The Loss of the Senses
The Loss of the Senses comprises eighteen essays that Ivan Illich wrote between 1987 and 1998 and continued to edit until the end of his life. This collection is unknown to the English-speaking world.
The essays cut across academic disciplines and range over different facets of contemporary life. Included among the many topics are the roots of the service economy, the history of the gaze, the idea of technology as a Western invention, and the co-related eclipse of the university and the text in the twenty-first century.
Despite the variety of subjects treated, these essays cohere for two reasons. As Illich's Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis did before, they confirm that being immersed in a technological milieu disables our native capacities to learn, heal, and move. Furthermore, they imply that we must deeply historicize the present to rightly understand the nature and effects of present-day socio-technical systems.
The Loss of the Senses holds up "the mirror of the past," in which Illich recognizes the looming figure of the contemporary man without senses. He incisively argues that the techno-scientific cloud that now envelops us withers the realm of our felt experience. For example, our "age of the show" yokes the ubiquitous screen to an eye that can no longer see but, like a camera, can only record what it is shown.
Illich also reminds us of the ever-present possibility of "ascetical practices" that can enliven our senses and thwart the dissolution of our embodied sensibilities.
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