Annotation: Jean-Pierre Dupuy – the theorist of “enlightened doomsaying” whose scientific interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and modern technology – tries to elucidate why modern society is on the path to self-destruction in his book The Mark of the Sacred. Drawing on the ideas of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and writing in dialogue with René Girard and Ivan Illich, Dupuy argues that we must remember the sacredness of the world in order to contain human violence. Dupuy's book reads like a metaphysical and theological detective story in which the author discovers the "sacred" in the very places where human reason is considered to be the most free from irrationality—i.e., in science, in technology, in economics and in politics.