South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 Copyright © South African Journal of Philosophy Printed in South Africa — All rights reserved SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY ISSN 0258-0136 EISSN 2073-4867 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2015.1118610

Reconsidering Foucault’s dialogue with

Adrian Konik Department of Journalism, Media and Philosophy, School of Language, Media and Culture, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa [email protected]

Against the backdrop of various interpretations and criticisms of Michel Foucault’s engagement with Buddhism, the focus of this article falls on the specific type of Buddhism which he studied during his 1978 trip to , and the possible relationship between its dynamics and those of his own research trajectory following the publication of The Will to Knowledge. In this regard, Foucault’s eschewal of the Engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Zen Buddhism of Taisen Deshimaru—both of which had risen to prominence in France by the late 1970s— which Zen and the samurai code of bushid Moreover, it will be argued that such preference on Foucault’s part was indicative of his eminently practical, rather than general philosophical, interest in Buddhism as a technology for the adversarial repositioning of subjectivity in relation to discourse. Finally, the implications of this for the abovementioned various interpretations and criticisms of Foucault’s engagement with Buddhism, will be considered.

Introduction David Macey in The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993) recalls how in 1970 and 1978 Foucault travelled to Japan, on the first occasion at the invitation of Moriaki Watanabe, the French Literature professor who translated The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 into Japanese, and on the second occasion with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, for the purposes not only of lecturing on his work but also of learning more about Zen Buddhism (Macey 1993: pp. 237, 399–400). In the latter regard, Foucault ‘spen[t] some time at the temple of Seionji at Uenohara, Shunjû’ (Carrette 1999: p. 110). Needless to say, when an important philosophical figure like Foucault makes such a dramatic gesture in relation to a religion, the event can all too easily become a nodal point around which a large amount of theorisation develops. And such theorisation does not always revolve primarily around what that person actually says within the new domain in question, but can also focus instead on what he neglects to say, or even the unspoken implications of his presence within, and perceived attitude toward, the foreign environment concerned. Indeed, in relation to Foucault’s trips to Japan, such subsequent theorisations formed a continuum of sorts that ranged between, on the one hand, attempts to identify in his gesture the trace of a secret Buddhistic philosophical underpinning to his work that he had hitherto not admitted to the world, and on the other hand, endeavours to detect echoes and reflections of Eurocentric prejudices in his interactions with the Japanese people and culture. In many respects, the poles of this continuum are rather neatly exemplified by, on the one hand, Uta Liebmann Schaub’s contentions in her article ‘Foucault’s Oriental Subtext’, and on the other hand, Jan Hokenson’s criticisms of Foucault (and others) in his Japan, France and East-West Aesthetics. That is, on the one hand, as indicated by the title of her ‘Foucault’s Oriental Subtext’, Liebmann Schaub advances an underlying affinity on Foucault’s part for certain Buddhist concepts, and

South African Journal of Philosophy is co-published by Taylor & Francis and NISC (Pty) Ltd 38 Konik maintains not only that ‘Foucault concealed the Oriental element in his work’, but also that he did so ‘to avoid having his discourse stigmatised as “religious” or “metaphysical”’ (Liebmann Schaub 1989: pp. 306–307). And as evidence for such efforts at concealment, she draws attention to the preface of the first edition of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), which ‘Foucault suppressed…in all later editions of th[e] book’. In this text he wrote: Within the universality of Occidental ratio there is to be found the dividing line that is the Orient: the Orient that one imagines to be the origin, the vertiginous point at which nostalgia and the promises of return originate; the Orient that is presented to the expansionist rationality of the Occident but that remains eternally inaccessible because it always remains the limit (Foucault 1961: p. iv, in Liebmann Schaub 1989: p. 308). In relation to this, Liebmann Schaub argues that through his description ‘the reader witnesses the retreat through a geometrical disappearing act’ of the Orient, because what initially ‘seems to be a space [rapidly] becomes [an] immaterial point zero’. Yet, importantly, she suggests that this does not amount to ‘pure negativism and irreverence’ toward the Orient and its people, because Foucault’s covert recourse to Buddhist thought ‘furnish[es] the possibility for non-positive affirmation’. This is because, in contrast to ‘Christianity and Western humanism’, Buddhism ‘operat[es] around nyat empty of content’, such that ‘the ‘other’ can remain empty, open, unthinkable, and unspeakable while [simultaneously] providing the ground for a critique of its counterpart’. Through use of this mechanism, argues Liebmann Schaub, Foucault ‘operates a counterdiscourse that appropriates Oriental lore in opposition to Western strategies of control’, in a way that partially parallels how ‘Western counterculture has embraced the Orient’ and, indeed, how certain ‘nineteenth-century European thinkers adopted Orientalism as a position from which to criticise Occidental culture’. But beyond this, she also emphasises how, because Buddhist spirituality involves ‘a theology without God’, as it were, which renders it ‘indistinguishable from philosophy’, it held a particular allure for Foucault (Liebmann Shaub 1989: pp. 308–309). However, on the other hand, what Liebmann Schaub considers a critical virtue, Jan Hokenson in Japan, France and East-West Aesthetics (2004) construes as a Eurocentric vice. This is because, for him, such an ‘Orient…is not the realm of aesthetics and plenitude’ or ‘even of intuition…so much as it [i]s the realm of reflexive negation: the non-West, as nonrationalism, nonrepresentationalism, nonindividualism’. And he goes on to argue that ‘this figure of the Orient’, which is ‘only loosely differentiated into Japanese, Chinese, and Hindu’ by Foucault and others, ‘serve[s] as anti-figure more than content’. This is because it is simply ‘used to deconstruct the Occident, not to explore the internal nature of the [Oriental] other and then bring into French the boon of [related] discovery’ evidence for this, not least when he moves rather glibly through centuries of complex history and cultural interface between India, China and Japan, to arrive at discussion of Zen mysticism. But in ignoring Foucault’s efforts to draw him into further historical discussion, and by asking Foucault instead what he Japan is deep or superficial, does seem to reflect aspects of the prejudice which concerns Hokenson. In terms of this, Foucault rather boldly declares that he is ‘honestly…not constantly interested in Japan’, and that what really ‘interests [him] is the Western history of rationality and its limit’; how aspects of Japan comprise such a limit because they are ‘very difficult to decode’; and how such limits are valuable to consider in the current ‘crisis of Western thought’ that Foucault identifies with ‘the end of imperialism’ (Foucault 1978a: pp. 111–113). Against the backdrop of these opposing appraisals of Foucault’s engagement with Buddhism— exemplified by Liebmann Schaub and Hokenson—and with a view to reconsidering the dynamics of Foucault’s dialogue with Buddhist thought in general, and Zen Buddhism in particular, the following two questions are arguably important to ask: On the one hand, was there not an immediate technical, rather than broad metaphysical, reason why the atheistic Buddhist spirituality advanced by South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 39

Liebmann Schaub held such appeal for Foucault? On the other hand, why did Foucault specifically Buddhism that were proliferating in France at that time, and what are the correlative implications of this for the type of criticism proffered by Hokenson? With a view to exploring these two questions, in what follows, firstly, Foucault’s interview The Will to Knowledge, and in relation to the lecture he gave a few months before the interview, at the University of Tokyo, entitled ‘Sexuality and Power’. Secondly, the form of Zen Buddhism taught by emerged and to which it remained thematically linked. Thirdly, Foucault’s dialogue with Buddhism will be reconsidered in light of his eschewal of the Engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Zen Buddhism of Taisen Deshimaru—both of which had risen to prominence in France by the article will conclude by considering the implications of the above for the opposing contentions and criticisms of, respectively, Liebmann Schaub and Hokenson.

