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Secondary literature 2016

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism

Frank Ruda

by Ruda, Frank (2016)

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Synopsis

Frank Ruda's Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (2016) argues that the contemporary ideological function of "freedom" as a signifier of oppression—freedom as a capacity one owns, cultivates, and deploys on the market—can only be dismantled by traversing a counter-history of Western rationalism that reveals fatalism to be the necessary precondition for any genuine concept of freedom. Moving through Luther's predestination theology, Descartes's doctrine of divine providence, Kant's categorical imperative and its Schmidian radicalization into "intelligible fatalism," Hegel's absolute knowing as absolute fatalism, and Freud's systematic demolition of the illusion of psychical freedom, Ruda demonstrates that each major figure in the rationalist tradition arrives, by internal logical necessity, at the position that freedom cannot be a capacity, that the worst has always already happened, and that only from this assumption can something like genuine emancipatory action emerge. The book's central wager is that "transcendental fatalism"—starting from the assumption that no matter what one does the worst outcome is already determined—is not a counsel of despair but the structural condition of possibility for authentic freedom, conceived not as possession but as the vanishing of all grounds. The argument is prosecuted through close readings that treat each thinker as a fatalist avant la lettre or malgré lui, driving each position to its own necessary and excessive conclusion in a style that self-consciously enacts Hegelian dialectics. The conclusion names this position "comic fatalism," distinguishing it from tragic, nihilistic, and existentialist variants, and arguing that its inherently self-undoing, self-inverting structure is irreducibly comic in the Hegelian sense. The book ends with a series of paradoxical slogans—"Act as if you did not exist," "Act as if the apocalypse has already happened"—offered as the provisional morality of a contemporary rationalism that has learned to expect the worst.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes Abolishing Freedom within the Lacanian and post-Lacanian corpus is its sustained attempt to construct a philosophical genealogy of fatalism as the secret inner logic of Western rationalism rather than its antithesis. Where most contributions to this milieu engage freedom negatively (freedom as impossible, as ideological fiction, as the name for the subject's constitutive lack), Ruda takes the more audacious step of arguing that fatalism is not the negation of freedom but its enabling condition—a move that allows him to reclaim Luther, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel as fatalists without reducing them to simple determinists or pessimists. The conceptual innovation is the notion of "absolute fatalism" and, ultimately, "comic fatalism": the idea that assuming the worst, the impossibility of salvation, the always-already-lostness of everything, is precisely what clears the ground for an act that is genuinely free precisely because it is not grounded in any capacity or natural possibility. This is a structurally Lacanian insight (freedom as the Real that vanishes the moment it is predicated on the subject; the act as possible only from the position of inexistence), but it arrives there via an independent philosophical genealogy rather than by direct application of Lacanian categories.

The book also makes a distinctive contribution in its recovery of the nearly forgotten Kantian thinker Carl Christian Erhard Schmid and his concept of "intelligible fatalism," which Ruda reads as the logical completion of Kant's practical philosophy and a necessary waystation between Kant and Hegel. This historiographical intervention fills a gap in the standard narrative of German Idealism and allows Ruda to show how the tension between freedom and necessity, rather than being resolved by Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal, is in fact intensified into what Schmid calls the forced decision of the undecidable—a structure that anticipates Badiou's event while remaining rigorously within the Kantian framework. The book's integration of Freud into this genealogy is equally original: by reading free association not as an expression of psychical freedom but as the coercive rule that exposes total psychical determination, and by rereading "anatomy is destiny" as a statement about the structural impossibility of closing the Oedipal circuit rather than a biological determinism, Ruda positions Freud as the figure who extends and completes the fatalist tradition into the domain of the unconscious.

