It is undeniable that man invented God so that his wretchedness might be forbidden by somebody greater than himself: God is the dialectical opposite of human imperfections. Ideal entities serve as compensations for wretchedness; that is why the qualities ascribed to the gods delineate by contradiction the failings and servilities of their creators.
The absolute is the sum of the compensations for human wretchedness. To create so perfect a notion, man has been obliged to renounce his peculiarity and miserable content. The absolute is powerful because perfectly empty: it is thanks to this characteristic that it represents the perfection of truth. Nothing can be demonstrated by the absolute: the absolute is precisely that supreme truth which remains indemonstrable. Only the details, the interludes can be demonstrated. Yet it is precisely this impossibility of proving the absolute which makes it irrefutable. It is impossible to shatter a lie which, having no object, cannot be related to anything: the lie, in effect, can be proven only if an object, which is readily and at first glance observed, does not seem consistent; which amounts to saying, in instances without importance. The lie limited by an object can be proven, but never the artifice of a construction, because that excludes the object. It is in this way that works of art are indemonstrable, on account of their being separate, like the absolute, from the object.
The absolute is the greatest expenditure of energy made by man; he then seeks to recoup the energy expended by means of prayer: from which it is evident that man is unable to endure his own energies, being obliged to separate himself from them in order to find equilibrium. It should be added that man, above all, is afraid of himself and of his own creations, imaginary entities he has separated from himself. It is thus that he has done everything to forget his dreams, because he fears his wandering soul. I believe that man has less to fear, faced with the Universe, than faced with himself, because he does not know the world, but only a little corner of it.
The absolute has been man's greatest exploit: it is thanks to that exploit that he outgrown the mythological state. But it was at the same time his greatest defeat, because he invented something greater than himself. Man has created his own servitude. That absolute is identical with the void and with that which has no object. It is thus that man dies by the absolute which is at the same time his means of freedom. Man dies, killed by his fetishes, whose existence is more or less situated in the absolute.
It would appear that philosophy is the degeneration of the mythological state: in fact, in the epoch of philosophy, the absolute is so enfeebled that it needs to be demonstrated. Things – whose frailty is such that, after having accepted them without due consideration, one must still demonstrate them – are called facts of science or of knowledge.
The absolute gods were, to begin with, the ancestors of governing classes, who deified themselves to enhance servitude and fear. Like money, the neutral absolute is a means of power; each may be changed into anything whatever, since they do not possess precise qualities. The absolute belongs to leaders, priests, madmen, to animals and to plants. On the one hand to the mighty and to kings, on the other to those without any power, entirely separate from objects and that very fact from their poverty.
The power of the absolute shows itself in its identity with the unconditional. The absolute has been identified with the essence and with being itself, and it is by means of the absolute that one is immortalised. What a fear of death! People must begin by seeing words through death, and it is thus that they become immortal spirits like the latter. Words, created by man, become his nightmares, and notions are the padded cells of the logicians; it is by means of notions that duration is conned.
The absolute belongs to the tectonic-ecstatics; the contemporary "contortionist" believes only in his own banal and obsequious "I": in this way he has discovered the most obnoxious form of the absolute and a freedom which, after one has forgotten death, has ceased to be limited by "taboos" and is no longer anything other than abject and ugly.
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