Žižek on Buddhism and on Christian Atheism: A Fan’s Notes

Brook Ziporyn

 

The latest installment of Slavoj Žižek’s vexed struggle with Buddhism comes to us in his recent book, Christian Atheism: How to Be a True Materialist. Some of the peculiarities of this struggle have been on the radar of a handful of contemporary thinkers for quite a while by now, in particular thinkers who have seriously engaged, and been seriously engaged by, both Žižek and Buddhist thought.   Žižek’s facility with paradoxical tropes of ontological incompleteness and his illuminating modelings of the intrinsic negativity at the heart of subjectivity have undeniable resonances with certain turns in the long history of Buddhist thought, as he himself does not deny.  It is therefore not surprising that thinkers with an interest in these topics would be drawn to both, and thus all the more bemused by the rather hostile treatment of Buddhism in his work.    Žižek is in some ways an ideal interlocuter for certain turns in Buddhist thought, and yet it does seem that something goes oddly askew in his treatments of this topic.  Many of his Buddhism-savvy critics have already pointed out how poorly sourced and unevenly argued the going gets whenever Žižek turns to this topic, and there is indeed undeniably something amiss here.   Even more than usual, when it comes to Buddhism, Žižek’s exposition gerrymanders, tumbles into head-scratching multi-page digressions, jump-cuts through non-sequiturs, sets up straw-men, triumphantly invokes risibly flimsy ad hominem arguments, switches sources in midstream, blurs distinctions, changes the subject.  His reliance on second-, third-, fourth-hand sources, sometimes even brief blogposts, as authoritative representative of a collective entity called “Buddhism” alone would disqualify him from most scholarly discussions of the matter, and this seemingly wilful flouting of community standards, almost a nose-thumbing at the very idea of such standards, might discourage us from even trying to engage this discussion seriously.  Now it might be argued that some of these tactics are almost inevitable when trying to engage in a critical reflection on a complex tradition outside one’s own accustomed field of expertise.  Gerrymandering, for example: choosing the best in one’s own group and the worst in the enemy’s group as representatives for comparison; in this case, drawing the lines of what counts as Buddhism and what as Christianity in such a way as to favor one’s own side: some officially Buddhist country does some ugly violent things, so Buddhism is bad, revealing the basic flaws of the entire system; but the only authentic Christianity is the long anathematized patripassianist heresy restored in Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s trinitarianism, so Christianity is really all about God’s self-destruction to enable our freedom, and none of what 99 per cent of historical Christians believe or do is really Christianity…. Not to throw stones from a glass house, I’m sure my own writings on monotheism will leave me open to similar accusations: of overgeneralizing, relying on selective sources, ignoring the possibility of someone’s preferred fringe interpretation, and so on.  But there is gerrymandering and then there is gerrymandering.  For my part, I do feel willing to say that I’ve made every good-faith effort I could to avoid such three-card-monty tactics in those critical writings, even when going out on some very uncomfortable limbs, bending over backwards as far as possible to consider more generous readings of the critiqued material and to offer reasons why I find them untenable.  To what degree I’ve succeeded, though, is of course not for me to judge. But if this pot calling out Žižek’s kettle is also somewhat black, I’ve tried at least to make it not quite so black—or at any rate not so black and white.    Žižek perhaps is grudgingly trying to play fair in some small way as well, through his efforts to cite and engage his Buddhist critics and consider their objections at some length.  But what we end up with is so much more aggressively substandard than mere shoddy scholarship and fallacious reasoning that it is hard to avoid the feeling that, in taking the bait and offering a serious answer, we are simply being punked.

Nevertheless, it is a testament to Žižek’s ineluctable power as a thinker and a writer that, in the midst of all this delightfully irresponsible riffing and tap-dancing, there are still some substantive points that can be extracted, some of which, though admittedly still egregiously underinformed, are quite incisive and worth discussing.  Indeed, almost every point Žižek raises can serve as a useful reminder to Buddhist thinkers themselves, since most of the critiques Žižek levels at “Buddhism” tout court have long been levelled by some Buddhists at other Buddhists.  The intra-Buddhist critique, admittedly, are not necessarily in the form of rejection of a “wrong” position to be replaced by the proffered “right” position, as the dichotomizing instinct of Žižek’s “intolerant Christian love” would go about it. Rather, they tend to take the distinctively Buddhist form of a recontextualization that affirms the original “wrong” interpretation while also showing it to have already operating all along in an unsuspectedly contrary way, as an upāya (“skillful means”), either useful as a ladder leading toward its own obsolescence, like a raft to be clung to while crossing the river but abandoned when one reaches the shore, or—in the Tiantai version to which I personally incline—as a raft that in the very act of being discarded turns out to itself be the other shore, a shore that leads back to more rafts, a raft that in ceasing to be a raft at all leads to all other rafts as all other shores.  I’d prefer to read Žižek’s gorgeous clowning in much the same way.  But this will require some unpacking.

But first, in solidarity with this spirit of merry irresponsibility, let us give in to the temptation to do some amateur ad hominem psychoanalyzing.  For it is worth remarking that, in spite of his possibly good-faith effort to grasp the anti-metaphysical Buddhist positions and their practical implications, one gets the distinct impression that the details of such critiques are all generated by a process of reverse engineering: it’s as if Žižek is simply turned off by the laid-back hipster kind of person and lifestyle he associates with Buddhism, so he’s sure there must be something wrong with it, and his work in this area consists of some anxious attempts to figure out what that is, with increasing urgency to distinguish it from his own uncomfortably similar ontological positions.  The challenge he faces is how to link his very Buddhist-sounding reading of Hegel and Lacan with an ethical consequence with what he considers distinctively unbuddhist overtones: a nostalgia for missionary zeal, knights of faith, martyrs to causes, fighting the good fight, and so on.  Of course, activist zeal in found in many traditions and in many forms.   What is distinctively Christian is the valorizing commitment to do this under the banner of an uncompromising categorical either/or of some kind, structured like the explicit reduction of the range of possible stances to a black and white “for” and “against” that we find in the repeated insistences of Jesus Christ in the Gospels: the spirit of “whoever is not for us is against us, whoever is not against us is for us”   (cf. on the one hand, Matthew 12:30, Luke 11:23, and on the other hand Mark 9:40, Luke 9:50—a black and white for and against either way). Žižek likes this part of Christianity, this “intolerant, exclusionary kind of love”—for him, this is a feature, not a bug.   Reading Lacan’s “Do not compromise on your desire” through this lens, we end up with an infatuation with the idea of passionate attachments to a Cause (even better, a quixotic or lost Cause), a kind of duty-bound brotherhood of spontaneous groups devoted to the Cause and to that extent also to each other, the romantic pathos of a heroic fight to the death, to prevail or to go down with the ship.   The problem is that the probable roots of such an ethical stance lie in the kind of traditional Christian metaphysics Žižek seems to want to reject: the world as rooted in a single unambiguous normative ground, providing a transcendent standard of good and evil, a demanding criterion to be applied uncompromisingly to judging the decisions and actions of autonomous beings, designed to weed out the tares among them from the wheat, to divide the sheep from the goats in the end.   The valorization of control, decision, judgment, agency are rooted in the conception of a ground of being which is itself an undeterrable moral agent in ultimate control, such that “control” itself is posited as the highest ontological category, for both God and man.  Žižek rejects this ontology: both man and “God” are for him constitutively self-conflicted and inconsistent, always wanting what they don’t want and not wanting what they want, incapable of settling into a single unconflicted desideratum of the will.  But for whatever reason, he also wants or needs the type of either/or ethical stance and all the glamor of decisive commitment and agency that typically go with this ontology.  So he is faced with the task of finding his preferred no-one’s-in-control ontology in the traditionally inhospitable ground of Christianity theology itself, albeit on the wispiest of threads—a path already cleared by Hegel, and in a broader sense not only by Hegel.   For Žižek is not wrong that there is long precedent among Christian thinkers for this kind of move—finding ways to make Christian doxology turn out to be symbolic of their own preferred metaphysic: Neo-Platonist, Aristotelean, Spinozist, Hegelian,  Marxist, existentialist, Heideggerian—the list goes on.   Perhaps that is what makes Žižek’s offerings “authentically Christian,” just as he claims.

(As a sidebar, I’ll note that Žižek’s struggle with Buddhism is not without precedent in a different way: it is very similar to the struggle with Buddhism enacted by the Neo-Confucians in late medieval China: hating on it and repudiating it, but incorporating many of its tenets into their metaphysics and claiming this is what the ancients meant all along, but yoked to an entirely different moral stance—the Confucian stance.   The conflicted anxious tone of the discussion has some similarity too.  Some Buddhist partisans see this as a theme in Western philosophers since the first encounter with this alleged “religion of nothingness”—a kind of Buddhaphobia in the face of a “fatal attraction.”)

So perhaps the root motivator of this whole kerfuffle lies in the trouble Žižek has grokking the profoundly unchristian ethical structure of both Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhism, because he’s looking for something to answer to the Christian-inflected Kantian-style absolute black-white morality of willing an unambiguous goal wholeheartedly, of the aspiration for total control—whether self-control or control of the world. But the core Buddhist doctrine of non-self is, among other things, a critique of control itself.  As this plays out in some of the Buddhist practices that seem to unsettle Žižek the most, it serves to undermine both controlling the world and being controlled by it, and in some of its further developments, even the hard-and-fast distinction between dwelling in suffering and escaping from suffering.  This means expanding rather than eliminating moral ambiguity. This expansion, though, changes the experience of that ambiguity rather than fighting to eliminate it.  Indeed, I think Žižek is quite right to notice that practices of detachment and “letting go” certainly are not designed to foment direct active interference in, alteration of, control of the flux of appearances, resolving the contradictions, eliminating the inconsistencies, fixing the world.    But neither are they simple exercises in passive acceptance of this impermanence and all the contradictions that go with it, amounting to inertial consolidations of the existing status-quo, as he sometimes seems to suggest.   The point is to enable changes in the experience of change and contradiction itself, a change of structure that shows up both in the detaching self and the detached-from things.   This is not autonomous freedom in the sense of free choice and agential control, nor is it the freedom-as-necessity of the man on a mission, whether for a cause or out of a love that he is driven to embrace through his own unconscious drives—Žižek’s preferred model of “freedom” as the kind of compulsion felt when one falls in love, faithfulness to one’s own unexplainable passionate commitment, more like being chosen than choosing.   But it is also not subjection to any single chain of causal determination, or even merely flitting from one such chain to another, blown now this way and now that. Rather, it focuses on the ambiguity of all such chains.  It is not just one thing replacing another, but also not simply exchanging one either/or framework for another.  It is a change in the either/or structure itself, which means also changing the dichotomous either/or between different either/or structures, between different ”Causes.” Buddhists might even claim that attempted control (commitment to a cause) always sabotages real change of this sort, unless that commitment also subverts itself—i,e., the case of the bodhisattva, where the inexplicable and impossible and internally heteronomous desire to which one finds oneself shackled is embraced and renamed “Vow”—but we’ll get to that below..

But first, we need to delve more deeply into the problem of desire itself.   To his credit, Žižek takes quite seriously some of the more incisive refinements put forth by his Buddhist critics, nuancing his reading of Buddhist detachment accordingly.  In the process, he raises some keenly observed and interesting problems that are very revealing of where the faultlines of this discussion lie.  The “desparate Lacano-Buddhists” among his critics make a powerful point about the Buddhist attitude to desire, which Žižek cannot completely dismiss.   They attempt to show that the Buddhist notion that all possible objects of desire are intrinsically unsatisfying, and the full embrace of this fact even while these the appearance of these objects remain unavoidable, is a true commitment to the real nature of desire.  In other words, the true fulfilment of the Lacanian bromides of “traversing the fantasy” and “not giving way on one’s desire” is to see and accept that desire for what it is, and not to confuse it with the concretized desire for any particular object.  This is what makes Buddhist a true exemplar, on this account, of being true to one’s desire, not compromising on one’s desire, rather being a mysticism, masculine or feminine, striving for immersion in jouissance.   Žižek says:

 

But what about the desperate Lacano-Buddhist attempt to read what Buddhism calls Nirvāṇa as basically the same stance as that signalled by Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy”? We cannot simply dismiss it as a gross misunderstanding of Lacan because there is a grain of truth in it: desire is metonymic – every empirical positive object that we desire is a trap (in the sense that, if we get it, our desire is not fully satisfied but disappointed, we experience a “ce n‘est pas ca” (this is not that what we really desired) [sic], so let’s drop our attachment to particular objects and just persist surfing along from one object to another. In other words, a true betrayal of our desire is precisely our full attachment to a particular object as its true object – if we renounce this, if we maintain a distance towards every object, we attain peace, we are faithful to our desire, i.e., to the void in its heart which cannot be abolished by any object …

 

 

Žižek sees the point, but then quickly fumbles it: he thinks that the goal is to reach full immersion in “the void” (sic) at the heart of desire–which later seems to be identified with “the Void in which multiplicities flow”–exempting nothing from insubstantiality, including the desiring self.  He seems to think that what remains in this metonymy of desire is then a calmness, merging with the peaceful void which is “the medium” in which flows the flux.   Hence he continues:

 

But this logic ultimately fails: 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. If we subtract particular objects, we get the gesture of breaking-up, of disturbing the balance, as such. What any particular empirical object of desire obfuscates is not the balance of a void but this negative gesture as such: any particular object particularizes this rupture as such, transforming it into a desire for something that positively exists as a particular object.

 

His critique is that “the Void” does not merely provide a medium for this insubstantial flow; the flow itself is generated by our attempt to cover or fill that Void as essentially and irredeemably traumatic.   And he’s right!  And many Buddhists do perhaps tend to miss this point as well.  But maybe not as many as Žižek thinks when he claims that Buddhists never really answer the question of where the temptation for attachment and ego-identity come from in this void of insubstantial relational appearances:

The key question that arises here is, of course: where does desire come from? How do we get caught into its illusion? Desire cannot be accounted for in the terms of the opposition between reified particular objects and the void beneath them, so that it arises when we get excessively attached to particular objects. The object-cause of desire (what Lacan calls objet a) is not an empirical object, it is a virtual element which disturbs the harmonious natural circuit described and celebrated by my Buddhist critics. So the vision, advocated by my critics, of a desire purified of its excess, is for Lacan totally illusory: desire is in itself a “pathological” excess, a de-stabilization of any balanced natural order. Suzuki seems to imply that what makes a desire mortifying is its “intellectualization,” its submission to rational categories that reify the fluid life experience of reality into a world of fixed substantial objects. However, desire is at its most basic not an effect of mechanic intellectual imprisonment, it is a “deviation” inscribed into life itself. In other words, if we subtract desire from life we don’t get a more balanced life, we lose life itself. To put it succinctly: 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 entire reality out of balance.

