Slavoj Zizek: Heresy, Western Buddhism and the Fetish
“To be strange is to be foreign, alien - a stranger is a person whose home is elsewhere. ...But I cannot explain the mystery."
- V. S. Naipaul
What always fascinates me about Slavoj Zizek is that he is always digging deeper and deeper into that darkness beyond the human, seeking if not answers then disturbing the darkness that is looking for traces of its excess. In his little book On Belief there is an essay Gnosticism? No Thanks! he offers a window onto heresies of all types, political or religious, and how they are actually outgrowths of orthodoxy itself: these "strange" beliefs which seemed so shocking to the orthodoxy were precisely those that had the appearance of stemming logically from orthodox contemporary doctrines. That is why they were considered so dangerous". * What is important here is that any orthodoxy, religious or political, has to confound or compromise its founding radical doctrines, its essential message; and, heretics are only those who reject this compromise by reinstituting the inherent intent of its original message.
He tells us that an understanding of Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit, of "being-thrown" into a concrete historical situation can help us understand heresy. He tells us that Geworfenheit is antithetical to both humanism and gnosticism: in the "humanist vision, a human being belongs to this earth: he should be fully at home on its surface, able to realize his potential through the active, productive exhange with it; for the gnostic, on the other hand, "the human Self is not created, it is a preexisting Soul (spark) thrown into a foreign inhospitable environment." What both traditions share is the idea of a home for humans: for humanism it is this natural earth, for the gnostic it is that far country of the preexisting earth beyond this universe. Heidegger instead offers another vision. Zizek asks "What if we effectively are "thrown" into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, "out of joint," and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if this very dislocation grounds man's ex-static opening to this world?"
Zizek emphasizes his own materialist reading of Heidegger saying there is no Sein (being) without Dasein (being-there) does not mean that if Dasein were to vanish without a trace that no things would remain, entities would still exists, yet "they would no be disclosed within the horizon of meaning - there would have been no world." Zizek's reading of Dasein is that it "is the ex-static relating to the entities within the horizon of meaning, which is in advance "thrown" into the world, in the midst of disclosed entities."
He tells us there still remains the "naive" question of "if entities are there as Real prior to Lictung (clearing), how do the two ultimately relate?" He reminds us that Schelling was faced with the same thing in his Welalter drafts in which he tried to deploy the idea of the "emergence of logos out of the protocosmic Real as divine drives." Then he asks if we are to now take the move that modern physics entails "whose results seem to point towards a gap/opening discernible already in the pre-ontological nature itself?" Then he speculates on the possibility of the disappearance of this horizon of meaning through the productivity of technology back into "the prehuman mute being of entities without Lictung?"
Zizek then takes a turn toward Oriental thought in which, as Medard Boss proposes, in contrast to Heidegger, that "the Clearing (Lichtung) in which beings appear does not need man (Dasein) as the "shepherd of being" - a human being is merely one of the domains of "standing in the clearing" which shines forth in and for itself. Man unites himself with the Clearing through his self-annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the Clearing." Heidegger tells us that the idea of man as the "shepherd of Being" introduces the "notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itself, a motif totally lacking in Indian thought." Another aspect of Heidegger's thought that is not found in Indian thought is the idea of Ver-Rucktheit, "derangement", that the "emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of the Clearing is in itself Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion, with no possibility of returning to the undistorted Order."
The contradictions within Heidegger, Zizek tells us, between the need to make the founding gesture of Greek philosophy of overcoming the mythic strain within Asiatic thought, and his constant struggle within myth to overcome it instead of just letting it fall away is, according to Zizek, that philosophy "needs recourse to myth, not only for external reasons, in order to explain its conceptual teaching to the uneducated masses, but inherently, to "suture" its own conceptual edifice where it fails in reaching its innermost core, from Plato's myth of the cave to Freud's myth of the primordial father and Lacan's myth of lamella." The point is for him that myth is always-already the Real as logos: the "foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain fully within it." This is the lesson, he tells us, of Adorno and Horkeheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the "enlightenment itself is mythical", and just at the point that postmodern society of late capitalism reaches its apogee it "generates its own myth" too. Then he tells us that all reductive, eliminative science and returns to paganism in our time are nothing but the two sides of one coin: the defeat of modernity in its very triumph.
He adds humor here when he tells us that at the very moment of the triumph of late capitalism the legacy of Judeao-Christianity is being threatened within by a return to New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in "its different guises, from the "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism." This is the irony of it all: that with this New Age remedy to the pressure of capitalist dynamics we discover that it is actually an additive, a supplement to its very power as ideology. Western Buddhism has become a fetish: it enables us to accept capitalism as the Real, as "the way it is", and helps us "participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game" while sustaining the perception that we are not really in it, that we are all aware how worthless this spectacle is - that what really matters to us is the "peace of the inner Self" to which we can always withdraw. It is our very disavowal through this fetishtization within our superficial Buddhistic fantasy that compounds our participation in the game of capitalism, and through our very denunciations of its gambit by our fake withdrawal into an illusionary Self it reclaims us as a commodity of its own insane gesture.
1. Slavoj Zizek, On Belief (Routledge 2001)
*Note using Kindle version so will refrain from using page numbers: all quotes are from this book.