Main themes

  • Freedom as a capacity versus freedom as the vanishing of all grounds
  • Fatalism as the inner logic and precondition of rationalism
  • The 'worst has always already happened' as enabling condition of emancipatory action
  • Sublation of the Aristotelian concept of capacity across Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Freud
  • Comic fatalism versus tragic, existentialist, and nihilist fatalism
  • The unconscious as the fatalist dimension of psychoanalytic rationalism
  • Predestination and providence as structural analogues to Lacanian necessity and the Real
  • Ideology critique of liberal freedom as capitalist signifier
  • Absolute knowing as absolute fatalism and absolute comedy in Hegel
  • The act as possible only from the position of assuming total impossibility

Chapter outline

  • Provocations
  • Introduction: Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization
  • 1. Protestant Fatalism: Predestination as Emancipation
  • 2. René the Fatalist: Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom
  • 3. From Kant to Schmid (and Back): The End of All Things
  • 4. Ending with the Worst: Hegel and Absolute Fatalism
  • 5. After the End: Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom
  • Last Words

Chapter summaries

Provocations

The brief opening manifesto frames the book's polemical stakes. Ruda diagnoses the contemporary situation as one in which 'freedom' has become a signifier of oppression—used to dismantle social protections, naturalize precarious labor, and legitimate capitalist exchange relations. Citing Marx's observation that the marketplace is 'a very Eden of the innate rights of man,' Ruda argues that the conceptual root of this ideological function lies in the identification of freedom with a capacity that one possesses and can deploy. The manifesto proposes a counter-move: comic fatalism, whose slogans include 'Start by expecting the worst!', 'Act as if you did not exist!', 'Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!' These are presented not as counsel of despair but as the only consistent rationalist position once freedom-as-capacity has been destroyed.

Key concepts: Freedom as capacity, Ideology, Comic fatalism, Signifier of oppression Notable examples: Marx, Capital Volume 1; Communist Manifesto

Introduction: Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization

The introduction develops the book's central philosophical wager through a reading of the Marquis de Sade's novella Florville and Courval, which Ruda reads as a literary instantiation of 'transcendental fatalism': the discovery, always too late, that the worst has always already happened. Florville's story exhibits a structure of perverted, inverted, and compulsive repetition in which hope itself becomes the mechanism of catastrophe—she brings about her own worst fate precisely through her virtuous attempts to avoid it. The moral Ruda draws is that genuine virtue requires starting from the assumption of the worst, which he calls 'Sade's truly transcendental fatalism.' This fatalist insight is then linked to the famous Jamesonian observation that it is easier to imagine the earth hit by a comet than a radical social transformation: Ruda proposes to treat the catastrophic comet not as a future possibility but as an event that has always already occurred, thereby inverting the temporal structure of hope into a structure of retroactive assumption. The introduction also establishes the book's method: a speculative, Hegelian counter-history of rationalism structured as a series of readings that drive each position to its own excessive and necessary conclusion.

Key concepts: Transcendental fatalism, Repetition, Hope as catastrophe mechanism, Retroactive assumption, Speculative proposition Notable examples: Sade, Florville and Courval; Jameson's comet saying; Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist

1. Protestant Fatalism: Predestination as Emancipation

This chapter reconstructs the 1525 debate between Luther and Erasmus over free will (De Servo Arbitrio vs. De Libero Arbitrio) as the founding moment of rationalist fatalism. Erasmus is read as defending a 'religion as capitalism': a cooperative model in which human beings cultivate their divinely given capacity for salvation through good works, with grace as the background condition that makes this cultivation possible. This model, Ruda argues, is fundamentally Aristotelian—it grounds freedom in a natural teleological capacity, analogous to the dishwasher-to-millionaire narrative of liberal ideology. Luther's counter-position is analyzed as a 'subtractive theology' that radically disidentifies freedom from capacity: there is no free will, salvation is impossible through human effort, and God's predestination is absolute. Crucially, Ruda argues that Luther's famous 'exaggeration'—his absolute necessity—is not an anti-rational excess but a dialectical clarification: it drives Erasmus's cooperationism to its own necessary conclusion, revealing that any softened version of free will ultimately either deifies it (removing God) or reduces it to an empty name. Luther's formula 'Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise' becomes the paradigm of a freedom that is not a capacity but an affirmation of necessity. The chapter also draws the structural parallel between predestination and the Freudian unconscious: Luther's claim that salvation is written in the hearts of all even though no one knows they know it anticipates Freud's definition of the unconscious as 'a knowledge we do not know we have.' The chapter concludes with Luther's 'subtractive and inhumanist theology' as the first form of a genuine non-exclusive universalism: not-all are condemned, but election is impossible from the human side, arriving only as the impossible event of grace.

