[P2P-F] Fwd: The Eutrapelia and Austerity of Ivan Illich (save the dates)

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Justin Murphy <justin at theotherlifenow.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 12:05 PM
Subject: The Eutrapelia and Austerity of Ivan Illich (save the dates)
To: <michelsub2004 at 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
<https://click.convertkit-mail4.com/zlum896rwztnh2mlgoap/m2h7h6uoom255pcm/aHR0cHM6Ly9zaGFyZS50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL3MvNDBkOTA0NjQ=>,
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.

   - This Monday the 26th we're hosting a free workshop with the world's
   leading expert on Illich, David Cayley. Register now.
   <https://click.convertkit-mail4.com/zlum896rwztnh2mlgoap/e0hg68k3c0ukkqmvv3u8/aHR0cHM6Ly9sdS5tYS9tYWhsOTV6NA==>
   - Enrollment will officially open on the following *Thursday, July 29*
   (I'll email you that morning).
   - We'll host an Orientation/Meet-and-Greet on *Thursday, August 5th* at
   10am Central / 4pm London.
   - Then *group discussion seminars every following Thursday,* at the same
   time, for 8 weeks.

Attend workshop with Illich biographer David Cayley
<https://click.convertkit-mail4.com/zlum896rwztnh2mlgoap/z2h84z98a7uoop5662hp/aHR0cHM6Ly9sdS5tYS9tYWhsOTV6NA==>

Sincerely,

Justin Murphy

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