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Jan 17, 2026
The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other
From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation
Summary
In The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation (Columbia UP, 2025), Daniel Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann terms “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding of “self-purification” as integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Each reading furnishes Wyche with a lexicon of concepts and practices that he develops with great care toward a critical account of the self in relation to others.
Daniel Louis Wyche is a Senior Scholar with the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana.
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