Falling into negation is God’s highest eminence, not his diminishment

Evidence

Philosophers who see a diminishment of God (yet God, without his incline, would be no more than an abstract and impoverished concept) in the necessity of this decline (involved as much in the essence of the Aristotelian θες as that of the God of Revelation) are missing the profound originality of Hegel’s thought. To introduce a negativity in God which puts him into motion and makes possible his flexing, is undoubtedly the highest possible way of imagining his eminence, the condition and dimension of his fall. Hegel is a thinker for whom the movement of falling is not a degeneration in the ordinary sense of the word, but a term of expiration – something which falls due. It is a matter of taking the future into account, a future which erupts when it ‘comes from’ and explodes while falling. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1259

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of plasticity: negativity within God is what flexes, moves, and makes falling itself the condition of eminence.
• QUESTION: The falling-as-expiration image (‘falls due’, future erupting while exploding) is dense enough to want further unpacking against the earlier temporal chapters.
• DEEPTHINKING: The revaluation of fall as expiration/eminence rather than degeneration — where negativity in God is the highest imagining of his eminence — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting paradox central to the whole plastic dialectic.
• XREF: connects to: God’s incomprehensibility means he exceeds knowledge, not that reason fails him. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 744; God’s death is the thought that negation strikes the eternal itself. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 779; God’s fall is the highest form of his eminence, not his diminishment — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1259 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• God’s fall is the highest form of his eminence, not his diminishment #corroborates (0.97) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1259
• God becomes God only through self-externalizing fall, not despite it #corroborates (0.93) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1258
• Hegel’s radical divine negativity expresses God’s plasticity, not lack or passivity #corroborates (0.88) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 758
• Thinking the negation of negation requires passing through the death of God #expands (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 156