The God of metaphysics is not the final, nor the most tenacious, of the gods Badiou seeks to despatch in his assault on the latent theology of finite thinking. Haunting the thought even of those who claim to have deconstructed the God of metaphysics is the third of Badiou's three ‘chief deities’: the God of the poets. For a finite thinking the God of the poets remains perfectly intact after the God of metaphysics is ‘finished’ (CT 18–19/BOE 28), for the motif of finitude is ‘comme la trace d'une survivance, dans le mouvement qui confie la relève du Dieu de la religion et du Dieu métaphysique au Dieu du poème’ (CT 20).

The God of the poets is neither the God-principle of Western metaphysics nor the ‘living God’ of religions. It is the God(s) – or divine principle(s) – of Romanticism, whose most acute expression is found, Badiou argues, in the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (CT 18/BOE 28). This God is the poetic principle of the enchanted world, and it is neither dead nor alive but rather withdrawn. It follows that the God of the poets cannot be mourned, like the God of religions, nor critiqued, like the God of metaphysics; its persistence is felt in terms of a nostalgia, a melancholic and endlessly disenchanted anticipation of its improbable return that leaves thinking in a state of paralysed suspense (CT 19/BOE 29) that Badiou gives the name ‘Romanticism’.