Indifference

In Ruda's argument, "indifference" names the paradoxical outcome produced by the liberal-ideological conception of freedom as freedom of choice. The theoretical move is precise: when freedom is understood as a capacity or possibility that is already actualized in the mere having of a choice — before any choice is actually made — freedom collapses into a kind of inert equipoise among options. The subject, confronting an array of pre-given alternatives, is in principle equally capable of selecting any of them; this formal symmetry is what Ruda calls indifference. Far from being a neutral or benign condition, indifference is here a mortification — a deadening of genuine freedom, because the subject is reduced to the passive bearer of a pre-given possibility-structure rather than being constituted through the act of deciding.

This diagnosis follows from what Ruda identifies as a latent Aristotelianism in liberal thought: the conflation of potentiality with actuality. Once the possibility of choice is taken as already equivalent to freedom itself, the actual moment of choosing adds nothing; the subject is already "free" before doing anything, and therefore the act of choosing becomes a mere execution of a pre-structured menu. Indifference is thus not a psychological state of not caring, but a structural effect of an ideological grammar of freedom — one in which the formal availability of alternatives displaces and forecloses the transformative, constitutive dimension of the act. Ruda's proposed remedy — "pure fatalism," choosing to be unable to choose — is positioned as the only genuine exit, precisely because it breaks with the indifference-producing logic by refusing the pre-given field of options altogether.

This concept appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as the critical diagnosis against which Ruda's positive proposal — Pure Fatalism — is constructed. Indifference is the pathology that Pure Fatalism cures. In this sense it is not a standalone concept but a structural effect, the negative pole that organizes the argument's entire arc. It cross-references Freedom of Choice directly, as its defining symptom: the liberal grammar of freedom-as-choice produces indifference as its necessary byproduct.

The concept sits at the intersection of the cross-ref'd canonicals in a revealing way. It is, first, an ideological effect in the precise Lacanian-Žižekian sense: like Ideology as defined here, indifference is not a matter of conscious belief but a structural operation that shapes how subjects experience and inhabit their situation — one in which the formal availability of choice papers over the constitutive antagonism between possibility and act. Second, indifference can be read as a suppression of jouissance in Lacan's sense: the pre-given menu of choices forecloses the surplus, excessive dimension of the act (its Real kernel), reducing the subject to a calculative relation to options rather than a constitutive encounter with the drive's repetitive circuit. Third, the remedy Ruda proposes — the repetition-with-difference structure figured through Sade's Florville — aligns with the canonical concept of Repetition and gestures toward the post-Oedipal dimension (cross-referencing the Oedipus Complex as the structure being traversed and left behind). Finally, indifference can be read as what results when no point de capiton anchors the field of choices: without a master signifier to quilting-pin the options into a hierarchy, the subject floats in formal equivalence — the very sliding of signification that the point de capiton is designed to arrest. Indifference is thus the libidinal-political face of an unanchored signifying field masquerading as freedom.

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

A result of understanding freedom as freedom of choice that is already actualized in having a choice (and thus before actually making it) is 'indifference.'

The phrase "already actualized in having a choice… before actually making it" is the load-bearing formulation: it names the Aristotelian short-circuit — potentiality treated as actuality — that generates indifference as a structural consequence rather than a personal failing, making "indifference" the precise theoretical name for what happens when the grammar of liberal freedom collapses the gap between possibility and act.