The ‘third phase’ of Foucault’s research In 1984, Foucault retrospectively maintained that throughout his career his ‘objective’ had ‘been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’. In terms of this, his early archaeological phase concerned how certain ‘modes of inquiry’ gave ‘themselves the status of sciences’—namely life, labour and language—and then objectified the living, working and speaking subject. In contrast, in his later genealogical phase, which entailed the inclusion of power as a variable in the archaeological project, he ‘studied the objectivising of the subject’ through the ‘dividing practices’ of disciplinary/bio-power that saw ‘the subject… either divided inside himself or divided from others’. However, in the third and final phase of his work, his focus fell on how ‘a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ (Foucault 1982: pp. 326–327). Foucault’s transition to this third phase is reflected in both of the remaining two volumes of his History of Sexuality—namely The Use of Pleasure (1984) and The Care of the Self (1984)—and in his preceding 1981/1982 lectures at the Collège de France, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject. As such, the genesis of this transition dates back to around 1977/1978, in the wake of the 1976 publication of the Will to Knowledge. In light of this, Foucault’s interview interesting precisely because of the adumbrations within them of the orientation of his third and final research phase. In this regard, it is helpful to consider briefly what Foucault advances in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, in order to render the intimations of such ideas in his interview with In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault endeavours to insert between the two great modes of conversion identified by Pierre Hadot, namely the fifth century BCE Platonic and the third century CE Christian metanoia, a different type of conversion that existed within the context of the first/second century CE Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self. Accordingly, this different type of conversion, while it respectively reflected and foreshadowed certain aspects of its predecessor and successor, cannot be categorised under either of them. That is, as Foucault explains, for Hadot, on the one hand, Platonic entailed ‘awakening, so to speak, and (recollection)’ of the forms as ‘the fundamental mode of the awakening’. On the other hand, Christian metanoia entailed ‘a different schema’ in which there occurred ‘a drastic change of the mind, a radical renewal; …a rebirth of the subject…with death and resurrection at the heart of this as [both] an experience of oneself and the renunciation of the self’ (Foucault 2005: p. 216). In contrast to both of these forms of conversion, Foucault argues that within the context of the Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self, conversion did ‘not function on the axis opposing this world here’ to any ‘other world’, but rather entailed ‘a reversion that takes place within the immanence of the world,…liberation from what we do not control so as to finally arrive at what we can control’. Moreover, instead of recollection, which was so important within Platonic , what was required was ‘exercise, practice, and training’; in short ‘’—but importantly not the asceticism of later Christianity which aimed at 40 Konik the mortification of the flesh. Rather, what the Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self pursued was ‘a complete, perfect, and adequate relationship of self to self’ (Foucault 2005: pp. 210–211). For Foucault, what this involved was a turning of one’s gaze away from others toward the self, ‘in order not to…be carried away by the eddy of futile and vicious thoughts’ which otherwise characterises our existence. And through such means, a ‘clear…space around the self’ was created to facilitate a ‘concentrated…presence of self to self’. But this was not done for the purposes of self-decipherment and confession as in the context of Christianity, but instead for the attainment of ever greater self-transparency—or the rarefaction of the self—which was pursued as an end in itself. Echoes in Foucault goes on to emphasise that ‘we are much closer here to the famous archery exercise… so important for the Japanese (Foucault 2005: p. 222). As Daniel Defert—Foucault’s long-time partner—has confirmed, this constituted a reference to Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery, of which ‘Foucault…was a great reader’ (Gros 2005: p. 227). Yet it must also be remembered that, for Foucault, pursuing such self-transparency/rarefaction of the self did not involve the progressive approximation of a state of enlightened vacuity, as it were. Rather, it entailed the approximation of a state of immanent reflexivity, in which decisive action becomes possible, insofar as emotional distraction and/or previous habitual conditioning no longer cloud the mind. A single-minded action that addresses with perfect proportion the requirements of the moment through its appraisal of such requirements as an utter singularity, in a way that remains totally open to difference.1 In this regard, Foucault also points to the ‘famous image of Socrates evoked in the Symposium’, which remained a model for the first/second century CE Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self. In terms of it, Socrates’ capacity for meditative stillness and restraint, patient endurance of hardship, and complete calmness in battle, were consistently thematised (Foucault 2005: pp. 49–50) in ways that strongly parallel hagiographic accounts of samurai. concern with how the of the Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self facilitated both self-transparency/rarefaction of the self and correlative openness to difference become apparent. On the one hand, in the interview, Foucault advances that within Christianity there is a ‘search for more individualisation’, through the individualising knowledge produced via confession that interminably attempts ‘to seize what’s at the bottom of the soul of the individual’. In short, this enterprise entails seizing hold of and articulating thoughts, desires, fears, etcetera into an ever more complexly embroidered idea of individuality. An individuality that, in turn, is rendered all the more concrete both through its verbal disclosure to another during the act of confession, and through the ensuing dialogical elaboration upon it, which constitutes an additional part of the confessional process. On the other hand, in terms of Zen,2 Foucault argues ‘that all the techniques linked to spirituality’—in particular the silent meditative practice of —aim ‘to attenuate the individual’. This is because they entail not a process of seizing hold of and articulating such thoughts, desires, fears, etcetera but rather the practice of progressively letting go of them, and indeed, of the sense of integral individuality that they might otherwise congeal into. But again, for Foucault, the pursuit correlative processes of de-conditioning and opening up to difference which zazen makes possible. This much is clearly evinced in his valorisation of the capacity of Zen to bring into existence ‘new relationships…between the mind and the body’ and ‘between the body and the external world’ (Foucault 1978a: p. 112). In his earlier University of Tokyo lecture, Foucault provided clarification concerning the importance of these two new relationships to the issue of power. That is, in ‘Sexuality and Power’, he argues that the important question is not ‘“Where does power come from, where is

