Christian Nyampeta
A Community of Practices

The workshop with Christian Nyampeta draws from his research under the title How to Work Together, with a focus on idiorrhythmy. This is a concept drawn from early monasticism, which institutes communal transformations by making room for the individual liberty. In contrast to the way of life of the hermit, this idiorrhythmic community can be summed up as “living together alone”. This way of life equally differs from “regular” monasticisms, namely asceticism and coenobitism. For us today, the study of idiorrhythmy offers an understanding of the manners, the habits and the intellection of these early artists-philosophers who have worked out personalised methods of collective engagement against the dominant forces of their times. The purpose of the workshop is to theorise and to practice how individual experiences and reflections might be thought through collectively. The workshops suggest the idea of a “community of practices”, brought together by a “shared grammar”. Against today’s dominant discourse of war making, the workshops will sketch out the figure of the “idios” as an ethical dimension and a practice of inhabiting and sharing the world. Idios (which means particular, private, or one’s own, which is also the origin of the word idiot), upholds the following qualities: tiredness (inhabiting the horizon of rest) and study (the search of the knowledge of and the attraction to the Other, to the Outside). An idios is engaged in an act of loving, in attending to the self as a way of attending to the world. This attendance to the world through an attention to the self produces a “theoretical fiction” and a “practical philosophy”. In order to study this theoretical fiction and practical philosophy, the workshop uses specific “exercises” and “techniques”. The main exercise is “de-scription”: un-writing or or self-writing; and one of our techniques is the making of the structures in which these exercises can take place. We will begin the workshop by making a notebook. As a “public interior” of sorts, the notebook will be used to take notes throughout the subsequent activities.