Temporality of Fortune

The "Temporality of Fortune" names the specific distortion of subjective time that occurs when the will orients itself toward objects dependent on contingent external luck (fortune). In Ruda's reconstruction of Cartesian fatalism, this distortion is not incidental but structural: when the subject desires what lies outside its own power—wealth, reputation, health, other people's choices—it becomes hostage to contingency, and in doing so its temporality is corrupted. Time is "used up" waiting on fortune's outcome; the subject's relation to past, present, and future collapses into a single anxious surveillance of external circumstances. The three dimensions of time—retention of the past, anticipation of the future, presence to the now—cease to be lived as an open field of self-determination and become instead a flattened, hollowed-out waiting-time, an emptied medium for what fortune will or will not deliver. This is what the passage calls time being "emptied out of its dimensions."

The concept functions as an index of unfreedom. Descartes's fatalism—the conviction that what is already determined is already determined—is proposed as the structural antidote: by withdrawing desire from the domain of fortune and returning it to what lies within the subject's own jurisdiction (the will, judgment, assent), the subject reclaims temporality as the medium of self-determination rather than a zone of anxious dependency. The temporality-of-fortune is therefore not merely a phenomenological observation about how time feels under desire's sway; it is the materialist diagnosis of why desire directed at contingent objects is itself a form of unfreedom, opposed to what Ruda frames as the genuinely Cartesian (and, against Aristotle, non-eudaimonistic) practice of freedom.

The concept of the Temporality of Fortune appears in provocations-ruda-frank-abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-contemporary-use-of-fata, where it serves as a diagnostic foil to Cartesian fatalism's liberatory function. It is positioned explicitly against Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics, which ties flourishing to external goods subject to fortune, and for which the good life therefore inherits the instability of what fortune can give and take. Within the source's argument, the corruption of temporality is the concrete mechanism through which fortune-dependent desire produces unfreedom—and fatalism (as the conviction that necessity is already at work) is what short-circuits this distortion by withdrawing desire from fortune's domain entirely.

The concept resonates structurally with several cross-referenced canonicals. It is most closely aligned with Desire and Anxiety: the Lacanian account of desire circling endlessly around an inaccessible object and never reaching satisfaction maps onto the subject's time-consuming vigil over fortune; and the Lacanian account of anxiety as arising not from loss but from the threatening proximity or threatened closing of the gap aligns with the temporal collapse that fortune-dependent desire produces. The "Temporality of Fortune" can be read as specifying the phenomenological-temporal register of what Lacanian theory describes structurally as desire's constitutive unfulfillability and anxiety's disorganization of the subject. It also touches the Dialectics canonical insofar as Ruda's argument turns on a dialectical reversal: fatalism (apparently the negation of freedom) becomes the very precondition of freedom, precisely by negating the false freedom of the will that desires fortune. The concept is thus an extension of the broader Lacanian-inflected critical tradition within this corpus, translating structural claims about desire and temporality into the register of a Cartesian philosophy of the will.

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

Desiring external things that depend on fortune is literally time-consuming... Time collapses, as it is emptied out of its dimensions.

The phrase "literally time-consuming" shifts the critique from the merely moral register (it is bad to want external goods) to a structural-temporal one: fortune-dependent desire devours time as such, not just this or that moment. The follow-up — "Time collapses, as it is emptied out of its dimensions" — then specifies the mechanism: it is not that time speeds up or slows down, but that its very dimensional structure (past/present/future as an open field of self-determination) is destroyed, leaving a flattened, contentless medium—a direct figure of subjective unfreedom.