From: Justin Murphy <justin@theotherlifenow.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 12:05 PM
Subject: The Eutrapelia and Austerity of Ivan Illich (save the dates)
To: <michelsub2004@gmail.com>
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben recently wrote that the work of Ivan Illich—misunderstood, misrepresented, and underrated for decades—is finally seeing its "hour of legibility." This is why we are pleased to be launching the sixth course in the IndieThinkers.org course system, dedicated to the famous anarchist Catholic priest from Croatia. After previous courses on Deleuze, Jung, Bataille, Leo Strauss, and René Girard, we are excited to give Ivan Illich his due in this esteemed pantheon. I'm writing you with a minor update to our schedule for the course, so you can save the dates and get ready to enroll shortly. But before I do that, I want to share a word from the course instructor, the British philosopher Nina Power. In our recent podcast on Ivan Illich, Nina said: One of the things that Illich does really well is he beautifully resurrects concepts and terms. One of his words is eutrapelia, which he translates as graceful playfulness, which he thinks we need to bring back into our personal relationships. It's an ancient term.
To be convivial, obviously, is to live with, but not just to live, but to thrive, in this kind of graceful playfulness. The idea that social interaction doesn't have to be the mediated relation of people as things, in terms of exchange and use, but rather a kind of beautiful game, if you like. And so he uses conviviality against the expansion of technology, basically. He wants to limit tools, so that they serve eutrapelia.
Also, austerity. He tries to resurrect this word "austerity," which is even more interesting to do now, because austerity became an economic term that was used to punish countries like Britain after economic crashes. It doesn't have very nice associations.
But for Illich, he takes the concept of austerity from Aquinas: he talks about it as the foundation of friendship. And so austerity then is the “austerity of virtue, which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from, or destructive of, personal relatedness.” Austerity allows space for beautiful or graceful relationality, by limiting distractions.
Already, one can sense how Illich's worldview disrupts contemporary ideological coordinates. We think this is one of the best reasons to study Illich right now, at a time when public language is so badly suffocated by politics and dubious ideological mappings. Nina's intensive 8-week course on Ivan Illich is nearing its start. Here are the key dates.
Sincerely, Justin Murphy Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 113 Cherry St, Seattle, WA 98104-2205 |
