The new blog Tabula Rasa develops some interesting and cogent criticisms of Zizek and Badiou:
The relationship between materialism and idealism was configured, unsurprisingly, partially through an interrogation of the theological register, especially Christianity. What for me needs to be immediately addressed are the implications of the elevation of Christianity as the only universalist religion and hence paradigmatic model for a militant atheism. At the conference two speakers, John Milbank and Creston Davies, presented the theological Christian view (and not a model) as the political solution to the failures of liberal democracy itself. These were very strange presentations – Milbank, especially with his disconcerting assertive mode, critiqued democracy from what could be rightly called Christian authoritarianism. The unapologetic, near fascism of this undemocratic position raised explicitly the potential problems of the logical construction of a militant politics inside the prescriptive contours of a reworked Marxism through Christianity. The narrow formulation of these still euro-centred Christian polemics also indicated clearly for me how the claim to universality in philosophy is still enunciated in a narrowly western register, where a straight linear line is drawn from ancient Greek philosophy, through Christianity, modernity and global word order with little reference to the constitutive role of ‘Afro-Asiatic’ history and thought in the very formation of Europe as the West.
Read the rest here.
July 27, 2007 at 7:08 pm
“What for me needs to be immediately addressed are the implications of the elevation of Christianity as the only universalist religion and hence paradigmatic model for a militant atheism.”
This is precisely, or at least mostly, what I want to address in my eventual re-consideration and critique of Zizek’s critique of (Western) Buddhism. There is an important dimension to Zizek’s critique that is missing when he takes as his standard for the beliefs and practices of Buddhism its decidedly Western, dare I say Capitalist, form.
In one of my first blog-posts– for those who don’t know, you can access by clicking on the screen-name attached to this comment– I am already able to give some preliminary examples of the kind of one-sidedness for which Zizek praises “intolerant Christian Love.” The best ones I’ve come across so far are to be found within the Ch’an and Zen traditions, though I’ve been considering others too.
This taking it further is important precisely for reasons I think Zizek himself gives us. In the case of Zizek’s critique of Western Buddhism, he is giving credit to, practically endorsing the palpable ideological co-ordinates that the West has given the Buddha’s teachings and practice.
We must take his critique further than that though. He has made gestures towards the way that a tradition of teachings/beliefs can sometimes only survive its own contradictions and political struggles through a sectarian division. How come, I want to know, must we assume that Western Buddhism was a/the “successful” sectarian division in which the buddha-dhamma was maintained. I ask this especially because in the West, Buddhism has promulgated by means of the academey and its functionaries (print-culture). I think that the buddha-dhamma has has a parallel with Lacanian psychoanalysis as demonstrated in the following quotation from an article by Anna Shane:
“There are many who enjoy Lacan’s teachings, and find his concepts useful in thinking through questions of interest. Still, some texts may be misleading, if one is led to think that Lacanian analysis is a technique that can be learned, rather than a technique that can only be transmitted.”
In this sense, we encounter the Buddha’s teachings in, I argue, a kind of analytic situation with a teacher. It is what the Ch’an and Zen traditions have called the transmission of mind. While it may exist in the West, it is the exception and not the norm, and certainly does not determine popular, New Age-ish, ultimately liberal democratic notions of Buddhism.
July 28, 2007 at 9:06 am
pdx this is an interesting thread, maybe you should expand it. i noticed parallels between buddhism and lacanism while watching david lynch’s mulholland drive, but don’t have such a vast knowledge of the religion to be able to elaborate.
but for me zizek primarily errs vis-a-vis his neighbouring religion, christian orthodoxy, which like that whole cultural area is completely ERASED from his thought (and for good reasons too!). his justification of christian intolerance via unjustufied reversal as presented in puppet and dwarf would be viewed there as a heresy, because the orhodox church takes a non-meddling attitude towards the world affairs. it was always the source of its argument with communism, because communism in serbia wanted to change society in a violent fashion.
July 28, 2007 at 9:08 am
dr sinthome, i am not speaking out of some assumed position of christian orthodox superiority – abstinence from politics is an institutional creed in that church, unrelated to issues of faith.
July 28, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Don’t worry, Parody, it’s coming. I should say, I am sympathetic to what Zizek says, but only if we give some focus to what he’s talking about. One thing I notice in his discussions of Buddhism, which in sum-total about to maybe 15,000 words, is what seems to be deliberate (I don’t think he’s that stupid) blurring of what he calls “Western Buddhism” and what you might call “Buddhism in Itself,” or more straightforwardly the teachings of the Buddha.
