Never mind that, in the end, all of human life will have amounted to an infinitesimal flash of dull, vaporous light, wholly inconsequential to the cosmic whole. Never mind that all evidence—biological, geological, cosmological, even historical—betrays processes that are as blind and indiscriminate as they are relentless and ruthless.
Once upon a time, in some remote corner of that universe which is effused into numberless glimmering solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history;” but, of course, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled, and the clever beasts had to die.—One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how pathetic, how shadowy and evanescent, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.(1)
Two claims.
- X-buddhist meditation dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their rhetoric of practice hooks chaotic modes of human being together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.
- As long as you live under the compulsion of x-buddhist decision or the principle of sufficient buddhism, you live also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability.
That first claim is a bastardized version of a statement made by Theodor Adorno concerning punctuation marks.(2) The second is a rewording of François Laruelle’s “Theorem 00000000000: On the Advent of Impotence.”(3) (See notes for original wording). I’d like to explore them in answer to a question recently posed on this blog. Doing so will allow me to review some features of non-buddhism (as I am conceiving it).
The question arose from claims that I made in an earlier post on meditation:
(1) Speculative non-buddhism is deeply curious about the role that meditation practice might play in transcending the division between ideology and self-reflective critique. The raw remarks that I present [in that post (4)] stem from a re-reading, and hence a re-commissioning, of primary classical-buddhist postulates; namely, disenchantment, ancestral anamnesis, vanishing, phenomenal identity, nihility, conceptual proliferation, contingency, world, surface, perspicuity, unbinding-extinction (my translations of, respectively: nibbida, sati, anicca, anattā, suññtā, papañca, paticcasamuppāda, loka, sabba, paññā, nibbāna/nirvāṇa). My, still speculative, contention is three-fold: (i) these postulates can be (re-)read to constitute the Protagonist’s (i.e., Gotama’s, the Buddha’s) calculus, understood here as the qualification of real-world limits; (ii) the calculus, thus re-commissioned, subsumes nihilism, and (iii) meditation is, for the practitioner, an organon of nihilistic dissolution.
(2) Non-buddhism is a theoretical practice proceeding by way of classical-buddhist axioms yet producing theorems which are buddhistically uninterpretable.
(3) “Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible.”(5)
The question put to me was this:
“What is the ultimate aim of this speculative trajectory that starts with your preliminary ‘zombification’ [of the original x-buddhist terminology], your potent ‘substitute’ of the desired dharmic good, a.k.a. ‘deep joy’? I gather…that if meditation is, as you say, an organon of nihilistic dissolution, then might it be that what you desire by gaining in intelligibility, is something that Brassier also calls ‘the truth of extinction’?(6)
Yes. I want to say that such intelligibility is something that I, as clever homo sapiens beast must come to “desire.” But Read the rest of this entry »