Key concepts: Predestination, Sublation, Freedom as capacity vs. freedom as necessity, Subtractive theology, Unconscious as unknown knowledge, Non-exclusive universalism Notable examples: Luther, De Servo Arbitrio; Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio; Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus

2. René the Fatalist: Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom

The chapter makes the counterintuitive argument that Descartes's last and most ridiculed book, The Passions of the Soul (1649), contains a sustained fatalist argument concealed behind its official concern with freedom of the will. Ruda begins with Descartes's theory of the passions: passions are perceptions that originate externally and distort the will's self-relation, while 'internal emotions' arise when the will's volition and its judgment of that volition coincide, generating a 'causality of freedom' in which the soul becomes indistinguishable from its own movement. This analysis of internal emotions sets the stage for Descartes's treatment of fortune and providence. Descartes argues that belief in fortune (external luck) is a failure of rational judgment that results from not knowing 'all the causes which contribute to each effect'—a specifically Aristotelian error, since Aristotelianism universalizes natural causality and thereby naturalizes freedom, making it dependent on external outcomes. Against fortune, Descartes affirms divine providence: 'everything is guided by divine Providence, whose eternal decree is infallible and immutable.' Ruda reads this not as piety but as the rationalist's necessary move: to avoid desiring what does not depend on us, to make proper judgments, one must assume that everything external is determined by an absolute necessity. This is the fatalist insight that a true rationalist must be a fatalist. The chapter then develops the paradox of God as 'extimate'—the external cause that determines freedom from within its innermost kernel, exploding Cartesian dualism from within. Ruda argues that the only way to think God, for Descartes, is as the lack of lack, as infinite will; and that thinking this unthinkable thought forces the thinker to encounter freedom not as a capacity but as that which one cannot think, which vanishes the moment it is predicated on the subject. The conclusion is that Cartesian freedom is structurally analogous to the Lacanian Real: it is encountered only when one is forced to do what one cannot do.

Key concepts: Freedom as capacity, Divine providence, Fortune vs. necessity, God as extimate, Internal emotions, Freedom as the Real Notable examples: Descartes, Passions of the Soul; Descartes, Meditations; Descartes, letters to Mersenne and Princess Elisabeth

3. From Kant to Schmid (and Back): The End of All Things

This chapter argues that Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals can be read—and was read, by Kant's contemporary Carl Christian Erhard Schmid—as providing the metaphysical foundations for a rationalist practical fatalism. Ruda shows how the categorical imperative's demand that one act as if one's maxim could be a universal law excludes all empirical, teleological, and theological grounding, leaving the will determined by pure reason alone. Reading the German 'Ich soll so handeln, ob ich gleich nichts anderes wollte' in its ambiguity, Ruda demonstrates that the categorical imperative can be read as commanding the will to will nothing—to direct itself to its own pure form, which is the definition of freedom—but also as commanding the will to act 'as if' it were determined by objective necessity, collapsing the distinction between subjective and objective necessity and producing a practical fatalism. The chapter then introduces Schmid's largely forgotten Essay on Moral Philosophy (1790) and his concept of 'intelligible fatalism': because pure practical reason determines the rational will absolutely, rational action is both theoretically impossible (reason cannot guarantee its own realization in the phenomenal world) and practically necessary (one is forced to decide the undecidable existence of God as the placeholder for an impossible yet necessary decision). Schmid's moral world ('splace') is the phenomenal world inscribed by rational-moral causality—a space where freedom and determinism are no longer opposed but mutually constitutive. The chapter concludes with Kant's own essay 'The End of All Things,' which Ruda reads as the necessary complement to Schmid's position: the compulsion to imagine the total end of temporal succession is itself constitutive of reason, which cannot function without an act of totalization that includes imagining the catastrophe of its own cessation.

