Under capitalism, the only thing which can make a difference is the semblance of difference. That is, there are no real differences, but there is at least the appearance of difference and that it appears to be the case there are differences stands in the way of the objective fact of the lack of any difference whatsoever. The semblance of difference which appears to make a difference when it does not is money; in our society now, everything has made itself amenable to money so much that a price can be put on anything. Money is the universal standard of equivalence which levels all other differences and leaves in place of the absence of any qualitative differences the appearance that there are different prices of things, and that the amounts of these prices really make a difference (when they are different). This point is the reason for Frank Ruda’s writing of both the book Indifference and Repetition and its previously written sequel Abolishing Freedom, but it does not exactly make up the content of the present book. Rather, the book is directly concerned more with modernity and the rationalist philosophers who were to be found during its arrival. Most notably for Ruda, these are made up by the figures of Descartes, Kant and Hegel.

In both of these first two books of a planned series, Ruda takes up the problem of human freedom, which he argues requires a seemingly contradictory commitment to fatalism and therefore to a new reading of the history of philosophical rationalism. An unassuming spectator might ask, if things are fated to be as they are and could not be another way, how might we consider ourselves to be free? Ruda’s response in short is that in any moment where it is not necessarily the case that we act with freedom, as opposed to merely appearing as to be free, then whatever minimal notion of pseudo-freedom that we cling to could very well be taken from us, leaving us unfree. A direct corollary to this position is that we must be apathetic toward whatever is not of our freedom to act, since it is not of concern to us. If we are not free to act in regard to some objective conditions, those will simply happen to us and we must “accept” that it is the case things are that way. Of course, even our acceptance here is not of any relevance to the making of a real difference, and it may be the case that this characterizes much of our time.

There is a short foreword from Alain Badiou, who describes Ruda’s background and his influence unlike Badiou’s which stems more from Kant rather than Descartes. This means that Ruda has taken on Kant’s appreciation for Humean skepticism, and Badiou remarks that this is what led Kant to deal in a moral philosophy rather than either a scientific or religious one - both would be laden with metaphysical dogmatism. Kant of course had carefully delineated the difference between knowledge and lived experience, and he was well aware of the scientific developments of the time. Most pertinently though, what lies at the basis of rational philosophy is not a scientific naturalism. This act displaces the absolute as apart from knowledge but keeps it linked in thought to moral duty. In spite of this influence by Kant’s rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, Ruda brings Descartes back into the picture, and he believes that both Descartes and Kant have plenty to tell us about absolute freedom which ends up being informative to Hegel’s broader discussion of the absolute.

Cartesian Metaphysics

Ruda begins his discussion of Descartes with reference to Kant which gives an impression of the winding dialectical logic this argument will follow, which is not simply unique to Hegel. Kant is the one who makes the best argument that to give the definition of a human it is necessary to include how they are also as an animal. As Kant argues, animals are able to act in accord with what would be judgments of the agreeable. Whether or not they can reason, we observe them acting in such a way when they practice basic communal forms. Conversely, judgments that are purely conceptual could only be made by spirits. Since human judgment must be made at the same time as animals, reason must concern both particularity as well as universality in addition to the resultant pleasure for oneself generated by it.

The form of judgment which is otherwise human is the judgment of beauty, it is that which is both animal and rational, both subjective and universal. When people reason about beauty, they indicate at a pleasure for oneself but that is not just for oneself. My objective determination of beauty should be able to be arrived at as a judgment by another and inspire pleasure for them. Judgments of the agreeable could be made by another, but they are not made because another could make them, rather it is a form of judgment which assumes that all must act in accord with it without any judgment necessarily having been made by anybody. It is definitively the judgment of beauty which a human makes also as animal but does not sink them into the pathological condition of merely how an animal would behave. Ultimately, this is what supplies the argument that individuals are able to reason in a way that does not conform only to mass public opinion, and furthermore, that there is the possibility for humans who are also as animals to act as though they were only animals.

