Frank Ruda’s 

Abolishing Freedom is both philosophically and stylistically

daring. The book, says Ruda, ‘aims at abolishing freedom in all prevailing senses
of the term’ (1). At present, “freedom” has become a term of disorientation. It
seems nearly impossible to stand against it, while freedom at the same time
increasingly serves to justify systems of oppression. ‘Freedom of speech’ is a
rallying cry of the far right. Healthcare, education, and public welfare generally
are attacked in the name of freedom of choice. Belligerent and cruel foreign
policies as well as the job insecurities of the gig economy are presented as
furthering freedom. The list goes on. In an effort to break this impasse, Ruda
embraces fatalism. The intent is liberatory; that is, he seeks, through his analysis,
to lay out the preconditions for a fundamentally different orientation to freedom,
and, invoking Marx, ‘prepare for the real movement that abolishes the present
state of things’ (172). Ruda, furthermore, enacts this preparation within a
Badouian conceptual landscape: ‘fatalism is an assumption that makes it possible
to prepare for what one cannot prepare for—that is, for what Badiou calls an
“event”’ (9).

The use of fatalism is not unprecedented in the Marxist tradition. Gramsci

remarks in the Prison Notebooks ‘how fatalism is nothing other than the clothing
worn by real and active will when in a weak position’ (Gramsci 1971, 336). For
Gramsci, revolutionary consciousness is energized in times of defeat by the idea
that victory is assured in the end by the necessary course of history. Gramsci, like
Ruda, rejects mechanistic determinism, but sees a subjective use for fatalism.
While Ruda’s analysis, like Gramsci’s, is justified by the circumstances of the
moment, he goes much further, suggesting that something like his notion of
fatalism is metaphysically necessary for finding our way to fundamental change.

Toward this end, Ruda seeks to uproot the popular and philosophical tendency to
view freedom as a personal capacity (free will) that one always or already has;
‘Reduced to being a capacity, freedom already has its reality (maybe even its full
reality) in its possibility’. This, Ruda sees, as a conflation that ‘leads to the idea
that freedom is already real without actually being realized’ (3). This
naturalization or substantialization of freedom is conceived by Ruda as
fundamentally Aristotelian and his task is its removal from the philosophical and
social field of play, as its consequence is a kind of totalizing indifference and an
ongoing choice to forgo commitment. Because one has freedom of choice, one
never has to exercise it.

The text has an aesthetic unruliness to it and is best read as, in part, performative.
It begins with a set of “provocations” which serve Ruda as a kind of preliminary
ethics:

‘Start by expecting the worst!

Act as if you did not exist!

Act as if you were not free!

Act in such a way that you accept the struggle you cannot flee from!

Act in such a way that you never forget to imagine the end of all things!

Act as if the apocalypse had already happened!

Act as if everything were always already lost!

Act as if you were dead!

Act as if you were an inexistent woman!’ (xi)

These are the slogans of Ruda’s ‘comic fatalism’. For Ruda, comedy lies in the
‘gesture of continuing even after everything seems to have been relinquished…’
(168). One slips on the banana peel and then carries on as if nothing had
happened. The above list in effect commands this continuation. In addition, Ruda
seeks to derive these principles by constructing a ‘kind of Hegelian counter-
history of rationalism’ (10). Embracing the excess of his list, he asserts,

[t]he argumentative style…cannot but be consciously redundant or, in other

words, somewhat tautological…This is not the case because I aim to bore my
readers but because the counter history of rationalism I present cannot but repeat
the very same argumentative move time and again in new and different forms
(12).

In this vein, he examines a sequence of thinkers: Luther (a kind of prelude to

Hegel), Descartes, Kant, Hegel (who is more or less the star of the show here),
and Freud.

He moves from an emphasis on divine providence in Luther and Descartes to the

secular fatalisms of Kant and Hegel. While Ruda’s readings are stimulating, they
are also highly selective and speculative, including reflections on Descartes’
contortions regarding the relation of mind to body in the Passions of the Soul and
a reading of Kant mainly informed by Kant’s younger, rather obscure
contemporary Carl Schmid.