 

So we see what Žižek wants to shore up: the radical subjective engagement in a crazy desire which throws entire reality out of balance.   Sounds pretty cool!  But “throws” it out of balance?  Was it ever in balance?   Could it be?  Is “harmonious balance” even conceivable?   This will be our sticking point.   Where this all lands is made clear a few dozen pages later:

 

Here my Hegelo-Lacanian position and that of Buddhism come very close – with one detail that changes everything. In Buddhism, the absolute ground out of which everything arises (and dissolves back into it) is the Void, the abyss of internal rest – humans should tend to rejoin it in order to get rid of desire and suffering that comes with the fall from it (Buddhism never properly explains how does the illusion of maya – being caught in Saṃsāra, the wheel of desire – and the striving for material objects emerge in the first place). In my view, however, the barrier (or, in theological terms, the Fall) comes first, it (logically) precedes what it is presumed to fall from: at its most basic, “reality” is a barrier, an impossibility, nothing behind the barrier, and, as we have just seen, even this void behind the barrier is divided, split in itself. The point is not that Buddhism excludes the dynamics of movement: as we have already seen, the Void as the ultimate reality is the medium in which the process-relational flux, the continual coming into existence and passing away of the experiential bits of the world, all of which is quite real, takes place. What the Void excludes is just the idea that this flux is sustained by some “deeper” substantial reality which cannot be resolved in its relations with others. The peace towards which we strive in Buddhism is nothing else than the peace of the full immersion into this flux of appearances – or, as Badiou [sic], the Void in which multiplicities thrive. So what Buddhism tries to get rid of is the fixation on any substantial identity that is exempted from the relational flux and disturbs its harmonious balance – but where does the temptation to do this come from? The Hegelo-Lacanian view turns the entire perspective around: the relational flux does not just flow in the medium of a Void, it is elicited by an irreducible bar, by an impediment which we, caught in its wheel, try to fill in by some substantial entity. The primordial fact is that of an absolute “contradiction,” and that’s why Lacan calls Hegel “the most sublime of hysterics” (the title of yet another of my books): the elementary reversal in a dialectical process is the displacement of the barrier from our subjectivity (we, mortal humans, cannot comprehend all of reality) to the Real which is barred already in itself – as in Christianity, where the distance that separates a human from god is transposed into god himself (god doesn’t believe in himself). In the next step, of course, this self-difference in god is to be transposed into the self-difference in man: “God” is a name for the fact that man is not wholly (not divine but) human – whatever human being we encounter, “s/he is not it.” This is why a true materialism does not simply claim that god is a product of humans, of their imagination: “god” names the fact that man in not wholly man, that there is an inhuman dimension in its core.

 

Bravo!   Couldn’t agree more.   But it is here that we can see just what a straw man has been standing in for “Buddhism” through this whole discussion.  Buddhism starts from the inhuman dimension at the core of every human, the incongruity and inconsistency and heterogeneity that is the condition for the appearance of any putative “one,” any possible entity.   There is no harmonious balance that gets disturbed—precisely because there is no God to begin with.   All conditioned—that is, determinate, conceivable—entities are suffering, are impermanent, are non-self.  It is has always already been out of joint.  Put another way, impermanence, time itself, is the outrage of outrages, the scandal of scandals—no scandal of groundless subjectivity or the Cross is needed to make it paradoxical and unsettling of all certainties, undermining every consistent identity.  It is doing that already every moment.  This is true even for the most fully smoothed over domestication of this impermanence, any steady format or schema posited as undergirding the flow of time—it is already its own breakage.  Clock time, a grid of objectification, is one such domestication; conscious or unconscious willing, subjectively running alongside the passing of time as if in charge of making the future happen, is another. But time is its own undoing no matter what.  There is no present unless in contrast to a past: an eternally new present would never be experienced as different from a past, a definitive momentariness of genuinely distinct instants arising and perishing.  So pure time as pure passing of the old and production of the new would not be time at all.  Time is time only because it retains the past, a way of dragging itself back and over and against itself, to subvert its passing away and production of the new even as it is doing so: there is no passage of time without the failure of time to pass, in the form of the past which haunts the present, and without which there is no present and no change.   The entire Madhyamaka revolution that kicks off the Mahāyāna depends on first accepting and then dispelling the fundamentalist notion of Abidhammic momentariness, moments as genuine and definitely “different” from one another.   In fact, after the strictly phenomenological reduction of every seemingly solid thing to merely a rapid series of momentary flashes of experience, given an illusory continuity and solidity like that of a circle formed in the dark by a rapidly rotating lightsource or a wave passing through the crowd at a football game as the fans stand and sit in sequence, the Madhyamaka expands the critique to logical grounds via reductio ad adsurdum arguments to show that no definitively same nor definitively different entities of any kind can possible exist.  But this same critique is then applied to these moments themselves: we move on to see that moments too can be neither the same nor different from one another.    In fact, the moments cannot be same or different from themselves.   The moment’s arising must be different from its perishing, but it also cannot be different: if the arising and the perishing were definitively different, these would constitute two different events, each of which in turn would need to have an arising and a perishing.  But we also cannot simply dispense with distinct moments altogether, recognizing them to be an inadequate conception of the Understanding that has nothing to do with reality (as Spinoza, Hegel, James, Bergson et al. all do in their own way), substituting instead some extended specious present enduring through a specifiable though vaguely bordered length of time, because the same problem will apply to this “one” experience, however long or short or vague we make it.  For the problem is with the very notion of a one as opposed to a many, neither of which can be eliminated.  The brute fact of our naïve notion of a “now” throws this marvel in our face in a most salutary way; both the oneness of the moment and the impossibility of this oneness are to be embraced rather than discarded or unilaterally transcended.  Each moment is its own arising, enduring and perishing, irreconcilably conflicted and yet identically that one snap of an instant, each is its own past and future, each an entirely new array of past and future, yet simultaneous with its entrapment in these alien pasts and futures.   As such, each is its own pulling away from the constant self-undermining that is itself, its own endeavor to undermine this undermining.   Nothing further is needed for either its unsettlements nor its constant futile attempts to settle itself: they are one and the same, and there is nothing besides.  Time is the very attempt to stop time.  The attempt to settle is a further unsettling, a further leap toward even greater indetermination, yet another determination to undetermine whatever already is.

And this is why Žižek’s fetishization of the Act, of the Event, of special moments of unforeseeable and world-changing radical change, is such a regrettable atavism.   This singling out of certain moments at the expense of others consolidates the illusion that there could be any sort of transformation of one moment into another that is not a constant wrenching recontextualization and revolution of all reality.   It obscures the radical change that is already going on as the everyday passing of time, the horror and outrage and scandal of the fact that now is not now.   It is an unwillingness to tarry with this negative, to embrace its immanent liberative powers, that started the panicked Hegelian search for an alternative negativity, driving the transition from sense-certainty exclusively toward secondary negativities of language and its universals, finding those liberative powers again the long way around, to be sure, but with the enormous cost of now restricting them to some moments and not others—clandestinely reinstating the moral either/or of the mutual exclusivity of identity and difference that this negativity alone could have finally overcome.  Instead of that overcoming, we get the demon seed of eschatological monotheism back again but refurbished with new retrovirus defenses—no surprise, then, that it is this either/or that still lives and breathes even more vigorously in Žižek in spite of his crypto-Buddhist atheism, going so far as to even Christianize it.

The (Tiantai) Buddhist alternative would not be to exclude these alternate negativities, the abstracting powers of the Understanding as the operation of Reason itself that Žižek rightly highlights in his reading of Hegel, nor to remain statically at Sense-certainty in the Phenomenology, or at Being in the Logic; it would be, instead, to read Hegel both forwards and backwards, moving both toward and away from the immanent contradictions of every weigh-station along the way, and applying every category recursively to every other.   In other words, rather than a unilateral subsumption in the Idea, we would have the intersubsumption of Spirit and Sense-certainty, of Being/Nothing and Identity/Difference and the Idea.  What would then the relation between Spirit and sense-certainty, between the Idea and Being?   Not identical, not different.  What about between this very act of Spirit subsuming Sense-certainty and this very act of Sense-certainty subsuming Spirit?   Again, not identical, not different.  The same would go for the relation between time (which Hegel calls the negativity of Spirit in its (merely) existent form) and Spirit in its fully realized self-recognition: neither identical nor different.   This is what we mean by “intersubsumption.”

And to return to the topic at hand, we would then see intersubjectivity as an elaboration of the really existing negativity of time, of the self-contradictory now, but also the reverse: time as an elaboration of intersubjectivity.  Žižek/Lacan is not wrong to insist that the search for self requires an other’s recognition, and that this other is intrinsically unstable and inconsistent.  But the whole intersubjective field is an elaboration of the primary intersubjectivity of the relation to the present and its past objectifications, of the present and its projections into the future—and vice versa.   We are that intersubjective swarm itself.  Being alone in a room is already social.   Which comes first?  Does time condition recognition of being recognized by others, or does intersubjectivity create our experience of time?   The neither-same-nor-difference should be applied here: it is idle to try to identify one as prior and the other as posterior, whether logically or empirically.   Above all we should avoid the temptation to feign this intersubsumption—actually blocking it–by distributing the priority of time to efficient cause and intersubjective spirit to final cause, each subsuming the other only in this restricted sense.  These “senses” themselves must be viewed also as mutually entailing, immanently Mobius-stripping into one another, intersubsuming: neither-same-nor-different.

To be sure, if Nirvāṇa is conceived as a real alternative to this, in pre-Mahāyāna style, we might talk of some peace and calmness to be attained, albeit in a highly attenuated and apophatic sense.  But this is an alternative that should have long been off the table, since Žižek is engaging Nāgārjuna and the Mahāyāna and bodhisattvahood, and above all non-abiding Nirvāṇa (also known as “Mahāparinirvāṇa,” “The Great Nirvāṇa,” the subject matter of the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra) which abides in neither Nirvāṇa nor Saṃsāra.  This Great Nirvāṇa is described as both extinction of body and mind and the eternal activity of body and mind, the triangular “three dots” of liberation (the extinguishment of a buddha’s body and mind), dharmabody and prajna-wisdom (the continuing activity of a buddha’s body and mind).  This is not conceived as an alternative to or replacement of Nirvāṇa as quiescence, though.  Is more thoroughgoing Nirvāṇa, deeper and more comprehensive, more universal extinction.  It is quiescence but more so: the extinction of both definite extinction (to the exclusion of activity) and of definite activity (to the exclusion of extinction), abiding in neither Nirvāṇa nor Saṃsāra.  Yet Žižek is not wrong, in fact is exceptionally astute, performing a crucial service, in stressing that everything hangs on this question, that non-abiding Nirvāṇa is the only real Nirvāṇa.  For indeed, in many Mahāyāna sources, the idea of bodhisattvahood is initially introduced as merely a temporary stay of execution, albeit one that may go on for trillions of years: the whole point of this tarrying in Saṃsāra is to eventually reach old-school exit from Saṃsāra, for both oneself and others.  In this initial form, re-entry in the world is merely a means for a more complete exit from the world.  Most Mahāyāna exposition indeed leaves this point in place without comment, though increasingly de-emphasisizing it, elongating the time of delay, and above all stressing the constitutive infinity and impossibility of the task.  Rhetorically, the emphasis is gradually shifted over to the tarrying, while the final goal, actual extinction and exit from the turmoil of Saṃsāra, increasingly fades from the picture.  But the structure is rarely explicitly addressed, since the means-ends relation between bodhisattvahood tarrying in the world and eventual achievement of full disappearance from the world is the lynchpin that holds the entire structure in place.  It is not until the Lotus Sūtra that the structure finally reverses itself definitively, in the big reveal in the first half of the text that the search for extinction of the Two Vehicles is really just a form of bodhisattvahood, one that even requires forgetting that one is a bodhisattva, that there really is no “small Nirvāṇa” of the individual, and the even bigger reveal in Chapters 11-16, that the exit from the world at the end of the process is merely a feign, another technique applied within the compassionate engagement of bodhisattva activity, even for a buddha.  The end of the process, the goal of the process, is part of the process itself: exiting the world is just another way of being in the world, Nirvāṇa as extinction is itself one more tool in the hands of bodhisattvahood, one of the many skillful means in the arsenal of engagement, one of many forms of the real, non-abiding, Nirvāṇa, which deploys both Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra, abiding in neither, freely flowing through both.  The end is a means in the hands of the means.  The Buddha’s extinction, ostensibly the goal of all this labor in Saṃsāra, is now seen as another tool in his toolkit.   There is no escape from life in the world.

But crucially, this does not amount to constant aggressive activity in the world: both the activity and the letting go, both the presence in the world and the absence from the world, are parts of this activity of the world: the point is how absence functions as a form of presence in the form of absence, quiescence as a form of activity.  We see this in Chapter 11 of the same text, where a buddha appears actively interacting in the work many eons after his alleged “final extinction,” and in Chapter 16, where the buddha uses his own appearance of death and absence as a way to compassionately engage sentient beings, absence from the world as a form of being active in the world.  Non-abiding Nirvāṇa as encompassing both Nirvāṇa-as-extinction and Saṃsāra as strenuous work means that presence and absence alternate, Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra alternate, but both are forms of presence and both are forms of absence: both are ways of being in Nirvāṇa and both are ways of being in Saṃsāra.  As opposed to the relentless uninterrupted activity in the world that Žižek sometimes seems to want (this “sometimes” marking a welcome inkling peeking through some of his recent works that disengaging is also sometimes crucial), non-abiding Nirvāṇa includes (does not abide in) manifestations of both aggressive engagement in bodhisattva activism, striving at every moment to liberate beings, and complete withdrawal, absolute absenting from the world: both of these are forms of liberative activity in the world, of bodhisattva activity, and both are fully non-abiding Nirvāṇa, absolute extinction, absolute Buddhahood.

Relational flux thus does not flow in the medium of a peaceful void.  Relational flux is the peaceful void—which also means the peaceful void is relational flux, with all the contradictions and chaos that implies.   To get to the contradiction that is the source of both chaos and void, we don’t need something “beyond” the void: that is the void, which contradicts itself, which is the flow of chaos—and vice versa.   If it could be merely void, or merely flux which is not also anti-flux, it would already be too much of a “thing,” not at all a void, not really flux.   And this applies not only to the “unattached” flow of flux, but to the flowing desires, attachments and egos themselves—no other “source” is needed.

