The current understanding of freedom is in crisis: liberalism’s promises of freedom have been so thoroughly exhausted that reactionary and authoritarian movements have been able to hijack the concept of freedom in recent years. Underlying this are not merely unfulfilled promises, but the suspicion that the realization of liberal promises has itself entailed a deeper form of domination and subjugation. Autonomy has not proven to be self-determination, but rather produced self-subjugation, the domination and exploitation of nature, and particularly effective mechanisms of social control. Against this backdrop, we must fundamentally redefine the concept of freedom. In their books This Life (2024) and The Life of Freedom (2026), Martin Hägglund and Thomas Khurana both attempt to do this by redefining freedom in relation to the concept of life. According to Hägglund, we have to start from this life in its finitude, to understand freedom anew as way of collectively giving meaning to our limited time. According to Khurana, we have to trace autonomy back to living self-determination, to gain the freedom to seize and transform our lives, rather than succumbing to it in the attempt to master it. Both approaches stand in tension with the capitalist logic of exploitation and the neoliberal mode of political rule. At Roter Salon, Martin Hägglund and Thomas Khurana will comment on each other’s books and discuss with Rahel Jaeggi how we can redefine our relationship to ourselves, to nature, and to others through a living form of freedom: how self-determination can be reimagined beyond capitalism and liberalism.