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.
Table of Content
Foreword: Frank Ruda’s Philosophical Oeuvre by Alain Badiou | vii
Preface to the English Edition: Freedom as Slavery | xi
List of Abbreviations | xxv
Introduction : Indifference and the History of Philosophical Rationalism | 1
1 Descartes and the Transcendental of All My Future Errors | 13
2 Kant and the Fall into Natural Necessity | 47
3 Hegel, the Dead Disposition, and the Mortification of Freedom | 82
Conclusion : Toward Another Type of Indifference | 113
Translator’s Afterword by Heather H. Yeung | 127
Acknowledgments | 133
Notes | 135
Bibliography | 171
Index | 183
About the author
Frank Ruda is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. His most recent books are Reading Hegel (with Agon Hamza and Slavoj Žižek); The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (with Rebecca Comay); and Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism.
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