1 Similarly, while Jacques ‘Derrida’s vision of the absence of separate identity and interpenetration of all cognised beings approximates the most radical Buddhist visions of empty, relative existence’ (Mattis 2002: p. 145), this in no way diminishes either ‘the political implications of deconstruction’ nor ‘the critical importance of Derrida’s thought for political imagination today’ (Beardsworth 2013: p. xii). 2 In this regard, Foucault indicates Paul Demiéville as his source (Foucault 1978a: p. 112); Demiéville, who was a major contributor to the academic ‘understanding of…Ch’an history in China…followed the French approach’ insofar as he ‘look[ed] at the ethnographic as well as the textual sources…of the tradition’. Accordingly, his work entailed ‘a reconstruction of the history not totally dependent upon the South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 41 it going?” but rather “In what way does it happen and…how can one describe certain of the… relations of power which are exercised in our society?”’ Relations of power that occur, on the one hand, ‘between different persons’ in different institutions—or between the body and the external world—and on the other hand, between the mind and the body ‘in the psyche of the individual’ and ‘in the economy of desire’ (Foucault 1978b: pp. 127–128). Thus, for Foucault, the silence of Zen meditation has an important political dimension, insofar as it makes possible a space for very precise reflection not so much on the relations of power within a given society—which is more of a textual, genealogical enterprise—but rather on how those relations of power have intimately informed the relationships between one’s mind and one’s body, and between one’s body and the outside world, so that subsequent change becomes possible. In other words, Foucault advances Zen as a meditative space for immanent reflection on the role of such relations of power in the constitution of one’s subjectivity, the progressive de-conditioning recognition of which stands to open up possibilities for the establishment of different modes of being. Of course, from the critical position exemplified by Hokenson, outlined earlier, this would no doubt be construed as an audacious colonisation of Zen by Foucault. That is, a misappropriation of Zen couched in a Eurocentric sense of entitlement that gives terribly short shrift to its traditional Buddhist emphasis on the pursuit of enlightened wisdom and compassion, and which ends up emptying Zen of its cultural aspects and rarefying the Orient out of which it emerged, all in order to wield zazen as a weapon for the pursuit of specific politico-discursive ends. However, such criticism would be significantly problematic for the following reasons: On the one hand, it is possible to criticise Foucault for colonising, rarefying, and politicising the first/second century CE Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self for such ends, and indeed Pierre Hadot—upon whose work Foucault explicitly based The Hermeneutics of the Subject lecture series—has advanced such criticism. In short, Hadot objects both to Foucault’s elision of Stoic logic and physics as ‘enormous excrescences’ (Foucault, cited in Hadot 1999: p. 25), and to his correlative exclusive focus on ethics, and argues that Foucault’s related idea of ‘spiritual exercises…is precisely focused far too much on the “self”, or at least on a specific conception of the self’. Instead, Hadot maintains that Stoic ethical practice was indissociable from a contemplation of physics—one’s elemental constitution—and the logic of divine reason, which together allowed the individual to transcend the limits of their personal identity. In other words, ‘to go beyond the self, and think and act in unison with universal reason’, through realising one’s ‘belonging…both to the whole constituted by the human community, and to that constituted by the cosmic whole’; a powerful realisation that ‘radically transforms the feeling one has of oneself’. Obviously, this contrasts markedly with Foucault’s conception of the Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self, which Hadot suggests is ‘a culture of the self’ that ‘is too aesthetic’, and which consequently amounts to ‘a new form of Dandyism, late twentieth-century style’ (Hadot 1999: pp. 206–211).3 But, on the other hand, to criticise Foucault for colonising, rarefying, and politicising Zen is highly problematic, because in many respects, the Japanese had long since beaten him to it, and his interest simply lay with how they had done so.

To provide a full account of the historical features and philosophical dimensions of Zen Buddhism before the twentieth century is well beyond the scope of any one article; indeed, within the ambit of Buddhist studies, ‘the major lacuna is still the absence of a general history of Chan in China and neighbouring countries’ (Faure 2003: p. 10), not least because of the immense parameters of such a project. Yet, the enormity of the topic notwithstanding, it remains important to sketch out some of its

3 Admittedly, in Foucault’s defense, he never suggested that he wanted to reinvigorate the Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self in the contemporary era—as if these comprised ‘the key to everything’ which ‘we have [somehow] unfortunately forgotten’—but rather emphasised the unavoidability of producing something new in relation to them (Foucault 1984: p. 294). After all, as he argues in ‘On the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people’ (Foucault 1983: p. 256). Instead, the contemporary remedial response advanced by Foucault in ‘The Subject and Power’ is to ‘promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of th[e] kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries’ as part of the Christian and disciplinary/bio-power discursive legacy. And when one considers the immense political parameters of the ‘“transversal” struggles’ (Foucault 1982: p. 336) he thematises in this article, the impossibility of reducing his project to a form of Dandyism readily becomes apparent. 42 Konik key features, in the interest of providing a context for the development of the type of Buddhism that, as indicated above, Foucault was interested in. In terms of the mythological longue durée of Zen, contention exists over whether Zen originated from the Buddha himself in fifth century BCE India as his most enlightened teaching, or ‘whether started Zen Buddhism in China’ in the sixth century CE, or whether Zen was the product of ‘Chinese monks such as Dao An (Tao An, 312–85) Dao Sheng (Tao Sheng, 360–434) and Hui Yuan (334–416)’—monks who both ‘emphasised meditation in their spiritual cultivation and were much influenced by Taoist thought’ (Wong 2001: p. 64). Admittedly, in terms of texts, ‘no clear Indian origin for Zen can be discovered’, apart from ‘some resemblance, especially in manner, between Zen and the more paradoxical parts of Nagarjuna’s teaching’ (Baruah 2000: p. 385).4 Yet there is significant evidence to suggest that Zen did indeed emerge in China around the tenth century, but as both a religious and political dynamic. That is, the related ‘traditions refer to an incident’ in fifth century BCE India, ‘when disciples…gathered around Sakyamuni Gautama to listen to the Dharma’. However, rather than teaching them verbally, the Buddha simply ‘took intuited the meaning of the act and smiled, in a moment which involved ‘the direct transmission of prajna (wisdom) by Buddha to his disciple’ (Samad 2011: p. 254). Importantly, though, ‘there is the tale was subsequently advanced as ‘part of the Buddhist canon,…there is no evidence that this “scripture” existed prior to the Sung’ dynasty of 960–1279,5 such that today ‘it is widely regarded as apocryphal’. Nevertheless, its political significance was immense because, as this story ‘began to appear in Ch’an transmission records’, the notion of Ch’an being characterised by the additional possibility of ‘a special transmission outside the teaching’ of Buddhist scripture gained ground. And in time, the study of Buddhist scripture was in some cases even marginalised as a practice, and supplanted by emphasis on silent meditation. By all indications, such ‘major components of the Ch’an identity were Sung, instead of T’ang [dynasty (618–907)] innovations’, and even though the Ch’an masters in question maintained that they had inherited rather than founded such traditions, in effect, they ‘were…responsible for shaping our view of the Ch’an tradition’ (Welter 2000: pp. 96–98). To be sure, at the time, their ideas did not go uncontested; for example, the eleventh century Ch’an master Huai maintained that those who ‘speak frequently of abandoning the scriptures and regard silent sitting as Ch’an…are truly the dumb sheep of our school’ (Huai, in Welter 2000: p. 98). Nevertheless, in many respects, the prospect of wielding power against—and over—ossified inherited tradition, through making up new religious rituals and formulating new approaches to Buddhism, and indeed through writing new Buddhist texts and inscribing them within the Buddhist canon, won out over such conservatism. On the one hand, the risk involved in such creative appropriation and development of religious tradition should not be underestimated. In terms of Buddhist lore, not only does the act of creating a schism among the sangha carry one of the heaviest karmic penalties,6 in addition, a more immediate danger also exists, insofar as any unrestrained development of Buddhism along a plethora of idiosyncratic lines stands to undermine the continuity of the major Buddhist traditions, along with the material infrastructure indissociable from them, and their broad social relevance—which

