Predestination as Emancipation

Predestination as Emancipation is the concept by which Ruda, reading Luther's radical theology through a Lacanian-Hegelian-Adornian lens, reframes the doctrine of predestination not as fatalistic resignation but as the very condition of genuine freedom. The key inversion: freedom is not a capacity or property the subject possesses and exercises at will (Erasmus's position), but an event that befalls the subject from outside — a forced encounter that can only be received in a state of total despair, radical passivity, and the complete relinquishment of self-determination. The subject's discovery of its own incapacity — its inability to fulfill the divine commandments by its own will — is not a defeat of freedom but its prerequisite condition. Grace, arriving as absolute necessity, is what constitutes the free subject retroactively, not the subject's prior autonomous agency. This structure is explicitly "isomorphic" to the Lacanian subject's relation to the Real: just as the Lacanian subject is constituted through the forced choice of alienation (the vel), where the apparent abdication of being is the only way through to the subject's emergence, Luther's doctrine of predestination enacts a "forced choice" that abolishes free will precisely to open the space where genuine faith — and genuine freedom — becomes possible.

The concept also carries a distinctly anti-perverse valence. Ruda reads Luther's insistence on the hidden God (Deus absconditus) and the absence of any "Other of the Other" — no meta-cause grounding God's will — as homologous to the Lacanian formula that the Other is barred, inconsistent. There is no guarantee behind the event of grace, no symbolic safety net. This radical contingency, received in surrender rather than mastered in calculation, is what makes predestination emancipatory rather than merely deterministic: it performs the same cut the Lacanian Act performs, retroactively positing its own conditions of possibility and transforming the subject who is "hit" by it into a subject constituted by that encounter with necessity.

This concept appears exclusively in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as a key theological-historical precedent within Ruda's broader argument for "abolishing freedom" as self-possession. The Lutheran material functions as a case study demonstrating that the most radical traditions within Western thought have already registered the insight that emancipation and autonomous free will are incompatible — that genuine freedom requires the subject's destruction as a self-sufficient cause. In this sense, Predestination as Emancipation is an extension and specification of several canonical Lacanian coordinates simultaneously. It maps onto the concept of the Subject insofar as the predestinated subject is constituted through passive fading — through aphanisis before grace — rather than through deliberate self-authorization; Ruda's subject of faith is structurally the barred subject ($), produced in the gap between self-possession and its impossibility. It relates to Alienation through the vel's logic: Luther's "forced choice" between clinging to one's own capacities (and losing everything) or surrendering capacity (and receiving grace) reproduces the Lacanian choice between being and meaning in which the subject can only emerge through loss. The concept is also anchored in Anxiety — the "undeniable experience of incapacity" that the commandments are designed to produce is precisely the anxiety-function: not the absence of an object but the terrifying proximity of one's own inadequacy as Real. And it resonates with The Act: like the Lacanian Act, the event of grace is retroactively self-grounding, transforms the subject who receives it, and operates at the level of the Real rather than within the symbolic order's pre-given rules. Finally, the concept touches Absolute Necessity and the Real directly: what is "absolutely necessary" in Luther's frame is what arrives without symbolic guarantee, without an Other behind the Other — the pure contingency of grace that, once received, presents itself as having been necessary all along, in exact parallel to how the Real "always returns to the same place."

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

Freedom is rather that which becomes absolutely necessary for me, but only after an event of faith... Freedom and belief result from an event of grace.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it condenses the entire structural inversion at stake: "absolutely necessary" and "freedom" are placed in a relation of consequence rather than opposition, and the mediating term — "an event of grace" — is precisely what falls outside the subject's voluntary control, rendering freedom a received condition rather than an exercised capacity. The phrase "only after" further marks the retroactive, event-driven temporality that aligns this theological structure with the Lacanian Act's logic of retroactive self-grounding.