Illusion

In Ruda's text, "Illusion" names the specific ideological-psychical formation that psychoanalysis—beginning with Freud—targets and dismantles: namely, the belief in psychical freedom and autonomous willing. The concept does not refer to mere perceptual error but to a structurally necessary misrecognition: the subject's conviction that it is the sovereign origin of its own acts, desires, and hopes. Freud's fatalism, as Ruda frames it, consists precisely in exposing this conviction as illusory—not by replacing it with a better picture of the self, but by showing that the subject is always already spoken by forces (drives, repetition, the unconscious) that precede and exceed it. The illusion of freedom is thus not a contingent mistake but the ego's characteristic self-presentation, the imaginary register's default mode of occluding structural determination.

What gives "Illusion" its edge in this context is its pairing with "hope." True hope, Freud's fatalism implies, cannot be grounded in the subject's capacity for self-determination, because that capacity is itself an illusion. The concept thus performs a double operation: it names what psychoanalysis negates (the sovereign will) and simultaneously opens the question of what remains once that negation is complete—what a non-illusory hope, stripped of voluntarism, might look like. The theoretical wager of the chapter is that only by working through this illusion, rather than by rehabilitating a softer version of agency, can thought arrive at something genuinely emancipatory.

Within the source provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, "Illusion" appears in the epigraph and framing section, functioning as the conceptual antagonist against which the book's entire argument is oriented. Ruda recruits Freud as a fatalist thinker whose discovery—the unconscious—is precisely the instrument that explodes the illusion of autonomous selfhood. In this sense, "Illusion" is not a standalone term but the negative foil to the unconscious: it is what the unconscious structurally undoes.

This relationship is tight and direct. The Lacanian unconscious, as the cross-referenced canonical concept establishes, is not a depth-psychological storehouse but a structural-linguistic field constituted by the signifier—a "discourse without a knowing subject." Its defining feature is that it speaks through the subject rather than being commanded by the subject. This means that every experience of transparent self-presence, of "I chose this freely," is precisely the imaginary closure that the unconscious, in its pulsating opening-and-closing, repeatedly interrupts. "Illusion," in Ruda's usage, is therefore best understood as a specification of what the ego's imaginary register produces: the fiction of sovereign interiority. The concept extends the Lacanian account of the unconscious by giving it a fatalist-political valence—the unconscious is not merely a structural curiosity but a weapon against the liberal-humanist presupposition of free psychical agency, and hope that is not grounded in that illusion becomes the book's affirmative horizon.

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

True hope has become with . . . Freud suspected of being an illusion.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it places "hope" and "illusion" in a relation of mutual contamination: once Freud enters the scene, even hope—ordinarily the most benign and forward-looking of psychical stances—falls under suspicion of being structurally deluded. The word "suspected" is critical: it preserves the asymmetry between a fatalist critique (which suspects) and the ideology of freedom (which hopes), staging the entire argumentative tension of the chapter in a single compressed phrase.