Going back to Descartes, Ruda unearths an extended argument through the text of the Discourse on the Method which has been read over and over again for centuries while having often ignored this seemingly important component to it. The regular conversation around that book concerns topics like mind-body dualism, the existence of God, and the significance of human thought. What Ruda identifies is Descartes’ direct and primary motivating concern with the issue of indifference, which Descartes viewed as a great risk endangering the entirety of human freedom. To emphasize the point that it is difficult to discern in this text what Descartes was really up to, Ruda describes at length how even Sartre was bewildered by the way Descartes seemed to believe that actual freedom could in any case come out of his apparent but confusing attacks against indifference.

Specifically, Descartes is working out the consequence of a common social indifference that he had understood to be arising to determinations of truth. Descartes believed that it would be possible for philosophy, taking a course of skeptical doubt, to clarify various errors that had been founded on indifference and this would lead to proving the fundamental contradiction of the popularized position of indifference, clearing it out of the way for a real philosophy to begin. What Descartes criticized about the indifferent was that they had identified freedom with the freedom of choice, following from Aristotle’s definition of freedom as consisting in a matter of capacity. This definition persisted until much later when it was represented in an identical manner again without comment by William of Ockham. The indifferent would come to say from common sense that I am free to do x or not to do x, and therefore I am free. It is my free choice whether to do x or not, and I make that choice of my own accord.

Descartes’ own response to this position is to negate it. He insists that since I am “free” to do x or not to do x means that I am indifferent to the choice between the two options, and it does not matter whether I do one or the other. Therefore, this does not serve as an indication of my freedom but rather it is the very sign of my unfreedom. It is the result of an ideology of freedom which distorts my thinking so as to force myself to believe that I am free at the very moment when my freedom has been robbed from me. If I am suffering from an ideology of freedom that makes me unfree, at some point there must have been an error which led to this contradiction. Descartes very meticulously works to understand the nature of this fundamental error because it is so closely linked with the question of freedom.

For Descartes, this problem arises from a disconnect between the intellect and the will. Ruda, with a great deal of irony, remarks on how Descartes sets himself in opposition to a dualism that had restricted us against human freedom. This disconnect arises from my will being just as perfectly infinite as is God’s, but my intellect being limited in scope due to not having pure knowledge of everything that is. While we might scrutinize the reference to God, it does seem to be a permissible argument that if my freedom (of the will) is in any way conditioned moreso than a God’s free will would be, then it is not freedom, rather it is an imposition onto me. It is something that happens to me; and, it is not something which I carry out as a free act.

Here we find the place for a proper philosophy to intervene: my (infinite) will must be constrained so as to only reach the same limits as my (finite) intellect allows, and this is a responsibility for myself to observe. It is something which I can fail at doing, and it will have the consequence such that I act without knowing. It follows that I can not know the reason for my acting, why I am doing what I am doing; and so, what it is that I do is not done freely. It could have been done otherwise and I would not know the difference. The act which comes from a will that exceeds the limits of the intellect is done with an attitude of indifference. We can see that the task of philosophy now is the overturning of this form of indifference which we have discovered as a threat latent to our own heritage. However, it was only by proceeding with skeptical doubt indifferently against this indifference as a capacity or as the freedom of choice that we were able to overcome the form of indifference that undermines human freedom.

The discovery of the premodern form of indifference happens within philosophy and is not to be found prior to it. It is an artifact of philosophy itself and not a fact of some historical past that we have moved on from or could go back to. Since we have now found indifference again within philosophy, we can see that philosophy’s critique of ideology contends with a repetition of the return of indifference that threatens human freedom. It must overturn the premodern myth of the givenness of freedom again and again. Ruda uses Heidegger’s terms of a transition from ontic to ontological (in)difference here, only he has revealed that Descartes as the archetypal rationalist has already made this distinction long ago. Descartes himself condemned the form of indifference which threatens to collapse philosophy, by articulating not just the identity of the indifferent but two different forms of indifference which arises as a real distinction by an analysis of indifference. The original determination of the identity of indifference is not itself decisive, it needs to be supplemented by two different ways of being indifferent. Heidegger has forgotten that Descartes did not forget the pure difference in the being of beings, and his erroneous form of reason has made this concealed for us now.

