Alexandra BACALU
Academic Year:
2025/2026
Field of Study:
History
Research Program:
Trust
Affiliation:
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest
Position:
Lecturer
Country:
Romania
One variety of popular therapeutic discourse that has become particularly prominent across media in the last two decades is (neo)Stoic self-help—a recent movement led by a robust network of historians, philosophers, psychotherapists, and self-help authors that includes Donald J. Robertson, John Sellars, Massimo Pigliucci, Gregory Lopez, Ryan Holiday, and others. Although this revival of Stoic practical ethics has centred around these key figures, this is a much larger trend shaping contemporary self-help literature and popular philosophy, online advice blogs and forums, and self-care content on social media. My concern in this project is to account for this latest resurgence of Stoicism as a key dimension of contemporary self-help/self-care and to investigate the intellectual and cultural transformations that define—and make possible—this recent phenomenon. In particular, I am interested in the way in which the human subject is (re)defined at the intersection between a renewed Stoic self-disciplining ethos and contemporary therapeutic practices emphasizing self-affirmation, especially in terms of individual vulnerability/fragility and resilience/strength. My hope is that this will allow for a careful examination of the paradoxes and contradictions intrinsic to the movement, with an eye to both the intellectual-conceptual and cultural-political forces upholding such tensions. In the end, I interrogate the extent to which Stoic self-help has the potential to offer an alternative conception of the self going against (neo)liberal narratives of resilience, and provide valid answers to some of the main cultural issues facing the contemporary world—whether in terms of political leadership, economic and ecological crisis, or gender politics.