Christ’s death is the painful negative identification of sensuous existence with divine universality.

Evidence

Recalling Luther, the concept of Entäußerung in Hegel continues to designate the ‘divine sacrifice’. However, he interprets this sacrifice as God’s genuine ‘becoming other’, and this justifies the French translation of this concept by ‘aliénation’. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel indicates that the act whereby the Son, ‘having come into the world’, acquiring his determination as ‘Other’ – an act brought to its fulfilment by his death –, is understood as the work of Entäußerung. The Incarnation is ‘the alienation of the divine (Entäußerung des Göttlichen)’, and Death, the ‘alterity of the divine (Anderswerden des Göttlichen)’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 682 (#expands, via linked claim)

God has died (Gott ist gestorben), God is dead (Gott ist tot) – this is the most frightful of all thoughts (der fürchterlichste Gedanke), that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God. The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievability, the annulling of everything that is elevated, are bound up with this thought. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 779 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

At the very moment when she shows that according to Hegel, ‘the death of God appears as a moment within God’s Being’ and the ‘advent of the “metaphysics of subjectivity”’ (a proposition which, taken on its own, Heidegger would probably not have repudiated), Malabou follows a path whose very necessity is marked by this reflexivity of the farewell of God to his own self, an infinite reflexivity of the infinite farewell to one’s self which does not by some chance end in finitude, in the ‘situation of an absolute finitude characterized by modern philosophy’. Inasmuch as the death of Christ is the Mittelpunkt around which all turns and according to which begins the ‘conversion of conscience’ and the true ‘faith’ (the ‘apprehension by Spirit, as the spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit’), we arrive at this thought, which is at the same time a philosophical and religious thought: the negation is in God. And more so, fatal doubling, this negation in God passes by the experience of a farewell to salvation, ‘the loss of all salvation’, the ‘feeling of complete irretrievability’, the very salutation to salvation or the farewell to all and any farewell. … God has died (Gott ist gestorben), God is dead (Gott ist tot) – this is the most frightful of all thoughts (der fürchterlichste Gedanke) that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God. The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievability, the annulling that everything that is elevated are bound up with this thought. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 154 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: God’s death is the thought that negation strikes the eternal itself. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 779; The theology of God’s death transferred into philosophy’s absolutizing of finitude. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 784; For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 154 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The Incarnation and Christ’s death are Hegel’s model for God’s genuine self-alienation as otherness #expands (0.90) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 682
• God’s death is the thought that negation strikes the eternal itself. #corroborates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 779
• For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being #corroborates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 154
• The theology of God’s death transferred into philosophy’s absolutizing of finitude. #expands (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 784