VICTOR TAVARES BERTUCCI

In the final paragraph of Faith and Knowledge (1802), Hegel introduces the matter of the death of god in the history of philosophy, to which he would return throughout his mature works. The placement of the problem in the conclusion of the article, however, demands us to treat this question as a result, not only of the article but also, as we shall argue, of Hegel’s own formation. By returning to fragments from the Berne period, one seeks to show a continuity between his early critique of transcendence and his mature critique of representation and of the ontology of finitude by moving through its development with a critique of the abstract universal of post-kantian philosophy and his own development of an ontology in the Frankfurt years, to then move on to the collapse of his Volksreligion project as a transition to philosophy through the refuse of ontology and a prefiguring of the mature notion of logic as metaphysics. Taking, therefore, his refuse of the beyond, his critique of ontological difference and subjective perspectivism, Hegel formulates the death of god as the moment wherein thought inscribes difference within itself as absolute, moment which is, in itself, merely a moment, in the sense of not constituting an insurmountable barrier within the absolute.