Essential to all of these readings is the idea that fatalism is conceptually

necessary to arrive at the notion that freedom is something that can happen to
us or be forced upon us and thereby constitute a new subjectivity. It can’t
preexist this moment. Freedom is not possessed by anyone. It is not something
one uses. So, Luther in his dispute with Erasmus follows St. Paul:

Belief emerges from a conversion experience…There is no inner realm (of

freedom) from which faith can emerge. Rather ‘my “inner” approaches me
radically from “the outer”’ I experience faith only when I encounter God, and I
am thus forced to renew myself (16).
Ruda reads Hegel in part through Luther, citing Hegel’s remark, ‘What began
with Luther as faith in [the form of] feeling and the witness of spirit, is precisely
what spirit, since becoming more mature, has striven to apprehend in the concept
in order to free itself, and so to find itself, in the present’ (110). Given the kind of
totalizing movement that is Hegel’s system (a completeness that must contain
incompleteness), freedom, within this system, again cannot be a capacity,

since all capacities must be realized and are always already exhausted and
dissolved when the true freedom of spirit emerges. Philosophy thus cannot be a
philosophy of capacities (and therefore cannot be Aristotelian), as it emerges
only when everything we are capable of has already vanished (111).

The stages of Hegel’s Phenomenology represent attempts to cling to some

stability for knowledge and subjectivity. However, for Ruda, ‘the very idea of
stability is unsustainable. Reason cannot escape the conclusion that there is
nothing to cling to, and this knowledge is continually brought about by the very
attempts to escape it.’ This instability is absolute knowing. Knowledge is based
on something that cannot be ‘integrated’ into itself. Instead of being an apologist
for the status quo, Hegel’s ‘absolute fatalism,’ for Ruda ‘is the very precondition
of preparing for that for which we cannot prepare’ (127). Ruda, much like
Badiou, uses revolution and falling in love as examples of events for which
preparation is impossible. This space that cannot be integrated allows for new
subjectivities to emerge via the occurrences of love or revolution, which cannot
be chosen. Freedom cannot be a capacity. It cannot exist, for then it could
be integrated. What Ruda calls ‘fatalism’ is needed for the emergence of
something fundamentally new.

As for Freud, Ruda takes him as a repetition of Hegel. That which is right in front
of us, even the smallest of things, like slips of the tongue, are understandable and
do not fall outside the realm of the rational. Everything matters. We must count
in the realm of the existent even that which seems not to exist. Ruda quotes
Lacan: ‘We must be attentive to the unsaid that dwells in the holes in discourse,
but the unsaid is not to be understood like knocking coming from the other side
of the wall’ (135). Freud is explicit: there is no psychic freedom. Ruda points to a
number of places where psychoanalysis leaves room for a different emergent
freedom. For example, in so called “free association”, the determinism at the core
of the psyche is brought forward:

What comes to light here is that a different concept of freedom is at stake in

psychoanalysis—a freedom that is not in contradiction with determinism and is
not a given capacity of my consciousness but something that emerges precisely
when I am compelled and coerced (151).

Finally, in order to arrive at the oddest of Ruda’s preliminary ethical commands,

he improvises a bit on Freud’s infamous claim that ‘Anatomy is destiny’. While
the male child is born directly into the Oedipus complex, the female child has
more than one possible developmental destiny. Ruda notes that given Freud’s
view that humans are essentially bisexual, the male and female developmental
schemes do not necessarily apply only on the basis of biological gender.
“Woman”, then is essentially the name for a choice of developmental destiny, a
name, according to Ruda, for courage:

for Freud, woman is the name of this peculiar freedom that we know nothing of.
But if woman is a name for this choice, this also means that within the female
logic woman does not exist (as a fixed entity). Rather woman is a name for this
act (163).

Hence, says Ruda, ‘Act as if you were an inexistent woman!’

What of the liberatory project after all of this? Much of the text is devoted to
bringing the above-named sequence of thinkers to Ruda’s side. This is part of its
performative dimension. Ultimately, whether these interpretations are successful
or not has little or no bearing on whether Ruda’s rejection of freedom of choice
and freedom as capacity is correct. One thinker that might have been helpful to
hear about here is Karl Marx. Early on, Ruda, aligning himself with Marx, at
least for the moment, as a critic of freedom, cites the well-known passage
from Capital describing the marketplace as ‘in fact a very Eden of the innate
rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham’ (2).
Ruda’s occasional references to Marx raise many questions regarding his overall
project. Is Marx on Ruda’s side or not? Can we make sense of the exploitation of
labor without a robust notion of coercion? Does the notion of alienated labour
presuppose a notion of freedom as capacity? These questions regarding Marx and
freedom are easily multiplied.