Critical Philosophy

It would be a little bizarre to find that indifference was the concern that sparked not only Descartes’ philosophical project but also Kant’s, and yet this is what Ruda next goes on to prove. He finds in the preface to Critique of Pure Reason, 150 years after Descartes, more scrambling to deal with a form of indifference that philosophy is confronted by. Kant had seen that skepticism both correctly neutralized the endless arguments among dogmatic metaphysicians that multiplied after the time of Descartes, but also that it could lead one further to the attitude of total indifference. Kant argues that the indifferent produce their own metaphysics which is easily explained, since they have no way of refuting metaphysics any more than they are able to appeal to it. They claim to have rejected all of the ideological distortions of metaphysics, but they can not hold any one of its postulates to be false necessarily either; they have become indifferent toward this distinction.

Even though indifference here takes on the appearance of an all-out rejection of reason, the fact that it still continues to deal in metaphysical theories requires that it must be making use of reason in some way. For Kant, this signals the good news of indifference. Even though indifference must be attacked by philosophy, its presence means that something else unlike it is on its way. Ruda quotes Kant as calling indifference, “The mother of chaos and night,” so that it blinds us to what is coming after it and does not know itself what it is bringing forth. The attack which Kant proposes philosophy make against indifference is that it can not be in human reason at all, and this puts him in opposition then to Descartes. Descartes believed that the indifference present in the freedom of choice was problematic because of the possibility of it as a real determination, but Kant disagrees that this should even be considered as a use of reason. Most especially, when it comes to moral matters for Kant, which is the domain that encompasses all human action, there can be no indifference at all.

Any small amount of indifference admitted into the moral philosophy would produce an ambiguity between good and evil, and there would be no way to judge the righteousness of each act or the character of any person. This is where history itself begins, when humanity reaches an understanding that one is always responsible for the moral determination of any act carried out with real freedom. What we should say is that this characterizes every human act, because doing otherwise would mean that people could get away with performing certain acts without judgment. It is the result of indifference to suggest that it does not matter what the moral character of some decisions are. To admit that some acts are done without moral character serves as an abandonment of human freedom more generally. It reduces one to the condition of an animal.

The indifferent would claim we find in social life plenty of evidence to support that there can be both some good and some evil in human beings. Even though for a person to be evil their actions must be carried out with an evil maxim behind them, this maxim is not ever observable from outside beyond the appearances of the action itself. The act that is evil must have a subjective ground on which a person decides to act; it can not just be that the act appears as evil, but that the person decides (freely) to commit an evil act. Therefore, the maxim is absent in the appearance of the act that goes along with it, and we can not really make any judgment about the matter, and this leads to indifference about matters of moral philosophy. Kant admits that when the indifferent make this dreadful argument, and keep their composure, and meet the world with a, “Joyful and valiant heart,” they even appear to be true philosophers. The indifferent present themselves as standing next to the first true critical philosophers as if they belonged.

Kant though doubles down on the rigor of moral philosophy. He remains adamant it just is absolutely the case that every act and the character of every person is either good or it is evil and there is no in between or any additional terms of consequence. This of course requires a commitment to uphold, it surely is not the case that the world appears to us in this way as it already exists. The critical philosophy must constantly ward off indifference toward human freedom where it repetitively threatens to arise again and again. It performs this act of repellence by its understanding of the impossibility of indifference.

