Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton. Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. 296 pp.

Review by R. John Williams

12 April 2016

It is long past time someone mounted a rigorous response to Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Buddhism’s role in the totalizing realms of global capitalism. Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism by Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, and Timothy Morton is ostensibly that response—“ostensibly” because, for better or for worse, what this book giveth, this book also taketh away. For every stab the authors take at Žižek’s caricature of Buddhist praxis as the spiritualist ethos of neoliberalism, they also concede, however grudgingly, some overarching point in his argument. The effect is often unsettling, if not confusing, but not without merit. The explicit goal of the volume is to articulate a network of unacknowledged “connections between Buddhism and critical theory,” often by suggesting that even the loudest anti-Buddhist voices in critical theory are unwittingly reproducing some deeper form of Buddhist philosophy. In Morton’s section of the book, for instance, Žižek is characterized as being a “closeted Buddhist,” furiously repressing the spectre of Jacques Lacan’s more sensitive crypto-Buddhism while simultaneously embracing the retrograde prejudices of G. W. F. Hegel’s “Buddhaphobia.”

 But if the authors of Nothing find Buddhism working behind the scenes in ways many would not have expected, they show little interest in the everyday practices of the more than 300 million people who are avowedly Buddhist. Funeral rites, reincarnation, shrine offerings, pilgrimages, guru devotion, astrology, and a host of other ceremonial practices are almost entirely ignored in favor of what they call the “radical core” of Buddhism—that practice which has become, in the West, the most favored of Buddhist technê: meditation. Still, the point that mindfulness and meditation need not be understood only as tools for banal work-life seminars, management therapy, and consumerist quiescence is worth making, and they are quite convincing in arguing that Buddhism (or at least the “Buddhism” these authors are committed to) evidences secret affinities with critical theory (or at least the non-Frankfurt school “critical theory” these authors are committed to). Such affinities are offered here as good news, but we are left wondering how the authors might respond to research suggesting that lifelong practitioners of Buddhist meditation may be the least likely to demonstrate the qualities such practices supposedly cultivate.[1]

The underlying, proselytic goal of Nothing is the desire to have readers view Buddhist meditation as less of a psychotherapeutic mode of release, and more as a rigorous site of inner paradox, strange loops, and cybernetic ontologies. That paradoxes, strange loops, and cybernetic ontologies are already essential to the infrastructures of global capitalism indicates how much deeper one might go in exploring these questions, but Nothing is an admirable beginning.   

[1] See Jay L. Garfield, Shaun Nichols, Arun K. Rai, Nina Strohminger, “Ego, Egoism and the Impact of Religion on Ethical Experience: What a Paradoxical Consequence of Buddhist Culture Tells Us About Moral Psychology,” The Journal of Ethics 19 (Dec. 2015): 293–304.