The Illich Conversations

Four videos from this autumn's online sessions

One of the last photographs I’ve come across of Ivan Illich. This was taken in Octopec, Mexico in 1999 with his oldest friend, Lee Hoinacki, and Jean-Michel Djian, author of Ivan Illich: l'homme qui a libéré l'avenir.

‘On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
Four evenings of conviviality!’

I promise there won’t be too many more of these strained rewrites of the Twelve Days of Christmas! But as I’ve been wrapping up the year that was 2023, one of the remaining tasks was to put together the recordings from the Ivan Illich Conversations that took place over Zoom in October and November.

This series was convened by

David Benjamin Blower

and Marcus Rempel, as a follow-up to an earlier online reading group around David Cayley’s book Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey.

In the opening session, I was in conversation with Cayley, who first met Illich in the early 1970s and collaborated with him on two books, Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future. This was a particularly sweet encounter for me, as I’ve been listening to David’s radio work and reading his books for twenty years, but until this event, we had not had the occasion to speak.

In the second session, David was in conversation with

Samuel Ewell

, the author of Faith Seeking Conviviality: Reflections on Ivan Illich, Christian Mission and the Promise of Life Together.

In the third session, Sam and I picked up the threads, talking about Illich’s ‘One No’ to the singular trajectory of industrial modernity and the ‘Many Yeses’ that can lie on the far side of such a turning.

Finally, the series was brought to a close by

Michelle Berry Lane

and Katharine Bubel, with a conversation about Illich and the sacred feminine, picking up on his use of the myth of Epimetheus and Pandora in the closing chapter of Deschooling Society.

I’m grateful to Marcus and David for bringing this series together – and to those of you who joined us for the live sessions. Looking ahead to 2024, I hope to bring together some further series of live conversations in collaboration with other Substackers, open to our paid subscribers, so watch this space.

Meanwhile, you can also listen to the recordings of the Illich Conversations as episodes in Marcus’s podcast, The Ferment.

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This is one in a series of posts that I cued up before going offline for the holidays. I’ll be back at my desk on 10 January 2024. Meanwhile, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

DH