My paper explores the depiction of the desert in Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, Divisadero (2007), whilst also drawing on Anil’s Ghost (2000) and The English Patient (1992). In the cultural imagination of the West, the desert has fulfilled numerous, sometimes contradictory, functions: a place of religious revelation, a spiritual tabula rasa, a gateway to another world inducing the dissolution of the subject, a museum of buried treasures defying the principles of temporal linearity, and finally, a theatre of war. Ondaatje’s later prose evokes all these different connotations of the desert. Furthermore, the desert becomes a canvas on which we can trace the intricate relationship among politics, ethics, religion and literature as it has been investigated in deconstruction since the 1990s. Using Derrida’s later work such as The Gift of Death and writings by Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo and David Jasper as my theoretical framework, I wish to address the following questions: does Ondaatje’s work primarily evoke a post-religious, ethically neutral worldview in which an excessive rationalism may lead to what in The English Patient is referred to as the equally destructive and self-destructive “tremor of Western wisdom”? Have all forms of depth and meaning disappeared in a free play of signifiers and floating images as the evocation of the postmodernist mirage par excellence, Las Vegas, in Divisadero suggests? Or does this novel’s mixing of Christian, Buddhist and secular symbols, on the contrary, indicate a celebratory post-secularism, a return to a pre-dogmatic faith which has mostly survived in art?