Frank Ruda Ehem. Senior Fellow

Frank Ruda
Oktober 2016 - März 2017

Vita

October 2016 - February 2017 -Senior Fellow at the IKKM, Weimar
April 2016 -Interim Professor for Philosophy of Phenomenology at the FU Berlin

Dated from 2017

Field of research

Twentieth Century European, esp. French Philosophy, German Idealism (esp. Kant and Hegel), Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics and Media Philosophy (esp. Film / Literature and Philosophy), Descartes, Issues in Metaphysics.

IKKM Research Project

What's the Point? Condensation and Courage

The project will investigate the peculiar relation between an affect and one of the two operations that stand in the focus of the 2016/2017 IKKM’s annual topic, namely the relation between courage and condensation. Its main thesis is that their coupling can be best comprehended by systematically focusing on specific kinds of “transition[s] from loose to firm connections”, namely in cases when there is a fundamental change and transformation in one’s life (or in the life of a socio-political collective) and where the “transitional object” that appears (and which constitutively “is simultaneously not-me and never entirely not-me”) is – maybe dangerously – often referred to as ‘decision’. It is in such ‘moments’ in which all the multifold differences that determine the specificity of a concrete historical situation appear to be condensed into the form of the two sides of a decision that cannot not be taken, for not taking it would be opting for one of its sides. And it is such choice, as the project will argue, that is accompanied by an affect of its own, namely courage. Due to the lack of a systematic and elaborate philosophical theory of courage, the project provisionally, as working hypothesis, defines courage as a working with (and through one’s) anxiety – anxiety being traditionally the affect that indicates the very possibility of change – and aims to provide in its course not only an account of the conceptual link between specific modes of condensation and courage, but also a contemporary philosophical theory of this very affect.

Selected Publications

Reading Marx, together with Agon Hamza and Slavoj Zizek (Polity Press 2017).
The Dash - The Other Side of Absolute Knowing, together with Rebecca Comay (MIT-Press 2017).
Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska UP 2016).