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Ungovernable Counter-Conduct: Ivan Illich’s Critique of Governmentality

Christiaens,Tim
Abstract
Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of ungovernable counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo.
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Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Copenhagen Business School, Department of International Business Communication. All rights reserved.
Date
2023-09-10
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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FoucaultIllich.pdf
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Keywords
Governmentality, Counter-conducts, Ivan Illich, Decolonization, Zapatismo
Citation
Christiaens, T 2023, 'Ungovernable Counter-Conduct: Ivan Illich’s Critique of Governmentality', Foucault Studies, vol. 34, pp. 25-51. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i34.6934
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/79587
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