Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents

"The free offer of freedom, of a capacity one is permitted to use at will, is a gift horse Ruda looks in the mouth. What he finds stowed away there is indifference and the arbitrariness of choice. The alternative he argues for is remarkable for being off-menu: a freedom won only from the negation of the given. A strongly argued, important book."--Joan Copjec, Brown University "Indifference and Repetition is a timely and interesting challenge to the modern liberal ideology that freedom is our inalienable natural right. It offers a weapon against the illusory freedom of algorithmically determined choice in increasingly virtual social interactions."--S. D. Chrostowska, York University "Ruda writes with authority, masterfully guiding readers through material that ranges from the familiar to the intriguingly obscure, while demonstrating how the latter still matters."--Vincent Lloyd, author of Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination 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 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 their subjects to no longer act and think freely. 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. Frank Ruda is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Dundee. His most recent book is Reading Hegel (with Agon Hamza and Slavoj Zizek).