The leading thinker retraces the philosophical discussions around care

We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, but our culture tends to thematise the bodies of desire and to ignore the bodies of care—ill bodies in need of self-care and social care.

The discussion of care has a long philosophical tradition. Philosophy of Care retraces some episodes in this tradition—beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander Bogdanov, having passed through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The central question is who the proper subject of care is? Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the dominating mechanisms of control.

Boris Groys is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU. He has published numerous books, including On the New, Introduction to Antiphilosophy, The Total Art of Stalinism, and The Communist Postscript.