Generally, my research asks the question: Can transforming the self transform the world? I answer yes, but only if we think of self-transformation – or ‘askesis’ – as something more than an isolated, individual project whose political import, if it has one, starts and ends with the hope that many individual self-transformations will amount to a broader world-transformation.
I aim to develop a sufficiently nuanced theory of what self-transformation has entailed and could entail in its political valences. Properly understood, effective asceticism is always a collective undertaking in constant dialectical relation with broad economic and political structures/strategies and local, concrete institutions.
The title that I give to my general research agenda is “global political asceticisms.” I undertake the global, contextual, and comparative study of organized systems for the training and modification of bodily and mental capacities. Most recently, I have been exploring Gandhi’s ascetic activism and the ashram as an “ascetic technology” for the generation of anticolonial and anticapitalist political agency.
Books (in progress)
The City and Self-Transformation: Michel Foucault and the Death of Politics
Book manuscript workshop info
Simone Weil, Labour, and the (Post)Marxist Tradition (edited by William Tilleczek and Pascale Devette)
Dissertation
Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism. Available here
Recipient of the APSA Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in a Topic of Political Philosophy
List of publications
(Please email me if you would like a PDF of any of the below for personal research use)
“Training the Philosopher King: Ancient Models of Political Action in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault.” Journal of the Philosophy of History (2024, forthcoming).
“The Aristotelean Ethic and the Spirit of Neoliberalism: Askesis and Capitalism Today,” in Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Ed. Burkhard Fehr and Panagiotis Roilos (Leiden/Boston: Brill, August 2024), 430-456.
“Between Authority and Care: Plato’s Crito as Defense of the Philosophical Life.” Dionysius, 39 (July 2024), 97-129.
“Simone Weil’s ‘Rationalisation’: Translated from French & Annotated,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 64-74.
“Human Being, Working Body, Working Day,” Global Labour Journal, 15(1) (January 2024), 58-63.
“On the Ownership of the Means of Training: Domination, Asceticism, and Capacities of Resistance.” Theory & Event, 26(4) (October 2023), 701-726.
“(Review of) Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 34 (2023): 52-56.
“(Review of) Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self: John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation.” Journal of Foucault Studies, No. 32 (2022): 388-391.
“Graffiti Walls: Arts-Based Mental Health Knowledge Translation with Young People in Secondary Schools,” in Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Ed. Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy. London: Routledge, 2021. (With Katherine Boydell et al.).
In addition to the above listed works, I currently have essays under review on the following themes:
Anticolonial ethics of self-cultivation and asceticism as anticolonial practice of liberation in thinkers such as Gandhi and Frederick Douglass (co-authored with Dimitri M’Bama)
AI technology’s impact on translation as an intercultural practice, and the attendant loss of skills for mutual comprehension and global dialogue
Inés Valdez’ work on racial capitalism, migration, and the failure of the left to meet the challenges of contemporary emancipatory democracy, in conversation with Frantz Fanon
A historical survey of the moralization of wealth and poverty in the ancient world
These works serve as first studies towards a second book project that is tentatively entitled: Social Domination and Political Asceticism: History, Theory, Strategy.