Frank Ruda

In capitalism human beings act as if they are mere animals. So we hear repeatedly in the history of modern philosophy. Indifference and Repetition examines how modern philosophy, largely coextensive with a particular boost in capitalism’s development, registers the reductive and regressive tendencies produced by capitalism’s effect on individuals and society.

Ruda examines a problem that has invisibly been shaping the history of modern, especially rationalist philosophical thought, a problem of misunderstanding freedom. Thinkers like Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx claim that there are conceptions and interpretations of freedom that lead the subjects of these interpretations to no longer act and think freely. They are often unwillingly led into unfreedom. It is thus possible that even “freedom” enslaves. Modern philosophical rationalism, whose conceptual genealogy the books traces and unfolds, assigns a name to this peculiar form of domination by means of freedom: indifference. Indifference is a name for the assumption that freedom is something that human beings have: a given, a natural possession. When we think freedom is natural or a possession we lose freedom. Modern philosophy, Ruda shows, takes its shape through repeated attacks on freedom as indifference; it is the owl that begins its flight, so that the days of unfreedom will turn to dusk.

Inhalt Was wäre, wenn es sich nicht immer lohnte, die »Freiheit« zu verteidigen? Wenn gerade die Verteidigung der »Freiheit« zu einer perfiden Rechtfertigung von Unterdrückung und Herrschaft führte? Und wenn gerade eine fatalistische Haltung nicht nur vernünftig, sondern die einzig denkbare Vorbedingung wirklicher Freiheit wäre? Wäre das nicht ein komischer Gedanke? Gegen-Freiheit geht von einer trivialen und zugleich verblüffend selten gemachten Beobachtung aus: Die großen Denker der Freiheit (etwa Descartes, Kant, Hegel und Freud) waren zugleich

The article addresses the strange rela­tionship between politics and philoso­phy, a relationship that is determined by peculiar asymmetries, by critically discus­sing the work of French anthropologist, Sylvan Lazarus. It demonstrates from a Hegelian perspective that philosophy is able to think that and what "politics thinks" in a historically singular way and thereby does not fall prey to the criticis­ms raised against it from the "thinking of politics in its interiority'' (Lazarus).

Tu tens uma reputação de estar vivo, mas estais morto (A Revelação de João, 3:1) 1. Uma bomba hegeliana No §244 de seu Linhas Fundamentais da Filosofia do Direito ** , Hegel introduz aquilo a que ele se refere como 'a populaça', a Pöbel. É este 'tópico' peculiar e aparente-e alegadamente marginal do pensamento de Hegel que pode em última instância mostrar por que uma formulação juvenil de Hegel se aplica ao próprio Hegel (tardio). Em algum ponto entre trinta e três e trinta e seis anos, Hegel escreveu no seu assim chamado Wastebook que "Na cultura [Bildung], obras 'originais' e completamente admiráveis são equiparáveis a uma bomba, que * Artigo convidado. Tradução do texto em inglês, gentilmente cedido para publicação pelo autor, foi feita por Ricardo Crissiuma (UFRGS/Cebrap) e contou com uma revisão de Fábio Mascarenhas Nolasco. ** As abreviações das referências do texto postas entre parênteses estão na bibliografia ao final do artigo; para as Linhas Fundamentais da Filosofia do Direito adotei a abreviação FD-conforme o princípio adotado pelo texto original, a referência a esta obra vai ser feita sempre pelo número do parágrafo (§) seguido, quando for o caso, de A, refere-se a anotações de suas preleções feitas por alunos e seguido de C, refere-se a comentários do próprio Hegel. Quando houver citações diretas de uma determinada preleção, adota-se FD e o ano em que elas foram ministradas (ex., FD 1821/-1822). [Nota do Tradutor, doravante N.T.]

Hegel's thought is a mark rather than a concept. A suspension rather than a conclusion. A dash rather than a full stop. Speculation is the thought that thinks its own suspension: in order to jump better-further, higher, today, tomorrow. Welcome to this book-! (Jean-Luc Nancy) It was a common tendency of recent French philosophy-Foucault and Deleuze as much as Althusser-to rise up in arms against the totalitarianism and idealism of the Hegelian dialectic. After mangling Plato, postmodern philosophy thought it would be useful to mangle Hegel too, always on the pretext of his supposed idealism. But in truth, neither Plato nor Hegel were idealists in the sense established by Kant. What Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda have shown, quite simply by reading Hegel's actual text, is that the dialectic dwells equally in chance, in uncertainty, in the 'perhaps,' like a country path to an unknown destination. But this in no way impedes, on the contrary it entails, that the absolute is always with us, at once necessary and hard to decipher-an indispensable compass to orient us on this interminable pathway that we must forever keep retracing. (Alain Badiou) The Dash is a vibrant and engaging book on Hegel's importance for contemporary theory, emphasizing that it is the most speculative of his notions-absolute knowing-that most deserves our critical attention. There is no other book quite like this, vacillating between a meditation and a romp, pursuing Hegel's complex thought with intensity and clarity. Comay and Ruda propose that Hegel's speculative thought exposes experience to its own impossibility and that the relation between logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit will be rethought once we grasp Hegel's ultimate rejoinder to Kant: the 'beyond' of experience is immanent to experience itself. Focusing on Hegel's punctuation brings us closer to this hesitation in thought that is part of its very operation. Just as empiricism and formalism finally converge in the Phenomenology, so exposition comes to coincide with its object in both texts. The convergence, however, is fleeting. This transitory encounter with a transitory object is marked not by a name, but by a dash with performative power, one that disorients us from the accepted coordinates of everyday life only to promise disorientation. We are then left with the demand to start anew, the occasion for decision. The dash, then, as the very point of transformation, proves important for a new reading as well as a new political orientation, one that emerges paradoxically from within Hegel's metaphysics. (Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley) Using the method that Althusser once described as 'thinking at the extremities,' two renowned Hegel scholars, one who had investigated revolutionary terror (Comay), one who had investigated the rabble of society (Ruda), gather to elucidate … what? a dash, that punctuates/ punctures, joins/disjoins the two major works: Phenomenology and Logic. They split the dialectics and uncover its impossible function: to identify the speculative and the empirical, thus leaving us no place for security, neither subjective self-certainty nor objective substantiality. Only the inconsistency of the absolute, or the necessity of contingency that is our material condition. Readers, fasten your seatbelts! But also enjoy wit and intellectual dramaturgy on every page. (Etienne Balibar,

Die Armut ist in der Verworfenheit die Empörung über diese Verworfenheit, eine Empörung, zu der sie notwendig durch den Widerspruch der menschlichen Natur mit ihrer Lebenssituation, welche die offenherzige, entschiedene, umfassende Verneinung dieser Natur ist, getrieben wird. (KarI Marx)

The article investigates two contemporary propositions that it
seeks to dismantle: 1. The proposition “everything is political”
that it takes as one of the crucial implication of the concept of
biopolitics. 2. The proposition “all art is political” that it takes to
be a defense mechanism against the insight of the indefensibility
of proposition 1. The article demonstrates how both propositions
ultimately unfold from the mythic assumption of a givenness of
politics and/or art and it concludes by suggesting that only
a complete suspension of any kind of givenness might be
a preparation for true politics or art to come. This
preparation the article delineates
as fatalist preparation.