 Far from abolishing the value of the absolute, the process that continues to be referred to today as “the end of absolutes” grants the latter an unprecedented licence – philosophers seem to ask only one thing of these absolutes: that they be devoid of the slightest pretensions to rationality. The end of metaphysics, understood as the “de-absolutization of thought,” is thereby seen to consist in the rational legitimation of any and every variety of religious (or “poetico-religious”) belief in the absolute, so long as the latter invokes no authority beside itself. To put it in other words: by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious (45).