Abolishing Freedom series editors · Marco Abel and Roland Végső Something in the world forces us to think. — Gilles Deleuze The world provokes thought. Thinking is nothing but the human response to this provocation. Thus the very nature of thought is to be the product of a provocation. This is why a genuine act of provocation cannot be the empty rhetorical gesture of the contrarian. It must be an experimental response to the historical necessity to act. Unlike the contrarian, we refuse to reduce provo- cation to a passive noun or a state of being. We believe that real moments of provocation are constituted by a series of actions that are best defined by verbs or even infinitives—v erbs in a modality of potentiality, of the promise of action. To provoke is to intervene in the present by invoking an as yet undecided future radically different from what is declared to be possible in the present and, in so doing, to arouse the desire for bringing about change. By publishing short books from multiple disciplinary perspectives that are closer to the genres of the manifesto, the polemical essay, the intervention, and the pamphlet than to traditional scholarly monographs, “Provocations” hopes to serve as a forum for the kind of theoretical experimentation that we consider to be the very essence of thought. www.provocationsbooks.com Abolishing Freedom A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism frank ruda university of nebraska press · lincoln and london © 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The series editors would like to thank Jaime Brunton, Daniel Clausen, Daniel Froid, Robert Lipscomb, and Edwardo Rios for their work on the manuscript. This initial volume of the series is dedicated to the memory of Ernesto Laclau. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Ruda, Frank, author. Title: Abolishing freedom: a plea for a contemporary use of fatalism / Frank Ruda. Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. | Series: Provocations | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2015049866 isbn 9780803284371 (pbk.: alk. paper) isbn 9780803288782 (ePub) isbn 9780803288799 (mobi) isbn 9780803288805 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Fate and fatalism. | Liberty. Classification: lcc bj1468.5 .r83 2016 ddc 149/.8—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049866 Set in Sorts Mill Goudy by Rachel Gould. Designed by N. Putens. To Eva, for teaching me that the worst always already happened In our times we can neither endure our faults nor the means of correcting them. — Titus Livy contents Acknowledgments ix Provocations xi Introduction: Fatalism in Times of Universalized Assthetization 1 1. Protestant Fatalism: Predestination as Emancipation 15 2. René the Fatalist: Abolishing (Aristotelian) Freedom 41 3. From Kant to Schmid (and Back): The End of All Things 73 4. Ending with the Worst: Hegel and Absolute Fatalism 101 5. After the End: Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom 131 Last Words 165 Notes 173 acknowledgments Even fatalists can be grateful. And if they believe that the worst has always already happened, they are grateful to those who in their respective ways made (thinking) the worst possible. They form something like a gang of the worst: a club that con- sists only of members who, following Groucho Marx’s famous saying, would never become members of a club that would take them as members. For me this impossible club includes Eva Heubach, Marco Abel, Alain Badiou, Georg W. Bertram, Lorenzo Chiesa, Rebecca Comay, Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Lorenz Engell, Simon Hajdini, Agon Hamza, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Menke, Mark Potocnik, Ozren Pupovac, Rado Riha, Aaron Schuster, Jelica Šumič, Roland Végső, Christiane Voss, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, and Hugo Heubach. ix