!"+,*" ,'"(" # &%($,"$$%)- 0.1//2 !"! The paradox of shibboleth: communitas and immunitas in language and religion. Massimo Leone Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy e-mail: massimo.leone@unito.it 1. Religion and language: two forms of comparison. This article revolves around the hypothesis that systematic comparison between religion and language will bring about fresh, unprecedented insights into many religious phenomena, including those which seem to cast a dark shadow on the peaceful life of many contemporary societies (LEONE 2007). Such hypothesis can be formulated in two different ways. According to the milder version, although religion and language intersect on several occasions - for example, language shapes the utterances of a ritual, it substantiates the message of a sacred text, it embodies the prayers of a religious community (KEANE 1997, SAWYER and SIMPSON 2001) - such intersections are mostly incidental and secondary, since religion and language remain two fundamentally distinct domains. The first can be compared to the second, but only as a poet compares two objects in a metaphor: the albatross, indeed, shares some features with the existential condition of Baudelaire, yet the bird and the poet remain two separate elements of reality, and the metaphor could not work without this separateness. On the contrary, the second, more radical version of the abovementioned hypothesis suggests that religion and language are actually two manifestations of the same dynamics (LEONE 2009). As a consequence, since linguistics and other disciplines are carrying on a project of systematic comprehension of language, new understanding of religion would be gained if such a project was extended to religious phenomena as well (DELORME and GEOLTRAIN 1982, PATTE and VOLNEY 1986). According to this second formulation, comparison between religion and language is not metaphorical but structural: these domains would appear as different