An attitude of indifference feigns to a concept of permissive law which it generates for itself while pretending to be as a philosopher, and this fabrication of the law is thoroughly rejected by critical philosophy. This brings Kant to complain that we live in a syncretist age. While indifference could arise from either the rejection of all terms or a concatenation of all of them, it’s easier to derive satisfaction from admitting to the possibility of all options being the case and for each to take up any option as they please. There is nothing which necessarily prevents this condition of gross consumption, and yet for the critical philosophy it must not be allowed. It ought not to be the case that we live by escaping into the immaturity which enlightenment has revealed as a possibility about ourselves.

Later on, Hegel will start to wonder whether moral reproachment offers the final say on the matter. He proposes very radically that the contradictions found in indifference are not to be nullified by the critical philosophy, but that it is contradiction itself which is the, “Rule of the true.” The truth is not clarified by getting rid of contradiction but it is produced by it as a one-sided relation. With each way of taking a contradiction from one side or the other, new distinctions found among the terms are multiplied. What a truth is is the truth of something that is a non-truth, and the existence (or non-existence) of a non-truth is something about which there can be truth. If the truth were rather that which the truth was about, it could not itself be as the truth of something. Therefore, falsehood consists in nothing other than imagining the purity of a truth that could be taken to be the truth on its own, and even Kant had misunderstood this problem.

Hegel believes that Kant developed a critical philosophy which operates as what he calls an, “Incomplete form of skepticism.” The critical philosophy has focused its attention on a practice of moral duty and it has mistakenly ignored the other side of duty which is as an idea. Moral duty has another side to it which is the infinity of the idea, because of how the considerations of the negative determination of its two sides multiplies as contradiction. This side of a moral duty which is as an infinite idea coincides perfectly with it and neither side is erased by the other, and in this way philosophy shows the relation between the infinite and the finite. Kant attempted to avoid indifference by postulating infinity as aside from moral duty, something that is for us outside of pure experience. In this way he ends up like the skeptics who practiced as Ruda says an, “Unacknowledged dogmatic metaphysics.”

It turns out that while there shall not be indifference, it is practiced even by the very critical philosophy itself. As with Spinoza, there is appearance and determinate being and our life within all this, but there is not an actuality to the (infinity of the) world. The way to respond to this, as we know, is to apply a skepticism renewed to both sides of the relation. We should not just be skeptical to the various dogmatic metaphysics that have been suggested to us, but it also works on any positive theory brought forth by our move away from all dogmatic metaphysics too. This broader skepticism can not give us the right answer, but it alerts us to the fact that both sides are wrong.

Though we have arrived at an indifference such that distinctions of the finite are insufficient for philosophy, we have at once endangered philosophy again. It announced to us this freedom of an actual relation to the infinite that could be ours, but people still fall into indifference toward it. It does not appeal to them, as philosophy has made promises but disappointed the expectations that follow along with those promises. There is an endless chatter of philosophy that goes nowhere, as recognized by Hegel. What comes out of public indifference to philosophy is superstitious belief. People believe in the essential nature of appearances as unchangeable, and they believe that philosophy can not give the answers to important questions. This is a belief that insists on indifference and gives up on what would have allowed one to decide whether I might want to be indifferent, which is freedom.

Since philosophy reminds people of this matter, it will cause them to despise it. Philosophy makes the demand that we leave the state of nature which indifference longs for where it can get rid of any practice of thought. It realizes an indifference toward nature which does not collapse into its leveling and equalization of everything but determines it so as to become free of it. Paradoxically, whereas indifference has in many ways reduced the world to an environment as an assumption of limited capability, it was only right as capitalism was becoming global that in philosophy it was realized how it is possible to misunderstand our own freedom. In this way, Hegel has taken a radical step beyond Kant and introduced that there is class struggle within philosophy, and that this goes so far as to concern ontology as the most underlying matter that decides on the character of human freedom.