Ok, so what is “the” Buddhist explanation for the origin of desire, or rather the reason no origin is required: how is it that impermanence itself is already the desire for permanence, how non-self is always already a desire for self, an attempt at selfhood?   It is not simply the result of the reifying intellectualizing work of the Understanding, as Žižek seems to think, citing D.T. Suzuki.   I will give several versions from actual Buddhist traditions.

 

In Theravāda, the short answer is that it is not reifying objects in the world as permanent essences that is the source of the problem, but the concomitant reifying of the self as a consistent, unified identity in control of what it desires, what it does, and what happens to it.  It’s not only that the self is impermanent: it is not even a single consistent whole at any single moment, always a composite of disparate elements, and never in unilateral control either of what it wants or what it does or what happens to it.   The desire for sensual pleasure, oriented around objects (kāma-taṇhā) is only a proxy for the other two types of desire in the standard list given for the Second Noble Truth: bhava-taṇhā and vibhava-taṇhā: desire to exist (as some particular identity) and desire not to exist (as some other particular identity).   In fact, all of these reduce quite simply to desire for unconditioned selfhood as controller of its own experience and identity.  (See my Emptiness and Omnipresence, Chapter One, for a fuller discussion.)   The detailed exposition of this is given in the twelve nidāna sequence, and in another way in the structure of the five aggregates.  In both, the idea is quite simple.  We start with conditioned co-arising as a necessary condition of impermanence, without which nothing at all can be experienced—hence as a necessary condition of all experience.  Conditioned co-arising means all experience and conceivable existence requires multiple causes and multiple effects, never one cause and one effect, never one cause and many effects, never many causes and one effect.   Any conditioned being, not being the source or sustainer of its own existence and identity, requires external sources of those things.  To be finite is to be dependent on external things to sustain one’s identity, and this multiple-sourcing, this lack of independence, is demonstrated simply by the fact of change itself: anything that was independently and in itself both a necessary and sufficient condition of being what it was never would and never could change.  The crudest example of this dependence for a living being, of course, is simply the dependence on food.  But Buddhist texts speak of experiences too as a kind of food—for sustaining not one’s body, but also one’s putative identity.   Given this situation, there will be contact between the dependent being and its outside.  Sometimes it will contribute as food for the body or the mind, sustaining it; that will be experienced as pleasure.  Sometimes the opposite happens: that will be pain.   Most of the time, both of these will be going on at once.   In terms of the aggregates, where there is a physical body (the first aggregate, rūpa), there will be sensation (the second aggregate, vedanā), experienced at first only as pleasure, pain or neutral contact.   Then we have the act of identifying the sources of the sensations, grouping them into classes so as to repeat the pleasant experiences (the ones that serve as food) and avoid the unpleasant ones (the ones that don’t) in the future: labelling and memory as the condition for the perception of identifiable objects, bringing experiences together under unified conceptual categories and identifying them as definite “things” with definite characteristics and predictable essences (this is the third aggregate, saṃjñā—literally “synthesizing cognition”).   On the basis of this, we have formative activities, most centrally volitions (the fourth aggregate, saṃskāras)—the body attempting to obtain the pleasant and self-sustaining objects and experiences and avoid the unpleasant ones—in other words, now having stable classes of things, it tries to make predictions about the future and exerts itself to repeat prior pleasant (i.e., nourishing and sustaining) experiences, repetition now for the first time being conceivable: “the same” type of thing can happen again under “the same” conditions.   On the basis of this desire, a fundamental division takes place: we get distinct consciousness of object as opposed to self (the fifth aggregate, viññāṇa), literally “dividing cognition”—the exact antonym of saṃjñā, synthesizing cognition.  In other words, by grouping objects into stable categories, we exert our volition to have some of them and not others, separating those we want to remain in contact with and those we want to avoid, and it is this that not only divides these objects into categories but also separates ourselves out from experience, able to stand apart from some experiences at will, allied to some and not others, detachable from the process of impermanence where all elements change together, with no exceptions, at every moment–hence as an autonomous self that continues self-identically through time, self-consciousness as putative selfhood.   It is not so much that we want the object of our desire to be stable, so we can enjoy it.  We want to continue to be there to enjoy it at that future time when it is obtained, requiring that our desires stay the same in the meantime, connected to and brought to be solely by a self that stays the same.  We want to continue to desire then what we desire now—a hint toward how “desire as desire of the other” will take shape here, to be discussed below.  Here we have the repetition compulsion that takes us “beyond the pleasure principle,” not as an independent power, but as a mutually exacerbating by-product of the pleasure principle itself.   To put it another way, the pleasure principle is itself already beyond the pleasure principle.   We want part of the world to change while another part stays the same, and that means a fundamental division.    But the claim is not only that this is not sustainable, because all parts of the world constantly change, both our desires and our self and the objects.   The point is that the very mechanism of seeking pleasure and life is its own subversion, creating the disjunction between the pleasure and the experiencer of the pleasure, disturbing the unity of the two coarising as a single moment of experience which was the sine qua non of the originally experienced pleasure, by attempting to sustain and repeat that self to be available to receive a subsequent moment of pleasure.   A brake is put on one half of the experience, the experiencer, while the other moves along, wrenching the experience into two, undermining the possibility of repeating the pleasure by trying to ensure it.   This is not because something has gone wrong; its wrongness (self-undermining) is how and what it has always been, intrinsic to the experiencing of pleasure as pleasure.

Nothing more is needed for this than the presence of finite beings and the ignorance that goes with being finite, the lack of complete information that goes with having any limitations—i.e., any determinations—at all, and the narrowing of attention that this necessitates insofar as being finite also means being dependent on and thus in need of prioritizing certain external things, as we’ve just discussed.   The world doesn’t “go out of whack”—it has always been out of whack, because all finite entities are in this condition, and to be an entity at all is to be finite; there are no other types of entities.   To be attached to some degree is just what it means to exist, even in the minimal form of physical inertia: when a rock resists being split apart, in the very hardness of the rock, we have a rudimentary case of attachment to being.   Here we must push back against the attempt to draw a qualitative rather than a quantitative distinction between the living and the non-living, or between the subject and the object.   The break is there even in base matter—a break from base matter is therefore not required to give us the full alienation known as subjectivity.   Would this not be what it means to see the barred subject not as a barring of the subject from reality, but a barring within reality itself, a barring of itself from itself?  True, the added factors of synthesizing cognition, volition and self-consciousness put in place a far more efficient mechanism for the self-perpetuation of this resistance to change, a feedback loop where suffering leads to action (karma) in an attempt to redress that suffering, which gives temporary relief, seeming to satisfying the demand for control whenever a deed happens to manage to succeed (I wanted to lift my arm, and—lo and behold—my arm lifted!).  But this satisfaction requires an exacerbation of ignorance: I have to learn to narrow my awareness all the more to ignore all the other factors that in this case allowed my action to seem to succeed in demonstrating my complete control (my arm did not rise solely because of my wanting it to rise: it also required oxygen in the room, sufficient food to supply energy to my muscles, lack of pathogens in my body, the stability of the earth’s gravitational field, etc.).  Doubling down on my newly confirmed sense of self with this intensified ignorance, I am hit by more suffering when it is again disconfirmed, requiring more action, requiring more self-blinding to preserve the illusion of success, and so on in an escalating spiral.   But all we need for this is the simple fact of finitude (including the realization that even the lack of finitude would, ipso facto, just be another kind of finitude—for finitude just means lacking something, anything): not only everything that does exist, the reality we happen to inhabit—anything that could exist would be in this condition.   To exist is to be finite, which is to be desiring to continue to exist.  Nothing had to go wrong, because there was never any right to begin with: whatever there is or could be, any determinate entity whatsoever, would always have to be split upon itself in this way.

In Tiantai Buddhism, the origin of desire is still the above, but with one important twist: the impermanence-oriented inconsistency of the self has expanded through the negative dialectics of Madhyamaka Emptiness discourse to show the Emptiness of the self and all its objects: each is now understood to be not merely a composite of incongruous but internally self-consistent elements, but as entirely ambiguous from beginning to end in both whole and part.   It is not a collection of different elements, each of which however is simply identical with itself; rather, all its elements are also indeterminate in the same way.  This indeterminacy, however, is constitutive ambiguity, not a mere apophatic blank beyond conception, nor a vagueness or unclarity of determination.  That is, there are only clear and distinct finite existences, but these existences themselves are constitutively ambiguous.  Anything referred to or imagine to either exist or not exist is ipso facto to that extent coherent.  But to be coherent is also to be incoherent, which is also to be multiply coherent, innumerable alternate coherences.  This is the meaning of ambiguity: to be coherent requires a disambiguating context (and there is always at least one of these in operation if anything at all has been adduced for consideration) but every element of this context can disambiguate only to the extent that it is itself coherent, which requires that each has its own disambiguating contexts, and so ad infinitum.  But the entirety of possible and actual existence considered as a whole cannot be coherent as any particular unambiguous coherence, for the very same reason: it would need a further context outside itself, per impossibile, to disambiguate it.   So there is no consistent whole to contextualize and thus disambiguate any given element in the whole.   As such, the various possible contexts relevant to disambiguating any given coherence are inconsistent with one another, always alternately readable in the context of alternate readings of the ambiguous whole.   This is the global incoherence of every local coherence.   It amounts also to the multiple coherence of any such local coherence, in fact the subsumption within that particular coherence of all other possible coherences, both as elements of and as alternate readings of itself.   Thus is the meaning of the Madhyamaka Emptiness in the hands of Tiantai thinkers, elaborated into the triad of Emptiness (global incoherence), Provisional Positing (local coherence) and the Middle (the intersubsumption not only of these two, as synonymous restatements of each other, but the intersubsumption of all possible coherences).  Note that Emptiness itself is here merely one more local coherence, such that the same applies to it, rendering it threefold in this manner.   Negation is only ambiguously negation—and this is the true negation.   This is not a composite of a clear part and a fuzzy part, a determinate side and an indeterminate side: it is ambiguity through and through.  Local coherence is the only kind of coherence there is, but local coherence itself is a synonym for global incoherence, just an alternate way of saying and thinking it, a different sense (Sinn) of the same referent (Bedeutung)—but in this case the two alternate sense are themselves synonymous.  To use a familiar example, it is not a hybrid duck and rabbit—perhaps a duck’s head on a rabbit’s body: it is Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: entirely duck but also entirely rabbit.   And it is seeing the rabbit as a whole, subsuming every part of the figure into its rabbitness so that there is nothing but rabbitness there (every line a rabbit part: rabbit ear, rabbit mouth…), with no external context to further support this coherence, that instigates the flip over into total duckness, changing every single part to a duck part.   Rabbit and duck are the two sides of the Mobius strip, always opposed but with their transformation into the other guaranteed not by skipping to the other side from some outside vantage point, as a parallax viewed from outside, but by the very fact of following through all the way with one side or the other, seeing duck a product of seeing only rabbit and seeing rabbit a product of seeing only duck.  The transformation of each into the other is inherent to fully being what it already is.

Applying this to the origin of desire, we have, first, the above account of the arising of desire from the condition of finitude in need of external support, increasingly exacerbated in conscious beings by the attachment to self: this derives simply from ambiguity itself, “non-dwelling,” the fact that there is nothing to prevent it, that whatever way something might be, it could not “dwell” in that condition; however it might identify itself or be identified by others, it will always be “more,” other, something else as well—and this will apply no matter how broad and inclusive the determination may be.  If all there is is anything, including “eternal nothingness,” it will have to also always be something else.   In other words, again, ambiguity is simply concomitant with finitude itself, conditionality itself, conditioned co-arising, impermanence, Emptiness.   Ignorance and desire are the default state, given finite impermanent beings, which are the only kind of beings there could be—anything else wouldn’t qualify as a determinate being at all.   But seeing that this very condition means ambiguity for any possible state or characteristic, the same is applied to this very story of desire and ignorance and suffering.  Just as the whole duck is the whole rabbit, the entire arising of all sentient activity is now seen to also, just as much and just as little, to be bodhisattva activity: desires are now called vows, and every ignorant action of every sentient being, being fundamentally ambiguous (“Empty”), can and must now be read also as salfivic liberating bodhisattva activity, constructed intersubjectively on the basis of the prior reading of the same content as ignorant desire and suffering, in the manner of a punch line to a joke which recontextualizes its set-up.  That doesn’t mean it really is bodhisattva activity, nor that it is really deluded karma: it is neither, it is both—it is ambiguous.  To use again that favorite trope of Žižek’s, it is a Mobius strip of these two opposed sides which are also one.   Ethical activity here is to find ways in each situation to recontextualize in such a way that, in that specific case, the liberating aspect is also activated.   Ethics is the search for punchlines.

