The Guardian (UK National Daily Newspaper)

Monday December 9, 2002

Obituary - Ivan Illich, 1926 - 2002

Andrew Todd and Franco La Cecla

Ivan Illich

A polymath and polemicist, his greatest contribution was as an archaeologist
of ideas, rather than an ideologue.

Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world's great
thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10
languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia
and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led
to a constant criss-crossing of the globe in the last two decades.

Best known for his polemical writings against western institutions from the
1970s, which were easily caricatured by the right and were, equally,
disdained by the left for their attacks on the welfare state, in the last 20
years of his life he became an officially forgotten, troublesome figure
(like Noam Chomsky today in mainstream America). This position obscures the
true importance of his contribution. His critique of modernity was founded
on a deep understanding of the birth of institutions in the 13th century, a
critical period in church history which enlightened all of his work, whether
about gender, reading or materiality. He was far more significant as an
archaeologist of ideas, someone who helped us to see the present in a truer
and richer perspective, than as an ideologue.

Illich was born in Vienna into a family with Jewish, Dalmatian and Catholic
roots. His was an errant life, and he never found a home again after his
family had to leave Vienna in 1941. He was educated in that city and then in
Florence before reading histology and crystallography at Florence
University.

He decided to enter the priesthood and studied theology and philosophy at
the Vatican's Gregorian University from 1943 to 1946. He started work as a
priest in an Irish and Puerto Rican parish in New York, popularising the
church through close contact with the Latino community and respect for their
traditions. He applied these same methods on a larger scale when, in 1956,
he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, and
later, in 1961, as founder of the Centro Intercultural de Documentacisn
(CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, a broad-based research centre which offered
courses and briefings for missionaries arriving from North America.

The radicalism of CIDOC attracted many young North American priests, but it
became a victim of its own success in a rightwing climate, and was wound up
10 years later by the consent of its members. (Illich said of its director,
Valentina Borremans, that "she realised that the soul of this free,
independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising
influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which
will corrupt it".) By this time Illich had also resigned active duty as a
priest, thereby sidestepping a potentially bitter conflict with the
conservative Vatican authorities, who now opposed CIDOC.

Illich retained a lifelong base in Cuernavaca, but travelled constantly from
this point on. His intellectual activity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on
major institutions of the industrialised world. In seven concise,
non-academic books he addressed education (Deschooling Society, 1971),
technological development (Tools For Conviviality, 1973), energy, transport
and economic development (Energy And Equity, 1974), medicine (Medical
Nemesis, 1976) and work (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its
Professional Enemies, 1978, and Shadow Work, 1981). He analysed the
corruption of institutions which, he said, ended up by performing the
opposite of their original purpose. He observed the roots of this process in
the institutionalisation of charity in the 13th-century church (he
frequently cited the Latin maxim "corruptio optimi pessima", the corruption
of the best is the worst).

His 1982 book, Gender, argued that the difference between feminine and
masculine domains had been sacrificed to the idea of neutral work,
capitalism creating and depending on the simplistic coupling of the male
wage labourer and the woman as mother to produce new workers.

The late 1980s and 1990s saw the flowering of his interests. There was the
historicity of materials (H2O And The Waters of Forgetfulness, 1985),
literacy (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind, 1988, co-written
with Barry Sanders) and the origins of book-learning (In The Vineyard Of The
Text, 1993). The latter volume was, he said, an attempt to understand the
transition from the book to the computer screen through the prism of the
changes in 13th-century reading practice.

In essays, papers and through the work of his collaborators, he addressed
themes as diverse as the history of the gaze, friendship, hospitality,
bioethics, body history (particularly with his close collaborator, the
sociologist Barbara Duden) and space.

Illich lived frugally, but opened his doors to collaborators and drop-ins
with great generosity, running a practically non-stop educational process
which was always celebratory, open-ended and egalitarian at his final bases
in Bremen, Cuernavaca and Pennsylvania.

His charisma, brilliance and spirituality were clear to anyone who
encountered him; these qualities sustained him in a heroic level of activity
over the last 10 years in the context of terrible suffering caused by a
disfiguring cancer. Following the thesis of Medical Nemesis, he administered
his own medication against the advice of doctors, who proposed a largely
sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible.

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French
next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die
surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning
centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised.

- Ivan Illich, thinker, born September 4 1926; died December 2 2002

 

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