Where it becomes more interesting is where I see his critique of Buddhism as profoundly Nietzschean. The Western Buddhism he is now condemning is literally the European Buddhism that Nietzsche forcasted. Nietzsche, however, did not have the pretensions to really talk Buddhist philosophy when he didn’t mean it. Nonetheless, Zizek’s comments on Western Buddhism, if we confine it to that, are worth considering. They are comments made by many Buddhists themselves.
Where I depart from Zizek is when he conflates this theoretical transmission of the Buddha’s teachings, which yields us Western Buddhism, with traditional means of practice and student-teacher interaction, which take the form of what should be called an unconscious transmission– precisely in the sense Anna Shane uses it in my comment above. This doesn’t have to be a distinction between a false-appearance and the real-deal either. It is more like Western Buddhism is symptomatic of a failed symbolization of the implication of the Buddha’s teachings, which is feminine jouissance.
July 28, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Isn’t Zizek’s argument about Christianity the same as Ivan Karamazov’s in The Brother’s K? If you’ll remember, Ivan wrote an article claiming that the church made a mistake in 300, making a pact with the Roman empire, since it is the church’s duty to become the state completely. And of course, Ivan wrote it as a non-believer.
July 28, 2007 at 7:28 pm
It is more like Western Buddhism is symptomatic of a failed symbolization of the implication of the Buddha’s teachings, which is feminine jouissance.
Can you tell more about that implication?
July 28, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Yes Roger I think there is a parallel, esp. because Zizek quotes the Karamazovs in other places. But that’s exactly the point, as soon as the church starts to dabble in politics, fanatics begin to proliferate. It’s that Protestant-proselytising, ”let’s roll up our sleeves and change the world” attitude, delivered from a morally superior position,which ends in ”I have come here to bring the sword”. But I find it even more problematic that Dr. Zizek’s musings on this issue play into the ”Yurepeen” supremacist fantasy (to quote Colonel Chabert) where we, the noble Europe, possess mystical knowledge inaccessible to those unenlightened non-Eurovision contestants, even as I’m sure Dr. Zizek has dialectically reversed this in other places the better to hide his alignment with social democracy = the Party knows what’s good for you, and they pride themselves in ”tough justice”. If you trace this back historically to dr. Zizolina’s sympathies for Edvard Kardelj style socialism, it won’t come as such a big surprise at all.
July 29, 2007 at 6:33 am
Just joining in here, being both a buddhist and zizek fan myself, but I’m not sure, parody, the basis on which zizek elevates christianity above buddhism. In terms of a universalist religion, that asks you to take a radical stand against relativity, buddhism, not christianity, is the first to accept all comers (by some 500 years), and to do so on the basis of a call to radically renounce the dysfunctional social order (at the time the caste system) and take up a practice of investigating reality. As for Western buddhism being the problem, to my mind, its made great strides in this “universalist domain” by being more radically egalitarian in terms of sex roles that are really horribly medieval in true, or at least, “really-existing” buddhism in asia. Additionally western buddhism is more radically taking up the questioning of social practices and norms then has generally been done in the asian tradition. I think where Zizek’s critque is accurate is that buddhism as practiced in the west often translates as just meditation, leaving out the strong ethical and devotional dimensions that are central to its tradition. But a lot of times zizek is using buddhism and its icons for his own purposes. Describing the dalai lama’s presentation of buddhism as “a feel good spiritualism without any specific obligations” doesn’t jive with the good lama’s stern proscriptions against violence, homosexuality and more, which we would more likely expect to hear from the pope. I read zizek’s critique of buddhism as a critique of cartoon buddhism, how pop culture imbibes buddhism. As such they are quite relevant. But I don’t hear a real argument from zizek as to why christianity has more revolutionary potential.
July 29, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Thank you for the explication, Michael, I didn’t know about that repressive aspect of Buddhism, but maybe that’s because unlike Madonna I don’t believe you can do Kabala without a knowledge of Hebrew, so I have refrained from reading Western interpretations of it without ever having visited Asia.