A Jab at Deleuze

It ought to be said that these three old philosophers have fallen into some disrepute, not so much individually each on their own, but certainly when taken together as a group in the name of “rationalist philosophers.” In this way they have come to be understood as the champions of a bourgeois mastery over others who are chained to the yoke of the oppressive theories and attendant culture which they helped devise. Not only has their work had a totalitarian effect on the politics of our culture, but the metaphysics that they developed does not even seem to serve any purpose for us any more as we have long since moved past all of it. And, while both Heidegger and Deleuze each in various ways would consider themselves as Kantian, if by their admission from some perverted new reading of Kant, they nonetheless have played a central role in the revolt against these rationalist philosophers.

In the following, I describe Ruda’s argument included in the book against Heidegger and I will attempt brief speculation about why the title of the book serves as what Rebecca Comay has called a “jab at Deleuze.” She notes for a start during a public lecture about Ruda’s book that Deleuze is an avowed anti-Hegelian influence on post-68 philosophy of difference, or what I would refer to as the radical political theory of the time. One point that might be said in favor of Ruda’s book is that it stays singularly committed to the task of developing a philosophical concept of freedom. So, he does not go far out of his way to explain what it is about the work of Deleuze that requires parody from us today.

Without naming him directly, the first problem Ruda brings up about Deleuze is that he has a fear of leveling, which is the condition of society in which everything is understood to be becoming equal. This is Deleuze’s reason for the writing of a book about difference, to resuscitate the meaning of difference in a time when it seems to have been lost to a static identity between things everywhere we look. Ruda follows this fear back to the work of Heidegger. It was Heidegger who posed the issue of leveling as a fundamental problem for 20th century philosophy, and it was taken up by many - even those who would not advocate fascism as a solution to social problems. Deleuze himself deals with the precisely capitalist conditioning of leveling as among its most relevant factors. For Heidegger though, this leveling could be said to have come not from the capitalist valorization process but more primarily it comes just from rapid advances in technological development and the positivist ideology of scientism which goes along with it. It is these latter things, along with the abstractions of philosophical metaphysics produced by all philosophers since Plato which for Heidegger has led to the disappearing of being.

It is not as though one can never cite Heidegger (without also being a fascist), however Deleuze does begin with the sense of leveling as a condition of society which is problematic for everybody living due to a transhistorical outcome of deficient metaphysics. This preliminary sense given to leveling before its conditioning by capitalism gets appended is entirely in accord with Heidegger’s understanding of it. So, the origin of this problem that was raised by a fascist has become obscured, despite that it was obviously not Deleuze’s goal to achieve such a result. Deleuze believes the history of philosophy has been overly preoccupied with the negative operations of identity and representation which leave us with only the stunted simulacrum of pure difference, and he pinpoints the singularly most terrible figure out of this incorrect trajectory on Hegel.

We do not rely on negation and contradiction, because difference is always right there to bring about new states of affairs. Difference self-manifests to the point that it is even found most formally in the repetition of the same which constitutes apparent regularity. There are of course insinuations here about the implicit totalitarianism of Hegel’s philosophy which was never given acknowledgment by subsequent Hegelians, that we are supposed to be surprised to learn was hidden there all along. Meanwhile, Deleuze is lackadaisically citing a ranking ideologue of the German Nazi party. He is not the only writer who has attempted this bizarre twist in the historical narrative, it is a problem that really has directed the whole of 20th century philosophy. We now find ourselves to be descendants not of Plato but of Heidegger, and there is something about that situation which should disgust us.

Ruda is no proponent of Deleuze, but neither does he take him to be the enemy. He has alternatively followed after Badiou, and this puts him in the camp of radical political philosophy to which both Deleuze and Badiou properly belong. This means, however, that they should search for a different beginning than the one Heidegger offered them, and Ruda chooses to find that new beginning in Freud. The book’s subtitle after all, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents, references Freud with a displacement from the term civilization to that of modern freedom, but does not perform any sort of ironic reversal on his work as does the title’s reference to Deleuze. Freud is the contemporary of Heidegger who offers us another way of understanding void, of confronting the prevailing nihilism which we clearly face but without having sunken into reaction.