 

I’ll give one more version of the origin or rather non-origin of desire, perhaps more to Žižek’s taste:  the story of Yajñadatta’s head from the *Śūraṅgama Sūtra 楞嚴經, a text which, even though it is a Tang dynasty forgery written in Chinese and merely posing as a translation of an Indian Sūtra reporting the Buddha’s own words, arguably defines the dominant theoretical framework and main scriptural pillar of the majority of Chinese Buddhist thought from the 9^th century onwards.  The story is told there of certain Yajñadatta, who woke up one morning and went to the mirror.  He noticed that the fellow in there was just like him in all respects but one.  He could see that the other fellow had feet and toes like him, legs and midriff and torso, chest and arms—but the guy in the mirror had a head, while Yajñadatta himself had none!   Captivated by the beauty of the face he sees in the mirror, that head with such clear and visible eyes and eyebrows, and outraged that he in comparison has no face to see, he goes mad, thinking himself to be some kind of uncanny demon. Suddenly panicking, he goes running all over town, fleeing in terror from the demonic headless man who was himself, searching everywhere for his lost head.[1]  He sees his head in the mirror, i.e., as an object, and then goes crazy because he does not have any “head” comparable to that which he sees there in front of him.  It is just his head which allows him to see the illusory head which makes him think he has no head.  The seeing head sees other things but is not an object itself; in its everyday function it sets up an object, just because with nothing added to the default ambiguity there is nothing to prevent it from doing so, to navigate its way through the world, but it goes mad when it wants to have the reality of an object of the kind it, through its much greater power, posited in the first place due to its not being an object, i.e., being a “seeing” rather than a seen.  This primary awareness just means “not anything, not excluding anything, the default ambiguity that pertains to any possible definite or indefinite existence or nonexistence.  Like Yajñadatta’s real head, it was there all along, expressing “not being anything, not excluding anything” all the more in not excluding the thought that it was absent, and the mad desire to want to remedy this. This ambiguity that is the default awareness requires no explanation—as the same sutra says elsewhere, awareness is not even definitively “awareness,” mind as opposed to object, space as opposed to fullness, ambiguity as opposed to definiteness–and this is precisely what makes it awareness.  Any awareness that was definitively awareness would cease to be awareness: it would have to exclude anything that is not awareness, which is to say any determinate objective thing, and thus would not be awareness of anything, and thus would not be awareness.  This headlessness is just the absence of any exclusion or inclusion, ambiguity itself.  What would require an explanation would be to be something or to exclude something.  Less is required, not more, to bring about this less-than-nothing that is awareness as opposed to its absence: it is neither a self-sustaining entity nor dependent on external causes.  Since it is not the exclusion of anything, the thought of an object cannot be excluded, and sooner or later arises—because why wouldn’t it?  When it does arise, in the effort of a hungry animal to track a predictable course to fulfil its needs, there is no self-nature of awareness to be lost or occluded thereby.   We need not inquire why the awareness fell into delusion, for this would imply that the awareness was a something, which could fall or vanish.  Since the original awareness distorted by the delusion is not a real entity, the delusion too, not having an effect on any real entity, is not a real entity; it too is neither self-existent nor caused by anything.   No account of it can be given (there is no “it” to give an account of).  Any and every perception would express it.  The true (Yajñadatta’s awareness, his true “head”) and the false (his madness, his search for his head) alike cannot be described by means of either self-existence or dependence on external causes.  As such they cannot be said to be the same or to be different.   Note too that this means that the insane search for a head through every proxy object and comical flight from his own headless body are not even misuses of this real headless headspace.  These are entirely legitimate uses of this headless headspace which is simply to allow the appearance of non-head determinations.   They are just a narrowing of that function, a restriction or limitation of its range.  So in one sense there is nothing normatively objectionable, no deep offence against ontological bedrock, about spending all one’s life in this futile search.  At most, it is somewhat wasteful, a missed opportunity for the indeterrminate-which-excludes-no-determinations to access even more determinations—to see and seek even more different things.   The only regrettable thing here is the way a single channeling of this non-exclusionary function shapes it into a de facto exclusionary one, the neither-same-nor-different now effectively boundaried and made definite, having a definite other, leaving out some possible experiences, some possible ways of beings and seeing, some possible beings to be.

We have in this story almost the inverted twin of Freud’s encounter with his own uncanny double in the mirror of a train compartment, and in another way with Lacan’s intersubjective mirror whose solidity and imagined gaze incite us to solidify ourselves.   The doubling here, the self-objectification, is both intrinsic to self-awareness as such and also intrinsically doomed to failure.  There is no great mystery to it.   As we’ve already hinted above, to be aware is already to be aware of oneself simply by virtue of having to pass through time, of having a past, which is to say to have a memory, .  But to have a remembered past is intrinsic to having a present, experiencable only in contrast to that past. The focus here is not on the projected view of oneself in the eyes of the mirrored other, but the sedimented object of oneself in the past.  If this seems circular—assuming the continuity through time that is present-with-a-past that is already fully-fledged self-consciousness, which is just what we are charged to explain–it is because it is imagined to be something that would have to arise from a prior default state of insentient objects.  But these are themselves just these very projections of self-objectification.  These insentient objects are more conditioned, not less, than the awareness that projects them; unless there is some reason to be something rather than something else, the default will be the neither-same-nor-different.  This headless thinglessness is what is objectified as a fully-fledged thing, a real head, that exists in a mutually exclusive relationship with other things, that is ruled by a definitive either/or canon of sameness or difference.  How does the awareness which sees and mistakes a head for itself arise?  Not from a head.  The head arises from it.  Hence there is no need to derive headlessness from the world of heads.

In being placed before a mirror of oneself as other, the disparity between the doubled sides is as unavoidable as their coupling, and sets off the slide of desire to escape from the void of such an uncanny headlessness and to fill the gap of the head.   This gap can never be filled, because there was never any loss: the true head is precisely the absence of a “head,” the real head is the seeing of heads and the missing of a head and the loving of heads and the searching for a head.  If there were a head, the head would not be a head: it there were a flesh-covered skull there where the other has it, he would never be able to see the other, or anything else.

That is the Śūraṅgama Sūtra version of the “origin” of desire, the non-origin of desire.   The “void” is our own (lack of) a head, and it is this void itself which goes search in search of the substance that would fill it, ransacking one proxy object after another—not realizing that the head is “found” precisely in this search, is none other than the search itself: for the true “head” is just “the absence of a head that searches for a head, the lack of a head,” the function of the void that seeks.   The “flow of objects” is each place to which Yajñadatta runs in this search, the metonymy of desire to which Žižek refers, finding that each object is not what was really sought.   What was sought was the head, which is the headlessness, which is the searching itself.   As we’ve seen, the sūtra further stresses, as Žižek does not, that this means there is no unambiguous answer to whether the head is lost or found: does he lose his head when he goes made and searches for it?  No, this is precisely the head functioning.   Does he gain his head if he stops searching?   No, he will never gain any more of a head than he already has when searching madly for it.  Has he failed to find the head when he takes it to be a cantaloupe?   Not only yes, because the cantaloupe that fills the void thereby obscures the true head, but also no, because the activity of engaging the head whether deludedly or not is precisely the finding of the head: the head is really there in the mistaken grasp of the cantaloupe as head.   There is no traumatic break from a calm prior reality, because the reality itself is broken: i.e., the “presence” of a head is precisely the absence of “a head.”      It is not, as Žižek claims “Buddhism” thinks, that there is a chaotic flux plus a calmness of accepting the chaotic flux ungraspingly; nor is it that there is, as Žižek claims, just a chaotic flux that is not also unchanging and calm.  The whole point is that the dichotomy between having and lacking, still and motion, chaos and peace, is a misconception—the either/or structure of reality which is precisely the theistic inheritance that Žižek strives to preserve in spite of his atheism: the Christian part of Christian atheism.

Here we see a more accurate depiction of what Žižek insists on calling “the Void”:  just as is the case for any other putative “thing,” there ain’t no thing that is the void—a calm voidness, a voidness that was simply itself and not also every interruption thereof, would not be a void but a self-nature, a definite entity.  That would be as much a “thing” as the most solid cantaloupe.   A thing just means what can exclude another thing: anything determinate, even definite “indeterminacy.”   But a void that was just purely void, void on its own, stably void, able to excluding any contents, would just be a thing of this kind.   This, it seems to me, would be a true example of “something as failed nothing,” which Žižek to his great credit emphatically endorses.  Nothing is far too much of a something to sustain itself, on the oldest and most commonplace Buddhist premises, simply the universal application of the impossibility of any self-nature.   Nothingness is impossible—what’s all this worry about “where things come from”?    It’s the old negation of negation, Slav!  He thinks Buddhism misses the self-contradiction at the root of reality, that the flux of insubstantial appearances is generated by our inescapable but futile attempts to cover up.  But how is this not exactly the non-abiding Nirvāṇa he had sympathetically engaged pages earlier?  That Nirvāṇa, that void, is not a placid void, not merely and exclusively a void, but also the opposite of itself: real Nirvāṇa is not just Nirvāṇa, but the paradoxical non-dwelling in both Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra.  This is already enfolded in the emptiness of emptiness itself, at least as it was understood in East Asia, starting with the great Seng Zhao, who nailed it already in the 4^th century: “If the absence of all characteristics was taken to be [definitively] the absence of characteristics, then it would ipso facto have characteristics.”    Non-abiding Nirvāṇa is the only Nirvāṇa there is, as Žižek rightly insists.   But this means it is neither Saṃsāra (the flux) nor Nirvāṇa (the quiescence), neither the passions of the flux nor the calm of the void.  Why does he insist on describing this as either flux or quiescence?  Calm in chaos is equally chaos in calmness.  Neither can ever be excised, and neither is more fundamental than the other. That’s just what is meant by non-abiding Nirvāṇa, the quiescence of quiescence which is its chaos, the emptiness of emptiness which is everything non-empty, the emptying out of emptiness’s emptiness.   The void is generated by the flux as much as the flux is generated by the void; their opposition is their synonymity, their synonymity is their opposition—one feels that Žižek of all people should know this.   Why then this insistence that it must be one or the other, that one must be the origin, that one or the other must be either the starting point or the ending point?  His own ontology knows so much better: where’s that Mobius strip when you need it?  So why?  This is why we have to guess that this is all reverse engineering designed to arrive at the foregone ethical conclusion: the Christian either/or demands it, the passionate intolerant attachment to emancipation, freely but unchoosingly embraced, for which one is willing to sacrifice everything…..

But there are other ways to conceive of passionate commitments to impossible desire—ones which ride and incorporate the insurmountable Mobius strip rather than abandoning it.  As for the reinstated passionate commitment of a bodhisattva, which Žižek calls “fake” because it claims to be purely altruistic, is this attribution not another projection of repressed Christian content, the inheritance of a tradition that insists upon an absolute gulf between self-interest and other-interest—which of course is parasitic on the gulf between self and other per se?   The inheritance of the Kantian dichotomy between pathological self-interest and universal ethical commitment looms very large here, and with it a conception of universality not as the full realization of particularity and vice versa, but as the absolute exclusion of the particular and contingent, the Christian either/or ethos of “not serving two masters,” where only nuance-free scorched-earth self-denial of the selfish animal self counts as morality.  But in Buddhism, where an ethos of “serving” and “masters” is altogether lacking, what’s all this talk of “pure” altruism?    The bodhisattva claims outright to benefit both self and other—there is simply no possibility of purely disinterested altruism in Buddhism, because suffering is the only motivator, with no supervening “moral law.” The reason a bodhisattva devotes himself to his obsessive desire (his “Cause”) is to overcome it, not by eliminating it but by restoring the flow between this obsession and every other possible obsession—a valorization of obsession per se, as pre-Mahāyāna Buddhism was a valorization of unrealizable desire per se.  The point is not to make one’s own baseless purpose actually prevail instead of someone else’s equally baseless purpose, but only to exacerbate the necessary misrecognition that allows one to reach the collapse of this purpose and its transformation–into those other purposes.  And this recognition of the various contingent obsessions of others as versions of one’s own contingent obsession is, we may feel, the real intersubjectivity of desire, the real solidarity, the real communitas.  What is missing in Žižek’s account is the self-obsolescing raft structure as the model of both attachment and detachment, and their convergence.   Žižek weirdly thinks of bodhisattvahood as having something to do with sacrifice rather than this shamelessly self-interested “benefit of self and benefit of others.”   But this too is off the table once we have the redefinition of Nirvāṇa as non-abiding, as non-dwelling ambiguity itself: the real Nirvāṇa is the bodhisattva path of re-entry in the world, attached to neither Saṃsāra nor Nirvāṇa.   Not attaining (small) Nirvāṇa is not a sacrifice but an avowedly positive access to non-dwelling Nirvāṇa.  Not being attached to Nirvāṇa means not being committed to being without desires, in fact expanding and exacerbating and universalizing them—and we now call the big desires “Vows.”   What this really means is the inescapable ambiguity between altruism and self-interest—for in a non-self universe, even greedy care about one’s own future experience is a concern for “another,” and there is no other kind of care.   So are bodhisattvas altruistic?  Yes in the sense that now the interactions between sentient beings are the only goal, interactions in which the other’s desires are no longer definitively distinguishable from my own and vice versa; but also no, in the sense that all the pathological desires of any given bodhisattva’s past and the pathological desires of all other sentient beings are now integral to his own actions.   Seeing others as himself also entails seeing himself as another.   Far from privileging some heroes who get to disavow their own selfish motives, the bodhisattva works on the premise of non-self: at this point the desires and attachments of others are also his own desires and attachments, as are those of his own past, from which he is never free.   The whole point is that no one can escape being a bodhisattva, without realizing it, “unconsciously” if you prefer: every motivation, even the selfish one’s, is always already rereadable as pure bodhisattva activity.  (And be it noted, this isn’t merely a highlevel theorical esoteric secret, it’s part of every day ritual for the rank and file: we see it in the commonplace opening to Buddhist gatherings where the congregation is addressed not “Ladies and gentleman,” or “brothers and sisters,” but “good morning all you bodhisattvas.”   This is addressed even to anyone who has just stumbled into the room for the first time.)

Also problematic here is Žižek’s claim that Buddhism misses the spiritual dimension of evil, and how the good depends on it, and not only because the whole discussion is framed in terms of inappropriately imported conceptions of good and evil.  Buddhism begins as a radical Promethean rebellion against not only the gods but against the whole cosmos: objecting to the entire set-up, all possible states and conditions are negated mercilessly and across the board.  That’s what Nirvāṇa initially means: nothing among the normal conceptions of good is really any good at all, it is all to be rejected.   This is the foundation of all the further developments, including not only the ascetic world-denial but also the bodhisattva world-embrace: they hate everything and everyone, and care only about how it affects their own suffering, but this itself quickly escalates into wanting everything and wanting to be beyond everything, even their own pleasures.  That insane quest for the unconditioned, that rejection of even the highest heavens of bliss, that crazed demand for the infinite, is the starting point of the First Noble Truth, and comes back in spades in the bodhisattva’s impossible infinite vows, which rub our noses in both the infinity and the impossibility: “Sentient beings are innumerable, but I vow to liberate them all; afflictions are inexhaustible, but I vow to exhaust them all…”   This very evil immanently ramifies into all the Buddhist virtues, both pre-Mahāyāna and Mahāyāna.

This is a parallax where the two incompatible views are internal to each, and Mobiused: the full follow-through of either turns it into the other, as with the Tiantai duck-rabbit, which only flips when the whole figure is seen completely absorbed into one side.    A bodhisattva is a practitioner of passionate commitment to a completely inexplicable and impossible desire which is now called a “vow,” as quixotic and hopeless as they come, doing all those things detachment doesn’t do—actively engaging in the world, intervening in radical ways to change things, to reinvent realities, to produce new bodies and new conceptions in the interest of undermining the sufferings and attachments of all other sentient beings—but in an intrinsically self-undermining, self-conflicted, auto-heteronomously self-canceling way.