Finally, and most importantly, how does Ruda’s project relate to actual political
practice? Does thinking about such practice (what we might choose to do to
bring about a better world) presuppose something like the Aristotelian capacity
rejected by Ruda? Upon finishing Abolishing Freedom, one cannot help asking
what, if Ruda is right, is to be done?’

3 April 2018

References
 Gramsci, Antonio 1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci ed.
and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International
Publishers).

URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/15681_abolishing-freedom-a-plea-for-a-
contemporary-use-of-fatalism-reviewed-by-michael-principe/
In the latest HKRB Interview, philosopher Frank Ruda has an extended discussion with our co-editor Alfie
Bown about all aspects of freedom, including whether we should even want to be free. Topics range from Bush
to Merkel and Marx to Dolar.
Frank Ruda is a philosopher and one of the most prominent scholars of Hegel and of Psychoanalysis in the world. He
is a member of the department at the Freie Universität Berlin and a visiting professor at the Scientific Research
Centre in Ljubljana. He has published a number of books and articles on Hegel, Badiou and psychoanalysis, and has
a co-written book with former HKRB interviewee Agon Hamza.
His latest book is a controversial and important intervention into political and theoretical discussion. Published with
Nebraska University Press, Abolishing Freedom claims that we need to do away with kind of the ‘freedom’ we often
believe in today and completely re-conceptualize what it means to be ‘free,’ questioning whether freedom is
something we ought to pursue at all. Here I had the chance to ask Frank some brief questions about this
groundbreaking book.
Frank Ruda, Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for the Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Lincoln: Nebraska University
Press, 2016) 191pp.
Alfie Bown: Let’s start at the beginning. Can you say something about why current conceptualizations of freedom
are problematic, about why freedom is, to quote your little preface, ‘a signifier of oppression’?
Frank Ruda: The signifier “freedom” can in general bring together a very mixed crowd of people, from nearly all
political camps, all on one side. Of course, this is not necessarily a problem and can even be a good thing. Yet, this
can also generate some conceptual confusion. Take the former US president, George W. Bush. He was inter alia a
militant – and military – supporter of freedom. Today, one could not be a Western head of state, or in the parliament
if one is not an avid adherent of freedom, of our freedom, committed to defending it against injury, sometimes adding
insult to it. “Freedom” is in the West, at least, what makes living our way of life. It is a name that condenses what
“we” are. For, there are also those who do either not think that freedom is an essential category of collective and / or
individual life, or who – and this often proves even more irritating – have a fundamentally different idea of what
freedom is or means. What for us can appear to be the ultimate essence of freedom thereby may appear to others as its
very opposite. So, in general it is not always already objectively given and clear who is a defender of freedom and
who isn’t. Today, many things are done in the name of freedom that do effectively turn against it. A telling recent
example is the American company, Virgin Enterprise. They claimed that having a prescribed number of vacation
days can prove unproductive for their employees. They should decide for themselves how often they think they need
a leave, freeing them from all external constraints (This was presented as being up to date: “Flexible working has
revolutionised how, where and when we all do our jobs. So, if working nine to five no longer applies, then why
should strict annual leave (vacation) policies?” – note: this could also work as a slogan for working from nine to nine
and abolishing vacation altogether).

Of course, there was a condition: holidays can only be taken when the work is done. And the employees are taken to
know when that is. What then happened was that the number of effectively taken holidays decreased further than
ever. There emerged an internal (super-egoic) pressure of self-control which proved more oppressive than the prior
external regulations. This was an effect of them supposedly “freely” deciding –  competition (among the employees)
can reign even harsher doing away with external administration. This brought about what Hegel calls “over-active
consciousness” which is less free because it continually feels compelled to freely determine its own freedom.