impossibilities in the positions of the quarrelling [Buddhist] schools’ of his time, and was ‘motivated in this by a sense of the goal of the Buddhist path as a practical end to which thought and mind have no direct access’ (Phillips 2003: p. 214). At a formal level, some resemblance exists between this and recourse within Ch’an/Zen to the ‘kong-an ( in Japanese)’, which ‘usually recount[s] sayings of ancient masters or interchanges between a master and student or between two masters’. Accordingly, ‘are not meant to be studied intellectually’, because each functions instead ‘as an experiential learning tool’ or ‘a prod to encourage the Zen student to wake up…and engage with the actual universe of experience, rather than clinging to self-constructed concepts’ (Shrobe 2010: pp. 1–2). occupied China’ (Van Gulik 1967: p. 76). 6 According to the Vinaya, ‘killing one’s father, mother, or an arhat, drawing the blood of a Buddha, and creating a schism in the [sangha or] monastic community…are crimes so heinous that their inevitable karmic result of descent into hell takes place immediately and necessarily in the next life’ (Silk 2009: p. 21). South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 43 demands of them stable textual and ritualistic handholds for the faithful. On the other hand, the impossibility of not developing Buddhist religious traditions at some or other point also needs to be recognised. That is, religious traditions, when they ossify, can constitute ‘states of domination in which…power relations, instead of being mobile, allowing the various participants to adopt strategies modifying them’, become ‘blocked [or] frozen’. But such blockage is never eternal, because ‘in human relationships a whole range of power relations…come into play’ sooner or later to problematise and erode such stasis. And while political ‘liberation is sometimes the…historical condition’ for change, such change can and often is more productively worked out ‘and controlled by [new] practices of freedom’ (Foucault 1984: pp. 283–284), involving the formulation of new ethical codes and the carrying out of related disciplined activity. Arguably, the above Sung dynasty Ch’an innovations comprised a new practice of freedom, involving as they did an amalgam of covert iconoclastic acts, like the creation of new texts and their incorporation into the Buddhist canon as part of an ostensibly inherited tradition, along with the development of overt iconoclastic practices, like the new emphasis on silent sitting meditation and the maintenance of an anti-ritualistic stance.7 But to protect against the descent into chaos which an unrestrained variant of the latter might lead to, such iconoclasm was also reined in, ironically, through processes of ritualisation. That is, while ‘seated meditation, from which Zen derives its name, is first and foremost a ritual imitation of the posture adopted by the Buddha’, it was also the case that ‘the sometimes violent confrontations between masters and their disciples’, through ‘the institutionalisation of Chan…became carefully orchestrated rituals’ (Faure 2004: pp. 162–163). Thus, although ‘centred on an antinomian model’, the end result of such processes was the instantiation of a ‘deeply seated formalism’ in ‘Zen ritual’ (Poceski 2008: pp. 107–108), and conversely, ‘the paradox…of a tradition which, at its most esoteric level, denies the existence of any tradita’ (Faure 1991: p. 11). As Foucault reminds us, ‘history…teaches us how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin’, because ‘what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin’, but rather ‘the dissension of other things’ and ‘disparity’ (1971: p. 372). And this is as much the case with Ch’an as with anything else. After all, along with Ch’an master Huai’s critique of silent meditation, the above Ch’an reenactments of iconoclastic acts for a long time ‘elicited strong criticism’ from those who saw it as a ‘contrived and romanticised reinvention of archaic religious ideals’, by means of a ‘highly artificial and degenerate’ form of ‘drama’. And ‘the ongoing interplay between the form and content…of…Chan…and the…tensions it engenders are recurrent themes in Chan history’ (Poceski 2008: p. 108), not only within China, but also within the context of Japanese Zen. During ‘the Nara (710–784) and Heian periods (794–1185)…Buddhist influences enabled Japan to attain a high level of cultural development’. But ‘the period of greatest Zen influence [really] begins with the transplantation of Zen from China at the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185–1333)8 and extends well into the Tokugawa period’ (Dumoulin 2005: p. 221)—which commenced with the ‘unification’ of Japan ‘under the Tokugawa shogunate after 1603’ (Hauser 1974: p. 7). In many respects, like the Sung Ch’an masters before them, the ‘Tokugawa “scholar monks” shaped our present understanding of the Zen tradition…with regard to its avowedly Indian origins’, and their ‘presentation of the tradition was taken a step further in the post-Tokugawa philosophical development known as Zen …which relied heavily on such premises of Indian roots’ (Mohr 2006: pp. 215–216). That is, in the Tokugawa period, the focus of monastic scholarship fell on, among other things, ‘bases of proof that the Indian Buddhist logicians had recognised as valid’, along with the ‘definitions or rules of Indian logic’ (Jorgensen 2014: p. 69), and this entailed a privileging of progressive intellectualism over conservative clinging to religio-cultural mores