I’m not sure, parody, the basis on which zizek elevates christianity above buddhism
In Puppet and Dwarf he explains the subversive core of Christianity by quoting an Eurosuprematist movie – ”The Sound Of Music” – and the whole book has that annoying tone of superiority, like, Christianity is superior because it introduces la differance. Then he proceeds with the Lacanization and Marxization of Christianity, but you can critisize this already by noting that e.g. Orthodox Christianity, in contrast, has a lot more in common with Spinoza’s teachings, and a lot of arguments against Marxism. So there’s no way the psychoanalytic interpretation is the only valid one. For me all this has little to do with Christianity but is simply a translation of the social-democratic Weltanschauung: it’s soft, and ”dialectic”, but it’s still that moralising Calvinist finger – ”we know what’s best for you” – which is behind dr. Zizek’s recent comments on the Zack Snyder film 300, to name one example.
I think where Zizek’s critque is accurate is that buddhism as practiced in the west often translates as just meditation, leaving out the strong ethical and devotional dimensions that are central to its tradition.
This can be said of any syncretic New Age contraption since the 1990s – astrology, Tantric massage, Bioenergetic therapy – but (1) why does Dr. Zizek fail to mention that his own crossbreedings belong to the same genre, being as it is Marxism as just a meditation and (2) why must we always automatically assume that these mixages are only ever bad and nothing good can come out of them? Like you point out yourself, Western Buddhism allowed for the freedoms absent from the Asian variant, etc.
July 29, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Thanks, parody, for your reply. I’m a bit confused though, not being an expert on zizek. I don’t hear him as being against mixages. I guess I read zizek as using Lacan especially and somewhat perversely perhaps to re-appraise and appreciate some of the core of the western tradition–hegel, the enlightenment, christianity. I love how he does this. He’s just not knowledgeable about asian traditions and so cartoons them becuase that’s not his project.
I also love Zizek’s point (as I read him) that looking for true pure “origins” is both hopeless and disengenuous: a true Marxism before Lenin and Stalin perverted it, a true Christianity before St paul ruined it. The same holds in buddhism. From the standpoint of a practitioner, complaining that unadulterated buddhism is only to be found in asia is exactly to not practice, to ignore or deny the material conditions of your present moment that demand that you make the practice real now. And there is a real way that these traditions need to be “perverted” to grow and that the later perversion is in a way implicit in the origin, at least now looking back. Paradoxically maybe the best way to move forward is to claim you’re going “back to the founder” as Lacan did, but you use that claim as the basis for practice not an excuse to not.
I mean of course I’m sure there’s a lot of narcissism in the easy appropriation of another tradition a la Madonna and kabala with no attempt to “go back”, but if you’re sincere and attempting to really reinhabit a tradition in present times–as Zizek does with Hegel, Lacan and Marx (again, as I read him)–what’s wrong with not knowing Hebrew? Do you have to know german to be a marxist?
Anyway, I just jumped in here, so forgive me if I’m off the current of what you guys are talking about.
July 30, 2007 at 3:07 am
And there is a real way that these traditions need to be “perverted” to grow and that the later perversion is in a way implicit in the origin, at least now looking back. Paradoxically maybe the best way to move forward is to claim you’re going “back to the founder” as Lacan did, but you use that claim as the basis for practice not an excuse to not.
Sure, yes, but it’s all in how you do it. I think Zizek never managed to re-read Lacan the way Lacan managed to re-read Freud. It’s more like Zizek BUGGERED Lacan.
But what is esp. erroneous for my money is that – even as I grant you that it isn’t illegitimate to apply Lacan to pop culture, provided you do not claim that psychoanalysis is the only possible explanation of movies – Zizek seems to claim that there is something UNIVERSAL about his interpretation of Lacan. Everything goes through this ”perversion”, this ‘’subversive” reversal. And that’s a powerful circus schtick indeed, hence the multi-billion dollar industry spun out of it, but is it really serious theory?
Alas if only dr. Zizek stayed with the movies, but no, now he wants to chastize us on Christianity.
I find it much more interesting what dr. Sinthome does, with his attempts to apply both a Lacanian/hegellian and Deleuzian/Spinozian model.
July 30, 2007 at 4:27 am
long time reader, first time post-er. i thought id put up a quote by dr. zizek that i think is quite to the point on his “materialist theology” from The Ticklish Subject, since I just started it(developed more later on in parallax view and puppet and d).
this is in relation to general criticisms for Heidegger’s “secularization” of Protestantism’s sin as cosubstantial with human existence in the Call of Conscience coming from within Dasein itself(Kierkegaard as the “non-secular” end of this):
“Heidegger should none the less be defended here: the criticism is no better grounded than the standard criticism that the Marxist narrative of the Communist revolution leading to the classless society is a secularized version of the religious narrative of the Fall and Salvation; in both cases, the answer should be: why shouldn’t we turn the criticsm around and claim that the latter, allegedly ’secularized’ version provides the true version of which the religious narrative is merely a mystified and naive anticipation?”
