Hegel’s radical divine negativity expresses God’s plasticity, not lack or passivity

Evidence

The suffering of God and the suffering of human subjectivity deprived of God must be analysed as the recto and verso of the same event. There is a fundamental relationship between divine kenosis and the tendency of modern reason to posit a beyond which remains inaccessible. The Encyclopedia makes this relation visible by presenting the Death of God at once as the Passion of the Son who ‘dies in the pain of negativity’ and the human feeling that we can know nothing of God. … If we insistently stress this relation, it is because it allows us to show that for Hegel, the divine negativity, conceived in its most radical form, does not manifest the lack or the passivity, but rather the plasticity of God. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 758

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to my earlier extract (ch78) that ‘God’s alienation in Hegel is simultaneously receptive and spontaneous, a plasticity rather than passivity’ — this chapter states the same thesis as the decisive interpretive key. — connects to: Negativity is essential to God because God must produce Himself.; God’s alienation and philosophical reason’s negativity are the same movement — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 756; Hegel was the first to philosophize the Death of God as God’s self-negation — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 765 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Shows plasticity doing real work: it names the reading that lets divine negativity escape both ‘lack’ and ‘passivity’ — antagonism to the very binary my MOC asks about.