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.
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This book problematizes predominant and intuitive understandings of freedom as natural capacity. It demonstrates how these conceptions emerge with a specific form of modernity, notably capitalist modernity and thereby demonstrates how philosophy from its modern inception was always also a critique of capitalism and its notion of freedom.
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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
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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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781531505318
Publisert
2023-12-05
Utgiver
Vendor
Fordham University Press
Vekt
458 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Forfatter
Oversetter
Foreword by
Biographical note
Frank Ruda (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.
Alain Badiou (Foreword By)
Alain Badiou is former chair of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and, with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard, founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.
Heather H. Yeung (Translator)
Heather H. Yeung is Reader in Literature (Poetry and Poetics) at the University of Dundee