# NATURA ALIENATA: Two Thinkers between *Sinnesverlust* and *Bodenlosigkeit;* Ivan Illich and Vilém Flusser 

**by Leonardo Christopher Eck Glenewinkel**

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At a certain moment in the 1995 documentary film about the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), the narrator says: “Wenn wir auch den Himmel über uns verloren haben, so doch nicht schon den Boden unter uns” (even if we have lost the heaven above us, not so, as yet, the ground beneath us).[^1] But what if we have indeed lost, or better, are losing, the ground too? I propose to seek an answer to this question by plumbing the *Lebenskreise* (spheres of life) of two great thinkers: Ivan Illich (1926-2002) and Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Observed synoptically, both biographies shed light on the question of the *Sinnesverlust* (loss of sense) and *Bodenlosigkeit* (groundlessness) in our daily lives.

Both thinkers were born in the doomed interwar period between 1918 and 1939, in which the final downfall of Old Europe was incubated. Illich was born in Vienna, Flusser in Prague, so both shared a post-Habsburgian heritage, the intellectual sphere of *Alt-Mitteleuropa*, but on different sides: Illich was born in the defeated one since the Habsburg Empire was vanquished, whereas Flusser, was born on the victorious side since Czechoslovakia attained independence after World War I. Both grew up in a plurilingual background: Illich with his Italian-German-French linguistic skills and Flusser with his German-Czech skills, and for both, more languages were to come. Both were forced to flee their nations, driven by the same diabolic war machine of the Nazis: Illich after 13 March 1938, the day of the *Anschluss* (annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany) and Flusser after the 15 March 1939, with the military occupation of Czechoslovakia. Illich found protection in Florence Italy, in 1942 and began his study of theology at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana in Rome by November 1944\. Flusser, socially less protected and ‘racially’ more exposed by being a Jew from both sides of his parents, fled his country a few weeks after the Nazi occupation of Prague. Flusser and wife Edith reached London, but already in 1940, they decided to leave for Brazil. Illich on the other hand, arrived on North American shores only at the end of 1951, when the horror of the war was already over. What Portuguese-speaking Brazil was for Flusser, the Spanish-speaking part of South America, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, were for Illich. Two “Old Europeans” were forced and decided to live in a Western-non-European environment: for them a mentally virgin world, far away from their acquired habits and ways of thinking.

However, Europe remained decisive for them both.  Between 1979 and 1981 Illich held lectures at the Kassel University in Germany, in 1981 he spent a year of research and lecturing at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and from 1983 until his death in 2002 he gave lectures in Marburg, Oldenburg, and, consistently, at the University of Bremen. Flusser, in contrast, lived as a real refuge with all its uncertainties: for him, Europe was at once a great temptation and a great abomination, but already in 1972, the Flusser couple went back to the old continent, beginning an intense peregrination between England, France, Italy and, only later, Germany.[^2]

Despite these biographical similarities, there is no evidence of an intellectual or personal intersection between these two men during this period. Though Illich was in and out of Brazil, between 1961 and 1971, there are no records of him meeting Flusser there. Moreover, it seems very unlikely that they did since their intellectual pursuits at the time were not the same. The themes that were central to Illich in the decades between 1960 and 1980 were not at all relevant to Flusser, who in 1965 published in Portuguese *A história do diablo* (History of the Devil), and in 1983, published, *Für eine Philosophie der Fotographie* (For a Philosophy of Photography). 

Around the mid-1980s, Illich made a radical turn in his intellectual productions when the question of literacy in history became a major topic for his investigations. In 1988, he published *ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind*, co-authored with Barry Sanders.[^3] Interestingly, though Flusser did not appear in this work, his 1987 published *Die Schrift Hat schreiben eine Zukunft?* (Does Writing Have a Future?)[^4] is cited in Illich’s 1991 *In the Vineyard of the Text*.[^5] Illich also makes direct reference to Flusser’s *Im Universum der technischen Bilder* (1985) in his *The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze. A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perception (*1995\).[^6] 

