Entlassen

Entlassen — literally "release" or "letting-go" — is the name Hegel gives to the originary act through which subjectivity is constituted in Ruda's reading of absolute fatalism. The term designates not an empirical letting-go of something one possesses, but a structural operation: the subject comes into being precisely by releasing the world (or itself) from the pretension of grounding, control, or recuperation. Crucially, this release presupposes that everything is already lost — the "apocalypse has already happened" — so that Entlassen is not a melancholic resignation but the paradoxical activation of genuine freedom. Only when the subject no longer strives to master or secure what is always already given up can it emerge as a subject at all.

The theoretical force of Entlassen lies in its inversion of the usual opposition between fatalism and freedom. Where fatalism is conventionally understood as the negation of subjective agency, Ruda (following Hegel) argues that fatalism and subjectivity are structurally identical: it is only through the full assumption of the "always already lost" — through the act of releasing — that the subject is not paralysed but freed. Entlassen is thus the point at which absolute fatalism flips into its opposite without ceasing to be fatalism. This makes it a modal operator on subjectivity: not a content the subject releases, but the act of releasing itself as the form through which the subject first appears.

Within the source (provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata), Entlassen functions as the hinge concept that resolves — or rather preserves in a transformed state — the apparent contradiction between Absolute Fatalism and Subject. It is closely tied to the rereading of Absolute Knowing: just as Absolute Knowing, in the Lacanian-inflected corpus, names not triumphant self-transparency but the acknowledgement of a constitutive gap that cannot be integrated, Entlassen names the act that proceeds from that acknowledgement — the subject "releases" precisely because there is nothing left to hold. The two concepts are therefore sequential: Absolute Knowing supplies the epistemic structure (one cannot stand outside one's own knowing), and Entlassen supplies the practical-subjective correlate (one releases because the ground is irretrievably lost).

Entlassen also stands in a specific relation to Negation and Dialectics as cross-referenced canonicals. It is not a simple negation — not the subject saying "no" to the world — but something closer to a negation of negation: the refusal of the refusal to let go, which generates a new subjective position rather than returning to an original positivity. This aligns with the Hegelian logic of double negation discussed in the Negation entry, where the second negation does not restore what was lost but produces a new determination. Yet Entlassen is distinguished from standard dialectical sublation (Aufhebung) precisely because nothing is preserved or elevated: the release is absolute. In relation to the Subject and Subjectivity cross-references, Entlassen specifies the genesis of the subject — it is not a gradual dialectical formation but a punctual act, closer in structure to the Lacanian cut or the analytic act than to the slow labour of the Hegelian slave. The Real also resonates here: the "already lost" that conditions Entlassen functions as the Real in Lacan's sense — that which cannot be symbolized and which the subject must finally stop trying to recuperate.

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of FatalismFrank Ruda · 2016 (p.133)

Hegel calls this act a 'release' (Entlassen)... It is the very precondition of freedom, the very precondition of becoming a subject.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it places Entlassen not as a consequence of subjectivity but as its "very precondition" — twice — insisting that both freedom and the subject are downstream of the act of release rather than its authors. The doubling of "very precondition" enacts the structural identity of fatalism and subjectivity: the same act grounds both simultaneously, collapsing their apparent opposition.