for Kojeve

from an online conversation, as much of the rest in fact is:

Do you never feel like the "golden boy"? The genius? The one who made it through the dangers to the prize? I see those old Christian paintings and sculptures in which Christ or some saint gives a sign with his hand. I feel that gesture. In my higher moments (not too rare) I feel a sense of great pride and transcendence. But this only became stable and fully mine conceptually via a kind of death. No secret, no escape, no ground. I am a fragile, mortal "god." I was quite amused to discover that Kojeve talked like this. Really it's right there in "his" Hegel that man becomes Christ.

To be clear, I'm not 100% with Kojeve. He presents nihilism/skepticism as an unsatisfying or unstable position. To me, on the contrary, it is "Christ." But Kojeve takes politics more seriously than I do. 
Nevertheless, his book understood philosophy as a religion of self-consciousness. The self-thinking thought is the goal, as I see it. The final identification is with disindentification itself. Death is God. Or God is the death of everything finite. God is a devouring flame that eats away at finite personality from the inside. Infinite personality has given everything fixed to God/Death/Fire and become God/Death/Fire. Dramatic rendering, of course.

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