Is Žižek a Mahāyāna Buddhist? śūnyatā and li v Žižek's materialism

Abstract

An intriguing interresonance plays out between various forms of Mahayana Buddhist ontology and Žižek’s dialectical materialism. His disdainful critique of (Western) Buddhism is well-known.As a cultural critic,Žižek might be onto something in his contention that Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideology for late capitalism.As an ontologist, however, he seems to be ambivalent regarding the parallels between the Buddhist Void(Absolute Nothingness-Formlessness-Emptiness), to which the Western Buddhists supposedly withdraw, and his elaboration of a new foundation of dialectical materialism.Žižek is one of the few contemporary continental philosophers who do not hesitate to engage Buddhism. My claim is that, notwithstanding his criticism, Žižek is much closer to Mahayana than he thinks. My aim therefore is to demonstrate how this is so. To do this, I will mainly focus on the following forms of Mahayana thought: śūnyatā (emptiness) in the context of Nāgārjuna's the Two-Truth doctrine, Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhist concept of li (coherence), and Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of basho (“place of nothingness”), which was heavily influenced by the Japanese Zen/Pure Land Buddhism. After going through some of the preliminary affinities among Mahayana forms and Žižek (e.g. nothingness as a generative void, self-relating negativity, irresolvable absolutely contradictory reality, materialism as affirming existence absolutely (immediately and without reservation) in its absolute contradiction, and materialism as the contradictory/paradoxical field conceived as an atheistic religious field, and so on), I will analyse each school of Mahayana mentioned above and point out the parallels between these and Žižek’s own thought.