Žižek: A Very Brief Introduction, and His Critique of Western Buddhism

Some have called him dangerous. Some have called him a bête noire ("black beast" - something that is particularly distasteful or difficult and to be avoided). Some - perhaps most - have never heard of him. The Slovenian political philosopher (and I give him that title because I'm not sure how else to classify him, if not bête noire), Slavoj Žižek, is the patron saint of the young European intellectual elite (if in fact we've entered an era in which sainthood can be conferred upon the living), and he'll be shaking things up with the hipsters on this side of the pond soon enough. Although, if history offers a key to understanding the process of culture shaping, Žižek's influence will probably linger just below the surface, waiting for a posthumous eruption.

I've been reading a couple of his books in my current research, The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Monstrosity of Christ. Before you get tripped up on "monstrosity," know that it does not mean what you probably imagined at first glance. With "monstrosity," Žižek refers to Hegel's notion (which Žižek shares) of the subversively powerful claim that God, the divine Logos, the Word of God, "became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). Here's Žižek on the matter:

Hegel uses this unexpectedly strong word,"monstrosity,” to designate the first figure of Reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: “This is the monstrous [das Ungeheure] whose necessity we have seen.”¹ The finite fragile human individual is “inappropriate” to stand for God, it is “die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt² [the inappropriateness in general, as such].”³

So much for introductions. I'll let you wrestle with the Incarnation. I began this post with the intention of presenting a few of his insights on Western Buddhism. To those we now turn. Oh, and it's important to know that he's a Marxist:

Spiritual meditation [and here Žižek means the so-called "pure" forms of meditation - mindfulness, Zen, "sitting," Transcendental Meditation (TM), etc.], in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.⁴

Elsewhere, in an interview with Believer, a San Francisco based magazine that concerns itself with issues of hipster culture, Žižek elaborates on Buddhism and Capitalism:

...This basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential. [What is] essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality, blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like, how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?

 To which the Believer interviewer responds,

OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.

Science fiction, or the high point of Western Civilization as it is today. Have you ever noticed that a great deal of the highest quality clothing and gear at REI is branded with Buddhist names? "The Zen," "Prana" ("breath" in Sanskrit), and so forth. They don't even attempt to conceal it.



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I owe a great deal for my understanding of Žižek to my friend, Vincent. You know who you are.

¹G. W. F. Hegel, Theologian of the Spirit, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1997), p. 238-9.

²G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 272.

³Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 74.

⁴ibid, p. 28. Italics added for emphasis.