Daniel Wyche, "The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation" (Columbia UP, 2025)

New Books in Critical Theory · Jan 17, 2026 · 1h 17m

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…