Pure Fatalism

Pure fatalism, as coined by Ruda in the source provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, is not a passive resignation to determinism but an active, willed posture toward necessity. Ruda diagnoses the prevailing liberal conception of freedom as a form of Aristotelianism: it treats freedom as a capacity or possibility always held in reserve, available to be actualized. This conflation of possibility with actuality produces not genuine freedom but its mortification — a structural indifference in which the subject is suspended between options without ever being compelled to choose. Pure fatalism intervenes against this impasse by inverting the liberal formula: rather than choosing among possibilities, the subject chooses to be unable to choose. This is not mere paralysis; it is a determinate negation of liberal freedom, a choosing whose content is the abolition of the choosing-subject's foundational illusion that freedom consists in the maintenance of open possibilities.

The concept carries a distinctly post-Oedipal theoretical charge. Ruda illustrates it through Sade's Florville, figured as a repetition-with-difference structure: a subject who, having passed through something like the Oedipal circuit, re-encounters its scene not to overcome or resolve it but to inhabit its necessity fully, without the fantasy that things could have been otherwise. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that freedom, properly conceived, is never freedom from the signifier but always freedom within a necessity that the subject retroactively assumes as its own. Pure fatalism is thus freedom thought from the side of the real rather than the imaginary register of open alternatives.

Within the source provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, pure fatalism occupies the argumentative apex: it is Ruda's positive proposal after a critical demolition of liberal freedom's ideological underpinnings. It functions as both a specification and a critique relative to the cross-referenced canonical concepts. With respect to Ideology, pure fatalism targets what Ruda identifies as ideology's specific operation in the domain of freedom: the liberal subject's constitutive non-knowledge about the real structure of its choices. Like the ideological subject who acts as if its fictions were true even while "seeing through" them, the liberal subject acts as if its freedom were real even while the structural conditions of indifference — the mortification of choice — undercut any genuine act. Pure fatalism aims to exit this ideological loop not by exposing the illusion but by passing through and beyond it, choosing necessity itself. With respect to Repetition, pure fatalism is explicitly structured as repetition-with-difference: the Florville figure does not simply replay the Oedipal scene but returns to it in a transformed mode, one in which the necessity of what happened is owned rather than mourned. This aligns with the Lacanian understanding of repetition as not mere mechanical recurrence but the drive's insistence at the level of the real, irreducible to the pleasure principle.

The concept also bears on Jouissance and the Oedipus Complex in an indirect but important way. The liberal fantasy of open possibility is, in Lacanian terms, a fantasy that covers over the constitutive loss installed by castration and the entry into the signifier. Pure fatalism, by contrast, would be the posture of a subject who no longer needs this covering fantasy — who has accepted the foreclosure of the jouissance that was never available in the first place. The reference to a post-Oedipal structure in the Florville illustration suggests a subject who has traversed rather than merely repressed the Oedipal impasse, and who inhabits its aftermath as necessity rather than tragedy. In this sense, pure fatalism can be read as specifying what it means to be on the far side of the Oedipus Complex — not beyond law and castration, but beyond the illusion that one was ever free of them.

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

Fatalism, the pure fatalism it will defend, aims at abolishing freedom in all prevailing senses of the term.

The phrase "abolishing freedom in all prevailing senses" is theoretically loaded because it refuses any partial or reformed notion of liberal freedom — the target is not one deficient conception but the entire field of "prevailing senses," indexing ideology's saturation of the conceptual space; and the self-referential formulation ("the pure fatalism it will defend") signals that fatalism here is itself an active choice, a performative act that enacts precisely the structure — chosen necessity — it names.