7 ‘Lin-ji and other Zen Buddhist schools adopted special non-verbal devices, such as abrupt shouting and hitting, to stop the practitioner’s tendency of attachment. However, the extraordinary use of language remains the major means to deliver the message of non-attachment’, as illustrated by Lin-ji’s instructions: ‘Kill the Buddha if you…meet him. Kill…an arhat if you come across him. Kill your parents…if they are in your way. Only then can you be free…and set your mind at ease’. Although these sentiments seem to controvert the injunctions of the Vinaya listed above (see note 6), what they really concern is the ‘ceaseless’ iconoclastic pursuit of ‘open-ended exploration rather 8 An overlap thus exists between the end of the Sung period in China and ‘the Kamakura period in Japan’ (Biswas 2010: p. 143). 44 Konik and accretions. The authority of the Tokugawa family ended in 1868, when ‘a turning-point in Japanese history comparable with 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia’ occurred. In short, ‘a handful of ambitious samurai…carried out a bold coup d’état…and proclaimed the restoration of power to the imperial [Meiji] dynasty which had reigned over Japan for well over a thousand years’, but which ‘for more than five centuries [had] been excluded from any role in government’. However, while in the years that followed, the power and prestige of the samurai were progressively diminished, ‘a policy of “civilisation and enlightenment”’ concomitantly ‘encouraged the study of the West and involved the introduction of Western style institutions’, as Japan sought to transform ‘into a modern nation-state dedicated to…catching up with the leading Western powers’ (Sims 2001: pp. 1–2). And under the auspices of this modernisation drive, Buddhism became subject to significant persecution in Japan, being perceived as a foreign, ‘corrupt, decadent…and superstitious creed, inimical to Japan’s need for scientific and technological advancement’. In response, ‘a vanguard of modern [university-educated] Buddhist leaders emerged to argue the Buddhist cause’, and they did so by admitting ‘to the corruption’ and ‘decay’ of Japanese Buddhism during the late Tokugawa period, while simultaneously calling for Buddhist ‘reform from within’ (Sharf 1995: p. 109). And such reform not only entailed renewed ‘interest in reason and logic’, as it had been studied by the above Tokugawa scholar monks; in addition, under the auspices of ‘the search for modernisation’ and the idea that ‘Buddhism was to be remoulded as an Eastern philosophy, the idea [also] arose that logic was an integral part of this New Buddhism’ (Jorgensen 2014: p. 70). A ‘New Buddhism’ which was to be touted as a ‘world religion’ that had been ‘purified of all superstitious accretions’ until it was ‘uncompromisingly empirical and rational, and in full accord with the findings of modern science’. Moreover, ‘the ‘foreignness’ of Buddhism became an asset rather than a source of embarrassment’, insofar as it was construed as linking Japan to the rest of Asia—although the modern form of Japanese New Buddhism dovetailed with growing domestic sentiments concerning Japanese exceptionalism (Sharf 1995: p. 110). This last point is important because ‘one of the key documents in the establishment of Japanism as an entrenched ideology was the Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan)’, which did ‘not reject Buddhism as a foreign religion…but rather attempt[ed] to absorb’ it ‘into a homogenous Japanese spirit or essence’. Yet this not only came ‘at the expense of the possibility of Buddhist criticism of government policies’, but also actually permitted the ‘cultivating or sustaining [of] attitudes and practices of social discrimination’ among Japanese Buddhists (Shields 2011: p. 41). That is, efforts carried out under the auspices of Kokutai no hongi sought ‘to demonstrate the divine attributes and superior qualities of the imperial line, through citing myths and others sources’ that could ‘exhort the emperor’s subjects to…patriotic behaviour’ (Clarke and Beyer 2009: p. 636). And the corollary of this was an increasingly ‘firm commitment to Darwinian theories of social evolution’ and ‘Darwinian inspired notions of (struggle for survival) and (survival of the fittest)’ (Weiner 2009: p. 5). These were cited both as an explanation for Japanese victory over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, and as legitimation for the ensuing Japanese colonial conquest of, respectively, Taiwan and Korea. In many respects, the Japanese belief in their superiority to the rest of Asia was mirrored in the Japanese New Buddhist attitude of superiority to the West. An attitude which, surprisingly, many Westerners for a long time failed to detect, but which even a cursory overview of early New Buddhist proselytising efforts in the West makes quite clear. As Sharf recalls in ‘The Zen of Japanese Nationalism’, the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago played a key role ‘the first to travel to America’, and who presented on Zen Buddhism and subsequently undertook a lecture tour in America and Europe, in addition to publishing the first English book on Zen, Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot orientation, and as compatible both with other faiths and with science. However, on the other hand— particularly in the ‘sermons delivered during his second trip to America’ in 1905—he also expressed support for the Japanese wars of conquest in Asia as an unfortunate but necessary purifying fire that will later yield positive spiritual development. And this same dogmatism regarding Japanese South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 45 superiority was reflected in the ‘quintessential nihonjinron theme’ in his lectures,9 namely the sharp distinction between a refined and more evolved Orient—epitomised by Japan—and the as-yet-immature Occident. Accordingly, because of this, he argued that ‘Orientals’ are ‘naturally drawn to meditation’, which by comparison remains exceedingly difficult for Westerners (Sharf 1995: pp. 112–114). This distinction readily contributed to the trope of the Orient and its insights as both inexplicable to and unattainable for Westerners, reflected in Foucault’s one-time idea— discussed earlier—of an ‘Orient that is presented to the expansionist rationality of the Occident but that remains eternally inaccessible because it always remains the limit’ (Foucault 1961: p. iv, in Liebmann Schaub 1989: p. 308). done for him by ‘the Japanese scholar Suzuki Daisetsu, better known in the West as D.T. (Daisetz his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen’ only ‘as a sectarian tradition’ (Faure 1993: pp. 52, 57). Nevertheless, he went on to become one of the most important exponents of Zen . That is, on the one hand, ‘Suzuki’s willingness to combine Zen with militarism’ in general and with ‘’ in particular, 10 began ‘during the period immediately after the Russo-Japanese War [and] set a pattern that would mark his work for over half a century’ (Benesch 2014: p. 139). On the other hand, and in an echo of the Japanese exceptionalism Zen and Japanese Culture argued for the thorough permeation of everyday Japanese life and art by the spirit of Zen. In this regard, he advanced ‘Zen aestheticism… as a concentrated expression of Japanese spirituality’, and maintained that Zen, ‘despite all rhetoric about bodhisattvas of compassion…does not sustain any moral position and remains immoral— beyond good and evil’ (Odin 2001: p. 148).11 Understandably, this perspective all too conveniently allowed for continuing silence over Japanese atrocities in East Asia. Moreover, Suzuki not only sought to marginalise Chinese Zen, or Ch’an, maintaining that ‘Chinese…Ch’an Buddhism…died an early death on the continent…after the Sung dynasty’, and that it was only when ‘Chinese Ch’an met the samurai culture of the Kamakura period that it…attain[ed] its consummate form in Japanese Zen’ (Sharf 1994: p. 48). In addition, in his discussion with Shin’ichi Hisamatsu at Harvard in 1958, he correlatively suggested that Westerners—despite their interest in Zen—are neither able to truly understand Zen nor capable of attaining enlightenment (in Sharf 1995: p. 130). The response of Hisamatsu, ‘a professor of Buddhist philosophy from the Kyoto school’, who was also one of the more important ‘elite post-war cultural nationalists’ (Kato 2004: p. 74), is also very telling. In short, he both similarly advanced ‘Zen as a transcultural truth that is nevertheless the unique property of the Japanese’, and went so far as to re-qualify enlightenment as culturally specific, stating: ‘I have long spoken of “Oriental nothingness”…because in the West such nothingness has never been fully awakened, nor has there [even] been penetration to such a level’ (Sharf 1995: p. 132; Hisamatsu, in Sharf 1995: p. 133). The importance of the last two figures—Suzuki and Hisamatsu—to the present discussion to both of them. While through his own writing ‘he became acquainted with D.T. Suzuki’, the latter then Crown Prince Akihito’ (Victoria 2005: p. 42).12