Key concepts: Categorical imperative, Intelligible fatalism, Autonomy, Forced decision, The end of all things, Practical reason, Moral world Notable examples: Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Kant, Critique of Practical Reason; Kant, The End of All Things; Schmid, Essay on Moral Philosophy

4. Ending with the Worst: Hegel and Absolute Fatalism

The longest and most philosophically dense chapter reinterprets Hegel not as the philosopher of reconciliation but as the philosopher of the worst—the thinker of absolute fatalism. Ruda begins by cataloguing the standard criticisms of Hegel (too idealist, too materialist, too rationalist, too eschatological, too dialectical, too undialectical) and argues that this 'too muchness' is not a sign of failure but a symptom of Hegel's genuine radicality: his systematic self-exceedance performs the very logic of absolute necessity it theorizes. The chapter then offers a reading of Hegel's account of the emergence of philosophy: philosophy begins only when a civilization has already begun its inevitable decline, when 'the worst' is already underway and unstoppable. Spirit is the spirit of its own dissolution. This grounds the claim that Hegel's philosophy is not a philosophy of finitude but the radicalization of finitude to the point of its own disappearance—'absolute fatalism' is more subtractive than any prior philosophical position because it does not rely on finitude as a stable transhistorical category but dissolves even that. The chapter develops the relationship between providence and the concept in Hegel's Phenomenology and Science of Logic: the concept is providence, understood as the absolute recoil of necessity upon itself. Reading Hegel's concept of 'absolute knowing' through Rebecca Comay's interpretation of the Phenomenology as reason's endless resistance to its own necessary insight, Ruda argues that absolute knowing coincides with absolute fatalism and absolute comedy: reason assumes its own vanishing, the apocalypse having always already taken place. The chapter concludes with the concept of Entlassen (release/dismissal) as the precondition of becoming a free subject: one can become a subject only by sacrificing the idea that one can or will become a subject, thereby revealing that Hegelian absolute fatalism is not nihilism but the very precondition of emancipatory action.

Key concepts: Absolute fatalism, Absolute knowing, Sublation, Providence as concept, Entlassen (release), Comedy and dialectics, Spirit as dissolution Notable examples: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Hegel, Science of Logic; Hegel, Philosophy of History; Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy; Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist

5. After the End: Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom

The final chapter extends the genealogy of rationalist fatalism into Freudian psychoanalysis, arguing that Freud's foundational gesture—taking parapraxes, slips, jokes, and symptomatic actions seriously as objects of rational explanation—establishes a 'materialist rationalism' predicated on a non-exclusive universalism: everything, however minimal or apparently irrational, deserves analysis. This universalism requires psychical determinism, because any event that defies rational explanation undermines rationalism's totalizing scope entirely. Ruda argues that the choice between psychical freedom and determinism is not a free choice: it is predetermined by the side of determinism, which proves that one never had a free choice to begin with—the very structure of this choice enacts Freud's point. The analysis of free association is particularly striking: Ruda shows that the 'fundamental rule' (say everything, omit nothing) is a coercive rule that produces the illusion of freedom while systematically exposing its impossibility. Free association is not freedom but the technical apparatus that reveals total unconscious determination—freedom and coercion become indistinguishable in the analytic situation. The chapter then reads Freud's concept of 'drive destiny' (Triebschicksal) as a fatalist concept: the drive is a constant coercive force from which one cannot flee, and its four modes of defense (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are not freedoms but fated responses to an inescapable determination. The analysis of 'anatomy is destiny' is rescued from its feminist critics by showing that Freud's statement is not a biological determinism but a claim about the structural impossibility of resolving the Oedipal circuit: the male child's 'proof' of castration in female anatomy is itself an illusion, so the overcoming of the Oedipus complex rests on a constitutive misperception—'the means of overcoming Oedipus is an illusion.' Freud thereby demonstrates that even the subject's apparent developmental freedom is grounded in a necessary and inescapable fatality.

