The progressivists have (had) the misfortune of laicizing their categories in a radical manner. The gods ejected with such a to-do have often returned by the back door. The construction of a space of knowledge disencumbered of the revealed truths of the various religions has itself been contaminated by soft forms of religiosity. Two important concepts in the intellectual structuring of progressivist thought, the linked categories of “totality” and “synthesis”, continue to have a theological aftertaste. The high priest of German philosophy of history, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), played an important role in the promotion of these categories and in their association with that of “Progress.” However, thinkers as different as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) have provided us with resources for us to dissociate ourselves from them. In so doing, they stumble across certain intuitions of the language of contemporary cinematography. Taken together, they help open the way to a problematic of relative transcendences and Filtered Enlightenment.