Freedom of Choice

In Ruda's argument (source: provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata), "freedom of choice" names the conceptual conflation that results whenever possibility and actuality are treated as continuous — the signature error of Aristotelianism in both its naturalistic and transcendental variants. On this view, the capacity to choose among alternatives is taken as the very definition of freedom: to be free is to have options, to be able to do otherwise. Ruda's critique is that this conception reduces freedom to a feature of the subject's modal situation — the mere existence of multiple possible paths — without any account of the force or necessity by which a genuine choice is enacted. Freedom of choice in this sense is always already indifferent: because all possibilities are held open, none compels, and the subject remains suspended in a kind of mortified neutrality, perpetually deferring the actuality that alone would constitute a real decision.

The concept therefore functions as a critical target rather than an affirmative category. Ruda deploys it to diagnose why liberal notions of freedom end up paradoxically abolishing what they promise: by collapsing freedom into the possession of options, they install indifference at the heart of agency, leaving the subject structurally incapable of breaking with the circuit of repetition. Against this, Ruda's "pure fatalism" — choosing to be unable to choose — is proposed as the genuine counterpoint: not the absence of freedom but its realization through the embrace of necessity, illustrated by the figure of Florville as a post-Oedipal structure of repetition-with-difference. Freedom of choice, in sum, is the ideological name for a pseudo-freedom that forecloses actual transformation.

Within provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, "freedom of choice" occupies the position of a negative anchor — the concept that must be dismantled before the alternative (Pure Fatalism) can be articulated. It cross-references several canonical concepts in structurally precise ways. Most directly, it connects to Ideology: just as ideology in the Lacanian-Žižekian account does not operate through false beliefs but through the libidinal structure of participation — cynical distance being ideology's most fundamental mode — freedom of choice is ideology's privileged self-presentation. It is the master fiction through which indifference is lived as empowerment, and through which the subject's mortification is experienced as autonomy. The concept is thus a specific instantiation of ideological operation, the point where the dominant liberal discourse quilts floating signifiers of "autonomy," "agency," and "possibility" into a coherent, seemingly natural whole — which connects it to the Point de capiton: "freedom" functions here as a master signifier that retroactively organizes the liberal field while remaining formally empty of determinate content.

The connection to Jouissance and Repetition is equally important: the indifference produced by freedom of choice is not mere passivity but a structure in which the subject compulsively cycles through available options without ever exiting the circuit — a mode of drive-satisfaction-in-non-choice that Ruda links to the mortification of freedom. The Oedipus Complex enters through the figure of Florville, whose fate exemplifies a post-Oedipal repetition-with-difference: the very structure that "freedom of choice" claims to transcend is shown to be the unconscious matrix from which the subject cannot exit by simply selecting among options, but only by fully assuming the fatalistic necessity of what has already been. Freedom of choice, in this light, is the concept that names the Aristotelian-liberal failure to think the Real of desire and drive.

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

One name for the conceptual conflation at work in nearly any kind of Aristotelianism, be it of a naturalistic or of a transcendental kind, is 'freedom of choice.'

The theoretical weight of this sentence lies in two moves: first, the phrase "conceptual conflation" signals that the error is not merely empirical but structural — it operates at the level of the concept itself; and second, anchoring "freedom of choice" to "nearly any kind of Aristotelianism, be it of a naturalistic or of a transcendental kind" universalizes the critique beyond obvious targets (liberal political philosophy) to include all frameworks that equate the modal continuity of possibility with the actuality of freedom, thereby making the concept's dismantling a condition of any non-Aristotelian theory of the subject.