So although Žižek sees clearly that much of Mahāyāna thinking, particularly the versions of Nagarjunian thought that his interlocutors have brought to his attention, is uncomfortably close to his own view on the ultimate metaphysical incoherence of the world, and even glimpses that the ambiguous position of the Bodhisattva in attaining non-abiding Nirvāṇa returns to the place of “surplus-desire,” and can thus re-engage in passionate struggle, he cannot help adding that the “trick” is to cover this up with the excuse that the re-entry is due to the high ideal of helping others.  This seems to me entirely misconceived.   It makes even more confounding his further claim that Buddhism here misses the constitutively intersubjective nature of desire. Even after recognizing, correctly in my view, that “the only authentic Nirvāṇa means that I fully remain in this world and just relate to it differently: “non-abiding” Nirvāṇa is the ONLY full and true Nirvāṇa,” Žižek asks, “So where does even this authentic Nirvāṇa fail?”  His answer is:

Buddhism ignores the radical intersubjectivity of desire, the fact that desire is always reflexive (a desire for desire, a desire for being desired), and that the primordial lacking object of desire is myself, the enigma of what I am for my others… our desire is irreducibly (constitutively) “alienated,” mediated by the desire of the Other in all three meanings of the term: I desire to be desired by the Other; my desire (even in its most transgressive form) is structured by the big Other, the symbolic coordinates of my universe; the enigma that propels my desire is the enigma of the impenetrable Other (what am I for others? how do they perceive me?). This is why it is meaningless to search for my own ‘true’ desire: as Lacan put it, my desire is the desire of the Other”—in three related senses: 1) I desire to be desired by the Other; 2) my desires are structured by the symbolic coordinates established by the Other, even when they take the form of opposing and ostensibly not wanting the other to approve of or desire me, and 3) the enigma of what I am for others is what propels my desire.  I have no straightforward desires of my own, e.g., for simple pleasure or concrete life.

 

He then points to Hegel’s “fight to the death for pure prestige” as illustrative of what is implied by this: I’m willing to risk my life for the purely symbolic prestige of not surrendering my pride, my ostensible infinity and universality, my good name as symbolic of my ability to transcend any finite condition.  This violent relation to the other is intrinsic to alienated desire.  Žižek’s point here is profound and very pertinent: this insane violence toward oneself (one’s own life) and the other is a crucial prerequisite for the recognition of the other as other—i.e., as the unsurpassable negativity of a true intersubjective subject—and thus for the full recognition of my own negativity (freedom), which depends on the fully constituted (i.e., fully negative, free) other’s gaze.  This negativity, this freedom from any finite determinate content, is the insane infinity of “evil” in question here:

 

….[T]he domination of others and violence towards them is a key moment of the painful process of intersubjective recognition. This violence is not an expression of my egotist self-interest, it relies on an “evil” for which I am ready to put at risk my own welfare and even my life. Relational dharma is not enough to account for this “evil” since this dimension of “evil” is constitutive of how I experience an Other: as an impenetrable abyss which cannot be dissolved in a fluid network of appearances. At is most basic, “evil” has nothing to do with my egotist interests: it is more spiritual than simple self-interest…”

 

The question here is whether the relation to “others” and “otherness” more generally is primordial or derivative, whether it depends on or is depended on by this infinite and thus purely negative and unfulfillable demand, which abstracts from all finite contents.  The Hegelian account is perhaps not as straightforwardly unilateral here as Žizek’s depiction of it.  Though my accomplished recognition of the other requires that I first enslave those who will not risk their finite selves, putting them in the position to manifest that infinity otherwise through work and its negation of all given content, thus unexpectedly besting me at my own game, the initiating quest for recognition of my own infinity, the manifestation of my own freedom to abstract from any and every finite content, already requires the threat to my naïve self-certainty, my need to prove it not only through physical conquest but also in the eyes of that other: my willingness to sacrifice my life rather than submit to the other differs already from my engagement of insentient objects of potential destruction and consumption.  This may be something discovered only retrospectively, when this conquered object (the slave who has lost the fight in fear for his life) ends up behaving differently from those other objects that I conquer and transcend: instead of being reshaped or consumed by me, and then having no more interactions with me, he continues to exist and to work for me, take over the alteration of the given that had previously been my sole monopoly.  The latter, however, requires us to imagine a pre-intersubjective state, useful for Hegel’s heuristic purposes of disentangling the embedded premises of accomplished intersubjective recognition, but not to be taken as a state any mammal could ever have actually been in: we are actually intersubjective before we are subjective, because we come upon our own infinite seeing only in the prior matrix of having long been seen as finite, that is, to put it crudely, as the child of a parent, or in the care of others as a member of a horde.  The lone individual wandering through the world of objects is a useful fiction, but also an impossible one.  The real question, then, is whether the other, however and whenever its existence may dawn on us, is ”an impenetrable abyss which cannot be dissolved in a fluid network of appearances.”   The Buddhist answer to all this, though, wraps all this up in a much more direct and straightforward form.  For this forced choice between the impenetrable abyss and the fluid network of appearances is a false dichotomy.   The fluid network of appearances is already an impenetrable abyss.  There is no self, but as we’ve already seen, all desire, including desire for pleasure and life, is really a proxy form of this desire for self, a purely symbolic non-existent entity.  It is the (doomed) desire for control, unilateral effectivity of our will on our experience, that we desire when we desire to attain a pre-imagined pleasurable object: the power to repeat an bygone experience, and thus a will to power, to unliateral control, which is what a self is: the power to be the sole determinant of its experience, which is to say, to negate and transcend any finite content at will.   The object is merely a way of demonstrated that I can get what I want, which is only a way to demonstrate to myself that I am really a self, that is, that my every volition serves as a single cause that can unilaterally bring about its effects, that I am a self-sustaining entity with a definite identity which I can myself guarantee.   The key to this conception is that, in the non-self context, the relation of my own past to my own present and my present to my imagined future is already an intersubjective relationship.  The “Other” whose desire this moment’s desire is is not only a social world of other humans: it is also a social world of other impermanent moments of experience, my own, in the past and future.  Indeed, this even extends to my most primordial relationship with the alleged insentient objects of consumption, which on closer inspection turn out to be a misleading and impossible abstraction from any actual or possible experience.  Even my animal hunger, by the time I am able to act upon it on my own, is already saturated with my dependence on an other, as psychoanalysis surely knows just as well as Buddhism does. This is already present to me as my experience of time, as my deeds as tied to any prospect of a future outcome.  Again, my very act of “trying to get what I want” requires a demand that my future desire will also be wanting what I want now; I act only on the condition of a desperate and eternally unconfirmable wager or faith that this will be so, something entirely outside of my present control.   The future, my own future, my own future desire, my own future infinite negativity, is impenatrable abyss enough.  My present desire is mediated by the desires of past and the projected future, by the need for the power of repetition, by the dream of having a self that could sustain itself into other moments and be recognized as such by them.   So the first mistake here is the equation of “self-interest” with non-symbolic material desires for pleasure only— putting it exclusively in the category of what Buddhism calls “kāma-taṇhā.”  But from the beginning, as we’ve seen, Buddhism lists this (in the Second Noble Truth) as only one of three basic forms of desire, the other two being bhava-taṇhā and vibhava-taṇhā: desires for existence and for non-existence.   These latter two forms of desire are already thoroughly enmeshed in the symbolic dimensions of selfhood, for the self that could either exist or not-exist is itself already stipulated to be a purely virtual construct: the unconditioned status of the self demanded by this desire to unilaterally control its own existence or non-existence is already the quest for the infinite in its rawest, most insane and disruptive form, already abstracted from any concrete finite contents.  The future status and condition of that self, whether in ceasing to be or continuting to be the same or in attaining some envisioned identity, is already a matter of prestige, of intersubjective recognition in the intrapsychic community of one’s own prospective moments of sentience. Žižek does not notice that the Buddhist self is always itself an intersubjective swarm of intentional karmic volitions that span internal and external, that even the past-present relation here is intersubjective and all desires caught in the whirl of alternate desires to which it must futilely strive to make itself answerable.  The “impenetrable abyss” is also our own future and past.

If we do not normally notice this fact, if we feel relatively secure and confident about our ability to know or control our future selves, to know what we will want and have wanted and presently want, if we are placidly undisturbed by the flow of time itself until confronted with the terrifying abyss that we face in the face of a human other or a symbolic communal Other, it is because we have hypnotized ourselves with a bad faith blindness to the otherness of ourselves.  In the Buddhist context, the greatest ideological smokescreen, the most dangerous papering over of a constitutive inner antagonism, is self-confidence, commitment, resoluteness, decision, willing agency: the present’s fantasy about the tractability of the future, its confidence of being recognized, approved, understood by the future which it calls its own—the present existing and experiencing and acting only through the constant appeal to a constitutively unreliable future narrator of ineluctably ambiguous identity, as the only way this present self constitutes itself as the constant attempt to be what it ostensibly is.   (And the Lotus Sūtra gives us a word for the full embrace of this radical uncertainty.  It is a kind of certainty—but the certainty of one thing only: of future buddhahood.  And that is a future the noting of which changes its entire past—which is to say, a prospective retrospection on the present that is, in lieu of willing and agency, the only way to change that present.   But that may be more than we can get into here.   See Emptiness and Omnipresence for an unpacking of this admittedly cryptic and portentous pronouncement….)

In fact, even this deluded sense of security we get when confidently envisioning our continuity with our own future self is recontextualized into a profound resource by the idea of the bodhisattva, just as the bodhisattva vow itself is a transformative recontextualization of the obsessive clinging and attachment of the passionate desires endemic to deluded sentient life.  The deluded obscuration of the radical conditionality and disruption of time makes me complacently confident that, even if in the future I have changed to such an extent that I’ve abandoned all my present beliefs and practices as false and wrong, that future me will still be forgiving, understanding, giving me the benefit of the doubt, knowing I was doing the best I could under the circumstances, wanting only what is best for me–even if that self thinks it was a good thing for me to have failed and suffered, to shake me out of my errant ways, for (what that future self regards as) my own good.   We expect understanding and a thoroughly benevolent regard from our future self because, we think, he will remember what it was like to be this present self, having experienced it from the inside.  This is precisely what structures a bodhisattva’s regard for all other deluded sentient beings and their sufferings, the very bedrock of the bodhisattva’s compassion: the bodhisattvas have been us, they know what it’s like, they’ve been there.   And as their bodhisattva practice progresses through its trillion eon course of gradual expansion, they remember this more and more directly, more and more vividly, that past becoming more and more immanent to their present existence, presenced as their present compassion for their now-also-virtually-present past delusion and suffering.  These bodhisattvas have always a future of still unaccomplished purification and a past of utter depravity and delusion, and a conflictual set of desires belong to both past self and current others which they can creatively respond to but never control or eradicate.  They are hostages to all sentient beings, incapable of setting independent agendas, responders and recontextualizers in all directions rather than agents.  This is all there even before the crucial twist, given in the Lotus Sūtra, that explicitly introduces the above idea of unconscious bodhisattvas, who are acting as bodhisattvas not only in spite of not knowing or even actively denying that they are bodhisattvas, but even because of that forgetting and denial, doing it in the necessary form of not knowing they are doing it, in that very deed: bodhisattva is only fully accomplished in its own denial and absence.

What is missed in Žižek’s critical account of bodhisattvahood is the “raft” structure and its ramification into the incorporating innumerable temporary values and enabling their transformation into each other, attachment as a means to detachment and detachment as a means of radical change.   Žižek, being twinkiingly provocative, names a section of his book “Why Bodhisattva [sic] is a Fake.”   He was more right than he may have realized.   In some of his earlier works, Žižek had begun to notice there was something of a Mobius-shaped Liar’s Paradox structure in bodhisattvahood: the true Buddhahood is the bodhisattvahood, the striving toward Buddhahood, differing from bodhisattvahood per se only in it knows that there’s no further buddhahood beyond this bodhisattvahood of eternal striving.   A Buddha is a bodhisattva who knows there is no buddhahood beyond bodhisattvahood, while a mere bodhisattva is a bodhisattva who still thinks there is some beyond he could reach where bodhisattvahood will end, i.e., who thinks there is such a thing as buddhahood.  As such, the bodhisattva is not just a fake: he fakes both Nirvāṇa and Saṃsāra, both the quiescence and the chaos: abiding in neither, he constructs them both as part of his eternal interactive compassion determined by the innumerable alternate delusions of sentient beings, creating semblance Nirvāṇas and Saṃsāras  as among the infinitely various responsive upāyas that are now his only actions.  And when he realizes further that any proposed “both/and” or “neither/nor” of the two would be just as fake, for just the same reason—insofar as it says anything, and thereby excludes and negates anything, insofar as it is determinate at all—that there is no alternative, he is faker than ever, realizing that to be is to be fake, it is all fake.  But all fake is like all rabbit: that’s what makes it duck.   Fake, deprived of even any possibility of non-fake from which it can be distinguished, is just a synonym for real, the only way anything can be—that is, conditioned and conditioning, real, impermanent, effective.  It is no longer a put-down: it is just how things are, doing all the work.

A bodhisattva begins as a troubled, obsessed, self-sabotaging sentient being, just like the rest of us.   But it is through the universalization of this very obsession, and the transformation of its structure that this universalization entails, that this attachment and passion come to be renamed “Vow,” and become bodhisattvahood—not by abandoning the obsession, and also not by, per impossibile, satisfying the obsession or making it triumph over the conflicting obsessions and desires of other sentient beings.  Rather, the obsession is clung to even more relentlessly, which is what transforms it.   This last step is the one that seems not to register in Žižek’s accounts and critiques.   Žižek has long fought against both the naturalization of an unchanging universal norm and the relativist dismissal of any universal norm, and he has done great work in this area: drawing on Marx, he begins with the proletariat as a particular class which is also the universal class, precisely because it is no real class at all—just the refuse that, in capitalist societies, is expelled from the proper class system, the useless inconsistent garbage of the system, like the Dalits in the Indian caste system.   It is precisely because they are not properly integrated into the system, and not full constituted as a legitimate class with its own identity and norms, that this class serves as the universal the enacts the negativity of “class” per se, the negativity that is constitutive of universality, the grounding but also the unsettling of every other particular.  Žižek sees that this is a structural feature, which only accrues to the proletariat in particular because of its relation to a particular historical impasse: in fact, any system will have its excess, and that excess, where the intrinsic contradiction of universality and particularity becomes concrete, is where the negativity congeals into a particular universal.  Because it is structural rather than substantive, this universal will shift as the system shifts: every system will have its garbage, and wherever the garbage is will be the privileged locus of universality in that place and time.   This is why we now see the diversification of possible universalities, landing not just in the proletariat but, under other historical conditions, in any other group of indentityless outcasts and losers, who precisely by being nothing in particular and having nothing to lose are the concretization of the universal negativity, the disjunction of each from itself, that binds all the others together.