Of course, we must remember and consider that Vilém Flusser died tragically on 27 November 1991\. Like Albert Camus, he died “absurdly” in a car crash, right after his second visit to his hometown Prague, after he had to flee it in 1939\. The years between 1988 and 1991 is the only period during which these two minds, who then shared a common field of interests and were more or less in the same geographical region of Nord-West Germany, could have crossed paths. As it turns out, four days before his death, on November 23, Flusser held his last public speech (*Vortrag*) in Germany in Essen, at the congress “CULTEC- Kultur und Technik im 21\. Jahrhundert”, in front of an audience of 800 people. Flusser’s speech was entitled: “Die Informationsgesellschaft. Phantom oder Realität?” (The Society of Information. Phantom or Reality?).[^7] The only personal meeting of the two that was witnessed and reported on occurred after this speech.[^8] The meeting seemed very cordial, and the two spoke as if they already knew each other. This cordiality however did not imply a meeting of minds. Indeed, the two held utterly distinct and irreconcilable views on the question of technology and man. Illich already foresaw the shadow cast by technology on the human soul and flesh, while Flusser saw in it just the next step of human development, the age of a post-humanism *ante litteram*. In May 1991, during his first seminar in Bochum, Flusser pointed out that:

\>Since the downfall of Humanism, and therefore, since the downfall of the Enlightenment, briefly, since Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we don’t have a *model of the human being* (*Menschenbild*) anymore. So, eventually, we can, within the field of science dealing with human communication, achieve a new *model of the human being* (*Menschenbild*).[^9] 

Flusser thought within his timeframe: after the horror of the Second World War, the old ways of thinking were not only rusty and unusable but also dangerous. He felt the “absurdity” of his and our time. Time was not only out of joint, but it was also completely uprooted from the firm ground of the past. In his autobiography, Flusser depicted himself as a still life, or better, using the Italian expression, as *natura morta*, as dead nature. But he still felt the drive (*drang*) to enroot within a new ground (*Boden*), a new world, a new perspective for humanity. In other words, he was looking for a new *humus*, a new firm ground on which to redefine and redesign humanity itself: 

\>The word “absurd” in its original concept means “without ground”, in the sense of being “without roots.” Like a plant, which is groundless at the very moment it is picked and placed in a vase. Flowers on a breakfast table are an example of an absurd life. If you try to consider the existence of such flowers, then it becomes possible to feel their drive to root out and to enroot in some ground. This drive of the uprooted flowers is the inner feeling of absurd life.[^10] 

Flusser describes furthermore this deeply damaged form of existence as a senseless circular movement, having nothingness as background (*Die sinnlose Kreisbewegung, mit dem Nichts als Hintergrund, ist die Stimmung des absurden Lebens*).[^11] He calls this form of experience the inner feeling of groundlessness (*Stimmung der Bodenlosigkeit)* or the consciousness of being without firm ground. But unlike Sartre or Heidegger, Flusser placed his “existential philosophy” not on an ontological level but on a historical one: Auschwitz and Hiroshima were, for him, the two fused historical moments in which the old *humanitas* ceased to exist. Already after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, he said that “reality itself crumbled, and piece by piece, fell into the abyss.” (*die Wirklichkeit bröckelte ab und fiel stückweise in den Abgrund*).[^12]

A similar feeling was experienced by a young Ivan Illich in March 1939, during the Nazi occupation of Austria: 

\>I remember the day when I became old once and for all. I cannot forget the dark clouds of March in the evening sun and the vineyard on the Sommerleite between Pötzleinsdorf and Salmannsdorf near Vienna, two days before the “Anschluss.” Until that hour it had been a certainty for me that someday I would give children to the old tower on the Dalmatian Island. Since that lonely walk, this seemed impossible. Then, as a twelve-year-old boy, I experienced the disembedding (*Ausbettung*) of the flesh from the warp and weft of history, even before a command was issued from Berlin to gas all fools in the Reich.[^13] 

Interestingly, looking back a half-century from around 1992, for both Ivan and Vilém the darkened sky of Nazism corresponded to the end of the World, a *World of Yesterday*, as the writer Stefan Zweig called it in his autobiography.

