Gandhi, Foucault, and the Politics of Self-Care

This essay engages Gandhi’s thought in two staged conversations. The first brings his writings on dietary self-cultivation into conversation with contemporary discourses of food politics. The second brings his preoccupation with self-care into conversation with Foucault’s later work on practices of the self. Gandhi and Foucault’s respective conceptualizations of self-care might productively supplement one another while responding to the peculiar pathologies of neoliberalism. Foucault’s “practices of the self” contain friendly amendments that allow us to understand Gandhi’s yogic self-control as a response to power relations; while Gandhi’s call to political action ensures that work on the self is not overly-individualized or apolitical.