“Freedom” does then function as a kind of “empty signifier”, that is, as E. Laclau once put it, hegemonically
determined by (filled with) a specific interpretation. It can become effectively hegemonic when it as the same time
also manages to allow for a multiplicity of other particular renderings of freedom (freedom is freedom of expression,
but also of commerce, of the movement, etc.). These kind of filled empty signifiers for Laclau structure the social
spheres and politics emerges when such a hegemonic interpretation (or filling) is challenged. Then all differing
particular interpretations (say Merkel, Hollande, etc.)  align and present themselves to be just particular renderings of
freedom as such. An attack on the freedom of expression can then be perceived as attack on “freedom” tout court, etc.
This can generate a peculiar disorientation, because one might end up defending what one does not want to endorse.
In this sense, “Abolishing Freedom” tries to break or attack this unwilling alliance with what one might call
“ideology of freedom”.
But “freedom” does not only allow a veiled particular interest to gain a universalist appearance, but it can also
produce its own opposite. Think of examples analyzed by S. Žižek: people do not find a long term employment and
this is presented to them as a chance to explore ever new options; the freedom of not having a health insurance is
presented as freedom from state control, etc. Nonetheless, how could anyone one be against freedom? Even against
better insight, freedom is nothing anyone would like to give up, not even when it is de facto already gone. This is
where its disorienting and oppressive quality lies. What to do when freedom becomes a synonym of oppression, even
though a perfidious one? It is not enough to constantly appeal to its true meaning, which is by far not undisputed. So,
if it functions as instrument of oppression, freedom is not something that one should endorse no matter what. Yet,
that this seems so impossible shows that it became a peculiar contemporary fetish one shall better not touch.

Already Marx described “freedom” as a crucial component of the functioning and dynamics of capital. In Capital he
notes that within the “Eden”, that is the legal framework on which capitalist forms of production rely, “[t]here alone
rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” Freedom is part of a series of signifiers, which gains its consistency
by adding to it another term of a fundamental different quality: Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher. It is his name
that consistently determines the series hinges. “Freedom” here does not only mean that the exchange between two
equals, laborer and capitalist, is determined by their equally free wills, but it generates the effect that their free will is
determined by that which Bentham stands for: pure self-interest. This is what holds together the series of terms.
Mladen Dolar has added another crucial dimension to this analysis: He emphasized that suturing this series with its
last contingent element has a peculiar effect, namely the very contingency of this assemblage is turned into a
necessary concatenation. This how naturalization works.
This is crucial because one can find in the history of philosophy an often repeated diagnoses of this problem. It seems
natural to people to assume something is freedom, yet de facto this leads them to endorse being determined,
oppressed, enslaved, etc. There is a problematic metaphysics of freedom that is a constitutive part of the “ideology of
freedom.” Its main trait consists in naturalizing and substantializing “freedom” into something that we have, into a
possession. And any possession can be (and often has to be) invested. Yet, this idea has a calming and assuring effect:
if you always already have freedom, you may need to defend it, but you do not need to strive for it. One feels free,
even though one is not. This is what Kojévè once called, in commenting Hegel’s characterization of the Stoic slave,
who feels free, even when he is forced to work, the “slave ideology” – the slave ideology of freedom allows to avoid
confronting the actual situation. Freedom is paradoxically the only possession of the slave. This possession takes a
specific form, the form of a “capacity”. Why? Because a capacity can be actualized, but already has an actuality, even
when not actualized (we are able to eat, even when we are not eating for example). To take freedom to be a capacity
means to assume that there is an actuality of freedom before the becoming actual of freedom – an actuality of a
potential, of a possibility. This is the “ideology of the possible” – but who could have anything against possibilities? I
argue that the possible is today also a disorienting category, because it is constitutive to such an understanding of
freedom. The outcome of this peculiar conglomerate is that the most fundamental version of freedom as capacity that
we have in our possession  is identified with a freedom of choice: the freedom to choose  X or non-X. This is what
the philosophical tradition referred to as liberum arbitrium. I am and remain free, even if I do not realize freedom –
my rather profane argument is that one should always remember (one can still learn this from Hegel): not-realized
freedom is not(-realized) freedom.

