“Nous sommes farouchement religieux”. Appunti sul Collège de Sociologie e la sociologia sacra

This article traces a small paragraph of the history of the concept of the sacred in the human and social sciences: the use made of it by a group of writers, scholars, philosophers, and sociologists gathered in the double experience of the collective-magazine Acéphale and of the "moral community" of the Collège de Sociologie. Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, among the most active and participatory animators of the group, articulated in the course of the Thirties a multifaceted reflection around the notion of the sacred and, even more, they assumed it as the keystone of a cultural and political project focused on the concept of "sacred sociology". In the more accurate consideration of the Durkheimian magisterium, re-read and taken up in original ways, the Acéphale-Collège community has developed an extremely sophisticated discourse whose meaning must be sought on many fronts: from the assumption of the political value of sociology to the anticipation of critical reflective instances that the discipline would develop only long afterwards.