The insistence on the intrinsic failures of any totalized system claiming fully constituted determinacy will be familiar to us from the discussion of Tiantai ambiguity above, and the impulse to locate it in certain specific blurred excess of the normative characterization of a system has deep resonances with primitive Daoism, where it is the low, the weak, the empty, the vague, the feminine and so on that are given this privileged status of representing the outside of the system of determinacy in the form of a problematic and problematizing determinacy within it, though of course there the implications drawn are in stark contrast to those drawn by Marxist version favored by Žižek, largely due to the way value dichotomy is or is not affected by this very move in the two cases; it is here, I would claim, that we see the continuing dispositive influence of the Christian inheritance of either/or morality in both Marx and Žižek, exempting that final dichotomy from the undermining of dichotomy per se that the Daoist approach sees as entailed in this very move to a particular that by its very universality upends the dichotomy of particular and universal that undergirds every such dichotomy. Be that as it may, in the case of the bodhisattva as fully developed in Mahāyāna thought, with or without the Daoist influence in the background, we are dealing with something differs from both of these.  What we are dealing with here here is not a restricted but rather an unrestricted economy of loserdom: every sentient being, in some particular idiosyncratic way, is a loser and an outcast, a misfit without a self, and each will have some stupid obsession which they deludedly believe will somehow solve their problem—which it certainly won’t.  But this obsession is not only the engine of bodhisattvahood, it is the very mechanism of compassion, for reasons that resonate powerfully with the Žižekian analysis of universality at its best, but—in my view at least—follow through on its implications more thoroughly (thereby dropping the historicism and collective social activism that is most important to Žižek, which again is why, I suspect, he strives to avoid this implication, although it seems to me to follow from his own premises).    How this is supposed to work is nicely illustrated by the origin stories of various Mahāyāna figures given in the Śūraṅgama, the same text that gave us the story of headless head-hunting cited above, summarizing the reworking of the bodhisattva idea in the previous century as accomplished by native Chinese Buddhist thinkers.   The transformative universalization structure is laid bare most explicitly when considering the backstories of ambiguous figures like Vajra Krodha Mahābala Ucchuṣma, literally “fire-head” dharma-protector, or to use the felicitously punning English rendering, “Burning Impurity”—that is, one who is burning with impurity and at the same time burns away impurity—one of the ferocious protective deities often seen posted outside Buddhist temples.   Here’s what he tells the Buddha in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:

 

I constantly recall my life many long eons ago as a person with an extremely greedy and lustful disposition.  A buddha appeared in the world named King of Emptiness, who said that lustful people turn into blazing bonfires.  He taught me to contemplate the hot and cold energies within the body, and when my contemplation of these solidified within, my lustful mind was transformed into the blazing fire of wisdom.  Since then all buddhas have called me “Firehead.”   I used the power of this samadhi of fire’s brightness to become an Arhat, and then my heart gave rise to a great vow: that whenever a buddha accomplished the Way I would become a powerful man who could conquer the enmity of every demon.   The buddha has asked how each of us reached perfect non-obstruction.  In my case, by closely contemplating the sensation of (lustful) heat in the body until it was unobstructed, circulating everywhere. Once all leakages were gone, this vast and precious conflagration emerged.  In ascending to unsurpassable bodhi, this is the foremost method.

我常先憶久遠劫前，性多貪欲。有佛出世，名曰空王。說多婬人，成猛火聚。教我遍觀百骸四肢諸冷煖氣。神光內凝，化多婬心成智慧火。從是諸佛皆呼召我，名為火頭。我以火光三昧力故，成阿羅漢。心發大願，諸佛成道，我為力士，親伏魔怨。佛問圓通，我以諦觀身心煖觸，無礙流通，諸漏既銷，生大寶燄，登無上覺，斯為第一。

Note here that the very delusory attachment—in this case the “fire” of lust and greed—that was futilely attempting to solve the problem of his garbage existence, the very concretization of his self-obstruction and suffering as an unstable, impermanent, incomplete being, is not abandoned but rather expanded to universality and exceptionlessness, “unobstructed, circulating everywhere”: wisdom is thus here depicted as nothing other than lust universalized.  The passionate attachment and deluded desire is not merely a method used by an accomplished bodhisattva to deliver others (as in many other examples from Mahāyāna texts, such as Vasumitrā the prostitute bodhisattva in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra), it is the very method by which bodhisattvahood is attained, not by having less of it but by having more—delivering himself as an other.  But when it reaches the point of being “unobstructed, circulating everywhere”—that is, when all phenomena are seen as nothing but this lust–then it is has already become “compassion”: it is the non-obstruction also of self and other, the solidarity that flames and blossoms from individual desire to intersubjective vow.   Lest we think this only applies to angry dharma-protectors and vajras, in spite of the last line’s assertion implying that this vajra is already involved in bodhisattvahood if not buddhahood itself (“unsurpassable bodhi” being the characteristic wisdom specifically of a buddha), we may turn to the example in the same sūtra of the most prevelant and representative of all bodhisattvas in East Asia, Avalokitśvera, known in Chinese as Guanyin (“Observer of Sounds”), or Guanshiyin, (“Observer of the Sounds of the World”).   Guanyin gives their own origin story in the same sequence of the text, saying to the Buddha:

I recall that many many eons ago a buddha appeared in the world by the name of Guanshiyin, Observer of the Sounds of the World.   It was in the company of that buddha that I gave rise to the aspiration for Buddhahood [thus becoming a beginner bodhisattva].  He taught me to enter into samadhi with a contemplation and cultivation of the faculty of hearing: in the initial experience of hearing, I noticed how in the flow of entering perceptions the object [i.e., a specific sound] disappears, [i.e., that there is no heard sound that exists outside the act of hearing itself, subsisting prior to and after the instant of hearing itself].   Objects of heard perception being thus quiescent, the contrasting characteristics of motion and stillness, sound and silence, no longer appeared.   Continuing with this contemplation, both hearing and the heard vanished, but the absence of hearing does not abide as definitive absence: both awareness and object of awareness being empty, this empty awareness becomes fully comprehensive, such that the contrasting entities of this emptiness and what it has emptied also both perish.  Both arising and perishing having thus perished, absolute quiescence appeared precisely as present manifestation, suddenly throwing me beyond both Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa, fully illuminating all the ten realms.  This simultaneously brought about two spectacular effects: first, above I merged with the fundamental wondrous awakening mind of all the buddhas of the ten directions, sharing in one and the same power of compassion as that of all these buddhas [directed at the suffering of sentient beings]; and second, below I merged with all the suffering deluded sentient beings of the various paths of Saṃsāra, experiencing one and the same sorrow and longing of all these sentient beings [directed at the compassion of the buddhas].

憶念我昔無數恒河沙劫，於時有佛出現於世，名觀世音。我於彼佛發菩提心。彼佛教我從聞思修，入三摩地。初於聞中，入流亡所。所入既寂。動靜二相了然不生。如是漸增。聞所聞盡。盡聞不住。覺所覺空。空覺極圓。空所空滅。生滅既滅。寂滅現前。忽然超越世出世間。十方圓明。獲二殊勝。一者，上合十方諸佛本妙覺心，與佛如來同一慈力。二者，下合十方一切六道眾生，與諸眾生同一悲仰。

Let’s pause to consider several features of this story.  First, note that the buddha who inspires this bodhisattva has the same name, “Contemplator of the Sounds of the World”—the conditions of possibility of this practice are thrown back into the past, retrospectively, by the practice itself and its still-to-be-attained prospective universality.  The one who initiated my practice of X is embodiment of the perfected practice of X that I will attain in the future.  I come to hear all the sounds of the world by having my sounds heard by that universal hearing.   Second, the specific focus on sounds is what is expanded, through its breakdown and negation, into the unobstructed universality—and when universalized, retains its specificity: it is still “universality as hearing,” rather than universality as such.   It is at once the problem to be solved, the locus of impasse, the motivator of the need to solve it, the engine of its solution, and the realized solution to itself as problem.   Third, the resultant hearing is universal in the sense of both hearing all the cries of distress of the world from the realized position of a compassionate bodhisattva or buddha—the traditional role of Guanyin in the role of savior deity—but also the ones needing to be saved, the experience of the delusion, sorry and longing of the sentient beings being heard.  Becoming one with sound means becoming one with both the compassionate hearing of cries on the part of the buddhas, but also with the distressed and longing cries for compassion directed by those beings toward their saviors.  It is to be both the savior and the saved at once, the sufferer and the liberator from suffering, with neither eliminating the other; the split between them remains, as do both the lament over that split from the side of the sentient beings and the constant endeavor to overcome that split on the side of the buddhas.  The loss of object in the cries does not lead to a “calm void,” but rather to a cacophony of voices manifesting their agony in cries of desparate longing to be saved from their suffering—and at the same time, the compassionate mind of all buddhas and bodhisattvas who are called upon to do this saving.  For the double vision itself is exactly the universality, and the compassion is nothing but this structure itself.

So in a way Žižek is right to tirelessly invoke D.T. Suzuki’s remark about Zen, for example, being compatible with any ideology—fascist, communist, apolitical, woke, neo-conservative….  No judgment can be made to distinguish authentic bodhisattva activity from crazy obsessions in terms of their content.   Against the naïve insistence that awareness of interconnectedness and its attendant negations of definitive stances is simply tantamount to what we in a particular ideological position would identify as compassion, suggested by some engaged Buddhists, there are circumstances in which any conceivable position or behavior could be precisely what a bodhisattva is fanatically committed to at a particular place and time.   The motivating vow is indeed compassionate, but this compassion is structural, a condition of the possibility of any determinacy rather than determinate itself in a way that is identifiable as compassion as opposed to, say, hostility.   To respond to the world non-abidingly must by definition be able to assume any form whatsoever—and it is in its very responsiveness, its unravelling of the abiding on either of the two sides of any dichotomy of self and other or this and that, that constitutes its compassion, grounding both “compassion” and “opposition.”   These two qualities also cannot tell themselves apart from each other, and therein is their self-love as other-love, their quarrel which is also their embrace, their passion for as well as their compassion for each other, if you like.   This begins as a deluded, unjustifiable and futile passionate attachment—to lust, to listening—which is then pursued relentlessly to its utmost, to realize its very nature, which turns out to be its negation, not as an erasure into a calm void, but as its universalization into an unobstructed pervasion that comes to share this same relationship it previously had with this one entity—lust, sound—with every other entity: it is each other thing by its failure to really be what it claims to be, just as it was sound by failing to be sound, lust by failing to be lust.  It is was X by being fake X, its sham consistent continuity as X constituted by its constantly failing attempt to be X and its dogged insistence to keep trying again to be X.  In the case of sound, it was first noting the way it exemplifies most directly the radical impermanence that actually pertains to all entities in the Buddhist view: unlike visual objects, which can at least seemingly be revisited and examined from other sides after the initial encounter, persisting to reveal more of themselves, a heard sound (at least prior to the advent of recording technology) is gone once and for all the moment it ceases, and cannot be revisited, cannot be attached to as something to possess or even more fully investigate for its characteristics.  This means the impression of a separation between the observing and the observed, normally brought about through this very disparity between the act of knowing which is momentary and the thing known which endures into other moments, is effaced; the hearing and the sound are not in that moment experienced as two separate things, and since there is no revisiting possible to create that wedge, the sound and the hearing remain indistinguishable; unlike seeking, where it is possible to close the eyes or turn the head, the hearing remains circumambient and constantly in effect, even when sleeping (otherwise we could not hear our alarm clock in the morning).  The eye sees but is also seen.  The ear hears but cannot be heard.   The eye can see itself in a mirror, and thus objectify itself, in a way that the ear cannot: there is no mirror for the ear.  As such, even the pauses in sound, the silences, are examples of hearing, and the dichotomy of sound and silence, defining the field of aural objects, drops away, and with it the distinction between hearer and heard, the distinction between knower and known. From here this same non-dichotomy originally belonging only to sound, and noticed only when closely attended to in isolation from other sense data with their own peculiar forms, is universally applied, and the sounds of other sentient beings, their cries of distress, are one’s own hearing, one’s own sound.  Now Guanyin has that same sound-shaped relation to every other sorrow, every other obsession, every other longing, every other baseless endeavor—including the equally baseless, “non-abiding” obsession of bodhisattvas and buddhas, called their vow, to eliminate suffering full stop, just as they had always been baseless trying to eliminate suffering for “themselves,” requiring no further justification or motivation.   “Trying to eliminate suffering” is what every sentient being is always already doing in its delusion, that is just what it is to be sentient, to be finite, to be susceptible to external influence.   This requires no justification: suffering by definition is “what one is trying to avoid.”   Bodhisattva adds nothing to this, it merely subtracts the “abiding”: when arbitrary limits on the delusory endeavor are removed, it keeps on doing what it has always been doing: desiring to eliminate suffering.  This is now called compassion, and rightly so.   What is missed in Žižek’s horror at the implications of this—as suggested by Suzuki’s insouciant affirmations–is not only the sheer statistical probabilities this unleashes—yes, a bodhisattva might now and then be a fascist, but how often would that happen, what would motivate it?   What normally motivates such commitments?  What the engaged Buddhists get right is that, in the absence of dichotomous commitment to a particular notion of self, there will be astronomically fewer occasions where such a thing would happen, since the sustained embrace of any program of ameliorative reform like fascism or communism or wokeism or conservatism requires a commitment to a consistent and non-self-undermining universal Good, a substantive and non-shifting universality (even if it’s just universality per se, the always as yet undefinable “Good” qua Good, to the definite exclusion of any particular content)—and this is just what non-abiding makes impossible.  Flare-ups of unfortunate and sometimes egregious ugliness and violence are unavoidable; what makes them cancerous and disastrous is the attachment to the notion of a fixed universal good that holds them in place for longer than that flare-up, making them a program of passionate activist interference.  It takes a lot of attachment to set up a death camp and gulags and work through all the shifting emotions of both enjoyment and revulsion that this probably evokes in any confused sentient being: to be consistently evil, evil enough to produce large results in the world, requires attachment to a self, a good, a universal that does not undo itself through its very success, a conception of universality that is not self-cancelling, that does not universalize into alternate values and obsessions.  This is just what atheism could have provided, one of its greatest boons; Žižek’s Christianized atheism blocks precisely this safeguard against the abuse of universality, against the stability of universality, even as he see that the shift from content to content is intrinsic to the notion of universality per se–that even though universality can only be as a particular, and no particular can exist without it, it can privilege no particular particular consistently for very long, precisely due to this intrinsic self-universalization.   The spiritualization of evil, the universalizing thirst for infinity that makes it evil rather than just a passing spurt of animal mischief, is also what undermines and overcomes evil, if not blocked from reaching the full reversal that is intrinsic in this universalization. God was always what stood in the way of this reversal; if removed, the tracks open toward both the affirmation of passionate attachments and their self-diversification and undermining through the very persistence of the attachment, all the way to the bottom, with a different “God” (final normative stance) posited for each obsession, as Guanshiyin’s initiating and grounding buddha was also specifically “Guanshiyin.”   The point missed here is the correlation of depth of commitment with transformation out of the specificity of any of these starting points, the transitional dissolving of the goal into the other goals which is the only locus of universality: determinacy itself, which is conditionality itself, which is instability itself, which is transformation itself.

