"The Concept is the killing of the Thing"

Thinking the thing, the object, means thinking the death of the thing as well as its living relation to you: this is what Kojeve means when he says that the Concept is the killing of the Thing. Thinking, for Hegel, is always therefore a thinking of death. It is a thinking that thinks and indeed enacts the death of the thing thought. This is because, at bottom, the being that is thought is at the same time nothing--at least this is what Hegel says in the Science of Logic. The crucial thing to grasp is that even if we consider the thinking of the thing's nothingness, its death or relationship to you [the thinker, the thinking] as dead--even if we consider this thinking of nothingness a reduction of the abstract, pure nothingness of the thing to a determinate nothingness, one still has to think the death of the thing in this act. In other words, sometimes too much stress is put upon Hegel reducing nothingness to something determinate and something able to be exchanged in an economy of being--Bataille and Derrida are guilty of this--and not enough on the fact that what is indeed interesting about the determinate nothingness is that it is nothingness, that it is the death of the thing, the thinking of its negativity as related to whatever that negativity brings about. The recuperation of negativity into a determinate economy of negativity, the extraction of negativity from its abstractness, its purity, is secondary to this engagement with negativity as the other side of every single thing. Only if one stresses that thinking is a thinking of the death of the thing, a simultaneous lifting it into death and out of abstraction, does one really get what Hegel is talking about when he calls this thinking in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit submitting to the "labor, the patience of the negative."
Quickly, I'll just finish by being clear: thinking is the thinking of the death of each thing because at bottom each thing has its being purely, in pure abstraction--in pure being. Now, this is at bottom the same thing as nothingness. Insofar as a being is a being it is equal to nothing--thus, with any thinking of the being of something, one also has to think its negativity. Even when determinate and not pure, the abstract equality of nothing with being reigns... it is what brings about this determination of being and nothing. Thus, one is thinking at the same time of a being and of its death, its abstract nothingness. It is only by thinking this nothingness as part of the thing that one can say something is at all. Also, it is only by thinking this nothingness that one can lift what is equivalent to nothingness out of its abstraction and into the Concept: the Concept is therefore the thinking that comprehends the nothingness, the death of the thing, giving it its determinacy and its nothing equally as it gives it its being. Thus Hippolyte can also say that Language is the death of the thing, along with Hegel, and be right: associating the Concept with language as he does, Hippolyte equally shows us that language is what accesses the nothingness, the death of the thing.