Nietzsche got it all wrong. God is never dead. For intellectuals over the last two centuries God has simply changed form. People always postulate an Absolute. Even today's poststructuralist dictum that there are no absolutes is an absolute. So too, yesterday's most confirmed existentialist, waiting for Godot, had found an absolute in the total absence of meaning and of God.

If we wish to understand how we have come to the point whereby theory is preferred to history, value is declared contingent, and genius is belittled, then we must look to the changing face of God in nineteenth-century thought. It is in the displacement of absolutes from the values of the Enlightenment to those of German Romanticism and of the French counter-Revolution that we begin to find answers to this query. We also must consider the various modes of deterministic thought, from German Idealism to French positivism, to round out the picture. Then we can see more clearly into the strategies and practices of the leading poststructuralists and their immediate precursors, such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Edward W. Said, Hayden White, Terry Eagleton, and Norman Bryson.

“‘Diversity’ and Its Dangers”

God never stands alone. For divinity is always associated with beliefs and values that partake of the Absolute.