Drive-as-Destiny

Drive-as-Destiny is the concept, developed in Ruda's reading of Freud, that names the strict tautological identity between the Freudian drive (Trieb) and fate or destiny (Schicksal). The title of Freud's 1915 essay "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (Triebschicksale — literally "drive-destinies") is read not as a mere metaphor but as a theoretical proposition: the drive is destiny, in the sense that it constitutes an inescapable, constant inner force that determines the subject from within and admits of no external override. The four modes canonically named by Freud — reversal into the opposite, turning against the self, repression, and sublimation — are not exits from the drive but its own internal self-transformations, defense formations that never annul what they defend against. The drive thus closes on itself as a circle: every apparent escape or modification remains an expression of the same destinal force, not a transcendence of it.

This tautological identification produces a rationalist theory of psychical determinism: psychoanalysis, on this reading, does not open a space of freedom against fate but rather demonstrates that what the subject experiences as will, choice, or transformation is always already the working-out of drive-destiny. The distinction between fate and will collapses because the will's very resources — including its apparent negations of the drive through sublimation or repression — are already modes in which destiny accomplishes itself. The drive's circular structure (what Lacan describes as its "tour" around the object) becomes, at the level of Ruda's argument, the structure of Destiny itself: a self-closing, self-accomplishing circle from which there is no outside.

Drive-as-Destiny appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, a text whose broader argument concerns freedom, determinism, and fatalism. The concept is an intensification and philosophical sharpening of the canonical concept of the Drive: where the standard Lacanian account emphasizes the drive's circular, looping structure (the tour around the object, satisfaction in the circuit rather than attainment of a goal), Ruda's move goes further by identifying this circularity with the logical structure of Destiny as such — self-enclosed, self-accomplishing, admitting no genuine exterior. The four Freudian vicissitudes (reversal, turning-against-the-self, repression, sublimation) are reread not as genuine transformations but as internal modes of destiny's self-realization, which aligns with the drive's relationship to the Pleasure Principle: just as the drive's circuit constitutes "the only form of transgression permitted to the subject in relation to the pleasure principle" without ever leaving the field of the drive's own economy, so the apparent modifications of drive-destiny never escape the destinal circle.

The concept also resonates with Repression and Sublimation as cross-referenced canonicals: both are explicitly named as modes of drive-destiny, meaning they are subsumed under the same fatalistic logic rather than functioning as genuine exits. The connection to Masochism is structural: if masochism is the paradigmatic form of a subjectivity constituted around loss and staged repetition, Drive-as-Destiny generalizes this structure — all vicissitudes of the drive, not just the masochistic one, are repetitions in which the subject remains captive to an originary determination. Finally, the concept touches on Extimacy insofar as destiny here functions as an intimate-yet-exterior force: what most thoroughly determines the subject from within is not chosen by the subject, arriving from a locus that is simultaneously most internal (the drive's source in the body) and most foreign to conscious will — an extimate core of psychical life.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (page unknown)

the drive is destiny that manifests itself according to the four modes... the Freudian 'drive' is ultimately another name for 'Destiny,' for the reversal through which the circle of Destiny accomplishes/closes itself

The phrase "the circle of Destiny accomplishes/closes itself" is theoretically decisive because it fuses two logics: the drive's circular topological structure (Lacan's tour around the object) and the philosophical concept of a self-grounding, self-completing Destiny — a Hegelian resonance in which the result retroactively posits its own presuppositions. The word "reversal" links this to the first of Freud's four vicissitudes (Verkehrung ins Gegenteil), making that vicissitude not merely one transformation among others but the very logical mechanism by which destiny closes on itself.