Embodiment of the Unrelation

The "Embodiment of the Unrelation" names Ruda's paradoxical ontological status of the human being as the site where two incommensurable orders — nature (governed by external, deterministic causality) and unnature (freedom, understood as radical self-determination) — neither synthesize nor cancel each other out, but persist in an irreducible non-relation. The human subject does not occupy a middle point between these two orders, nor does it transcend one in favor of the other; rather, it is the living instantiation of their incompatibility. This is not a deficiency to be resolved but the very structure of what it means to be human. Crucially, "unrelation" is not mere absence of relation — it is a positive, structural gap, the kind of non-synthesis that resists any Aristotelian naturalization of human essence into a determinate ousia or teleological function.

This formulation follows directly from Ruda's reconstruction of Cartesian freedom: because genuine freedom is not a natural capacity but a contingent, externally forced result (produced by a determination figured as God), it cannot be incorporated into the order of nature. Freedom is, in this sense, structurally "unnatural" — it interrupts causality rather than completing it. The human being who is the embodiment of this unrelation is therefore not a substance with a stable essence but a kind of living contradiction: the point at which nature's causal closure encounters its own constitutive outside. This aligns with the broader Lacanian principle that the subject ($) is itself a gap or split rather than a positively existing entity.

This concept appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as the ontological punchline of Ruda's argument about fatalism and Cartesian freedom. It sits at the intersection of the cross-referenced concepts of Essence, Freedom, Form, and Subject. With respect to Essence: rather than locating a stable inner nature in the human being, Ruda's move denaturalizes essence entirely — the human has no determinate ousia because its defining feature is the non-relation between two incommensurable orders. This is consistent with the Hegelian strand in the corpus that treats essence not as a hidden substrate but as a reflexive gap within appearance. With respect to Form: the "embodiment of the unrelation" could be read as a peculiar form — not a Gestalt or organic unity, but the formal structure of an incompatibility made flesh, a "pure form" of contradiction that cannot be resolved into content.

With respect to Freedom and Subject: the concept is an extension and radicalization of both. Freedom here is not a property the subject possesses but the very rift that constitutes it; the subject is the embodiment of the non-relation rather than a bearer of free will. This positions the concept as a specification of the Lacanian divided subject ($) — the barred subject is precisely the being that cannot be totalized because it is the site of an irreducible gap — but recast through a Cartesian-fatalist lens in which contingency and external determination are the mechanism of that gap. The concept also implicitly critiques Ideology: any ideological naturalization of the human (assigning it a fixed essence, role, or telos) covers over the unrelation that is its true "form."

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

there is an unrelation. This ultimately means the following: The human being is the embodiment of the unrelation between nature (which is determined by external causality) and unnature (freedom).

The phrase "embodiment of the unrelation" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to let the non-relation remain merely abstract or logical: embodiment insists that the gap is lived, materialized, made flesh — the human subject does not represent or point to the unrelation but is it. Meanwhile, the explicit pairing of "nature (which is determined by external causality)" against "unnature (freedom)" encodes the full Cartesian-fatalist paradox: freedom is literally defined as the un-natural, that which cannot be accommodated within causal determination, making the human a walking structural contradiction rather than a unified essence.