@article{Self-Overcoming::2185,
      recid = {2185},
      author = {Wyche, Daniel L},
      title = {The Politics of Self-Overcoming: Spiritual Exercises and  Political Liberation from Michel Foucault to Martin Luther  King Jr.},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-03},
      pages = {347},
      abstract = {This dissertation develops the underspecified political  consequences of what I call the category of practices of  ethical self-overcoming. This grouping consists in Michel  Foucault’s ethics of the care of the self; Pierre Hadot’s  “spiritual exercises;” what the French sociologist of labor  Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort;” and what  Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of  “self-purification” integral to direct action. I define  this category as exercises intentionally taken up in order  to bring about an ethical transformation within practicing  subjects. I argue that these conceptions are each  vulnerable to what Friedmann calls political “moralism,”  wherein the political lives of groups and systems amount to  the mere aggregation of individual ethical behavior.  

Taking that challenge seriously, I argue that any robust  conception of ethical self-change must be able to  effectively counter the moralist charge. On that critical  foundation however, I demonstrate in turn that this  category can instead collectively articulate an  understanding in which the care of the self, the care of  the other, and care of the community become coterminous. I  do so through a reading of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus  Boycott, understood as a collective political-religious  exercise. I analyze primary-source documentation of the  non-violent training workshops and first-person accounts of  the daily walk to work, as exercises of ethical-political  self-change. Insofar as these practices serve as the  non-reductive condition for efficacious political  transformation, they constitute a representative space in  which the care of the self and care of the other are  necessarily indistinguishable. In so doing, they provide a  formal model for a politics of self-change immune to the  moralist charge. On this reading, the Boycott is a  representative space in which caring for oneself and caring  for others are necessarily indistinguishable, thus  articulating a new and theoretically fruitful conception of  the relationship of changing selves to changing material  conditions.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2185},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2185},
}