(he then goes on to do the usual thing of connecting the Call of Conscience to the lineage in Kant, Freud, Hegel, Lacan)
also he does incessantly repeat that his privilege of an atheistic reading of orthodox Christianity is simply because it is here in which the infinite coincides with finitude and doubts itself, where God is an atheist itself. Without remembering this point along with that presented in Ticklish Subject and expounded elsewhere, this privilege conjurs up its otherwise nasty connotations in its complicity with Western imperialism (also accenting these conceptions of Zizek as a “philosopher Stalin”, a dangerous politician demanding sacrifice and disciplince etc. )
also I think its notable to explore other religions for their equal potential in performing the function that Zizek sees in Christ the atheist, but I don’t really see the criticisms of Zizek’s privilege as holding up since he himself is more certainly a theoretician who would like to really talk about Kant and Hegel all day…heres where I think the only suspicious agenda lies with Zizek, in making Hegel and Lacan major forces to be dealt with in ‘popular’ academia…also, when to discern his polemic posturing with his theoretical assertions is important and I think when Foucault talks about himself as a theoretical toolbox rather than an idol with its own encyclopedia, i thik this is precisely the task to take when dealing with theory, the same as with respect to the analyst’s discourse. Otherwise there is no line to draw between where we privilege the theory and the effect our subjective reading of their ‘character’ or ‘private life’ has on how we put use to the theory.
July 30, 2007 at 12:37 pm
why shouldn’t we turn the criticsm around and claim that the latter, allegedly ’secularized’ version provides the true version of which the religious narrative is merely a mystified and naive anticipation?”
because the religious narrative, unlike the Communist one, is aimed at paradise in Heaven, not paradise on Earth, so this is simply parodic buggery and not any sort of serious philosophy
the criticisms of Zizek’s privilege as holding up since he himself is more certainly a theoretician who would like to really talk about Kant and Hegel all day
that’s not true. he is the informal advisor to the Slovenian government, active in Western Marxism and a political commentator as well.
July 30, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Not a bad post, apart from the absolute out and out crap he talks about Milbank in the bit you quoted. Wish everyone would stop with the fascist stuff, it really is nonsense.
July 30, 2007 at 10:53 pm
An interesting thread. Thanks pdx for link to your posts on Zizek and Buddhism. I agree with your reading of Zizek’s ‘Western Buddhism’as an ideological form operating smoothly within neoliberal capitalism. I also think he does generally blur the distinction between western Buddhism and Buddhism more generally. One reason for this maybe is that over time Zizek has come to argue for Christianity as the only religion that is compatible with his militant atheist universalism. Without working this out yet in any detail, my initial thought is that for Zizek, Buddhism in general is a monadic singularity, similar to Deleuze’s singular plane of immanence – there is little room for dialectical resistance.
Although at times Zizek does seem to mark a Buddhism as radically different to its western variant. Not sure for example what to make of his interesting comment in ‘On Belief’
“…the difference between Zen proper and its Western version: the greatness of Zen is that it cannot be reduced to an ‘inner journey’ into one’s “true Self”; the aim of Zen meditation is, on the contrary, a total voiding of the Self, the acceptance that there is no true Self, no ‘inner truth’ to be discovered […] What Western Buddhism is not ready to accept is thus that the ultimate victim of the ‘journey into one’s Self’ is the Self itself” (2002: 86-7)
July 31, 2007 at 3:56 am
Until a more direct engagement in the form of a book, or a lengthy section of a book, I don’t think we’ll know anything concrete about Zizek’s view of Buddhism and how he’s constructing it– unless one of us gets to know him more personally! From a preliminary stand-point (not having read everything he wrote, but knowing well enough that I don’t have to read every page to actually read every word) I think that his scholarship its a little more than questionable. I am intrigued nonetheless, because I don’t think his critique pertains to the Buddha’s teachings per se, but to a genuine social phenomenon ostensibly veiled in a cloak of those teachings.
Patrick Kerney wrote an interesting article on Why Meditation isn’t Psychotherapy, which I find defecient in ways I won’t get into here, but nonetheless indicative of the broader criticism in which Zizek is participating. In this sense, not only is Western Buddhism part of a program of permissive hedonism, but so is the large part of psychotherapy too.