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Zizek on Buddhism is an entertaining misinterpretation

“We know how Buddhism starts. You know. The problem is suffering. All living beings want happiness, want to suffer less. Then what is the source of our suffering? Desire, attachment to objects. You know the story. Here comes my first problem... If there is a lesson of psychoanalysis, it's precisely that we want to suffer... a typical (Film) Noir scene, for example, you get a guy, normal guy, suddenly he's seduced by an evil femme fatale. His life is ruined at the end, he's betrayed by her, everything. And at the (..?) of his death, somebody tells him, 'Oh my god. Now that you know how evil she was. Would you like to go back in time and start again, avoiding her?' And the typical Noir answer is, 'No, it was worth every moment.' ...This is the true Noir spirit. Even if I know that it's a catastrophe it was worth it.” 

This interesting provocation from Slavoj Zizek, the popular Marxist thinker currently promoting his new documentary, is one of many issues he takes with Buddhism in this video. Though while quite right to call out westernised “Buddhists” on their dilutions of its core perspective - in particular the attempts to parlay it into an underpinning of a 'progressive' middle class lifestyle - his materialist perspective leaves him incapable of understanding its essential truth. Both bourgeois westerners and Marxist philosophers would benefit from first understanding what the actual teachings of Buddhism amount to.

What is meant by suffering, in spiritual terms, is not the opposite of happiness, but precisely this getting caught up in the endless struggle to achieve happiness and avoid suffering - the natural consequence of attachment to objects. The opposite to suffering is spiritual enlightenment. This is what the philosophy is actually about (as opposed to leading a more pleasant, happy life). It means the human mind opening up to transcendent consciousness, the formless basis of the material world. From this perspective, all objects, all energy forms, are viewed with complete equanimity as parts of a whole the human organism lives in interconnected harmony with.

It's worth pointing out here, that Marxist philosophy actually appropriates this spiritual understanding, reinterpreting it as a secular end-point to a historical struggle. Here's Frederick Engels, Marx's collaborator and financial backer: “(T)he more this progresses [the historical struggle] the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature, and the more impossible will become the senseless and unnatural idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.” (From The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Apes to Man, 1876.)

Buddhism, though, is not opposed to social action. From its perspective, the human body, embedded in its environment, is naturally involved with social relations and their organisation. And in a globally-wired up world, that means it is connected in a tangible and meaningful way with the organisation of humanity across the planet. But a Buddhist knows that the deeper the internal perspective - the closer to the unitive essence of the universe - the more the sense of individualism and egoic separation is removed. They operate always from a genuine sense of relationship with everyone, regardless of superficial differences. Deeply connected with the unifying consciousness that pervades the universe, they bring clarity and understanding to social predicaments.

As for Zizek's point about Noir and the yearning for suffering, it is easily explained when we understand that he is confusing Buddhist 'happiness' (enlightenment) with pleasure. And that suffering and pleasure, on the terms he uses to discuss them, are not actually opposites, but different poles on a continuum. The human mind that cannot grasp its essential nature feels separated and alone in a world of objects - some it derives pleasure from, some it is repulsed by. To take the Noir example, this gives rise to sexual pleasure when communion with an apparently mutually-attracted human 'object' is engaged. But pleasure comes with an undercurrent of suffering, because even if unacknowledged, the sensation is always temporary and dependent on another's compliance, which can always be withdrawn.

Noir characters are drawn to formerly unattainable sexual pleasure and their previously unthinking, innocent happiness is disturbed as a result. Theirs is a journey to self-knowledge through experience, and to a deeper understanding of the fragile contracts social relationships are built on. It is the point of the genre, and why it is so compelling. It speaks to the deeper sense of truth missing from films about love that posit romantic coupling as the ultimate happiness we can achieve. Zizek is entertaining and insightful in his analysis of films, but only up to a point. Though the fact he actually attempts to engage with spiritual philosophy is welcome, and also shows his perspective takes him beyond the banal simplicities usually found in left-wing, secular materialist thought. 

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easier to imagine the end of the world

More on capitalist realism, following this earlier note about the need for an analysis of materialist realism to fully understand the nature of reality. 

"Capitalist realism can be seen as a belief: that there’s no alternative to capitalism, that, as Fredric Jameson put it, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Other systems might be preferable to capitalism, but capitalism is the only one that is realistic. Or it can be seen as an attitude of resignation and fatalism in the face of this – a sense that all we can do is accommodate ourselves to the dominance of capitalism, and limit our hopes to containing its worst excesses. Fundamentally, it’s a pathology of the left, nowhere better exemplified than in the case of New Labour. Ultimately, what capitalist realism amounts to is the elimination of left wing politics and the naturalisation of neoliberalism." from here

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inevitable cruelties and defeats

"Lovers are not in control of their actions. They're drawn by unbidden forces stored in the body, deeper and more real than the socially conditioned. Secret thoughts, terrible acts, impossible to contain, arise without welcome, undermining the planned and scripted life. Social niceties are abandoned in favour of the inevitable cruelties and defeats of the driven heart, selfish in its neediness."

From a short blast of a piece on Amy Hempel's Offertory for Dead Ink. Full text here


"The narrative begins in media res as a sort of spy thriller: ‘The woman was stripping the prisoner, tying him to a chair’. Already though, little details in the language prime the reader to expect a twist somewhere. Talk of ‘Fanatics’ gives way to a focus on how the prisoner ‘stretched his muscled body against the rope’ and the sexual frisson of how ‘the hard spike of [the woman’s] heels scrap[ed] concrete as she opened [the door].’"

From a not entirely complimentary review of my story, The Ruins, in Sabotage. Full text here