Key concepts: Psychical determinism, Free association, Drive destiny (Triebschicksal), Unconscious, Materialist rationalism, Anatomy is destiny, Oedipus Complex, Repression, Sublimation Notable examples: Freud, Introductory Lectures; Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes; Freud, Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex; Freud, On the Universal Tendency to Debasement

Last Words

The concluding chapter synthesizes the genealogy into the concept of 'comic fatalism' and argues for its irreducibly comic character. Drawing on Brecht's portrait of Hegel as 'the greatest humorist among the philosophers' and on Alenka Zupančič's work on comedy, Ruda argues that fatalism is inherently comic because it operates through self-undoing, self-inverting moves: one defends divine predestination in order to get rid of God properly; one assumes total loss as the precondition of genuine gain; the apocalypse is comic because it has always already happened and there is nothing left to fear. The chapter articulates the ultimate rule of comic fatalism—'there is no there is'—as a Hegelian speculative proposition that invalidates its own position of articulation, structurally resembling the Cretan liar's paradox but without collapsing into nonsense. This impossible proposition, affirmed from an impossible position, is what liberates thought from all givenness, from all reliance on realized natural capacities. The slogans of fatalism (Act as if you did not exist! Act as if you were an inexistent woman! Act as if the apocalypse has already happened!) are gathered as the 'astounding slogans of a contemporary provisional morality' derived from the entire Western rationalist tradition. Comic fatalism is distinguished from tragic fatalism (which presupposes a heroic subject who suffers), nihilist fatalism (which remains attached to what is lost), and existentialist fatalism (which grounds freedom in the subject's own nothingness) by its insistence on achieving 'less than nothing'—a subtraction that opens, rather than forecloses, the possibility of genuine freedom.

Key concepts: Comic fatalism, Speculative proposition, There is no there is, Sublation, Comedy and freedom, Inexistence, The act Notable examples: Brecht, Hegelian Dialectic; Beckett, The Unnameable; Zupančič, The Odd One In

Main interlocutors

  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Hegel, Science of Logic
  • Hegel, Philosophy of History
  • Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy
  • Luther, De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will)
  • Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will)
  • Descartes, Passions of the Soul
  • Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
  • Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
  • Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
  • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
  • Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Essay on Moral Philosophy
  • Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
  • Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
  • Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Freud, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
  • Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing
  • Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real
  • Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In
  • Rebecca Comay
  • Alain Badiou
  • Mladen Dolar
  • Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
  • Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX

Position in the corpus

Abolishing Freedom occupies a distinctive position in the secondary Lacanian corpus as a work of philosophical genealogy rather than applied Lacanian theory. It shares its fundamental problematic with Alenka Zupančič's Ethics of the Real (which reads Kant through Lacan and vice versa) and with Žižek's Less than Nothing (which constructs Hegel as the philosopher of the subject's constitutive self-negation), but Ruda's approach is more historically sequential and less directly Lacanian in its vocabulary. Readers who have engaged Žižek on Hegel and freedom, or Zupančič on the ethics of the act and comedy, will find Abolishing Freedom a natural companion that fills in the philosophical genealogy—especially the underexplored Luther-Descartes-Schmid nexus—that those works presuppose. It is also in productive dialogue with Badiou's Saint Paul and the concept of non-exclusive universalism, and with the broader tradition of reading psychoanalysis as materialist rationalism (Dolar, Copjec). The Lacan citations are sparse and functional rather than central; Ruda uses Lacanian concepts (the Real, extimacy, inexistence, the act) as orienting reference points rather than as the primary theoretical framework, which makes the book accessible to readers coming from continental philosophy or intellectual history rather than from clinical or strictly Lacanian traditions. It is best read after some familiarity with Žižek's Hegel and Zupančič's Kant-Lacan, and before or alongside Ruda's companion works on Hegel's rabble and Badiou.\n\nWithin the corpus, Abolishing Freedom is unusual for its sustained engagement with Reformation theology (Luther vs. Erasmus) as a philosophical rather than merely historical source, and for its recovery of Schmid's intelligible fatalism as a missing link in the German Idealist narrative. These moves give the book an intellectual-historical dimension rare in this milieu. It will be of particular interest to readers concerned with the politics of freedom (ideology critique of liberalism), with the philosophical foundations of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious as necessity, and with the question of how comic rather than tragic structures might ground an emancipatory politics. It should be read after the Introduction to understand its methodology (speculative counter-history of rationalism) and before engaging any of its individual chapter-length arguments as standalone contributions.

Canonical concepts deployed