However, even if their historical experiences were similar, the consequences drawn from them by the two thinkers could not be more different. As we have already pointed out, Flusser wanted to rebuild and redesign the modern world, of course not in the image of the old one, which he detested, but in the image of the new upcoming era of technology. His *Bodenlosigkeit*, his historical absence of firm ground corresponded to the need for a new beginning. Flusser tried to embody this in his biography: Brazil was for him a new beginning, and Europe was a new beginning as well: whether it was Robion, France, or Meran—a multicultural city placed in the Italian Alps but historically and linguistically linked to the German-speaking world where he and his wife decided briefly to live—it didn’t matter. But besides these personal situations, Flusser wanted to re-think the history of the human condition *generaliter*, in its wholeness, and for this reason, he perceived the new beginning as an awareness of being historically placed. In other words, he was aware that our “Menschenbild”, the model of how we conceived and conceive mankind is the result of history, or, as he pointed out in a very poignant and almost profane way:

\>I don’t believe that the models of mankind (*Menschenbilder*) follow each other, like in a sandwich, but I believe that they insert into each other (*ineinandergreifen*) and that all previously established models of mankind are present in us. This contemporaneity (*Gleichzeitigkeit*) of the past is, I believe, an important aspect of the so-called post-historical consciousness.[^14]

For Flusser, even if there was no way back, the highway of history, which carried forward him as an individual and mankind as a historical concept, was still there, ready to be redesigned in word and representation by progress. This becomes clear when he argues that there is a dialectical interdependence between the *image* and the *word*, in which imagination plays a central role.

\>Imagination is a method to bypass alienation, to find an orientation within a lost world. It is a method for hunting, (Lascaux), for making tourism (Michelin-Atlas), and for project-making (projections). But imagination can twist, dialectically speaking, and become a hallucination.  The images that result from such an imagination are not mediations with the world anymore, but on the contrary, they become opaque surfaces, which hide the world. The vectors of signification are reversed, and they show not the world anymore but the maker of such images. These images are not instruments of orientation, because mankind has become an instrument of its own instruments: it adores these images. It’s against the danger of such an idolatry, of an imagination which has become an intensified alienation, that writing was invented. Historically speaking, iconoclasm is the theoretical response against the madness of idolatry.[^15]

According to this dialectic history, the original sense of writing was determined by the need to limit the magic power of images, in case they could not reflect the world anymore as true vectors of signification. Flusser, at this point, makes no difference between the images produced during prehistoric times, like in Lascaux, and the images produced in modern times like the tourist maps of cities or highways. Both are seen as orientation tools and both, as well as the “techno-images”[^16] produced by the virtual world, were always endangered by their inner dialectic to become “opaque,” in other words, senseless like hallucinations. The medium has become not only the message, but the image produced by these media has become the only true world.  But in Flusser’s post-historical worldview, this was part of the same process, or at least, the risk of man becoming the instrument of his instruments was part of the equation of history. 

On the contrary, Illich felt the inner contradiction of the new beginning of this technogenic era as a brave new world, rebuilt on the ashes of Old Europe. What was emerging, he felt, was more like a *Golem* than a *New-Adam*, and this new Golem-like technogenic anti-world was, for him, a real *Absurdistan*. In an interview in 2001, shortly before his death in December 2002, Illich summarized his intellectual effort: 

\>If there is a reason for me to understand the rules by which this Absurdistan, in which we all live, works, it is because I and my friends want to know where we are NOT involved. \[We want to understand\] how to avoid that our souls, our senses, and our inner world are influenced.[^17] 

Illich was not a dream-walker or a backward-looking romantic. He feared the disincarnating abstraction of a new way of thinking for he knew that “we stand on soil, not on Earth. From soil we come, and to the soil we bequeath our excrements and remains.”[^18] At the same time, he was ready to acknowledge “sadly, but without nostalgia…the pastness of the past.”[^19] Illich knew that the epoch in which he was living had lost the heaven above, and he worried that it was also losing the firm ground, the soil, the humus on which humans had always lived and died. Technological advances, masked as progress, were creating an “absurd” bubble in which the senses atrophied. This new realm of Absurdistan was not Flusser’s *Bodenlosigkeit*: it went beyond. Illich wanted to unshackle thought to clean our “souls, senses and inner worlds” from the cold breath of *Unsinn*, of the Senselessness, of the demonic *Sinnesverlust*, the loss of human-connecting senses. 

