Zizek sins on Buddhism

It's Zizek-time at Progressive Buddhism with Joe posting "Zizek's Western Buddhism". I have briefly commented awhile ago on Zizek's treatment of "Western Buddhism" in his article "From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism" (!) and then it seemed to me that "while some of Western Buddhism indeed deserves a bashing as quasi-Western pseudo-Buddhism, it being an insidious newage flirtation with general Buddhist signifiers, and a shallow understanding and application of Buddhist spiritual methods, there is surely an authentic Buddhist mysticism for the 21st century being questioned and formulated here in the West by at least some. Slavoj Zizek, a rather famous postmodern philosopher and cultural critic, should be aware of the difference between legitimacy and authenticity, and eager to apply this basic distinction to his otherwise worthy critique, thus avoiding several seriously damaging fallacies." I still find that statement apt, though now it's rather clear that Slavoj Zizek, instead of recognizing a qualified overlap, flatly confuses the signifiers "New Age" and "Western Buddhism". Quite a mess.

Joe's discussion spans from Zizek's "Revenge of Global Finance" to Nietzsche to early Buddhist sources to Deleuze and Schopenhauer etc. Many good arguments, no need to reiterate here. I will just reinforce some points in my own position on Zizek's flamboyant bagatellizations. Truth be said, in the Revenge article Zizek does pronounce more of New Age, when he says,

"...The ultimate postmodern irony is today’s strange exchange between the West and the East. At the very moment when, at the level of “economic infrastructure,” Western technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide, at the level of “ideological superstructure,” the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the West itself by the onslaught of New Age “Asiatic” thought. Such Eastern wisdom, from “Western Buddhism” to Taoism, is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. But while Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the stress of capitalism’s dynamics—by allowing us to uncouple and retain some inner peace—it actually functions as the perfect ideological supplement."

This identical passage is used, in a typical cut'n'paste manner characteristic of serial authors, in the Marxism to Buddhism article as the opening thesis. While Marxism and Buddhism focuses more on the fetish of exotic other, the Revenge article attempts to speak of flatland without really giving credit to it (and without ever making a very basic distinction between interiority, subjectivity, perception, and perspective; for these, see KW's "Excerpt D"). For example, Zizek offers the following:

"... why complain that financial speculations with futures markets are “divorced from objective reality,” when the basic premise of Buddhist ontology is that there is no “objective reality”? (...) No wonder Buddhism can function as the perfect ideological supplement to virtual capitalism: It allows us to participate in it with an inner distance, keeping our fingers crossed, and our hands clean, as it were. It is against such a temptation that we should remain faithful to the Christian legacy of separation, of elevating some principles above others."

Is that so? Well, Zizek is elaborating from Oey's "Sandcastles: Buddhism and Global Finance", where economist Arnoud Boot, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche comments are compared and contrasted. As we know, or should know, Buddhism offers at least three different perspectives: absolute, relative, and the path. It's unfortunate that comments made from one of these perspectives regularly end up being interpreted as given from some other perspective or even on an entirely different basis. Buddhism never taught "there is no self" (or "there is no Self" or any other spelling), but a path where separate self is recognized as a dependently arisen notional entity. Thus, a self, as well as anything and anyone else dependently arisen, does not exist independently. That's all, and that's the path-perspective, pointing to the need to cultivate view and practice based on such truth. In relative sense, self is quite real and effective. It neither exists (not being "substantially existent"), nor does it not exist (not being a mere nothingness). It's absolute mode of being is beyond designation or conceptualization, though it may be expressed in special ways.

Zizek sins on these points (missing the mark the size of Pacific Ocean) and "comes short of the glory of God", while ascribing to Buddhism a lack of hierarchy of principles, as if the faults of Western New Age are to be ascribed to Eastern spiritual teachings, and not to the modern Western (and global) omission in providing a cogent spiritual basis with which to enter the 21st century. Such omission will not be adequately supplemented by recourse to the "legacy of separation" (it's actually funny to see someone like Zizek advocating faithfulness to a Christian legacy).

To round this up with a quote from the Progressive post,

"It is not that Zizek is lying to us, that this kind of person he sees doesn’t exist. Rather, it is that Zizek is wholly mistaken in accepting the self-identification of this person, of their guiding principles at any rate, as Buddhist. This pseudo-Buddhist is faced with the same Che vois? as the Zen monk by his teacher, but in the name of the very same principles that guide the monk to act the pseudo-Buddhist withdraws."

Quite so.