The history of modern rationalist philosophy frequently attacked the idea that freedom is an always already given
capacity. This criticism is a criticism of what W. Sellars once called the “myth of the given”, a criticism of what I call
the “myth of the givenness of freedom” (“the ideology of freedom”) argues that it is rational to reject this
identification of freedom with a capacity and to begin with, assume that one is not free. There is one truly bad guy, so
to speak, in the history I reconstruct: the one with whom freedom came under the yoke of the capacity, namely
Aristotle. I am here ironically mimicking a Heidegger’s history of metaphysics and at the same time seeks to
exaggerate it. Not Plato is at the origin of all evil, but Aristotle. And there is a reason why so many thinkers today are
(closet) Aristotelians. So, if the history of all hitherto philosophy has been the history of struggles between Plato and
Aristotle, this struggle enters a new stage, in modernity it became a struggle over freedom. Exiting the ideology of
freedom, its functioning as a signifier of oppression, means to find a way out of the mythical identification of
freedom with a given capacity. And this means primarily to assume that we are not free. Freedom is not a given. Not
a capacity. Not something we just have or are born with. Not inscribed into our nature. But something we may or may
not attain.
 Frank Ruda, by ChinHsin Esther Kao
AB: In the book you discuss a lot of conceptualizations of freedom, from the Aristotelian to the Freudian. As
someone working on psychoanalysis myself, I am interested in your discussions of ‘psychic freedom.’ From a
properly psychoanalytic point of view, you write, it is ‘fully rational and reasonable to give up the idea of free will
and psychical freedom’? Can you explain why it might be politically or socially useful or even vitally necessary to do
this, to give up on a positive investment in psychical freedom?
FR: Freud has a beautiful argument why one should start from the assumption that there is no psychic freedom. For
otherwise there are things that happen for no reason at all. Slips of tongue, for example. Yet, if these nonetheless
exist, one will never be able to understand them and infer that they do not matter. Freud suggests, this was precisely
the attitude of most people working in psychology (and philosophy) for a long time: There are things that deserve
rational explanation, and there are also things we cannot explain and comprehend, there material existence can thus
be ignored. These things became the paradigm of (the ideology of) psychic freedom. From this perspective a slip of
tongue or any kind of parapraxes is either explained away (“this is because I did not pay attention, was tired,
distracted”, etc.) or one denies it all significance. But thereby one ultimately ends up assuming that there is no reason
as to why someone used this or that expression (“it is just a figure of speech, it just came to mind”) or says more (or
less, or both) than he wanted to say.
Slowly, the assumption of psychic freedom keeps on spreading and starts to limit what can be rationally explained
and deserves any serious attention. These kinds of convictions stand behind Freud’s motivation to attack the idea of
psychic freedom. They lead to a limitation and negation of reason and rationalism. If our psyche is free, in this
understanding, it exceeds rational comprehensibility. But then it is hard to say what freedom is. Thereby the
assumption of psychic freedom leads us into an incomprehensible determinism – we become unable to say what
freedom is (and should therefore never care about the unwilling epitomes of freedom, like slips of tongue, etc.).
Freud’s gesture defends reason and rationalism against this kind of freedom. He does so by totalizing reason:
everything can be understood, but this also means: anything deserves attention. It is a move that one can also find in
Hegel – when he early on talks about the “totality of reason” (Vernunfttotalität). Rationalism seems impossible if it
does not totalize itself, otherwise you assume that certain things just fall outside the scope of reason. This is always
the beginning of the end of reason.
This gesture enables Freud to pay attention to the most marginal things, otherwise too irrelevant to bother with, the
“dregs of the world of appearances”. And they surprisingly led him into investigating the heart of the human psyche.
The embrace of an utter “psychic determinism”, as Freud calls his totalization of rationalism – fatalism, in my
coinage – produces an inversion of the classical hierarchy of the marginal and the essential (and consequentially even
of the one between existence and inexistence). It will also prove to be the very groundwork for the idea that the Ego
is not the master in its own home. What does this mean politically? I do not present a political position in the book, I
only clarify the preconditions of what it means to rationally speak about freedom.

But to give at least a hint: Fredric Jameson stated that when all grand narratives started to crumble, people also started
rejecting the concept of totality (there seemed to be a direct link between totality and totalitarianism). This led to a
peculiar kind of disorientation, because one became unable to see that or how things hang together. This even
enforced the assumption that they are not related at all (say the Apple store that I visit, taxation politics in Ireland and
shitty working conditions in India) and things happen for no comprehensible reason whatsoever. Assuming that there
is a totality (say: capitalism that has a specific logic which can be understood) means to somehow translate the attack
on psychic freedom into the social, political and economic realm. To endorse the idea that things can be
comprehended (and that there is no evil that defies thinking altogether) can help to gain some orientation. In this
sense, it helps to still speak about capitalism. Because if you do not want to do this, you have a similar problem,
mutatis mutandis, that Freud depicted.

