Getting Ivan Illich Straight
Has his "hour of legibility" finally come?
In 1972, the French broadcaster and leftist Catholic Jean-Marie Domenach interviewed his friend Ivan Illich for a television program. Their 51-minute conversation took place on a Parisian park bench, in front of a neoclassical statue of the goddess Pandora, aptly enough for Illich’s passionate invocation of Greek mythology.
A version of this remarkable video with English subtitles is here.
The video description posted on Vimeo includes the following:
“The conversation ranges over the myth of Pandora, Epimetheus and Prometheus, the replacement of hope with expectation, compulsory schooling as the ‘organ of reproduction’ of knowledge-capitalist societies, the need for a politics of consensually-determined upper limits on the applications of technology... and personal friendship as the bedrock of work in the world.” If you are unfamiliar with Illich, I hope that paragraph alone will draw you into the world of his thought.
Watching Illich’s dazzling style of delivery and expressive manner, it’s easy to imagine why he often cast a spell over his listeners. French was only one of his half-dozen or so languages but he speaks it here with a near-effortless clarity, so far as I can tell.
Who today are the Illichians? They are the advocates of the commons (notably the remarkable David Bollier), of limits to technology, of bodily autonomy, of degrowth.
Given Illich’s Catholic vocation (he never renounced his priesthood but merely asked to be relieved of his priestly duties) and his prefiguring of so many of Pope Francis’ ideas, one might hope the Catholic intellectual community is taking him up again, an idea I recently pondered in this article.
A final recommendation: The royal road into Illich’s thought is now Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, by his friend, the Canadian broadcaster David Cayley. It is much more than a biography and brings Illich’s ideas to bear on many (if not most!) of the issues in our current polycrisis. In fact, it’s one of those books which will shake you to the foundations.
See you next time—peace.
Interested to see that Giorgio Agamben wrote the foreword to The Powerless Church. I look forward to diving into that book as well as into An Intellectual Journey.
Your definition of "Illichians" today is the old standard definition, but I am doubtful it even describes Illich, at least the late Illich pondering the mystery of corruptio optimi pessima and pointing his finger squarely at the church and its successors in the modern state and other institutions.
Throughout his life, Illich was famous for denouncing all helpers and attempts to help. His only institutional effort in Cuernevaca only existed to debunk and demoralize missionaries from churches, states, and NGOs. His taks was to understand and to teach, but his message accentuated his pessimism for any project beyond hospitality and and organizing unit greater than the humble meal and conversation among friends but open to the stranger.
You know the message, but I have never believed that any of you (especially those whose response is to take to the internet and monetized platforms) have truly heard it, or believe it. You are still, as Illich said to one disciple seeking to have his project blessed, "whores who want to send their kids to Harvard."
You know better, but you cannot resist the addiction to doing something and simply wait to receive something that never comes, one of the important "amulets" from Weil that Michael Sacasas recently mentioned in his Substack. (I wish I could still say his blog of wholly owned software and writing.)
Acceptance, maybe some mitigation, and certainly suffering what "ruin" is coming and what we are already in — with conviviality, hospitality, humor and joy — are what Illich truly advises.