Abstract

CATANZARO, Gisela  and  WEGELIN, Lucía. Towards a dialectics of autonomy: the crossroads of the individual in neoliberalism. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2019, n.18, pp.37-78. ISSN 2007-4964.

This paper explores the moral dimension of the neoliberal ideology that characterizes the current stage of capitalist societies. We propose that, although individual autonomy is a key component of the entrepreneurial discourse in which each person is postulated as solely responsible for her/his failures, critiques of this discourse cannot be satisfied only by judging the assumption of self-sufficiency; rather, critiques of neoliberalism today face a double challenge. On the one hand, as Judith Butler suggests, it is necessary to emphasize not only social responsibility for precariousness, but also the precarious nature of individuals, which makes them constitutively dependent on others. On the other, however, this dialectic of vulnerability must be complemented by a dialectization of autonomy that, together with the identification of its ideological effect, will allow the conceptualization of its critical potential, associated with the reflexivity that the economization of the subject promoted by neoliberalism threatens to destroy. After the introduction, which justifies the notion that both dialectics are necessary for a critique of the present, the first section discusses Butler’s proposed critique of neoliberal precariousness, before going on to a reconstruction of the dialectics of autonomy that recovers Adorno’s reading of Kantian moral philosophy. Finally, based on a characterization of the senses in which neoliberalism makes autonomy precarious, not only in its promotion of an entrepreneurial individual but also of the collective images linked to him, we sustain the actuality of the critical contents identified by Adorno and the importance of a dialectics of autonomy for emancipatory thought.

Keywords : neoliberal ideology; vulnerability; reflexivity; individualism; autonomy.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )