Ruda - Abolishing freedom: a plea for a contemporary use of fatalism

Today freedom has become a signifier of oppression. In this historical situation fatalism is the only possible stance that allows us to think freedom without being indifferent. We must affirm the position of a comic fatalism, whose slogans are:

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 has already happened!

Act as if everything were always already lost!

Act as if you were dead!

Act as if you were an inexistent woman!

Heaven which wants! We never know what Heaven wants or doesnt want, and perhaps Heaven doesnt even know itself.

Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

Nothing, less than nothing, without any further determination. This book will argue that any rationalist should start from this assumption in order to conceptualize freedom. Fatalism, the pure fatalism it will defend, aims at abolishing freedom in all prevailing senses of the term. The motivation for beginning this book in such an apparently unappealing way is linked to a diagnosis shared by many contemporary thinkers, namely that freedom became (or is) a signifier of disorientation. As a result the signifier freedom can function as a signifier of disorientation, that is, in an utterly repressive way. But how could one not be in favor of freedom? In an age when freedom functions as a signifier that enables the dismantling of all forms of social protection, it is important to understand how freedom effectively works. The fact that today people often get only temporary job contracts, for instance, is presented to us as an opportunity to freely explore different job opportunities. Similarly the implementation of universal health care in the United States was attacked by stating that only in the absence of such a system is one free to choose the health care one actually wants. We may recall here what Karl Marx had already claimed in the first volume of his Critique of Political Economy. Within the exchange relation The freedom of most people consists in their freedom to sell their labor power (which appears to them as simply a necessity, given that not doing so would endanger their ability to subsist). The freedom of the capitalist, on the other hand, consists of freely buying another persons labor power. There is, then, a fundamental equality among the two groups of free agents involved in this exchangeyet one profits from this arrangement, whereas the other has no choice but to engage in it.

But what are the conceptual foundations of this arrangement? I will argue that one fundamental conceptual maneuver that is necessarily involved in turning freedom into a signifier of disorientation is the tendency to understand freedom in terms of a capacity that one has. However, by defining freedom as a personal capacity, we turn freedom into something that a person has and ownssomething that is someones property and can be invested in multiple ways. But there is another consequence of this definition of freedom. As soon as we understand freedom as a capacity (that may be realized whenever and in whichever way), we assume that freedom is not only a capacity but also a possibility. But by understanding freedom as a possibility, we conceive of it as already being real and actual in the form of this possibility (that then can be actualized). Reduced to being a capacity, freedom already has its reality (maybe even its full reality) in its possibility. With this conceptual move, freedom as possibility is identified with freedom as actuality. This, however, is a conflation because it leads to the idea that freedom is already real without actually being realized. Against this conflation, which is, as I will argue, fundamentally Aristotelian in nature, this book will attempt to exorcise the last remaining bits of Aristotelianism from contemporary thought. To put it simply, this book seeks to be fundamentally anti-Aristotelian.