- V. S. Naipaul
What always fascinates me about Slavoj Zizek is that he is always digging deeper and deeper into that darkness beyond the human, seeking if not answers then disturbing the darkness that is looking for traces of its excess. In his little book On Belief there is an essay Gnosticism? No Thanks! he offers a window onto heresies of all types, political or religious, and how they are actually outgrowths of orthodoxy itself: these "strange" beliefs which seemed so shocking to the orthodoxy were precisely those that had the appearance of stemming logically from orthodox contemporary doctrines. That is why they were considered so dangerous". * What is important here is that any orthodoxy, religious or political, has to confound or compromise its founding radical doctrines, its essential message; and, heretics are only those who reject this compromise by reinstituting the inherent intent of its original message.
He tells us that an understanding of Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit, of "being-thrown" into a concrete historical situation can help us understand heresy. He tells us that Geworfenheit is antithetical to both humanism and gnosticism: in the "humanist vision, a human being belongs to this earth: he should be fully at home on its surface, able to realize his potential through the active, productive exhange with it; for the gnostic, on the other hand, "the human Self is not created, it is a preexisting Soul (spark) thrown into a foreign inhospitable environment." What both traditions share is the idea of a home for humans: for humanism it is this natural earth, for the gnostic it is that far country of the preexisting earth beyond this universe. Heidegger instead offers another vision. Zizek asks "What if we effectively are "thrown" into this world, never fully at home in it, always dislocated, "out of joint," and what if this dislocation is our constitutive, primordial condition, the very horizon of our being? What if there is no previous "home" out of which we were thrown into this world, what if this very dislocation grounds man's ex-static opening to this world?"
Zizek emphasizes his own materialist reading of Heidegger saying there is no Sein (being) without Dasein (being-there) does not mean that if Dasein were to vanish without a trace that no things would remain, entities would still exists, yet "they would no be disclosed within the horizon of meaning - there would have been no world." Zizek's reading of Dasein is that it "is the ex-static relating to the entities within the horizon of meaning, which is in advance "thrown" into the world, in the midst of disclosed entities."
He tells us there still remains the "naive" question of "if entities are there as Real prior to Lictung (clearing), how do the two ultimately relate?" He reminds us that Schelling was faced with the same thing in his Welalter drafts in which he tried to deploy the idea of the "emergence of logos out of the protocosmic Real as divine drives." Then he asks if we are to now take the move that modern physics entails "whose results seem to point towards a gap/opening discernible already in the pre-ontological nature itself?" Then he speculates on the possibility of the disappearance of this horizon of meaning through the productivity of technology back into "the prehuman mute being of entities without Lictung?"
Zizek then takes a turn toward Oriental thought in which, as Medard Boss proposes, in contrast to Heidegger, that "the Clearing (Lichtung) in which beings appear does not need man (Dasein) as the "shepherd of being" - a human being is merely one of the domains of "standing in the clearing" which shines forth in and for itself. Man unites himself with the Clearing through his self-annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the Clearing." Heidegger tells us that the idea of man as the "shepherd of Being" introduces the "notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itself, a motif totally lacking in Indian thought." Another aspect of Heidegger's thought that is not found in Indian thought is the idea of Ver-Rucktheit, "derangement", that the "emergence of Man introduces into the order of entities: the event of the Clearing is in itself Ent-Eignen, a radical and thorough distortion, with no possibility of returning to the undistorted Order."
The contradictions within Heidegger, Zizek tells us, between the need to make the founding gesture of Greek philosophy of overcoming the mythic strain within Asiatic thought, and his constant struggle within myth to overcome it instead of just letting it fall away is, according to Zizek, that philosophy "needs recourse to myth, not only for external reasons, in order to explain its conceptual teaching to the uneducated masses, but inherently, to "suture" its own conceptual edifice where it fails in reaching its innermost core, from Plato's myth of the cave to Freud's myth of the primordial father and Lacan's myth of lamella." The point is for him that myth is always-already the Real as logos: the "foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain fully within it." This is the lesson, he tells us, of Adorno and Horkeheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the "enlightenment itself is mythical", and just at the point that postmodern society of late capitalism reaches its apogee it "generates its own myth" too. Then he tells us that all reductive, eliminative science and returns to paganism in our time are nothing but the two sides of one coin: the defeat of modernity in its very triumph.
He adds humor here when he tells us that at the very moment of the triumph of late capitalism the legacy of Judeao-Christianity is being threatened within by a return to New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in "its different guises, from the "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism." This is the irony of it all: that with this New Age remedy to the pressure of capitalist dynamics we discover that it is actually an additive, a supplement to its very power as ideology. Western Buddhism has become a fetish: it enables us to accept capitalism as the Real, as "the way it is", and helps us "participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game" while sustaining the perception that we are not really in it, that we are all aware how worthless this spectacle is - that what really matters to us is the "peace of the inner Self" to which we can always withdraw. It is our very disavowal through this fetishtization within our superficial Buddhistic fantasy that compounds our participation in the game of capitalism, and through our very denunciations of its gambit by our fake withdrawal into an illusionary Self it reclaims us as a commodity of its own insane gesture.
1. Slavoj Zizek, On Belief (Routledge 2001)
*Note using Kindle version so will refrain from using page numbers: all quotes are from this book.