Ivan Illich's Influence upon Agamben: A Theory of Institutions

At least three interrelated gestures uniquely define Ivan Illich’s position among what might once have been deemed the Left, and these two features draw his work close to Agamben, and if Illich may not be said to be in all of his work strictly speaking a philosopher (determining certain of these characteristics empirically rather than as rationally explicable universal and necessary features of the essence), then Agamben may be said to provide a philosophical form of the same claims, or their philosophical grounding: 1) unlike many of the more communistically minded of today’s left, Illich resists global gestures and above all the imposition upon marginalised natures and communities the impositions from above that national and supra-national bodies would impose upon them: his early work against missionary activity was the paradigm for this; 2) these impositions tend to assume the form of laws, imposed in a way befitting their authorising institutions, globally and without discrimination or differentiation; for Illich this both destroys the natural or habitual skills with which those not subject to laws in this way cope with the problems that the law presents itself as solving; 3) once such laws have been put in place or ‘instituted’, once these institutions grow beyond a certain size, they immediately engender counterproductive effects. We might summarise: local skills or ‘forms of life’ are destroyed by a global, legalising subsumption of human community, which thereby precisely destroy what they avow themselves to protect. Effectively this is one construal of what Agamben deems the ‘eclipse of the political’, the depoliticisation of the human community and its overpowering by expert or ‘technocratic’ rule. To the best of my knowledge, we find no reference to Illich in Agamben’s work prior to his political turn in the new century, and these references are concentrated in the last ten or fifteen years, suggesting that it is in such a context that Illich assumed the importance for Agamben that he did. Illich is prone less to speak of law than he is of 'institutions', and his work might allow us to understand that there is a somewhat concealed theory of 'institution' in Agamben's work, but it is so heavily bound up with theological terms and the notions of the Kingdom and the Church, that it is sometimes difficult to extrapolate from it to understand institutions beyond the religious. We shall attempt to see whether Illich can illuminate the way in which Agamben understands the nature and the history (not to speak of the future) of our institutions.