There is a wonderful fatalistic line by Samuel Beckett that has some political potential. At one point he comes up
with a quite comic description of a problem: “I see nothing. It’s because there is nothing, or it’s because I have no
eyes, or both, that makes three possibilities to choose from.” Sometimes it is important to see the minimal difference
by means of which a third option appears. Sometimes the problem does not lie in not being able to solve the problem,
but in seeing that the problem is what we perceive as problem (which blinds us for our own involvement in it).
Politically, although this is only a first step, one should opt for Beckett’s third option. This is certainly not (yet)
emancipation. But it helps to avoid seeing what is not there with eyes one imagined. This could prove a valid starting
point for thinking about politics.

AB: For you, fatalism represents an answer or an alternative to the problems we run into with freedom today. In what
way is fatalism, or a certain kind of fatalism (for you do mention ‘a bad kind of fatalism’ in which everything seems
predetermined), an alternative to the situation we talked about in the first question?
FR: Fatalism is not the solution, but a preparatory step for endorsing freedom properly. This does not lead into a
simple (and not even complex) objective determinism. Fatalism, in my sense of the term, means to assume that
everything is always already lost, that there is nothing (not even nothing) to rely upon. It means to start from the
assumption that, for example, there never will be emancipatory politics; no art worthy of that name, that we will
never be free and other apocalyptic ideas. Fatalism insists that assuming such ideas is fully rational. It does not mean
that – and this is crucial –anything we will attempt to do will ultimately fail. It is not a tragic world-view of whatever
kind, not a sort of (political, artistic, etc.) existentialism, or pessimism – all these positions come with a residue that
they take for granted (the human condition, the worldly or social conditions, etc.). I am rather close to what Nietzsche
called active nihilism, or, in my reading, what Hegel called absolute knowing.
This is not meant to depress anyone. It rather provides an antidote to the dominant mythic misconceptions of
freedom. I take my cue from an often unacknowledged fact: The most influential rationalist philosophers of freedom
(Descartes, Kant, Hegel) were at the same time defenders of what cannot but seem to be the direct opposite of
freedom: divine predestination. I argue that divine predestination becomes a conceptual, therapeutic tool to get rid of
mythic conceptions of freedom. Fatalism does not rely on any divine predestination, but it tries to rescue its
therapeutic value. One fatalistic axiom that is useful for the ideological battle in a time where “freedom” is part of the
problem and not of the solution is: never act as if you were free, but rather act as if you are not free. Paradoxically,
this is a liberating shift because it puts us subjectively in the position we are actually in.

A rationalist, i.e. a fatalist gives up any myth of the givenness of freedom and assumes that he will never be free
unless something happens to him that will force him to be free. This does not at all condemn anyone to a passive
standpoint. For, it takes a lot of effort to get rid of assuming a givenness of whatever kind. Already Luther saw that
such an assumption cannot but provoke anxiety. Today anxiety has no good press, because one constantly translates
anxiety into fear. Fear always has a relation to an object in the world (say the guy with the machete attacking me or
the refugee, or both at once), anxiety does not have an object of the world as its object but is related to something that
happens. If fatalism conceptually provokes anxiety, this might be a first step in overcoming an ideological framework
which constantly assures us that we always already free and only need to fear those who do want to take away what is
ours.

If one finds a point which produces anxiety, there also emerges the very possibility of courage. And courage first and
foremost names a way of gaining and sustaining an orientation. Courage is not a virtue we can just adopt (and there is
a reason why the category of courage is almost completely absent from politics today). The step from anxiety to
courage is precisely the constitution of a new kind of orientation – courage being a way to (put to) work (with)
anxiety (even though this is a longer discussion). So, my plea is to have the courage to be a fatalist. The history of
philosophy encourages us to do so: It is fully rationalist to give up the idea of freedom as something one has in one’s
possession. If this generates anxiety, this can only be a good sign, new courage might follow from it.