9 ‘Nihonjinron primary focus of Nihonjinron is, as its name implies, the Nihonjin or Japanese people themselves’, and related ‘discussion of Japan inevitably boils down to an emphasis on racial division and difference’ (Hutchinson and Williams 2007: p. 4). 10 resolution to die…is a constant, the cause to which it is applied has been an historical variable, ranging from medieval Samurai defending their warlords during the Tokugawa feudal period, to the kamikaze pilots of World War II’ (Odin 1996: p. 320). 11 ‘The Sanskrit term bodhisattva is composed of two words, bodhi and sattva. Bodhi is derived from the verbal root budh, meaning ‘wake’ so that bodhi is the state of being awake…The second component of the term, sattva has a wider range of meanings’, namely a ‘sentient being’ or a ‘mind (citta) or intention ()’ or ‘strength…directed toward enlightenment’ (Lopez and Rockefeller 1987: p. 24). 12 Akihito only acceded to ‘the Japanese throne’ when his father ‘Emperor Hirohito…died in 1989’ (Yamazaki 2006: p. 38). 46 Konik

the emperor and concomitant advancement of Zen as universal, along with his blending of and Zen, place him firmly within the camp of New Buddhism as it was articulated by Suzuki and Hisamatsu. The above is clearly evinced in Brian Victoria’s Zen War Stories (2005), which, among other Koishikawa district of Tokyo’ in 1934, ‘with the support of a number of right-wing activists aligned with the Imperial Way Faction, especially the Young Officer’s Movement’ (Victoria 2005: p. 50).13 Imperial Way Faction among all the patriotic organisations of the day’ (Victoria 2005: p. 50). This zazen meditation, the primary focus fell on Emperor worship and martial arts practice. And where longer zazen body of indomitable resolve through introspection and Zen practice’ (Victoria 2005: p. 51). In this regard, ‘Showa was the imperial reign title of Emperor Hirohito’ (Hanneman 2013: p. 50), and ‘the their actions by advocating as synonymous’ its ‘renewal (ishin) and revival (fukko)’ (Karlin 2014: p. one with the Way,’ someone ‘completely transforms the small self into the Way of the warrior. He then lives the Great Life’ (Victoria 2005: p. 51). That is, a life in which the selflessness of Buddhist enlightenment was progressively aligned with ever greater self-subordination to the Imperial Way. similarly advanced a universal New Buddhism that was intertwined with , while they at the same time consistently reified Japanese spiritual (and cultural) enlightenment. Moreover, their endeavours in this regard did not really entail any heretical deviation from the tradition of Sung dynasty Ch’an. As discussed earlier, the latter similarly involved the creative appropriation of a religious inheritance for purposes that were deeply political, and relied in large part on the power of dramatic gestures to effect such real world cultural change.

Foucault’s dialogue with Buddhism reconsidered A key figure in the introduction of Zen to France was ‘Anesaki Masaharu, who represented the [above] modernising trend in Zen and who [in 1919] lectured on Zen at the Collège de France in Paris’ (Faure 1993: pp. 52–53), in an endeavour to broaden ‘understanding of Japanese Buddhism in the world academic community’. In turn, as part of the ensuing ‘academic exchange…French Buddhologist Sylvain Lévi visited Japan in 1923’ (Rimer 1990: p. 233). Of course, a significant amount of French popular interest in Tibetan or Buddhism was subsequently engendered by Alexandra David-Néel, who in 1924 became ‘the first European woman to visit Lhasa after she travelled from the Chinese Tibetan border disguised as a Tibetan nun’, and managed to ‘live… undetected…for two months’ in the Tibetan capital (Marshall 2005: p. 437). Indeed, in many respects, David-Néel not only ‘brought Tibetan Buddhist…mysticism to the West early in the twentieth century’ through her 1931 With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet (Senner 2009: p. 67). In addition, she also succeeded in precipitating much of the international fascination with, and discussion of, Buddhist esoterica before the Second World War, through her evocative descriptions

13 The ‘Imperial Way faction…was headed by General Araki Sadao, who [in the 1930s] served as war minister’; in short, ‘he believed it was imperative to persuade soldiers and civilians alike to place unquestioning faith in their military leaders’ (Morgan 2003: p. 129). Correlatively, ‘the Imperial Way Faction [was] openly…authoritarian and ultranationalist’, and it ‘attracted the admiring and expectant South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 47 of, and often fantastical perspectives on, the spiritual animus of this religion. However, in this regard, Brett Neilson rightly describes her as an ‘Orientalist’ (2004: p. 163), and in France the mystifying trend of her work was tempered by two factors: firstly, the exigencies of Nazi occupation during the war, along with the realist/existential attitudes which emerged within and persisted long after the liberation of the country, and secondly, the continuing academic credibility of the modern New Buddhism introduced earlier by Masaharu, which resonated with such popular attitudes. Yet, the patronising anti-Western stance of such New Buddhism was also progressively contested through the works of French Zen authors Robert Linssen and Hubert Benoit, who approached Zen through the theoretical lenses of, respectively, science and psychoanalysis, as a hands-on remedial practice for the discomforting excesses of modern society.14 To a large extent, what this entailed was ‘a radicalisation of Freud’s position that cultural values are inherently oppressive to individuals, force them to repress their instincts and thus give rise to psychological symptoms’ (McMahan 2008: p. 195). And this, in turn, fed the dynamic in the late 1960s and ‘seventies counterculture’ whereby ‘Asian religions became widely accepted as antidotes to the ills of Western modernity’ (Ortner 1999: p. 186). priest ordination…in Japan’, and ‘as baby boomers started seeking Eastern masters in the late 1960s’ his ‘Parisian dojo became the basis of a rapidly expanding organisation’ (Melton and nationalist who supported, and indeed fought in, the Russo-Japanese war’ (Kay 2007: p. 235), and who in 1944 famously valorised the extent to which ‘Zen monasteries and the military… resemble[d] each other closely’ (Victoria 2005: p. 17), Deshimaru did not inherit his politics. On the contrary, as Phillipe Coupey explains, not only was he a pacifist during the Second World War, but he was even arrested at one point by the Japanese military and sentenced to death for supporting the local population of Bangka island, Sumatra, against the cruel prejudices and violent excesses of the Japanese soldiers; a sentence which was fortunately repealed (1979: pp. 27–30). In short, from the late 1960s onward, Deshimaru, on account of his ‘emphasis on practice rather than rituals or intellectual conceptions, his direct personality, and his provocative teachings’—which included ‘urging his students to reconcile Eastern and Western philosophies through zazen’—succeeded in ‘attract[ing] many European disciples’ who, in turn, lent increasing discursive momentum to the movement associated with him (Melton and Baumann 2010: p. 484). Similarly, in 1969—the year of Alexandra David-Néel’s death—the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘after being granted asylum in France…founded the Unified Buddhist Church’, and began teaching meditation under the auspices of Engaged Buddhism and engendering reconciliatory inter-faith dialogue.15 ‘The small Buddhist community of Sweet Potatoes, named for a staple food of Vietnamese peasants, followed in 1975, and that was followed in turn by Plum Village’, in Dordogne, southern France, ‘in 1982, which now serves as headquarters for Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing’ (Scott 2012: p. 290). Yet Foucault, instead of availing himself of the opportunity to study Zen Buddhism or Engaged with, respectively, Taisen Deshimaru or Thich Nhat Hanh, in the interest of augmenting East-West philosophical and religious reconciliation, opted instead for the much more adversarial were good reasons for his decision in this regard, which related to the third phase of his work discussed