Following after Freud’s theory, void will be related to terms of death drive and the unconscious and not to the absolute disappearing of being. It is a term which can be subjected to analysis by us rather than imagining it to have annihilated everything. The field of 20th century philosophy did not reject Freud in any overt way, but we also do not trace all of the fundamental problems which we deal with back to him. Freud is the 20th century philosopher who would allow us to leave Plato and Descartes be, as Heidegger had wished to do, but without constructing our “new” philosophy in a purely negative slant against them. As an aside, one place where Deleuze acts as a substantial corrective to Freud is on the topic of anti-psychiatry, which was not addressed by Ruda, but deserves elaboration if we are to determine what is the good in Freud’s work.

Heidegger blames the present nihilism which we face on the historical development of rationalism itself and not anything outside of it. The whole tradition of classical philosophy from Plato to Descartes to Hegel should be entirely abandoned. It is an immediately nonsensical argument insofar as Heidegger writes in the same manner as them, and given that he generally discusses metaphysical issues with the use of reason. Most of all, he blames a form of rational thinking which as Ruda describes, “Knows only one type of difference, namely that between beings”. So we have forgotten that Being produces a multitude of difference, but we only see it as different parts of nature which are all of the same nature - one thing and no difference within it. This for Heidegger constitutes the end of philosophy, as even the argument which leads to such a total indifference cannot make its own argument. The indifference of rationalism is finally indifferent to this argument as it is with everything else - and it is then that we must turn to the poets. This all amounts to an act of capitulation which Heidegger has reduced his own work to.

In the introduction of this book, Ruda sets out six points that sharply contrasts his own theory about indifference against Heidegger’s view. It is also apart from the 20th century philosophy which unfortunately attempted to proceed with a response to indifference in the fashion that Heidegger showed us how to do. Here, Deleuze is taken to be not the singular figure at fault for making this error but the most exemplary one - the radical political philosopher par excellence who makes far too many veiled, neutral-toned references to a fascist. This itself is yet a further act of indifference which we must now contend with, and which Heidegger does not have anything to inform us about because it is his own theory which must be overcome.

Philosophy has taken up indifference as an object of its inquiry, but Ruda does not believe this problem should be traced back to Plato, as it is a specifically contemporary phenomenon. The indifference which philosophy is faced with is our own problem and not a problem that was passed down to us by the Greeks. More than anything, the problem should be connected with capitalism as an uprooting of prior forms of life. Since capitalist society continually reproduces itself day after day, even to our horror at its persistence, then the problem of indifference which we have taken up cannot simply be an actual disintegration into nothingness as Heidegger vividly portrays the condition of nihilism.

Conversely for Heidegger, as described in Being and Time, the problem of indifference is to be located in the field of the ready-at-hand. It can be seen in the objects outside of us which hold an indifference as to whether we act on them or not. It is other than the dasein that is mine. Indifference just is an aspect of objects naturally and so it is both given to us and it is also not something which philosophy could change anything to resolve; indifference is not a problem inherent to philosophy itself. In this way, Heidegger chooses very ironically to let philosophy off the hook at the point where pressing it to carry out an intervention on its alleged inadequacies could have made a difference.

The problem of indifference is rather a problem with our own misunderstanding, it is a problem rooted in the human understanding. It is a problem which, most pertinently, is not bringing itself to go away on its own. We are not being washed away in a nihilism that leaves nothing behind, in fact we wake up the next day and we are faced with the demands of capitalist society once more. Following Ruda, we can describe the same effects that nihilism is having on society that Heidegger worried about by reversing one of his dictums. We should come to understand now that taking freedom to be freedom of choice leads to nihilism, and not the other way around. Ruda says that philosophical rationalism, “Detects and identifies indifference,” so while the discipline of philosophy is certainly a part of the culture which holds to this destructive indifference, it is not solely responsible for having produced it. Indifference is neither to be separated wholly outside of philosophy. Philosophical rationalism identifies the latent indifference present throughout society not in order to create it out of nothing where it did not exist previously, but to attack it because of its very pervasiveness.

