The ability to judge as an act of freedom – a critical examination with reference to Villacañas' concept of “precarious lives”

With the concept of “precarious lives”, Villacañas does not ‒ as one might initially assume ‒ point to the fact that individuals can fail economically under the conditions of capitalism. Rather, according to Villacañas’ interpretation, the sheer existence of precarious lives points to the structural relationship between neoliberal ideology and capitalism as a factual economic system. According to Villacañas’ thesis, neoliberalism creates a new form of subjectivity that is not capable, in the Kantian sense, of making autonomous judgments. Or to put it another way: to distance oneself from the facticity of capitalist structural relations by means of one’s own intellectual capacity for modality, which in turn always implies the possible (and thus a transcending of the capitalist system) alongside the necessary and the real/existent. The question that arises following these observations is: Can the autonomous subject ‒ which is capable of autonomous judgment ‒ still be saved? With recourse to the concept of natality ‒ which for Hannah Arendt represents the quintessence of freedom ‒ the following article attempts to elaborate an answer to this question.