Abolishing Freedom

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Abolishing Freedom

A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism

Frank Ruda

Provocations Series

210 pages

Paperback

May 2016

978-0-8032-8437-1

$25.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

May 2016

978-0-8032-8880-5

$25.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

May 2016

978-0-8032-8878-2

$25.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

Pushing back against the contemporary myth that freedom from oppression is freedom of choice, Frank Ruda resuscitates a fundamental lesson from the history of philosophical rationalism: a proper concept of freedom can arise only from a defense of absolute necessity, utter determinism, and predestination.

Abolishing Freedom demonstrates how the greatest philosophers of the rationalist tradition and even their theological predecessors—Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Freud—defended not only freedom but also predestination and divine providence. By systematically investigating this mostly overlooked and seemingly paradoxical fact, Ruda demonstrates how real freedom conceptually presupposes the assumption that the worst has always already happened; in short, fatalism. In this brisk and witty interrogation of freedom, Ruda argues that only rationalist fatalism can cure the contemporary sickness whose paradoxical name today is freedom.
 


Author Bio

Frank Ruda is an interim professor for the philosophy of audiovisual media at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and a visiting lecturer at Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author of Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism.

Praise

Abolishing Freedom is both philosophically and stylistically daring.”—Michael Principe, Marx and Philosophy

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 Žižek, author of Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism  


“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
 

“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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
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
Notes

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