Ruda’s strongest argument against Heidegger aims at his repeated endorsement of the idea that rationalist philosophers were blind to the very indifference which they were imposing onto society. Rigorous citation to the primary texts of Descartes, Kant and Hegel shows their attempt to work out the issue of indifference themselves in various ways with more or less success - but always taking it up as one of the most pressing problems to philosophy very directly. In the book’s conclusion, we get further discussion of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, figures who Heidegger might be more amenable to as they represent a sort of occult mysticism and a brutal combative pose against Hegel. They too are figures of rationalist philosophy, must they be abandoned as well along with all the rest? It would mean giving up on Kierkegaard’s hilarious depiction of the pseudo-spirituality of the ruling elite designed to cover over the deadly seriousness of being. It would have us look past Schopenhauer’s triumphant division of the whole history of philosophy into the defenders of the free will and what Ruda paraphrases as the, “True philosophers who reject this ideology.” It is a self-conscious decision made by them to address the problem of indifference explicitly. This proves a total contradiction of Heidegger’s beliefs about what is to be found in or absent from their writing.

The Spirit of Hegel and Marx

The English edition of this book adds an extremely important preface about Marx which is so valuable to the overall argument that its absence from the original publication must have been noticeable. The argument of the book itself begins from the sort of common complaints you hear in our public discourse that life under capitalism leads us to behave like animals and less like humans. Though the original argument already makes a case for freedom to anyone who believes that it is imperiled either way, it is really Marx that relays most pertinently how this problem has affected capitalist society. It is also significantly the case (and has gone lost on many theorists) that the development of the concept of freedom by philosophical rationalists deeply impacted Marx’s thinking. This goes against popular claims that Marx’s work generally stands in total contradiction with philosophy, metaphysics, and rationalism so much that there is no connection to be found there.

The preface first describes Silvia Federici’s writing in which she theorizes free time as the other to work. Free time is the time of sex that cannot be free because it is determined by its function in social reproduction and the times set out for it by the demand of work. Not only does my work get in the way of my free time, the time off for one becomes the duty for working in reproductive labor for another, it then serves as the work of one who must please and be pleased. Federici explains that sex as work is a problem for women as it is still one of their primary occupations and that there are elements of prostitution in every sexual encounter in such a society. This is read as an extension of Marx and Engels’s theory of the bourgeois family, which for them already had substituted financial relations in the place of the family itself.

Though this form of the invisible labor of women continues to be debated, the standard Marxist account provides a full description of the need to reproduce the labor of society. It already includes the reproductive labor of women in this collection of commodities that are needed for reproduction. Unlike other workers, these women who are constantly servicing the needs of those on their supposed free time are only paid for in an indirect wage. This leaves capitalism in a place where it is said that we are free to choose, but we are only really faced with the dichotomy between wage slavery and unwaged slavery. Ruda says that both our personal and our sexual relations “clearly” have aspects of ownership between human beings to them even without direct slavery. How do we square this reality with bourgeois democracy’s claim that it has instituted a free society for all in the place of the old autocratic feudal system which it overcame, by the announcement of its slogan: equality, liberty and solidarity?

Ruda then moves on to a lecture Angela Davis gave in 2008 titled “The Meaning of Freedom,” so we are beginning to align a series of figures for which freedom itself explicitly becomes the problem that we are immediately faced with. These figures do not only include the early rationalist philosophers, they are also the 20th century women who in their theoretical work very concisely targeted capitalism as being guilty for having ravaged human freedom. In advanced capitalist democracies, they especially have an important case to make because of how we have convinced ourselves about having abolished conditions of slavery to the great delight of everybody. Davis asks whether we can be sure we have abolished slavery if we have not given a very careful definition to slavery. If we have wrongly defined slavery, then in having celebrated that we already abolished it, in fact we are only allowing the existence of slavery to carry on invisibly while we attempt to ignore it. This neatly describes the persistent invisibility of women’s duty for performing reproductive labor, and it also applies to the overwhelming number of poor who are currently imprisoned.