 

The above quibblings about the minutiae of Buddhist doctrine can serve to show just how much the Christian part of the Žižek’s Christian atheism changes the nature of atheism, keeps it more Christian than atheist—as it has for so many past atheisms. We can now perhaps say a few words about Žižek’s atheism more generally, and how it differs from the atheism I personally would propose and prefer.   There are important commonalities here, to be sure.   First and foremost, we both see the implicit “Big Other” as Žižek calls it, i.e., effectively a second-order God-figure, hidden in simple atheism considered as a straightforward and consistent objective truth, for example in scientistic atheism or “vulgar materialism.”  This is because we both have reasons (though possibly different reasons) to view internal inconsistency and self-incongruity and self-division as ontologically primary.  This is most clearly evident as subjectivity, not as an accident that occasionally gets in the way of a prior consistent reality, but as a necessary condition of subjectivity as such: the self is its own blockage from being any particular consistent self, from any full concordance between itself and a definite reality, it is itself always only a doomed striving to be any particular something, living the gap between what is and what else is or could be, between here and elsewhere, between actual and possible, between this and whatever else, between thus and otherwise.   And I think we even both view it as crucial not to confine this intrinsic unstable dividedness only to the subject’s inconsistency with himself, or his inconsistency with reality, but to realize the inconsistency of reality itself, whether construed as physics or God.   This ambiguity and self-incommensurability at the heart of things is reality itself, it is the divine if anything is.  This already folds in the impossibility of being stable and consistent even as a void or lack, discussed already above: nothingness would be too consistent an identity for it to achieve.  It is not negation as a blankness like a white wall, which is definitely white and thus definitely excludes all other contents, but negation as endlessly morphing like a ferociously unstable mirror full of forms and colors, as turbulent as it is tranquil, its tranquility is only its turbulence and vice versa—and this only is what is referred to as its constancy, its stillness, its “peace.”   That way of talking uses the Buddhist (and Zhuangzian) imagery, which Žižek so dislikes, but we could also call it the true negation of negation intrinsic to the negative as such, to use the Hegelian language he favors.  On this general metaphysical intuition I think we have much in common.   To my mind, this ontological ambiguity (as I prefer to call it) would preclude both belief in a single-purposed God behind reality, as we agree, but also and crucially, undercut the ethics of a godlike single-purposed agency of any individual or of any community.  This latter point is where I think we disagree.   Žižek has a Euro-patriotic attachment to Christianity–which I think he would admit to characterizing as an irrational crazy passionate attachment, since that is what would make it count as truly ethical by his lights—which forces him to engage in all sorts of unconvincing and transparently hand-waving ahistorical conceptual backflips to attempt to salvage the importance and profundity and wholesomeness of Christ and Christianity in spite of his commitment to atheism–a kind of Statue-of-Liberty play, building on some tools from the likes of Schelling, Hegel and Chesterton.  But salvaging Christ, even as some kind of surprise atheist hero, to my mind is a kind of Trojan Horse for all the entailments of the fully monotheistic worldview, and will reinstate it this time as it has in every past attempt to do something similar.  This is where we disagree.  I think the with-us-or-against-us ethical pathos of Christianity that Žižek tries to salvage is shot through with the monotheistic ethos of dichotomizing purposivity, the very denial of thoroughgoing ambiguity, functioning clandestinely as a kind of retrovirus that knows how to disable the immune system against it with false-flag operations, which turns even the opposition to it into a force to help it spread and penetrate even more fully.

For Žižek the Christian Passion and Trinity transpose man’s divided condition onto God himself.   This is a revival of the ancient anathematized heretical view of patripassianism, with a Hegelian twist: the father too (or especially) dies on cross, and this transfers divine authority from the god in the sky, now dead, to the community as Holy Spirit.   In my view, this change of venue does not succeed in genuinely overcoming what actually is problematic about God, which is its structural enforcement of the ultimacy of purposivity, the monolithic dichotomizing of experience, as the standard for human existence.   Žižek knows that the inhuman (incoherent, purposeless) is at the core of man’s humanity, and enables it.  But the upshot is then to value only this enabled humanity, albeit retaining its contact with its inhuman core, ala Schelling: struggling to keep the still vilified inhuman (crosspurposed) dimension at bay, or down in the hole, manifested only as the fully integrated shadow self that enlivens our humanness.   The alternative would be to let this change the way we experience both of the two sides, both our own humanity and our inhumanity, without granting all evaluative privileges only to the former.   Žižek endeavors to combine this ontological position with an ethical stance that remains completely “godlike” and agency-oriented, in the sense of glamorizing passionate attachments to definite ethical projects—he still wants what Christians call “the purpose-driven life.”   So from some basic points of overlap theoretically, we draw very different conclusions and implications.

 

So here’s Žižek’s key claim about Christian atheism:

 

What makes Christianity unique is how it overcomes the gap that separates humans from god: not by way of humans elevating themselves to god through pious activity and meditation and thus leaving behind their sinful lives but by way of transposing this gap that separates them from god into god himself.  What dies on the cross is not an earthly representative or messenger of god but, as Hegel puts it, the god of the beyond itself, so that the dead Christ returns as Holy Ghost which is nothing more than the egalitarian community of believers.

 

And here he goes on to cite St. Paul’s claim that for Christians there are no women or men, Jews or Greeks, “all are united in Christ”  Let’s pause here, in passing:  Egalitarian?  How about the equality between this community of believers and everyone excluded from it, the non-believers?   How about the authoritarian structure and hierarchy even within that community, inextricable from the very notion of any determinate standard of the criterion of inclusion (i.e., “belief” in certain ideals or persons as authoritative)?    The “Body of Christ” has a head—Christ—and members which are eternally subordinated to that head: saying of Jews and Greeks, women and men that “they are all united in Christ” does not equal “egalitarian”: it means they are all equally subordinated to this community’s authority.  The Holy Spirit/community now takes the role of God, and has the same structure: it commands certain determinate ideals that are mandatory, and excludes others, structured just like of old on a dichotomous this/that black and white right and wrong, in or out, with us or against us—foreclosing ambiguity, multiple identities, wavering transformations, internal conflicts embraced and sustained as axes of alternation and non-teleological transformation.

 

Žižek continues about this community as follows:

 

The community is free in the radical sense of being abandoned to itself, with no transcendent higher power guaranteeing its fate.  It is in this sense that god gives us freedom—by way of erasing itself out of the picture.”

 

We have a variant of the classic Feuerbachian move here, which I call “compensatory atheism”: God is put out of the picture so man can be just like God was supposed to be, as if that were a good thing.  (He says, “One should note the anti-Feuerbachian thrust of this idea: in investing in “God,” we do not just project onto “God” the supreme potentials of human beings of which we are deprived in our actual life; “God” is a fantasy-formation which fills in a gap constitutive of being-human.” But the upshot is fully Feuerbachian: the community is now God, or Christ—just as bad!)

The big misstep, in my view, is the way indetermination is stealthily redescribed as freedom, to distinguish it from “mere” contingency.  Instead, I think it is crucial to affirm not only the synonymity of freedom and necessity, but also the three-sided synonymity of freedom, necessity and contingency.  The notion of “freedom” that creeps to the fore here will turn out to function just like the old Kantian notion of autonomy, in spite of Žižek’s own well-grounded theoretical reasons why it should not.  Is the intrinsically self-conflicted subject “free”?  Yes, as commanded by his own self-sabotaging unconscious drives—but this can be equally well be described also as inescapable necessity or as meaningless contingency.  The very ambiguity of these three terms is the real point.    Indeed, we should expand this further: every member of this triad can also be equally well described as determinacy or indeterminacy.   The point is that all five of these descriptions turn out to be synonyms when pushed.   None of them should be given exclusive privilege as the master descriptor of the package; what really matters, from where I sit, is the very ambiguity that joins and separates them, ensuring both that none ever occurs without also being the others, and also that they can never be unilaterally reduced to any one of them, and indeed that none of them can be entirely reduced to itself; the split between them is as constitutive as their synonymity—and their transitions, their applicability as the subsumer of the others, their “universality” as Žižek would have it, is the function of precisely this ambiguity: the inability of each to be simply and fully itself and itself alone, to be fully determinate in any way that is not equally its own indetermination.   This is what our response should be to the Kantian move toward practical reason and its one-sided fetishization of freedom, and with it all the parallel claims that continue to arise, from the Fichtean push against Spinozistic determinism to the cognitive scientist bracketing off of deterministic physical science from the practical requirements of lived realtime morality: in all these cases, seeing that there is neither empirical nor metaphysical support for free will, moral decisionism, reasons-oriented agency, they take this as all the more reason to double-down on these moral habits, though explaining their ontological status or lack thereof in newly devised terms—now they have the added glamor of being baseless and thus free decisions.   We must live as if  our actions were free acts, and that is where are true dignity as humans lies.  The claim goes further: the claim, which we see disappointingly repeated by Žižek himself, is that it is impossible to believe one is not free when involved in practical life: even if we know “objectively” that we are not, we must “subjectively” assume that we are free.   This is a Kantian half-truth, and a dangerous one, because it makes impossible the development of the oceanic alternatives.   We are now in a position to rewrite it in a more complete version, that preserves what is true there, but defuses that danger.   Yes, we can never not have the sense of being free.  But: we can also understand and experience this very freedom as indistinguishable from necessity, from contingency, from ambiguation, from disambiguation, and each of these from each other.  The fact that we cannot be without a sense of freedom does not mean we cannot in addition experience ourselves as fully determined, as fully ambiguous, as fully contingent, as fully necessary.   It is through the very ambiguity of these determinations themselves that makes this possible, even necessary—even free!   The sense of freedom then need not, per impossibile, be abandoned: we just have to see through the abstract sense of freedom as opposed to necessity to be able to switch our sense between them, Mobius-strip style, while preserving their eternal difference: we can experience our every move as fully determined as long as we understand that this is no different from experiencing ourselves as free.   Žižek follows Hegel in getting us this far.   But contingency, determinacy and indeterminacy are the further sides of this particular five-sided Mobius Strip, and lacking these, it seems to me, this advance comes to naught.   We can feel our freedom-necessity as contingent, our contingent-freedom-necessity as determinate, our determinate-contingent-freedom-necessity as indeterminate, and every permutation thereof.    They are different “senses” of the same “referent”—but this referent is nothing beyond the ineluctable presence of these multiple senses and their mutual synonymity itself.  The embrace of all of them in their transformative synonymity is what opens up to the oceanic, and just this is one of the greatest boons of a thoroughgoing atheism: it removes the false wedge driven between freedom and necessity, and from there between both of these in their identity and contingency, and determinacy, and indeterminacy.   That is the whole point of getting rid of God.  If this wedge is retained, what gain is there in atheism?  In other words, does not Christian atheism spoil the whole point of atheism?

The mistaking of this ambiguity for freedom alone, or even consistently wrapping the freedom-necessity convergence always with the freedom side up, is problematic because it puts us on a decidedly slippery slope.   There is a slide here to assimilate the absence of consistency, due to the absence of an external guarantor, more and more with the contours of a Kantian notion of autonomy, freedom as duty divested of all contingent contents, so that realization that self lacks a real self keeps the self working in exactly the way it always did before that realization: either as a purposeful agent fully in charge of itself (the individualistic option Žižek rejects, or else merely to transfer those characteristics of ungrounded self-determination onto communal action, which is what he ends up with.

This obsession with freedom and autonomy governing a consistent program of behavior seems to govern even in his ethics of the Act, conceived of as a break in causal continuity, causeless in terms of the existing system of causality but thereby retroactively positing its own retrospective new form of causality.   As Žižek well knows, this actually demonstrates that causal entanglement per se is transcendentally unavoidable, rather than pointing to a freedom from it altogether in the sense of autonomy.  I do think this is how action in general works, but I don’t think it is limited to special historically dramatic acts: instead, we should take this further and just say this is how time works, what time is, with apparent agency as a subcategory of temporal existence.   But I think it may be a dangerous misnomer to call this freedom, in that this term has the unavoidable implication of causelessness, absolute disjunction from all dependence on contingent connections.   It appears as the “beginning” of a new causal chain only in a paradoxical sense that it reveals the prior ambiguity of all causality, not the absence of it for even a moment, and importantly, we can be aware of that this sense of beginning is only an appearance while still also maintaining that sense of an absolute self-grounding (retrospectively precedent positing) beginning.  Even phenomenologically this means it is never a free decision done for any recognizable purpose.   Aimless wandering, drift and doubt awaiting surprise encounter, the eschewal or internal breakdown of agency rather than its accentuation, would be a better way to describe this than freedom.  It is an enliveningly weird coinciding of activity and passivity which passivity can easily bleed into (since there’s no pure passivity) but which activity is precisely the exclusion of (what I’ve elsewhere called “the great asymmetry” between prioritizing determinacy and prioritizing indeterminacy).   This is not a break in determinate causality and determination but a digging down into the nature of determinate causality itself, so that its own ambiguity is made manifest, that every causal chain is simultaneously revealing itself to have always also been alternate causal chains, all at the same time.   Žižek valorizes a heroic move from indeterminacy to determinacy, the decisive act of disambiguation, a final level of either/or, which in my view is a theistic inheritance: in spite of the invocations of the agony of falling in love and finally being ruled by a monomaniacal purpose, one feels here an even deeper level of relief to be back on familiar ground of “a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal” as Nietzsche put it when under the same kind of spell.      What I would prefer is to stress how each disambiguation is also a further ambiguation.   This means not to valorize one causal chain over another, nor to seek the escape from causality altogether instead of being subjected to it, but to focus on the very shift from one causal explanation to another itself as the locus of undeliberate value-production, the ambiguity revealed by the shift to an alternate reading not replacing devotion to a particular reading, but simultaneous with it.