In his 1992 written letter to Helmut Becker, Illich points out again, how the world in which he lived has become unnatural and absurd, how as a very young boy he felt the “disembedding (*Ausbettung*) of the flesh from the warp and weft of history.” And this *Ausbettung* of the living Flesh was perceived as an ontological rupture in the framework of the world. And this rupture was symbolized by evoking the historical decision of the Nazis to “gas all fools in the Reich.” In other words, the harmonic cosmos where reason could co-exist with foolishness because foolishness was still seen as the “dark and unseen side” of universal wisdom had ceased to exist. The original nature of man was mutilated, and for Illich, this mutilation was far away from being completed. In this letter, he continues: 

\>Genocide and Human Genome-Project; the death of the forests and hydroponics; heart transplants and medicide on insurance—these all are equally tasteless, without smell, impalpable, and un-worldly. We, who are just old enough and yet young enough to have lived through the end of Nature, the end of a world proportionate to the senses, should be able to die like no one else.[^20]

The English translation doesn’t quote a central passage: “Die Adventsfeier um die Erlanger Leiche zelebriert die Bodenlosigkeit des weltlosen Unmenschen” (the advent-festivity around the dead body of the Elanger-woman celebrates the groundlessness of the worldless unhuman being). Here Illich recalls the media event that took place in Erlangen in 1992, where a brain-dead pregnant woman was held in intensive care for many weeks to allow her unborn fetus to survive and to eventually be brought into the world. The fetus did not survive. For Illich, this was nothing but a pure expression of *natura alienata*, something natural made unnatural. 

For Flusser the *Bodenlosigkeit*, the absence of firm ground was a historic event, an apocalyptic one, but for him that disaster could still be undone by fostering a new awareness of the upcoming technological possibilities. Illich’s *Bodenlosigkeit*, on the contrary, stated the undeniable fact that humanity was turning unhuman, that the ground of very human existence had turned into a void, its *humus* had turned un-human, becoming *natura alienata*. 

Illich’s worldview is open to the awareness that “progress” has a high price that might include the human as such. The difference between Illich’s view and Flusser’s future-orientated worldview is evident in their differing ideas about the *custodia oculorum*, the disposition to protect our eyes from the illusions of the world. In an unpublished note, Flusser writes:

   
\>The world of images which bathes us does not only press against us. It is also the result of our own discrimination between the images that approach us. It is we who are responsible, in part, for visual pollution. We have only to shut our eyes to shut those images out which we feel that they pollute us. But such a shutting of eyes, such a blinking which permits some images to be seen and others not, is not counter-vision \[…\] Counter-vision intends to see how we are related to things, how we give meaning to them. And, of course, how, thus having provided the things with a specific meaning, we then change them. In sum: the intention of counter-vision is to see our being-in-the-world, not the world itself. Therefore counter-vision is “abstract,” in the sense of having its attention abstracted from the things of the world.[^21] 

Here Flusser realizes that man-created imagery can be a “visual pollution” for our minds, but then he analyzes and describes the functioning structures of the technogenic gaze, which he calls “counter-vision.” Counter-vision reveals our relations with the world but not the world itself, and by showing these relations we are aware of ourselves, but in an abstract and disrupted way. In counter-vision the human relationships get trapped in the network of abstraction. 

For Illich, this would exactly correspond to the *corruptio optimi.*[^22] If Flusser pleaded for a new conscious use of the technogenic world, Illich took a more anarchic but reflective path, as he recalls in the posthumous book of essays titled *Le perte des sens* from 2004: 

\>I plead for a rebirth of ascetic practices to keep alive our senses, in the lands devastated by the ‘show’, in the midst of overwhelming information, perpetual advice, intensive diagnostics, therapeutic management, the invasion of counselors, terminal care, and breathtaking speed. [^23]

Illich hope was not directed toward a new religion in technology. Unlike Flusser, who preferred to analyze rather than criticize the new order of things, Illich aimed toward incarnated human relationships. For him, friendship was the only true human *Heimat*, the only real *patria coelestis*, the new-old heaven embracing this worldly and earthy gift, called *conditio humana*. The key formula of this human-divine friendship can be found in *ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind*.[^24] Right at the beginning Illich quotes a letter of Hugo of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century cleric, who kindly and softly whispers in our hearts:

\>I know for sure that *love never fails* (1 Cor., 13:8). I was wandering around like a pilgrim, and I came to you in a foreign country; and it was almost not foreign to me, because I found friends there: but I don’t know if I made \[them friends\], or if they made me \[their friend\].” [^25]

The comparison of these two remarkable thinkers should not end up in an *aut-aut*. It’s not the time to choose one side or the other, but the time to choose to be at home in an absurd world. Italo Calvino, an Italian writer whom Illich recalled quite often, once said:

   
\>The hell of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here, the hell we live in every day, that we make by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.[^26]

Here we can find the very essence of an Illichian answer to the *Sinnesverlust* of the world: to recognize “who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell” and make this endure by giving to it its own “space,” a place to dwell and taste the sense of life. 