This worry about the duplicity of freedom under capitalism can be traced back again to Marx and Engels. They had said that bourgeois radicals promised all kinds of different new freedoms after the overthrow of the feudal lords, but the only freedom that was really enshrined by them was free trade. Therefore, when the bourgeoisie complain that the communist party seek to abolish individuality and freedom, they are right, because the bourgeois’s obsession with individuality is not one which has any interest in freedom for all. Rather, we are given the demand that one find a way to be original as an individual. Since everyone is given this same demand and must earnestly attempt to live by it, none of us can be original or free; it makes us all identical.

My final question to be posed to Ruda concerns his constant references to the concept of Spirit. Hegel says that the human being is not just a natural body but it is also a spiritual being. Earlier, Kant argued that while spirits can make pure judgments, the highest form of human judgment are judgments of beauty because human beings are half way between spirit and animal. While Descartes makes many references to God in a way that Kant would disabuse us of, one of the key moments where Descartes does this is when he says that deception is weakness and therefore God does not deceive. Sure, we follow with Descartes’ argument to see where it goes in spite of knowing that God is not, but there is no examination of the other side to the theory that deception is weakness. Even though rationalists (including these early figures) became increasingly suspicious that both deistic and agnostic theories are insufficient, it still seems very often that Spirit is treated as carrying with it a sincerity that should be questioned. This religious term is given some new esoteric definition by Hegel, but is it really operative in the world as such?

Throughout the book, Ruda gives a definition of philosophy that is not of an eclecticism. For Ruda, philosophy must commit itself to the task of attacking the ideology that makes us unfree. He tells a story where Lenin was supposed to have pleaded with comrades to issue a practical ban on the word freedom. At least, this should be the case in our propaganda material. Lenin was another who took very seriously that freedom is a word that allows us to believe we are free specifically in order to mask that it is valorized by the regime which dominates us. Its public use is only generally allowed in the way where it overtly bars us from seeing the truth.

Marx goes much further in his critique of religious ideology, and it’s unclear why the same ban should not hold for spirit too. So long as we are drawing on the field of rationalists, what could be recommended against the sappy optimist’s redescription of spirit as self-relating consciousness and the community of true believers to the cause and so on would be Kant’s notion of apathy. Ruda even describes Kant’s philosophical commitment to apathy and does not explain why or how it should be interposed with an optimism that he sources in Hegel. While Stoicism (which Kant draws apathy from) can properly be understood as a slave philosophy, apathy is not the refusal of all sensuousness but merely its subordination to reason. By now at least, it has been made obvious that whatever changes to the word spirit one would like to introduce aren’t being respectfully received by the public. For them, it continues to function very nicely as both a xenophobic tool of division and a siren call to the permanence of the existing order.

According to Kant, it is the mark of the true philosopher to exhibit apathy against the passions that would excite us and disengage us from the form of rational thought. It is exactly spirit which threatens such an outcome today. Furthermore, if we were to go along with Marx in the way that this book chooses to end, we would declare that the end of capitalism also serves as the end of prehistory - that is, history has not yet begun. There is the appearance of change though there is no change, and there is the semblance of a modernity that has not happened. It is apathy that is needed more than anything to regard the anti-sociality of what currently substitutes for community. It is apathy in the present which might allow the actuality of spirit to be realized when history begins.

Works Cited

Frank Ruda. Indifference and Repetition; or, Modern Freedom and Its Discontents. 2023

Frank Ruda. Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism. 2016

Rene Descartes. Discourse on the Method. 1637

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781

G. W. F. Hegel. Theses Presented in Advance of the Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets. 1801

Frank Ruda, Rebecca Comay, Mladen Dolar, Christoph Menke, and Slavoj Zizek. Indifference and Repetition Public Lecture. EGS Channel on YouTube. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WQhgN0wf7I

Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. 1968

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. 1927

Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930