Individual subjects must internally assimilate Christ’s death for representational faith to be overcome.

Evidence

The Death of God appears as a moment of God’s being. As such, the concept is intuited immediately as something necessary for consciousness. Revealed Religion differentiates itself from other religions precisely through this insight into the necessity of development, within which substance completes itself as self-consciousness, ‘and for that it is spirit’. This development is precisely the speculative meaning of kenosis. In it, the simple being of substance ‘alienates itself from itself, yields to death, and thereby reconciles absolute essence with itself’. Christ’s Death is thus at once the death of the God-man and the Death of the initial and immediate abstraction of the divine being which is not yet posited as a Self. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 774 (#expands, 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 (#expands, via linked claim)

The farewell to this renunciation, to the death of God, would only be the first moment of the negation, a first negation which must double itself and return in itself as a farewell to this farewell, that is to say as a death of death itself (mors mortis, Luther’s expression which seems to me, more literally than any other, since it concerns the very death of God, to justify the syntagm of this farewell to farewell, of this farewell to the farewell to God, etc.). Inasmuch as we must pass through the death of God and by the name of God in order to think the negation of the negation, the speculative idealism would also represent a gigantic effort, in truth a superhuman effort, to understand, with the name of God, of course, what we say when we say ‘farewell’. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 156 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: For Hegel, God’s death is an internal moment of God’s own development. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 774; For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 154; Thinking the negation of negation requires passing through the death of God — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 156

Broader Connections

• For Hegel, God’s death is an internal moment of God’s own development. #expands (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 774
• For Hegel the death of God lodges negation within God’s own being #expands (0.82) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 154
• Thinking the negation of negation requires passing through the death of God #expands (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 156