On the other hand, Flusser’s analysis can help us to gain more consciousness about this “hell.” As a thought-experiment, I would suggest what Calvino was to Illich, Machiavelli could be for Flusser, as when the great Florentine in a letter on 17 May 1521 to a friend, Francesco Guicciardini said “I believe that this should be the true way how to go to Paradise: to recognize the path to Hell and avoid it” (*io credo che questo sarebbe il vero modo ad andare in Paradiso: inparare la via dello Inferno per fuggirla*).”[^27]

If Illich-Calvino encourages us to acknowledge the fact that the world is the real hell and, at the same time, to recognize that we all can choose for ourselves the non-hellish elements of this hell, so Machiavelli-Flusser inspires us to study this hell to avoid it. Both are answers to the same existential problem, and both are true. 

[^1]:  Zwischen Himmel und Höhle", Film von Burghart Schlicht und Franz Josef Wetz 1995, West-Deutscher-Rundfunk (WDR). 

[^2]:  Till now I have followed the two main biographies available for these two men: *Ivan Illich (1926-2002). Sein Leben, Sein Denken* by Martina Kaller-Dietrich, Wien, Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, Edition Seidengasse, in der Reihe: Enzyklopädie des Wiener Wissens, Band. 1, 2007; *Vilém Flusser (1920-199). Ein Leben in der Bodenlosigkeit. Biographie* by Rainer Guldin, Gustavo Bernardo, Edition Kulturwissenschaft, Band 151, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2017\. Of great help were also the brief chronological biography written by Fabio Milana and contained in: *Pervertimento del Cristianesimo. Conversazioni con David Cayley su vangelo, chiesa e modernità*, a.c.d. Fabio Milana, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2000; and for Vilém Flusser, *Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Phänomenologie der Kommunikation* by Andreas Ströhl, Köln/Weimar/Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 2013\. 

[^3]:  *ABC. Das Denken lernt Schreiben. Lesckultur und Identität.* Zusammen mit Bary Sanders. Übersetzt aus dem Amerikanischen von Kuch Cremerius, Hamburg, Hofmann und Campe, 1988\. 

[^4]:  Vilém Flusser, *Does Writing has a Future?* Translated by Nancy Ann Roth, University Minnesota Press, Electronic Mediations, Vol. 33, 2011\. 

[^5]:  Here I’m referring to the German edition of 1991, *Im Weinberg des Textes. Als das Schriftbild der Modern entstand*, Luchterhand Verlag, hrsg. Von Freimut Duve, Frankfurt am Mein, 1991, p. 180, Fn. 334; an early French version was published in 1990 with the title *L’Ere du Livre*, Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1990; the original English written text was published only in 1996: *In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon*, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996\. Here, Flusser’s books are quoted at pg. 117, fn. 6\. 

[^6]:  *Die skopische Vergangenheit Europas und die Ethik der Opsis. Plädoyer für eine Geschichte des Blickes und Blickens.* Zusammen mit Barbara Duden. In: Historische Anthropologie, 3\. Jahrgang, Heft 2, 1995, Böhlau Verlag Köln/Weimar /Wien, pp. 203-221.

[^7]:  Guldin and Bernardo, *op. cit.*, 2017, p. 345\. 

[^8]:  Here I would like to thank, *vom Herzen*, Marianne Gronemeyer, who vividly told me this anecdote, during a meeting in Friesenheim (Wiesbaden), Germany, on 30 June 2024\. 

[^9]:  “Seit dem Zusammenbruch des Humanismus, und daher seit dem Zusammenbruch der Aufklärung, also kurz gesagt, seit Auschwitz und Hiroshima, haben wir kein Menschenbild mehr \[…\] Also, vielleicht, können wir auf dem Gebiet der Forschung der menschlichen Kommunikation zu einem neuen Menschenbild gelangen.”. The translation, as well as the transcription of the German text is mine. Source: *Vilém Flusser- Die Gefahren der digitalen Kommunikation* von Michael Reitz, SWR2; Sendung: 4\. Januar 2019, Redaktion: Ralf Kölbel, Regie: Günter Maurer. 

