Non-Buddhism

By Forest Russell Lewis

That the One is now a cliché of the wellness industry and appears in gratuitous form in soda commercials as a cartoon of mystical beatitude is perhaps a fine recommendation, in reverse, of how the Buddha refused to speak of Nirvana. Words wear out their meaning real fast. Nirvana is no longer whatever the release from samsara is, but rather a very famous pop band from Seattle. Kurt Cobain’s imaginary friend, to whom he addressed his suicide note, was named Boddah: is this a clue? He says in the note: “I must be one of the narcisists who only appreciate things when they’re alone.” Kurt is on to something here. At the very least we might begin to disambiguate between solitude and solipsism. The journey to the One is “the flight from the alone to the Alone,” said Plotinus (phygê monou pros monon). And with Kurt in mind we might revise this as the flight from solipsism into the solitude of radical immanence. From all-self, to no-self and no-other. It’s a solitude, because it is foreclosed to thought; you can’t speak of it—and, more to the point, it can’t be turned into an ad.

All that is solid melts into ads, must be one of the principle rules of our hell. I mean hell in a very technical sense. “Hell is not a metaphor,” as Laruelle says, “but the principle of sufficient world… hell is less mythological than ideological, combining philosophizability with universal capital.” The exploitation of Nirvana, whether band or Buddhist ideal, is the trend of both capital and philosophical decision. Self-care was once an act of political warfare, now it’s a six-trillion-dollar industry. This all-too sufficient world depicts itself as a cosmic egg, a coherent Edenic totality, bounded by all of the glittering astrology of wealth, containing multitudes, celebrating diversity, all the while necessarily and actively growing the limits of hell, exploiting, evicting, incarcerating, starving, and exterminating the dispossessed.

A Science of Hell asks: How does this happen?
Laruelle offers what may be the most succinct cause: “The desire for the One is Hell.”
What are we to make of this?

The psychoanalyst, familiar with vicissitudes of desire, and themselves practitioners of what might be called a science of the underworld, may provide the first axioms for our new Science of Hell; a mythology, offered without proof, and modeled on the most esoteric of mystical practices, in which the One, forever lost—but still desired—is remade as in a mirror.

1. In the beginning the child—the little stranger—is the One, in a zone most commonly designated under infantile amnesia, das ding, or the preoedipal. In this environment bounded by the parent, self and other, identity and difference are mixed and indeterminate. Formed from vulnerability and helplessness, completely insufficient, inaccessible to thought, word or memory, made out of emptiness and void, the zone becomes the dynamic force that unilaterally determines the psyche. Every godhead, and every image of transcendental oneness and plenitude descends dialectically from this zone. Not to mention all sorts of horror movies.
   
2. Little by little the child is cut away from the intensities of the zone precisely along the pleasure/unpleasure series. What is pleasurable becomes the ego, what is unpleasurable is projected outwards to become the exterior world. The pleasure- ego, bound by libido, becomes in time the basic organizing structure of the autonomous self; the model for all subsequent relations, defined most concretely by the notion of home.
   
3. Now the ego-self, while appearing whole and sufficient in the mirror, belies an enigmatic alterity left over from the emanating indeterminacies of the zone. While the One is recreated in effigy according to the specular image—the unitary illusion—the stranger is always already on the inside.
   
4. This unassimilated alterity, forever circulating in the seething cauldron, is excreted by the ego into pure visible difference; whatever the mirror excludes becomes the stranger, the alien, the monster, replete with every terror the ego-self fails to recognize in itself. The desire for the One is a desire for a self-sufficient image—as in a personal ideology. Violent aggression becomes the principle means by which difference is excluded from the unitary illusion (even while difference remains enigmatic and fetishized). This heavily policed self-sufficiency is isometric, scaling from ego to family to group to nation-state to world.
   
5. Private property reifies the illusions of the self. Self-sufficiency finds its object in ownership, while allowing a means and an outlet for violent aggression against trespassing difference. Desire for the One is transmuted into a desire for material wealth, thus motivating the abiding rule of primitive accumulation: get rich or die trying. So the limits of hell grow year to year. The home becomes a fortress; the pleasure ego becomes cellular, as in a well-decorated jail cell. The unitary illusion begins to consume itself in what Laruelle calls the “autophagic enterprise of hallucinated logic;” i.e. cell death. The flight of capitalist modernity goes from cartesian solipsism, through ecological collapse, and thence into a luxury bunker.
   Every libertarian prepper can now become their own solipsistic monad, hoping to wait out the apocalypse on their heap of weapons.
   

One wakes up, if one ever does, into insufficiency.
That the core Buddhist principle of dukkha is so subtle and difficult to translate perhaps saves it from becoming a philosophical decision: suffering, dissatisfaction, unease, discontent, unhappiness; all of these have been used to name this most elusive of states; in psychoanalysis it becomes loss, lack, castration, mortality. For our purposes here, and in the spirit of Laruelle and Non-Buddhism, we will translate dukkha as insufficiency.

To live is insufficient, to die insufficient, to grow old insufficient; the impermanence of all things is insufficient. It is helpful to note that the Buddha, in describing dukkha, was not speaking of hell, but rather of life and its vicissitudes. Insufficiency is not hell; sufficiency is. A Science of Hell must first disambiguate between the insufficiency endemic to life, and a hell that is manufactured, willfully produced; a hell that people are thrown into according to the cruel whims of political economy.

Further research may be directed towards the relation of desire with insufficiency and how this relation gives rise to hell, and more crucially, how it does not. Does psyche require a minimum of sufficiency (of ideology) in order to function? Or does any sufficiency whatsoever constitute hell? These and many other questions may be pursued in this clandestine science.

Italo Calvino has suggested for all time that there are two ways of living in hell: the first is to accept and participate in hell and so forget that there is one. The second is more difficult: to find those who are not the inferno and to make them endure, to give them space.

The wager of this paper is that this space, or zone, is real. In Laruelle’s terms, it is a radically immanent solitude and, like the Buddha’s refusal to speak of nirvana, its content is foreclosed to thought, for it remains unilateral to anything that can be said about it. It is a zone that belongs to the stranger alone (but of course, in the last the instance, we are all strangers). If solipsistic self-care feeds the fires of hell, then Audre Lorde’s self-care as an act of political warfare—as radical solitude—is a zone that exists outside of hell, even though it may be surrounded by inferno.

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Forest Russell Lewis is a psychoanalyst-in-training in NYC. Follow his work at spacewhy.org.