Since Saussure argued that there is an arbitrary, not a natural, relationship between a signifier and what it signifies, the human sciences have been in a "crisis of representation." This volume consists of essays which explore the critical and constructive dimensions of that crisis. The critical dimension focuses on the history of Religious Studies, especially phenomenology, showing how it has been predicated on a transcendental, non-empirical concept of subjectivity ("Geist"). This led to a universalized concept of "consciousness" and a dehistoricized concept of "experience" as central to the understanding of religion. Nietzsche's critique of precisely these concepts, as refined and extended by poststructuralist theorists, is applied to this segment of the history of the study of religion.