Confini, apparati ideologici e giochi di potere. In riferimento alla «storia sociale delle idee come fatti materiali» di Daniel Boyarin

How to write a «social history of ideas as material facts» without falling into teleologism and historical anachronism? How to conceive and narrate the history of discursive initiation and social constitution of two mutually exclusive religious systems, without providing any depoliticized social actor with some magical powers of interpellation? This article aims to restart the debate on Daniel Boyarin’s controversial reading of the question of the «partition of the ways» between Christianity and Judaism (how did it happen that two former nonreligions were borne to a new social existence as religions by certain linguistic acts?) and try to articulate a methodological proposal for a different answer. In order to do so, a new role is assigned to the main inspirers of Boyarin’s Border Lines: L. Althusser, J. Butler, H.K. Bhabha, J.C. Scott and M. Foucault – with the “extraordinary participation” of F. Barth.