youngmevittaya  163

difference: Unlike the wolf or the lion, religious man does not solely mark 
out limits and borders in order to keep others out – he does it in order to 
delimit and restrict himself. What the production of difference guards is, 
in other words, not exclusively the trespassing of others but also – and 
even more importantly – the trespassing and straying off of religious 
man himself. Only through the creation of otherness does something like 
selfhood and a notion of self emerge. And only through the production of 
exteriority does man find something beyond himself which helps define 
and settle his own role and place. Far from repeating or miming traditional 
Hegelian dialectics, Dupuy thus makes contradiction and not synthesis 
the main purpose of religious thought: It is only to the extent that man 
recognizes an otherness which forever remains outside his control and 
grasp that man finds the necessary means to control and delimit himself. 
The sacred is, for Dupuy, precisely this gift to humanity: The gift of 
self-restriction and self-governance. 

Now, it is this very gift that modernity with its tendencies toward 
disenchantment, demystification and desacralization threaten to take 
away. Following in the footsteps of the sociologists Max Weber and 
Emile Durkheim, Dupuy identifies the unlimited rule of rationality as the 
source of modern distress and destruction. Where nothing outside human 
ambitions and wants is appraised and worshipped, where no exteriority 
and otherness is there to delimit the actions of man, the purified reason 
turns into a madness of immanence: The moment everything is brought 
within reach and control is also the moment man loses control of himself. 
The gift of modern technology and of modern sciences is, according to 
Dupuy, also a poison; modern man´s omnipotence is at the same time 
his impotence. In his self-aggrandizing pursuit of progress, man loses 
not only the respect and value of nature but also the respect and value of 
human life itself:



164   Prajñā Vihāra

Modernity was born amidst the rubble of traditional  
symbolic systems, in which it could sense the presence only 
of the irrational and the arbitrary. But in its urge to do away 
with these systems once and for all, to utterly demystify 
the world, modernity failed to see that traditional systems, 
by setting limits to the human condition, endowed it with 
meaning; in replacing the sacred by reason and science, it 
lost sight of the fact that the very finiteness of life is what 
makes it worth living.1 

This blindness that inhabits and cripples the clear sight of  
reason and science is also what Dupuy, following the German philosopher  
Günther Anders, calls the “Promethean discrepancy”: In modernity “our 
power of making and doing infinitely exceeds our capacity for feeling 
and imagining.”2 Just as this discrepancy led to the unforgettable horrors 
of Holocaust and Hiroshima, it is now leading all of mankind towards 
the brink of doom: Nuclear weapons, global warming, nanotechnology, 
and biotechnology are all the offspring of man´s ability to create his own 
menace as the rotten fruit of his unwise wisdom. What has already begun 
to limit the possibilities of man in the form of ecological catastrophes is 
thus a limitation born of man´s own limitless behavior. For Dupuy, the 
loss of the sacred and the desacralization of the world is therefore not, 
as commonly believed and argued by Enlightenment thinkers, what will 
emancipate and free man, but rather what will enslave him and chain him 
to his own unlimited immanence and turn him into a victim of his own 
conquests. The “iron cage” of rationality only entraps man the moment 
he believes to have been set free. Dupuy therefore fundamentally agrees 
with Martin Heidegger when the German philosopher once stated that 
“the sciences do not think”. But he disagrees concerning the cure: To 
bring the sciences in touch with philosophy and with the insights and 
wisdom of philosophical thinking is not enough, cannot save us from the 
imminent danger that modernity has placed us in. Nor can philosophers 
take it upon themselves to think on the scientists´ behalf. Rather thinking 
must in fact turn towards its limitations, embrace its own finitude and 



Wanpat Youngmevittaya  165

insufficiencies, treasure its own shortcomings. In a strange and paradox-
ical way this means to think what must always remain outside thought 
– as an exteriority that can never, should never, be internalized and as an 
otherness that must remain forever foreign. Perhaps for this reason one 
inevitably has the feeling when reading Dupuy that he constantly defers 
or postpones the essential – that the sacred remains outside and untouched 
by his words. But in this case how could language do otherwise than 
constantly push what it wants to name in front of itself? Pursue it only 
in the hope of never reaching it? To rethink an exterior – an exterior that 
remains forever outside language and thought is the paradoxical objective 
of Dupuy´s own thinking. For to circumvent it is to kill it, to describe it is 
to annul it. But to forget it, as modernity has sought to do, is to be on the 
path to self-destruction. Hence everything depends on the right distance 
– and everything in Dupuy´s text becomes an art of keeping this distance:  
Advancing without coming too close, retreating without ever losing sight 
of what is essential. An awkward position indeed, which cannot hide its 
own awkwardness: The madness of immanence and the smothering of 
the sacred await the text on both sides of its course and of its movement. 
Hence writing must in a sense become ritualistic and performative itself: 
an endless return to that which always escapes – and the escape of that 
which always returns. The linear progression of thinking and writing 
is no longer an ideal or an intellectual virtue. Perhaps it is therefore no  
coincidence that the literature of Jorge Luis Borges and the films La Jetée 
by Chris Marker and Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock find their way into 
Dupuy´s book on the sacred. This is not solely because great works of 
art, like the sacred itself, seems to place us in the immediate proximity of 
an infinite distance: the irreducible distance that smiles back at us from 
the lips of Mona Lisa or from the waterlilies by Monet. Much closer to 
Dupuy´s own writing is the abysmal dread and fascination that Borges 
and Hitchcock expressed so well: The vertigo that accompanies the sacred 
whether this appears to us as the irreproachable beauty of Kim Novak or 
as the spirits of animistic beliefs.                                         



166   Prajñā Vihāra

end notes

1 Dupuy, 2013, p.79
2 Dupuy, 2013, p.185