[^10]:  “Das Wort »absurd« bedeutet ursprünglich »bodenlos«, im Sinn von »ohne Wurzel«. Etwa wie eine Pflanze bodenlos ist, wenn man sie pflückt, um sie in eine Vase zu steilen. Blumen auf dem Frühstückstisch sind Beispiele eines absurden Lebens. Wenn man versucht, sich in solche Blumen einzuleben, dann kann man ihren Drang mitfühlen, Wurzeln zu schlagen und diese Wurzeln in irgendeinen Boden zu treiben. Dieser Drang der entwurzelten Blumen ist die Stimmung des absurden Lebens,” in: Vilém Flusser, *Bodenlos. Eine philosophische Autobiographie*. Mit einem Nachwort von Milton Varga, Bensheim und Düsseldorf, Bollman Verlag, 1992, p. 9 (my translation.)

[^11]:  Flusser, *op. cit.*, 1992, p. 9\. 

[^12]:  Flusser, *op. cit.*, 1992, p. 23\. 

[^13]: “Ich erinnere mich an den Tag, an dem ich für immer vergreist bin. Ich kann die schwarzen Märzwolken in der Abendsonne nicht vergessen, und den Weinberg auf der Sommerheide zwischen Plötzleinsdorf und Salmannsdorf bei Wien, zwei Tage vor dem Anschluss. Bis zu jener Stunde war es mir eine Selbst-verständlichkeit gewesen, einmal dem alten Turm auf der dalmatinischen Insel Kinder zu zeugen. Seit jenem einsamen Spaziergang schien es mir unmöglich. Die Ausbettung des Körpers aus dem Gewebe der Geschichte habe ich damals als Zwölfjähriger erlebt, noch bevor von Berlin der Befehl ausging, im ganzen Reich die Narren zu vergasen.” Ivan Illich, *Verlust von Welt und Fleisch*. An Helmut Becker, 19\. November 1992, in: "Welt-abhanden", in: *Lust und Last der Aufklärung*. Ein Buch zum 80\. Geburtstag von Hellmut Becker, hrsg. von Gerold Becker und Jürgen Zimmer, Weinheim, Beltz Verlag, 1993, S. 76-79. I quote here the English translation made by Muska Nagel and Barbara Duden,

[^14]:  “… \[ich\] glaube … nicht das Menschbilder aufeinanderfolgen, wie Sandwiches, sondern dass sie ineinandergreifen, und dass alle vorangegangene Menschenbilder in uns gegenwärtig sind. Diese Gleichzeitigkeit der Vergangenheit ist ja, glaube ich, ein wichtiger Aspekt des sogenannten post-historischen Bewusstseins.” My transcription and translation from the lecture of 19 November 1991 entitled *Telematik. Verbündelung oder Venetzung?* (Telematics. Agglomeration or Networking?), at the Swiss Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI).

[^15]:  Vilém Flusser, *L’Iconoclastie*, in : Lire l’image, dirigé par Alexandre Bonnier, Centre d’Études et de Recherches Architecturales, Paris, 1979, pp. 57-69:  “L’imagination est une méthode pour dépasser l’aliénation, pour s’orienter dans le monde perdu. Une méthode pour pouvoir chasser, (Lascaux), faire du tourisme, (Michelin), et prévoir le fur, (projections). Mais l’imagination peut s’intervertir dialectiquement et devenir hallucination. Les images qui résultent d’une telle imagination intervertie ne sont plus des médiations avec le monde, mais au contraire des surfaces opaques qui cachent le monde. Ses vecteurs de signification sont retournés, et ils ne montrent plus le monde mais le producteur de l’image. Ses image ne sont plus des instruments d’orientation, mais l’homme devient instrument de ses propres instrumentes:  il adore ses images. C’est contre le danger d’une telle idolâtrie, d’une imagination devenue aliénation intensifiée, l’écriture a été inventée. L’histoire en tant qu’iconoclastie est une théorie contre la folie de d’idolâtrie” (pp. 61-62). My translation. The text was originally published in Portuguese, in: Cavalo Azul, Sãop Paulo, No. 8, May/June, 1979, pp. 78-84. A German version, translated by Flusser himself and slightly different, was made available for the public with the title *Ikonoklastie*, in: *Vom Begriff zum Bild. Mendienkultur nach Vilém Flusser* (Kommunikation und Kultur), hrsg. von Michael Hanke und Steffi Winkler, Marburg, Tectum, 2013, pp. 19-28: „Imagination wird dann gesteigerte Alienation, und der Mensch wird Instrument seiner eigenen Instrumente: er betet die Lascaux- Bilder an, und die Michelin-Karten, und die Projektionen. Gegen eine solche opak gewordene imaginäre Welt, gegen einen solchen Wahnsinn einer halluzinatorischen Imagination, als Rettungsversuch aus dem sich schließenden Kerker sich selbst bedeutender Bilder, ist die Schrift erfunden worden. Ikonoklastie ist Therapie gegen idolatrischen Wahnsinn.” 