14 While Linssen in his Living Zen ‘sees the logic of Zen Buddhism on thought processes in sympathy with modern physics’ (Shupe and Bradley 2010: p. 65), Benoit in his The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought construes Zen meditative practice through a psychoanalytic lens in a way that renders it universally applicable (Wilber 1993: pp. 171–176). Another Western exponent of Zen, Christmas Humphreys, neatly sums up the problem: ‘Eastern teachers alike criticise the West for being too intellectual. Herrigel alone, they seem to say, in his Zen in the Art of Archery has caught the spirit of Zen, but then he learnt it from a Master of Zen in Japan. This rules out my own Zen Buddhism, Benoit’s The Supreme Doctrine, and…Linssen’s Living Zen…Can nobody, then, write usefully on Zen who has not studied long in a Zen monastery?’ (Humphreys 1994: p. 30). 15 to the problems of society in a nonviolent way, motivated by concern for the welfare of others and as an expression of their own Buddhist practices’ (King 2009: p. 2). 48 Konik earlier, namely his interest in how ‘a human being turns him- or herself into a subject’ (Foucault 1982: p. 327). And these reasons have an important bearing on the opposing appraisals of Foucault’s engagement with Buddhism, exemplified by Liebmann Schaub and Hokenson, detailed earlier. meant’ anymore than ‘the protagonists of the Meiji Restoration knew exactly beforehand what it meant’, but resonances and dissonances exist between the two events. That is, they were similar in that ‘in both situations the main actors were junior officers…highly dedicated to the national cause…who enjoyed the support of their military establishments’, ‘were aided by influential elements of the old regime’, and sought ‘to establish a new government, which would carry out sweeping political reforms’. However, while ‘the Meiji Restoration was carried out in the name was ‘carried out against a government which ruled in the name of the emperor (Shillony 1998: pp. 99–100). This, in turn, implied another important difference between them: while the first was undertaken to break Tokugawa hegemony in the interests of re-establishing traditional Meiji authority and ushering in a period of modernisation in Japan, the second entailed a negative reaction to the debilitating excesses of such modernisation, which derived from aspects of the disciplinary/ bio-power indissociable from it. Apart from the swift and radical modernisation of the Japanese military along disciplinary lines,16 ‘a German constitutional model [was adopted] by the oligarchies of the Meiji Restoration’ to facilitate ‘a kind of elite control, which was designed…to forcibly create the conditions for capitalist industrialisation’, and which necessarily entailed the extension of disciplinary mechanisms. But soon ‘this imposed process of self-transformation…led to open hostility’, both ‘against those powers that had imposed it in the first place…and against all those elements within the political system that showed signs of Western democratic influence’ (Harrison bio-power. After all, the modernisation drive of the Meiji period had been accompanied by many of the disciplinary/bio-power mechanisms and technologies of nineteenth-century Europe, which functioned together to create the isolated, historically de-contextualised and docile citizens, so necessary for the constant augmentation of industrial production. And it was to the related ‘dividing practices’ that saw ‘the subject…either divided inside himself or divided from others’ (Foucault entailed the partial repositioning of subjectivity in relation to disciplinary discourse and, indeed, disciplinary time. As Foucault points out, the concept of individuality—so important to control within modern surveillance society—is ‘the fictitious atom of an “ideological” representation of society…fabricated by this…technology of power…called discipline’. And the isolation and progressive historical de-contextualisation of people from, respectively, others and the past, serve to create the individual ‘as an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power’, in a way that also renders them docile (Foucault 1991a: pp. 169, 191, 194), so that they may more easily be co-opted into the salvific historical trajectory of disciplinary power itself. This historical trajectory is neither cultural nor national, but rather orientated around ‘an “evolutive” time’ of progress; an ‘evolutive historicity’ which is ‘profoundly…bound up with a mode of functioning of power’, in terms of which ‘the small temporal continuum of individuality-genesis’ of the ‘individuality-cell or the individuality-organism’ is ‘an effect and an object of discipline’. Thus, it remains ‘at the centre of this seriation of time’ which ‘serve[s] to economise the time of life, to accumulate it in a useful form and to exercise power over men through the mediation of time arranged in this way’, which ‘tends towards a subjection that has never reached its limit’ (Foucault 1991a: pp. 160–162). As already mentioned, the remedial response advanced by Foucault in ‘The Subject and Power’ is to ‘promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries’

16 Modernisation of ‘Japan’s…military…began in 1866–1867 with the arrival of a French mission’, and Japan also ‘turned to the British Royal Navy as the model for its naval forces’. Subsequently, ‘France’s defeat in [the Franco-Prussian war of] 1870 led Japan to turn to the Prussian/German model’, and ‘in 1878 the Japanese hired a large German military mission’ to guide its modernisation efforts in this regard (Resende-Santos 2007: p. 39). South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 49