AB: A slightly different question to finish on, if you’ll allow it. For me, perhaps it is your argument about Hegel
which best helps us to conceptualize the relationship between fatalism and freedom. This section introduces a
comparison between freedom and mastery. I wonder if you feel affinity or tension with the ideas of accelerationism,
say, those of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, for whom general espousing of freedom as a great thing should be
eliminated and replaced by the quest for a new kind of ‘mastery’ over things. I provisionally agree with this, which I
think is a kind of Leninist argument that we need to take responsibility for the types of freedom we create or for
social organization more generally, rather than simply mindlessly claiming that we are a ‘free’ society. Yet, your
book made me think that fatalism might be a third option that is neither mastery nor freedom, an option which
involves an acknowledgement that you are never the master and that you are never free, but that you still have a
responsibility to make the revolution happen. Have I got it totally wrong here?
FR: Let me specify again the logical place of the fatalism I propose and why I do not lay out any normative claim
about political action or organization. My reference here is Descartes. He suggested that within a process of
dismantling all previously assumed evidence through radical doubt and without having reached any certainty proper
yet, that one nonetheless needs a provisory morality, some guidelines of orientation. Fatalism provides in my reading
such a provisory morality, also valid for today. This is why fatalism offers a form of orientation within a phase where
one is on the lookout of how to rethink political organization and action proper. Therefore, I do not endorse a Leninist
politics that, at least with Lenin, started from given economic contradictions and assumed that politics emerges inter
alia as and in the form of a practice that intensifies these contradictions. I do not think that politics is something that
is always already latently given in economy, and that the move to emancipation is to re-code it and deal with them
differently. Politics can be completely absent (and administration can reign). Yet, this absence needs to be
understood. Therefore, I take a step back from any such proposals (although certainly I am more sympathetic to some
than to others).
But I agree with your description, in the terms of the book: freedom is something that one does not have, it happens
to you, and when it does, you are radically responsible for it, even though you are not its author. But the crucial
question the fatalism concept tries to answer is the following one: how to prepare for such an event, for something for
which one cannot prepare? Or more specifically: for the advent of freedom? Or, in a cheesy example: how to prepare
to fall in love? My answer is fatalism. Start from assuming it will never happen, because only thereby one avoids
constantly to look for signs, possibilities, engages in problematic forms of activity and so forth, which often lead
nowhere. This gesture is similar to how Lacan defined psychoanalytic cure: it elevates an incapacity to a point of
impossibility. Fatalism for me is a form of how this elevation, a conceptual cure of misunderstanding of freedom is
conceived of in the history of modern philosophy. But there is a comic twist to this.

Alain Badiou once claimed that today one has to write the comedy of democracy, and in a sense this is what I tried to
do (which is why I defend that fatalism is ultimately a comic gesture). Why comedy? Because the comic character is
able to do (and thus affirm) something impossible. And the claim that the book tries to defend has to do with such
impossible acts and impossible affirmations. Just think of the cartoon character which runs over a cliff and even when
he has no ground under its feet, keeps on running. I think that subjects are able to do such a thing. Yet, this is at the
same time an indication of the possible problem we spoke about earlier: what if one takes the absence of a ground for
a ground (the absence of freedom for freedom)? Then it might help to shift the gaze a bit, realize one is walking, if at
all, on thin air and start to fall. Fatalism is the moment where the gaze turns and the fall begins, but I contend that this
is the very precondition for starting to run again on even thinner air – yet, this would be a running of a different kind.

Alfie Bown is the co-editor of the HKRB and the author of Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero, 2015)
and The PlayStation Dreamworld (Polity, forthcoming).
ChinHsin Esther Kao is the featured illustrator on this post. She is an undergraduate at Wheaton College (IL) and
double majors in English and Philosophy. She was the Critical Essay Editor for the college’s independent
magazine The Pub and the Art Editor for Kodon. Esther also writes for the online publication The Odyssey and
is interning forInheritance magazine under Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California.
The HKRB Interviews series specializes in new books in philosophy and critical theory. Recent interviews have
included Simon Critchley, Jodi Dean and Srecko Horvat.

Reviews
"Abolishing Freedom is not only the very acme of today's philosophy, but much more--it
is a book for everyone who is tired of all the ideological babble about freedom of
choice."--Slavoj Zizek, author of Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of
Dialectical Materialism

--Slavoj Zizek (09/15/2015)

"Appropriating it as a natural right, a possession that can be taken away, the sign of the
subject's sovereignty, liberalism has given freedom a bad name. Yet how to think
without acknowledging the fact of freedom? In his delightful book, Ruda shows us the
way. Reducing the liberal edifice to rubble, he rescues a freedom that is in no way ad
libitum."--Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
-- (09/15/2015)
"This is an utterly captivating, smart, provocative book--compelling in its argument,
fascinating in its detail, sobering in its implications. Absolutely exhilarating."--Rebecca
Comay, author of Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution-- (09/15/2015)
"Abolishing Freedom is both philosophically and stylistically daring."--Michael
Principe, Marx and Philosophy--Michael Principe "Marx & Philosophy "