[^16]:  Flusser, *op. cit.*, 1979, p. 66\. 

[^17]:  “Wenn es einen Grund für mich gibt, die Regeln zu verstehen, unter denen dieses Absurdistan, in dem wir leben, funktioniert, dann darum, weil ich und auch meine Freunde wissen möchten, wo wir NICHT mittun. Wodurch wir unsere Seele, unsere Wahrnehmung, unsere innere Welt nicht beeinflussen lassen.” Ivan Illich, *Frühstück mit Ivan Illich*. Artikel erschienen in: taz Nr. 6509 vom 30.7.2001, Seite 13-14, 826 TAZ-Bericht von Gabriele Goettle. 

[^18]:  *Declaration on Soil*. A joint statement, drafted in Hebenshausen, Germany, December 6, 1990, in collaboration with Sigmar Groeneveld, Lee Hoinacki, and other friends. 

[^19]:  Ivi. 

[^20]:  Ivan Illich, *op. cit.*, 1993, S. 76-79: “Genozid und Genomprojekt; Waldsterben und Hydroponik; Herztausch und versichertes Medizid sind gleichmässig geschmacklos, geruchlos, unfassbar und unweltlich. Die Adventsfeier um die Erlanger Leiche zelebriert die Bodenlosigkeit des weltlosen Unmenschen. Wir, die wir gerade alt genug sind, und jung genug, um das Ende der Natur, der den Sinnen entsprechenden Welt, erlebt zu haben, sollten, wie kaum andere, sterben können.” I quote here from the English translation made by Muska Nagel and Barbara Duden.

[^21]:  Vilé Flusser, *Counter-vision*, in: *Flusser Studies*, Vol. 13, May 2013, in: Flusserstudies.net Archive. The paper is a typescript, made of two dense-typed pages. 

[^22]:  Cfr. Ivan Illich, in: David Cayley, *Ivan Illich in Conversation*, Toronto, Anansi, ed. 2007, p. 213, p. 242\. 

[^23]:  Ivan Illich, *Le perte des sens*, traduit par Pierre-Emmanule Dauzat, Fayard, janvier 2004: “Je plaide pour une renaissance des pratiques ascétiques, pour maintenir vivants nos sens, dans les terres dévastées par le «show», au milieu des informations écrasantes, des conseils à perpétuité, du diagnostic intensif, de la gestion thérapeutique, de l’invasion des conseillers, des soins terminaux, de la vitesse qui coupe le souffle” (préface); an italian edition is also present : La perdita dei sensi, traduzione di Giannozzo Pucci, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 2009: “Mi batto per una rinascita delle pratiche ascetiche, che tengono vivi in nostri sensi, nelle terre devastate dallo ‘show’, in mezzo a informazioni schiaccianti, all’invasione si consiglieri, alle cure terminali, e alla velocità che toglie il respiro” (p. 11). 

[^24]:  Illich, Sanders, *op. cit.*, 1988, epigraph. 

[^25]:  “… scio plane quod charitas nunquam excidit. Peregre profectus eram, et veni ad vos in terram alienam; et quasi aliena non erat, quoniam inveni amicos ibi: sed nescio an prius fecerim, an factus sim” In: Patrologia Latina, Paris, Migne, 1854, Vol. 176, p. 1011 A. See Illich’s translation in *In the Vineyard of the Text*, p.26-7, fn. 53\. 

[^26]:  Italo Calvino, *Le città invisibili*, Torino, Einaudi, 1972: “L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio”; Engl. Edition: *Invisible Cities*, trans. by William Weaver, London, Secker and Warburg, 1974\. 

[^27]:  Niccolò Machiavelli, *Opere: Lettere*, Torino, UTET, 1984, Vol. 3, p. 520\. My translation.