(Foucault 1982: p. 336). Further, in ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, he made it clear that Buddhism was important in this regard, because ‘Buddhist…enlightenment’—involving realisation of how the ‘self was only [ever] an illusion’—strikes at the Christian heart of disciplinary individuality. This is because it operates against the individualising knowledge and progressive concretisation of individuality produced through confessional practices, which in contrast render ‘the self…much too real’ (Foucault 1981: p. 178), and which underwent exponential intensification and ‘multiplication’ with the emergence of disciplinary/bio-power (Foucault 1982: p. 336). on account of its status as illusion, but also a ‘becoming one with the Way’, which effectively parallels exist between this and Mussolini’s fascist ‘organic theory of the state’, in terms of which, just ‘as the cells of the body each contribute to a life far greater than their own, so too the state becomes a living being with an importance far beyond that of its individual members’ (Baradat 1994: p. 248).17 Similarly, just as ‘the cult of Duce…was buttressed by romanità’, or the thematisation of the glories of ancient Rome and the corresponding ‘argument for the superiority of Italian models, terms of the Emperor worship that had prevailed before the disciplinary era of the Meiji period. But whereas fascist Italy could never distance itself too greatly from Roman Catholicism, and by implication, from the Christian heart of disciplinary individuality, in pre-war Japan more radical dissolution not only of disciplinary individuality but also of its accompanying isolation, through the proportional advancement of a pre-disciplinary anonymous collectivity that was, moreover, couched in pre-disciplinary historical terms orientated around the divinity of the Imperial line.18 And what this correlatively demanded was the eschewal of disciplinary docility and the concomitant heroic embrace of extreme assertiveness—even in the face of certain death; something which was moreover engendered at a very profound psychological level through related zazen practice, during which ‘an p. 51). Simply put, what this entailed was an expansion of the low temporal horizon of disciplinary concern over the prosaic details of the present, into the epic durational horizon of an heroic past that not only dovetailed with the present, but also projected a future that was more evocative than the mere progressive realisation of disciplinary efficiency as an end-in-itself. Rather, an epic future was evoked in which there was moreover no longer any place for atomistic disciplinary individuality, insofar as the realisation of such a future was predicated upon the formation of an oceanic collective political will, immersion within which—prepared for via zazen—entailed a simultaneous loss of self through and the achievement of enlightened salvation.19

17 new religion of the dispossessed and oppressed. The devout follower of the Marxian faith has an unshakeable conviction that he knows what the meaning of history is, the goal toward which it is moving’, and ‘that he has joined the forces that in the end must win’, in a battle of epic proportions that will effectively usher in the end of history (Ebenstein and Ebenstein 1991: p. 707). 18 In contrast, as Foucault explains, disciplinary power ‘mark[s] the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualisation… takes place. In…the feudal régime…individualisation is greatest where sovereignty is exercised’, while relative anonymity is the condition of the masses. However, ‘in a disciplinary régime…as power becomes more anonymous…those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualised’ (Foucault 1991a: p. 193). 19 Interestingly, such fascistic appropriation of Buddhism has a counterpart today in what Anderson and Harper call ‘American Militant Buddhism’ or ‘AMB’, which involves ‘a uniquely American brand of redemptive violence framed by…Buddhist images and concepts’, distinguishes itself from other Buddhist vehicles by embracing violence to the self or others as the primary means of liberation’, and it is Star Wars and in both the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy (1999/2003) and David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), where physical suffering, violence and enlightenment are characterised as indissociable (Anderson and Harper 2014: pp. 152–153). At a more explicit level, in Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai related political context of growing French-German tensions in which they occurred (see note 16), in addition, Algren—after his capture by samurai and his subsequent conversion to ‘the way of the sword’—constitutes the hub around which ‘powerful visual imagery’ renders ‘Buddhism…inseparable from the Bushido samurai-warrior identity’. But, in making ‘no distinction between the potentially contradictory 50 Konik

Of course, significant irony hangs over such a narrative and its meditative practices because of the modern military—and hence pervasively disciplinary—context within which they emerged. But such irony also points to the need for complexity thinking in relation to this cultural phenomenon, which, in its interweaving of both pre-disciplinary and disciplinary dynamics, reveals the limits of any simplistic either/or approach. Indeed, it is possible that such complexity was deeply alluring for Foucault, involving as it did not an outright rejection of all things disciplinary, but rather a recalcitrant warping of disciplinary co-ordinates that produced a new and adversarial form of subjectivity—marked by ‘new relationships…between the mind and the body’ and ‘between the body and the external world’ (Foucault 1978a: p. 112). Considered in this light, Liebmann Schaub’s contention that a covert Buddhist subtext informed Foucault’s work, and that his subsequent suppression of the preface to the first edition of Madness and Civilization constitutes partial evidence of this, is problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, it ignores the possibility that Foucault’s suppression of the preface was simply the consequence of his changing perspective on the Orient, involving his relinquishing of a possible earlier affection for such Orientalist tropes, through a growing appreciation of the realpolitik of discursive formation in Japan and elsewhere. Secondly, it fails to recognise the development of a third phase in Foucault’s work, involving the first/second century Hellenistic-Roman cultures of the self, and the related question of how a human being turns him- or herself into a subject. A phase which resonated with— Buddhism in particular.20 In turn, Jan Hokenson’s criticism that Foucault, in his engagement with Buddhism, was guilty of colonising, rarefying, and politicising this religion for his own purposes, is also problematic for two reasons. Firstly, insofar as it implies that the Orient always involves cultural plenitude, it echoes aspects of the old Orientalist trope which characterised the domain as rich and timeless (Said 1985: pp. 86–87), the corollary of which is an all too easy eclipsing of the fact that—just like the Occident—the Orient is in a constant process of cultural change, involving the birth and growth of new social-cultural and aesthetic dynamics, and the stagnation, decay and death of others. Secondly, such a blind spot threatens to occlude the fact that—long before Foucault—Zen in the hands of the New Buddhists was culturally colonised for Japan, rarefied into a psychological and indeed physical weapon in association with , and wielded in the service of an imperial political agenda. In closing, in the interest of learning more about how the above was previously achieved so effectively, and with a view to exploring future adversarial repositioning of subjectivity in relation to discourse, Foucault could probably not have chosen a better teacher than Zen Master Omori

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contemporary co-optation of Buddhism in the service of an American imperialist agenda. 20 In either case, it should be remembered that ‘the “limit-experience” in which the subject reaches decomposition’, and ‘leaves itself, at the limits of its own impossibility’ was of ‘essential value’ for Foucault, who described it as ‘the way out, the chance to free myself from certain traditional philosophical binds’ (Foucault 1991b: p. 48). As such, Foucault’s subsequent suppression of his 1961 characterisation of the Orient as a limit could simply have been the consequence of an ensuing limit-experience which allowed him to exceed his erstwhile philosophical parameters. South African Journal of Philosophy 2016, 35(1): 37–53 51

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Received 1 May 2015, revised 10 August 2015, accepted 5 November 2015