The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world?

Join Daniel Louis Wyche in a discussion of his remarkably nuanced new book, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other, an examination of the political implications of what he calls "practices of ethical self-change." Exploring the ways five exemplary twentieth-century thinkers relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” the book traces their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.”

Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.

Daniel will be joined in conversation by Clio's founder Timothy Don. Copies of The Care of the Self... are available for purchase with your ticket.

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