4. Bodily Economies

‘Bodily Economies’ asks how we perform as human capital within contemporary capital and conceives the body as an economy within which wider economies, both financial and psychic, intersect. It focuses on the recent trend towards wellness as a post-millennial, secular belief system that revolves around the ritual and rhetoric of self-care, a phenomenon that transfers the vocabulary of corporate finance to conceptions of individual wellbeing. Mapping the movement from a Foucauldian ‘care of the self’ towards a neoliberal, reflexive, self-care, we argue that the body-ego and ego-ideal initiate a trend for an ostensibly holistic approach to the mind-body paradigm of wellness. This chapter analyzes how leisure becomes the site of labor, via a study of late Freudian social thinking as developed through Herbert Marcuse.