We not only are capable of this double vision; I would argue that our shared metaphysical stance ensures that we inescapably are this double-vision.   That this may require temporary devotion to one or the other causal interpretation is of course sometimes true, but it shouldn’t make us lose sight of what is really to be cherished here: not the Cause we think is motivating us, nor the exciting (false) sense of a total freedom from causes, or the equally exciting sense of finally being constrained to an clear imperative with a definite yes and no, but the ambiguity of causes (i.e., deep atheism).   The absence of any consistent internal or external standard or self does not make us free in that sense of independently determining something that was previously undetermined; it makes even our attempted determination deeply indeterminate, necessarily and forever transitioning into other identities, always simultaneously “only this” and “no, rather the opposite” and also “both”—all three at once: ambiguous through and through.  In my view, the very attempt to establish a single definite identity with some decisive action, not only for a person but even for any act of a person, any commitment or project, any meaning, undermines and reverses that identity in all sorts of directions.   The more it is accomplished, the more it is simultaneously undermined—and indeed, this may be what is best about it.   But that is not freedom in the sense of autonomously setting up ends and willing to accomplish them with uncaused deeds.  Rather, it is because everything is caused and changed by being contextualized by a million things at once that it is indeterminate even in the midst of its most distinct determinations.   Every fight for a cause is constitutively a misrecognition of that Cause and of one’s own motives.  I think this should be obvious to Žižek of all people, but his aspirational Christomania forces him to turn a blind eye here.   He should say rather that, since there is no escape from being an inconsistent subject, any “freedom” we have will also be inconsistent: we will follow multiple paths at once, and every path will turn out to have always led into, indeed to have been, also a different path.  In spite of himself, Žižek makes freedom sound like a matter of decisions and commitments moving in a single particular direction, even though he is very clear that these must come from unconscious irrational sources rather than from rational decision-making—his model of a true ethical act is of falling in love, which inspires unavoidable devotion and obsession even though it comes over one like a disaster from without, even as at the same time it follows our own deep and disavowed drives.   But on this very model, we should see that an ambiguous and multifarious subject, even if we commit ourselves to a “Cause” or fall in love—will always also be subverting that love and that cause in various ways, that self-sabotage is intrinsic to all our commitments.  Why not fold this in to the very act of devotion, rather than valorizing and romanticizing its disavowal?

I think he means to fold it in, as can be seen in his discussion of love and marriage in the book under discussion, depicting marriage as a way to numb oneself to the ethically preferable embrace of the agony of passionate disruptive love, a way to inauthentically or at least unheroically domesticate and tame it.   But the rousing ending of the book belies the limitations of his imagination of what this folding in would actually entail.  For what we end up with is “commitment to a Cause” modeled still on the either/or dichotomous purposivity of the old unreconstructed self-consistent God, thus giving us Žižek’s alarmingly romantic and pious concluding pages: a paean to Aleksandr Blok’s 1918 poem Twelve, which describes the march of twelve Red Guards through the streets of Petrograd in the snowy winter of 1918, and its last stanza:

 

And so they keep a martial pace

Behind them follows the hungry dog

Ahead of them—with bloody banner

Unseen within the blizzard’s swirl

Safe from any bullet’s harm

With gentle step, above the storm

In the scattered pearl-like snow

Crowned with a wreath of roses white

Ahead of them—goes Jesus Christ.

 

Žižek then comments:

 

This is an authentic image of the theologico-political short-circuit, an image of what Christian Atheism means as a political practice.   Christ is not their leader [?], he is just a virtual shadow whose presence signals that the twelve are not just a group of individuals pursuing their particular interests but a group of comrades acting on behalf of a Cause.  There is no promise or image of heavenly bliss in this image, it is just a group of comrades acting out of utter emergency, without an assurance of what the final outcome will be—maybe they will be liquidated by the enemy, or they will simply perish in the blizzard.  Even if they are not aware of it, they act in their utter dedication as if Christ is at their head.  Even in our “developed “ West, we recently encountered such groups which were inspecting locked-down areas for the victims of the pandemic, or looking for abandoned survivors of flooding and heat waves, or—why not—patrolling an area and searching for Russian mines on the Ukranian front.  And the list goes on: a group of artists engaged in a collective project, a group of programmers working on an algorithm that may help in our struggle for the environment….Without thinking about it, they were and are just doing their duty.  The subjective stance of the members of such a group was as far as possible from Politically Correct concerns and suspicions, they were totally foreign to the collective spirit that motivated the January 6 Trumpian mob which attacked the Congress building (a mob just performing a media spectacle), they left behind any traces of liberal individualism.  They were in hell, with no God to protect them, and Christ was there.”

 

That’s the end of the book, and besides the wildly selective reading of Christ (don’t Christ’s own stated promises and threats of violent compensatory reward and punishment in the Gospels change how we should understand the ethics propounded by Christ?  In what way is it “without promise of heavenly bliss”?),  it shows pretty clearly, I think, the philosophical problem with Žižek’s whole project here.   “Without thinking about it, they were and are just doing their duty.”  Really?  Can a constitutively self-conflicted subject “just” do their duty?  Without any cross- and counter-motivations, without any ambiguity or inner multiplicity of intent, without anything other than the pure black-and-white devotion to a wholly benevolent Cause?   What happened to the inescapably inconsistent subject?   Žižek thinks this transcends liberal individualism, but it only overcomes the “individualism” part of it, because it is collective action which is just as monolithically autonomous and duty-bound as the individual was supposed to be.   Now the community is the one who acts always for a purpose, for one purpose only, and cannot endure life without a Cause to which it is devoted, without an all-encompassing purpose: it’s the monolithically normative Good all over again.   And with that, all the “Politically Correct concerns and suspicions” that Žižek’s idealized Holy Spirit mini-churches are claimed to have overcome are bound to return in new forms—for all of them are outgrowths of the fundamentally dichotomous commitments, whether of an individual or of a community or of a universe, of the dichotomies imposed upon existence when unambiguous purpose is made ultimate and unsurpassable–even if it is an irrational, contingent purpose, or a contentless formal purpose, or a parallax of the two, as long as it is singular and requires single-minded devotion, rather than being intrinsically undermined and transformed into its opposite by its very realization—as long as the ethical Event is exempted from the general ontological ambiguity otherwise entailed in God’s non-existence.

Seeing this self-incongruity and ambiguity itself as divine is where this all should lead.   If indeed we all secretly “enjoy our symptoms,” find excruciatingly addictive enjoyment in our unconscious social and personal pathologies, as Žižek once claimed, rather than seeking anything as shallow as pleasure or happiness, then one asks: why should this lead to the desideratum to stop enjoying them, through some purposive project of social or personal amelioration?  If we enjoy them, why should we root out our clandestine reveling in our own debasement and oppression, rather than to cultivate further this enjoyment?   His answer is, I suspect, that enjoyment in Žižek’s Lacanian sense is deadly, lethal, ultimately unbearable, and that’s true—but deadly and unbearable to what, to whom?  To the single-determined identity of the allegedly autonomous individual, to our unilateral humanity, our humanity as conceived before taking in the inhumanity at its heart.   What values shall we embrace that override this deadly enjoyment rooted in the inconsistency and ambiguity of our existence, in the name of what should it be “cured” of it?      Žižek’s whole emancipatory project seems premised on the idea that noticing that we are sustaining our unnoticed debasement, because we secretly enjoy it, will motivate us to resist that debasement.  But why would we then need to resist it?   Only to maintain the illusion of a consistent commitment to a coherent course of action, a holdover of the old ideal of autonomy and transparent self-consciousness that he ostensibly rejects, which is threatened by this kinky enjoyment of our own self-sabotage.  Can’t we embrace the forked enjoyment of our forked beings?  We seem to like it that way.  Whatever unforeseeable alternate ways there may be to embrace this irrational enjoyment, including both our constant approach to its seductions and our constant backing away from its dangers, they are waiting to be discovered and developed—and who knows what new powers and horizons of experience could be derived from such a complexification of our sense of ourselves.  In any case, might it not be preferable to emasculating ourselves by avoiding or unidirectionally sublating our crazy counterselves into yet another version of the old program of a single unilateral for and against?  Someone once claimed that saying anything other than yes or no was evidence of an overweening belief in one’s own power to control the future, since we have not the power to turn even a single hair black or white; swearing an oath implied a power to guarantee a result, making a blasphemous claim on the real power that controls all outcomes.  Because this went with a belief that this controlling power was itself a single being with a single will, this admirable step away from overstating our commitments took the form of an even more severe dichotomy, a yes and no with no place for nuance or middle ground or ambivalence or even refusal to slice things so dichotomously.  Anything other than yes or no, it was then said, comes from evil.  We land in a world-historical irony: the renunciation of overcommitment to determining that things will be turn out one way or another turns around into an intensified overcommitment to making our speech and action and intention one way or another, and only those two ways with nothing in between–an even narrower and more sharply drawn demand for control, narrowing the range of what is acceptable to the smallest and most binary range, with any nod toward the intricacy of our selves, our intentions, our motivations, our world–anything that overflows our foreground coherence as a single unified unambiguous homogenous soul–condemned at a stroke as placing us in the party of “the evil one”– a black and white of our selves and our intentions as opposed to our powers landing us in a black and white even blacker and whiter than any hair.   An echo of the shape of this world-historical irony plays out in Žižek’s Christian atheism—he is faithful to his master after all.  What Žižek wants to retain from Christianity is not much on the theoretical level, but huge on the mindset level.  He wants to see what he can get playing around with crucifixion and trinity, and he’s good at that kind of thing.  It would be quite charming, harmless, and engaging for any thinker to have his merry way with so potently resonant a symbol as Christ on the cross.  I like it too when familiar things are turned this way and that to shake new meanings out of them, bending and shaping and pinging them to one’s heart’s content, without regard for historical context or traditions–just an orgy of gloriously irresponsibly riffing.  Žižek seems at times to be almost deliberately turning Christianity exactly on its head: the religion most responsible for hanging its whole ethic on promises and threats of postmortem reward and punishment is now made the standard-bearer of having no heavenly guarantees, with no thought of gain or loss; the church as a unified hierarchical body under the direct authority of the head of that body, Christ, whose body it is, the director of history toward a very specific promised eschatological goal when he assumes full command again, now turned into a leaderless ungrounded leap into full self-determination of an open future…. But all this sleight of hand and outrageous provocation would be quite fine, even wonderful to behold—if it didn’t simultaneously serve the purpose of reglamorizing the moral package, the authoritative command of a controlling yes and no, that went with the overturned and rebranded religion prior to this intervention.  This relocation of this moral package does nothing to reduce the unsavory results Žižek complains of when speaking of its operations in actually existing Christianity; on the contrary, it brings it into closer and more concrete proximity with everything going on down here, blotting out alternatives at even closer range.  It is the replication and indeed intensification of this baseline either/or instinct, reinstalling in a new form the deep and constitutive monotheistic intuitions embedded therein, that seem to me, very regrettably, to poison and undermine Žižek’s great atheist advances.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] 富樓那言：我與如來寶覺圓明，真妙淨心，無二圓滿。而我昔遭無始妄想，久在輪迴。今得聖乘，猶未究竟。世尊，諸妄一切圓滅，獨妙真常。敢問如來，一切眾生何因有妄，自蔽妙明，受此淪溺。

 

佛告富樓那。汝雖除疑，餘惑未盡。吾以世間現前諸事，今復問汝。汝豈不聞室羅城中，演若達多。忽於晨朝以鏡照面，愛鏡中頭眉目可見。瞋責己頭不見面目。以為魑魅無狀狂走。於意云何。此人何因無故狂走。富樓那言：是人心狂，更無他故。佛言：妙覺明圓，本圓明妙既稱為妄云何有因。若有所因，云何名妄。自諸妄想展轉相因。從迷積迷以歷塵劫。雖佛發明，猶不能返。如是迷因，因迷自有。識迷無因，妄無所依。尚無有生，欲何為滅。得菩提者，如寤時人說夢中事。心縱精明，欲何因緣取夢中物。況復無因本無所有。如彼城中演若達多，豈有因緣自怖頭走。忽然狂歇，頭非外得。縱未歇狂，亦何遺失。

 

富樓那。妄性如是，因何為在。汝但不隨分別世間業果眾生三種相續。三緣斷故，三因不生。則汝心中演若達多狂性自歇，歇即菩提。勝淨明心，本周法界。不從人得。何藉劬勞肯綮修證。譬如有人於自衣中繫如意珠，不自覺知。窮露他方，乞食馳走。雖實貧窮，珠不曾失。忽有智者指示其珠。所願從心，致大饒富。方悟神珠非從外得。

 

即時阿難在大眾中，頂禮佛足，起立白佛。世尊現說殺盜婬業，三緣斷故，三因不生。心中達多狂性自歇。歇即菩提，不從人得。斯則因緣皎然明白。云何如來頓棄因緣。我從因緣心得開悟。世尊。此義何獨我等年少有學聲聞。今此會中大目犍連及舍利弗須菩提等，從老梵志聞佛因緣，發心開悟得成無漏。今說菩提不從因緣。則王舍城拘舍梨等，所說自然成第一義。惟垂大悲，開發迷悶。

 

佛告阿難。即如城中演若達多，狂性因緣，若得滅除。則不狂性自然而出。因緣自然，理窮於是。阿難。演若達多，頭本自然。本自其然，無然非自。何因緣故，怖頭狂走。若自然頭因緣故狂。何不自然因緣故失。本頭不失，狂怖妄出。曾無變易，何藉因緣。本狂自然，本有狂怖。未狂之際，狂何所潛。不狂自然，頭本無妄，何為狂走。若悟本頭，識知狂走，因緣自然，俱為戲論。是故我言三緣斷故即菩提心。菩提心生，生滅心滅，此但生滅。滅生俱盡，無功用道。若有自然，如是則明，自然心生，生滅心滅，此亦生滅。無生滅者，名為自然。猶如世間諸相雜和，成一體者，名和合性。非和合者，稱本然性。本然非然。和合非合。合然俱離。離合俱非。此句方名無戲論法。菩提涅槃尚在遙遠。非汝歷劫辛勤修證。雖復憶持十方如來十二部經，清淨妙理如恒河沙，祇益戲論。汝雖談說因緣自然決定明了。人間稱汝多聞第一。以此積劫多聞熏習，不能免離摩登伽難。何須待我佛頂神咒，摩登伽心婬火頓歇，得阿那含，於我法中，成精進林。愛河乾枯，令汝解脫。是故阿難。汝雖歷劫憶持如來秘密妙嚴，不如一日修無漏業，遠離世間憎愛二苦。如摩登伽宿為婬女，由神咒力銷其愛欲，法中今名性比丘尼。與羅侯母耶輸陀羅同悟宿因。知歷世因貪愛為苦。一念熏修無漏善故，或得出纏，或蒙授記。如何自欺，尚留觀聽。