Re: D+G and the mind


About the Deleuze/Buddhism connection: definitely. This resonance is
particularly important to me, too. One place that it surfaces explicitly
is in _Dialogues_, where Deleuze turns to Buddhism to address the whole
desire-as-lack issue. I don't have the book here for the exact quote, but
it goes something like: "Why do people think that void = lack? What the
West really needs is a grain of Zen." He also speaks appreciatively, if
briefly, of the Zen tea ceremonies, etc. as "pure events," relating them
to his concept of the haeccity but also to his concept of "humor" (vs. the
arborescent master-discourse of "irony"). It's an especially rich
discussion because the unnamed target of his pejorative assault on "irony"
appears to be deconstruction--he says that only ironists prefer punning as
their chief form of wordplay and suggests that they make a fetish of the
slippery signifier *because* they are attached (if secretly) to rootlike
first principles of language. ("Ironists claim to belong to a master
race," he also says.)

Anyway, what's interesting here is that when Deleuze tries to distinguish
his sensibility--the *feel* of his method--from deconstruction, he reaches
for Buddhist analogies.

I think the similarities mostly lie at the level of feel rather than
explicit endorsements. Deleuze's whole concept of the
'plateau'--increasing alertness, an increasing plane of desire <without
discharge>--seems to me very Buddhist. Indeed, some of the things he says
about the sexy avant-gardist hedonism he is sometimes taken to endorse are
quite arresting; again in _Dialogues_ he says somethihg like: "the notion
of a 'discharge' of pleasure is very telling...there is a great deal of
hatred of the body, or fear of the body, in the cult of pleasure." And
where is it that Deleuze says, "Asceticism, why not?" He understands that
so-called "asceticism" has gotten a bad rap and is not in every case a
life-hating search for stasis but on the contrary a humming plane of
desire, a plateau--or can be (you have to decide in individual cases). The
West can't get this right because it's so invested in addictive structures
of desire (that is, desire as lack-and-replenishing) that when it sees
something that doesn't resentfully CRAVE, that doesn't binge and purge, it
screams "Lazy! Death-lover! Life-hater!" The accusation of "aversion" is
only a mirror-image of the accuser's addiction. Addiction and aversion,
twin idiots of lack.

Meanwhile Buddhism--and Deleuze--are off exploring another kind of desire. A
*lateral* move, out of this insoluble binary oscillation (and not a
life-hating double negative, which is all a lot of people can see in
Buddhism's "no attachment, no aversion" imperative, reading it as
hyper-aversion in order to send us back into hyper-addiction: the point is
getting to something else INSTEAD of this Hobson's choice: besides, even
if you stress the negative, why do people think void = lack?)

Deleuze is not consistent on this point; in the end I don't fully
understand how he can take the positions above and then, say, endorse such
a "passional" consciousness as D. H. Lawrence, or Nietzsche, for that
matter, both of whom yammer about getting out of the ego but are
thoroughly, drearily attached to it nevertheless. But even when he
endorses these characters he tends to import flows and plateaus into them
which de-emphasize their paranoiac side and make them more Vipassanish
than they actually are. At any rate, there's plenty of evidence for the
connection you're talking about. The more I read about Deleuze's
connection to Hume or his affinities to Wittgenstein the more clear the
similarities between his "assemblages" and the Buddhist psychology of
empty dharmas seems.

By the way: Jon B.-Murray cited the Nick Land article in the Journal for
the British Society of Phenomonology, in the pro-Anti discussion...but he
didn't mention that the whole issue was devoted to Deleuze! I went to look up
the article yesterday and found a bunch of articles on Deleuze and Hume,
Deleuze Castaneda & Wittgenstein, Deleuze and "Otherness," etc. Just to
pass that along to those who have this journal in their library...

Here it is, the cite again: JBSP 24:1 January 93. Fun reading.

Greg Polly










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