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The infinite is the negation of the finite. It is nothing positive or hidden, nothing more than the finite gathered into a unity and annihilated as the source of or the authority upon the self's value and dignity. Oversimplifying to get the point across, the self is structured by or is the "incarnation" of a Cause. This cause is its avatar on the world stage, its public self, or what it separates from its one thousand idiosyncrasies as its righteous essence. This cause is the self's worth or substantial being in its own eyes. Religion is still just politics to the degree that this cause is a finite or particular protagonist on the world stage, opposed to other finite and particular causes. It is implicitly or explicitly the imposition of duty toward and reverence for the particularity of its avatar, which is to say its own idiosyncratic specifications of the good and the authoritative. It crudely expresses itself as violence and more gently expresses itself as persua...

Agree or not, it's amusing: Bataille's insistent suggestion is that the nonutilitarian writer is not interested in serving mankind or furthering the accumulation of goods, however refined, delicate, or spiritual these may be. Instead, such writers - Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Michelet, Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka, and Genet are Bataille's examples in this text - are concerned with communication, which means the violation of individuality, autonomy, and isolation, the infliction of a wound through which beings open out into the community of senseless waste. Literature is a transgression against transcendence, the dark and unholy rending of a sacrificial wound, allowing a communication more basic than the pseudo-communication of instrumental discourse. The heart of literature is the death of God, the violent absence of the good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality. The death of God is the ultimate tra...

Also Hegel (not as himself but in order to criticize or sublate) presenting The Irony.  Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual...

Nietzsche, a great theologian, presenting a Christ that might as well be Spirit.  The "kingdom of heaven" is a state of the heart--not something to come "beyond the world" or "after death." The whole idea of natural death is  absent  from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The "hour of death" is  not  a Christian idea--"hours," time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of "glad tidings."... The "kingdom of God" is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a "millennium"--it is an experienceof the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere... I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word  imperieux , used by Renan...

Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e. so long as it does not annul time. Spirit appears as embattled agency. Agency is the seed, Spirit the blossom. Agency is a tension between the real past and the ideal future (existential time). Or we might say that time is "interesting" only within agency's journey of self-knowledge. Time is annulled (ideally) when the agent becomes Death / God / Spirit. He or It remembers the process of his or its self-discovery. What had to be lived moment by moment in terrible suspense now exists as a completely present "skeleton" in which the details are recognized as not terribly important. So our particular childhood trauma is not particularly interesting. The thinkers who happened to inspire us and the terminology they happened to use are not important. A ladder thrown away. Perhaps it had to be some thinker or some terminology, but from the cloud the...

I want to present and interpret a few quotes from Fichte. The italics are mine. There is within me an impulse to absolute, independent self-activity. Nothing is more insupportable to me, than to be merely by another, for another, and through another; I must be something for myself and by myself alone...I explain this feeling to myself, by reflection; and add to this  blind impulse  the power of sight, by thought.  I read something like Nietzsche's  will to power  in this. We might just as well call it a will to nobility or independence. For me it is a crucial point that this is a "blind impulse." Fichte points  beneath  rationality,  beneath  justifications in the realm of concept, and postulates an irrational or pre-rational  urge.  The systems of philosophers are the flowers of this urge.  The immediate feeling of my impulse to independent activity lies at the foundation of this thought; the thought does no more tha...