#frank ruda

[xjmlm]

Form is therefore not only the better choice, it is the only choice. This choice is multiply paradoxical: it is a choice that offers no choice, on several counts. Not only does one not have the option of not choosing, but there is only one option to choose, and furthermore this option is not really an option: form itself is not a substantive position in a binary opposition. The choice has the initial form of an opposition between 'form' and 'content' as its two equally unconvincing contents.But by opting for form . . . we force 'form' itself out of its position as a placeholder that would provide the content of one side in a formal binary arrangement. Only by purging form of the last grains of givenness—including every pregiven understanding of form—can one address the form of the choice between form and content. In other words, one must exaggerate form so that form becomes what it is. It is only by shedding its own context (and ultimately by arresting its own ineluctable tendency to become its own content) that form manages to twist out of the givenness of every context, and thus to transform the formal coordinates of the original decision. This is why one must always opt for form and formalism.

Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing

[onetwofeb]

HKRB Interviews: Frank Ruda – HONG KONG REVIEW OF BOOKS 香港書評

HKRB Interviews: Frank Ruda

In the latest HKRB Interview, philosopher Frank Ruda has an extended discussion with our co-editor Alfie Bown about all aspects 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."

"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."

[affirmation--negation]

For if Hegel attempts to develop the state in a way that in it any subject should realize its own freedom actively and this realization is guaranteed by the universalized right and the statist institutions, then in the impossibility of realizing one’s own freedom on the part of the poor, it becomes manifest that the appearance of the state—in civil society—necessarily produces suspensions of equality and justice. That the rabble cannot emerge from anywhere else but the poor means that Hegel has indicated in his Philosophy of Right the place from which a call for a different, more fundamental equality than that, of the statist equality (of attitude) can arise, for a different conception of justice than that with which the state fails, even more: a call for a sublation of the Hegelian state. Frank Ruda, “Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation Into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”

[ourladyofperpetualnaptime]

If the male logic moves from a universally binding structure [Oedipus complex] to the reign of a structural illusion [threat of castration], we can see that with the three female destinies [penis envy, neutralization of sexuality, or accepting castration] something else emerges: the insight that there is a peculiar forced choice. One cannot not choose which subject one will be, and this choice determines the way one will fantasize, dream, desire, and enjoy. This holds for both [. . .] male and [. . .] female subjects, yet it can be thought of only from the side of female logic. [. . .] [O]nly the deviation from the male logic, that is, the female logic, allows us to see the utter meaninglessness of anatomic dispositions for what they are: the (return of the) repressed of culture. [. . .] Only the female logic allows us to act as if we had nothing to lose. Courage is female. Only this logic allows for a break with the facticity of threats (including the threat of castration), for a rupture with structure (Oedipus) and with totalizing male logic.

frank ruda, from abolishing freedom: a plea for a contemporary use of fatalism

[kenotype]

[horlieux]

Frank Ruda, “For Badiou”

[anarchist-caravan]

By depending on fortune we hypostatize a future that takes over the present. Desire takes over our thoughts, which now solely focus on the future. This, in turn, eliminates the present of thought (and of free will). This way we always already live in our future and abolish our present. In more precise terms, we can claim that even the concept of the future, as the time in which the arbitrary outcome of things will become manifest, is a weak one. It somehow “annihilates . . . the future. Not . . . some abstract future, but the future of the very present, the future of its proper present.” When desiring external things, not only is the will not truly present as what it is (as something free), but it also believes that only the future is worth desiring and that thoughts about the past are meaningless. Even worse, through the very act of desiring the future the will abolishes its own present as well as the very future of this present. Time collapses, as it is emptied out of its dimensions. Desiring exter-nal things that depend on fortune is literally time-consuming. What Cartesian fatalism opposes is therefore this problematic conception of externality, of contingency, of action, and ulti-mately of temporality. Fatalism opposes hope just as much as it opposes fear, since they inevitably lead to these problematic consequences.

Frank Ruda - Abolishing Freedom: A Plea For A Contemporary Use Of Fatalism (Chapter; Rene Descartes The Fatalist)

[ourladyofperpetualnaptime]

“[. . . T]he subject of fate is indeterminable.” - walter benjamin, “fate and character”

“[. . . O]nly for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.” - walter benjamin, “on the concept of history”

“[. . . T]he philosophy of history can properly emerge only at the end of this process, when even God’s plan and with it everything that is has already vanished. It can emerge only if the end has already taken place.” - frank ruda, abolishing freedom: a plea for a contemporary use of fatalism