Predestination as Structural Necessity

Predestination as Structural Necessity names the theoretical operation performed in Ruda's Abolishing Freedom by which Luther's doctrine of predestination—the theological claim that salvation cannot be earned by human effort or rational striving but is granted or withheld by divine grace alone, prior to any act of the subject—is reread as a structural homologue to the Freudian unconscious and to the Lacanian logic of lack. The "necessity" in question is not empirical determinism but a constitutive prior constraint that the subject cannot step outside of, precisely because it is the condition of the subject's very emergence. To be "predestined" in this structural sense is to be the subject of a knowledge one did not produce and cannot revoke—a knowledge that arrives, as it were, from the place of the Other, or, in theological idiom, from God. This is why the concept maps onto Lacan's savoir: an articulated knowledge that functions without a subject "strictly speaking responsible" for it, circulating in the symbolic chain independently of conscious intention or Aristotelian purposiveness.

The emancipatory claim that follows is paradoxical but precise: genuine freedom is only possible once the subject relinquishes the fantasy of self-grounded agency—the Aristotelian teleological picture in which rational will authors its own salvation or liberation. Embracing radical fatalism (the impossibility of self-caused action) does not cancel the subject but rather clears away the ideological supplement that props up the illusion of autonomous mastery. In Lacanian terms, this is the moment of traversing the fantasy of the Subject Supposed to Know—the belief that there is somewhere a complete knowledge that, if accessed, would allow the subject to master its own determination. Predestination as Structural Necessity names the remainder after that fantasy is abandoned: a necessity that is not oppressive constraint but the very structure within which authentic, non-ideological action becomes possible.

In the corpus, this concept appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as the theological lever by which Ruda elaborates his central thesis: that fatalism, properly understood, is emancipatory rather than paralyzing (cross-referencing the concept of Fatalism as Emancipation). Predestination as Structural Necessity is best understood as a specification of the canonical concept of Knowledge (savoir): the Lutheran God's decree of grace is structurally isomorphic to unconscious knowledge—a knowing the subject carries but did not author and cannot survey. Similarly, it operates as an extension of Lack: the subject's inability to self-ground salvation is not a contingent deficiency but the very constitutive gap that makes the subject a subject. To accept predestination is to accept the irreducibility of lack rather than fantasizing its suture through works, reason, or effort.

The concept also stands in a critical relation to Ideology and Reason: the Aristotelian teleological framework—where rational effort secures a good end—is precisely the ideological formation that predestination shatters. Capitalizing on faith (treating grace as something to be accumulated or merited) is the ideological operation that Ruda identifies as the target of the Lutheran move. Finally, the concept implicitly dissolves the position of the Subject Supposed to Know: the figure who believes they possess the knowledge required to secure salvation is precisely the figure undone by predestination's structural claim. What is left after this dissolution—a subject acting without the guarantee of self-grounded reason or accumulation—is the site of the Anxiety that attaches to genuine emancipatory commitment, when the lack that constitutes the subject is no longer papered over by ideological fantasy.

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

if grace comes from . . . the predestination of God, it comes by necessity and not by our own effort.

The quote is theoretically loaded because its two opposed terms—"necessity" and "our own effort"—map precisely onto the Lacanian distinction between structural determination (the symbolic order, the unconscious, the Other's knowledge) and the ego's fantasy of self-authoring mastery; to say grace "comes by necessity" is to say it arrives from the place of the Other, foreclosing any Aristotelian or ideological narrative in which the subject's rational striving could be its own cause.