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 Buddhism 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 Zen Buddhism which he studied during his 1978 trip to Japan, 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.