ABSTRACT
The metaphysical notion of God as the foundation of being, and as the supreme principle of order and harmony (which was an aspect that brought together Greek philosophy and Christianity, and set a cultural standard in the Western civilization) underwent a crisis in the 19th century, together with the disruption of the traditional social order and the onto-theological “image of the world” under the blows of science and philosophical criticism. God is dead, announced the philosopher, and religion seemed to inexorably dissolve on the road to secularisation. God, however, was not extinguished: he has returned powerfully in the anti-metaphysical figure of a historical God, who manifests himself to man in contingency, as a principle of disorder and disarray, trauma and estrangement. Various authors (namely J. Ashbery, F. Dostoyevsky, P. Pasolini, T. Mendonça) are called upon to illustrate this image of God as "the great disorganiser", but also the possible fiasco of this clash with the transcendent, which implodes in “silence”, in the non-reception by the contemporary mass-man. The failure of the sacred, and its eventual banalization through repression and spectacularisation, are represented in a comic register by artists such as F. Kafka, S. Beckett, F. Fellini, J.-L. Godard.
KEYWORDS
Ashbery; Dostoyevsky; Mendonça; Pasolini; Sacred