Monastic resonance: or, what monastic life can tell us about resonance

Monastic life, a clear counter example of a society that is constantly tending towards a widening of its access to the world, seems to have created the ideal conditions for the development of stable axes of resonance in the women who lead it. This article reviews some of these conditions (both structural and dispositional) in the hope of engaging in dialogue with Hartmut Rosa’s sociology and thus opening up reflection on our society’s relationship to the world. The arguments put forward are based on a field experiment in three monasteries in French-speaking Switzerland, combining participant observation, qualitative interviews, and documentary analysis. These considerations lead to the identification of the constraining framework of monastic life and its relationship to time as the two central factors distinguishing between a diffuse situation of ‘resonance crisis’ and its opposite.