immanence

Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter.

In his reply, he later mistakes another author — of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different — for me, confusingly implicating me in a defense of D. T. Suzuki (among other things) where I had never attempted that.

For those interested in following up on this debate over Buddhism and its possible relations to Lacanian psychology, I would suggest the more complete version of my critique, which was published in my 2018 book Shadowing the Anthropocene (and which Žižek doesn’t seem to have read, so even though it’s open access, I will try to send him a copy of it). The critiques of Žižek feature in the sections “The Subject and the Subjectless” (pp. 185-193) and “Totality, or original hybridity?” (pp. 193-197), but there is plenty more reference both to Žižek and to Lacan in the second part of the book, which develops a Buddhist-inspired (and at times Lacanian-inspired) practice of process-relational “bodymindfulness.”

Regarding Žižek’s latest response, I don’t have much to add to what I’ve already written. I still think Žižek’s use of Buddhism as a foil for Lacanianism ends up reducing each to the other’s opposite in ways that miss the multiplicity of each, and especially of the two and a half thousand year tradition of Buddhist thinking and practice, with its many distinctive streams and sub-traditions.

“To put it succinctly,” Žižek writes,

Buddhism celebrates the stepping out of the “wheel of desire,” while Lacan celebrates the subject’s very fall into this “wheel”: “not compromising one’s desire” means a radical subjective engagement in a crazy desire which throws the entire reality out of balance.

And further,

“for Lacan, desire in its ‘purity’ (considered without an empirical object of desire) cannot be transformed into a peaceful integration into a non-substantial changing multiplicity of our reality because desire is as such a gesture of breaking up the balance of reality.”

There is certainly something deeply attractive about this “radical subjective engagement in a crazy desire which throws the entire reality out of balance.” But Buddhism also in some of its variants is intended to produce a “radical engagement” that throws the “reality” of the commonplace “out of balance.”

This contrast between the two allows Žižek to forward some contrarian poses (typical for his writing) — for instance, about how “the feeling of love” for small children “is a clear case of what is called the ‘Stockholm syndrome,’ a coping mechanism in a captive or abusive situation, when people develop positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time” — which call to mind Zen Buddhist teachings, as in sayings like “when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”

What Žižek is really attacking, I think, is the kind of “pop Buddhism” that many Buddhists themselves have gone on record critiquing (under the heading of “McMindfulness,” for instance) — the kind that believes it can find internal peace within a cosmic harmony of gentle interconnectedness (even as it pursues its capitalist excesses, which themselves could be seen, if we so desired, as variations of Lacanian/Žižekian “radical subjective engagement”!). Pop Buddhism may have the flavor of Buddhism, but hardly its radical message. Apart from this Buddhism of “mindful happiness,” there are the Buddhisms of Vajrayanic wallops, aniconic and apophatic Buddhisms, warrior monk Buddhisms, and many other kinds.

And when Žižek claims that Buddhism “ignores the radical intersubjectivity of desire,” he is making a valid point that some Buddhists have made against other Buddhists.

Žižek’s line of critique is useful, as is the whole questioning of the dualities that arise on the way — for instance, between the arhat who pursues enlightenment for his own sake and the boddhisattva who postpones it in order to help others (with the latter being “dangerously” privileged, in Žižek’s reading). But as any good Buddhist will tell you, the point is not to critique them, but to see them for what they are — crutches that could become new snares if they aren’t accompanied by an insight into their nature as such.

The point, in other words, is not to arrive at a place of peace, but to continue the work of simultaneously “seeing” things and “seeing through” them so as to act in ways that displace and in fact “break up” ongoing cycles of suffering — that, to use Žižek’s words, “throw the entire reality” of cyclical suffering (i.e., samsara) “out of balance.”

If that is Žižek’s goal, then it is not opposed to the teachings of the Buddha as understood by some of his followers. The question is whether Žižek (or Lacan, or Hegel) provides adequate tools to support that goal, or if Buddhism, in its many variants, may provide more useful ones.

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Note: on the Lacan-Buddhism encounter, I recommend the work of Raul Moncayo, including the just-published Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought: Reflections on Buddhism in Lacan’s Seminar X and Beyond (co-authored with Yang Yu, Routledge, 2023). See also this piece by Glenn Wallis.