‘Je prends au pied de la lettre la formule « Dieu est mort ». […] Dieu, c'est fini. Et la religion aussi, c'est fini’ (CT 12). This striking intervention in the prologue of Badiou's Court Traité d'ontologie transitoire is not merely a claim that the moral God is dead, much less that the death of God is one move in a wider Christian dialectic. By claiming that God is dead Badiou is doing more therefore than echoing Nietzsche's madman. For Badiou as for Heidegger, Nietzsche's claim that God is dead is not yet without God, for the theistic schema of the sensory and the suprasensory still dominates Nietzsche's thought. In other words, there remains in Nietzsche's thinking the Pascalian infinite abyss that can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object. When pressed, therefore, Badiou maintains a position more radical than Nietzsche's: ‘Mon propos n'a rapport à aucune religion, et c'est pourquoi il peut librement les traiter toutes comme schèmes de l'esthétique historiale. Dieu n'est pas même mort, pour moi (ce mort est encore l'interlocuteur constant de Nietzsche)’ (19R 262).