The Zen of Jacques Derrida

Zen and the gesture of deconstruction are complimentary. In my imagination, I can see Dogen and Derrida getting along smartly over tea. 

Zen and deconstruction are both nondual systems of inquiry. Their objective is to render strange that which we took to be familiar. This is accomplished by reading things against their own grain. 

For example, a deconstructive/Zen approach might say that, ironically, the truly religious person is comfortable using an atheistic mind. 

The mind which works from “great doubt” paradoxically reveals “great faith” because “absolute reality” is “beyond” our egoic notions of “being.” So instead of falling back on our ideas of reference (as "believers" do) we have to let go into the uncomfortable and intimate space of “not knowing.”

This is the practice of Zen. Or, more specifically, this is zazen.

The zazen way is to look beyond ideas of belief. The only way past ideas is through direct encounter of the mind which makes ideas. Through direct confrontation with the dualistic “believing mind,” the Zen student challenges the ideas of a Self which is always present. 

This looking reveals a humbling insight: just as Metaphysics is just another attachment to the craving for “good things,” belief in the idea of an unchanging Reality is heretical. 

Perhaps this is why the Buddha taught: “No Soul.” Clinging to the idea of a total presence is just desire run amok. In other words, it’s suffering. 

Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. 

To use Derrida’s lovely language: presence is always “divided, differed, and different from itself...” 

Acceptance beyond acceptance is therefore needed. We need a rapport and a rapprochement with the discomfort of our lived moments.

This is the way of the mystic.

The Dark Knight, Derrida, and a failure of autoimmunity...

After watching The Dark Knight, a columnist recently wondered about the ferry passengers in the Joker's "social experiment" (if you live in America and have a pulse, you'll know what I'm talking about):

"What if the detonators they were holding were actually for their own bomb?…and that in thinking they’d kill the others and save themselves, they’d only kill themselves."

Hmmm. Now there's a predicament that sounds politically familiar: our situation is a failure of autoimmunity. In other words, the patient is killing itself by deploying too high a fever. An hysterical response.

Here's a summary of the concept: It comes from Jacques Derrida, a philosopher deeply influenced by historical trauma, specifically colonialism in Algeria. His work originated the school of deconstruction: a method of reading text which seeks to disassemble any discourse standing as a "construction". Deconstruction demonstrates how if you read a thing against its own grain, it reveals something about itself which undercuts itself (this concept is sometimes called up as an "always, already").

How does it work?

Take 9/11 for example. Derrida deconstructs the "event" of 9/11 and problematizes the concept of terrorism. As always, he is interested in the question of language and how it is powerless to identify and label the attacks of September 11. The "event" is reduced to an "intuition without a concept", an "incantation" repeated continuously, by which the date "9/11" becomes more real to us than the actual event. Therefore, as we repeat the term "9/11" endlessly (in a traumatic "repetition compulsion") we become the continuing agents of our own trauma. We terrorize ourselves.

In this perspective, repeating the phrase "9/11" and compulsively attaching images of the towers falling, "spectacularize" September 11, and make it a "major event" in our psyches.

Even if we weren't there!

Derrida thus explores the suicidal temptation of "being there, as if." This could be called a "failure of autoimmunity" in contemporary American politics. For Derrida, "9/11 is the symptom of an autoimmune crisis occurring within the system that should have predicted it. Autoimmune conditions consist in the spontaneous suicide of the very defensive mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression."

Fox News much?

This is how Derrida reads the stories which we tell ourselves about ourselves. He also calls up the heritage of the Cold War, during which the United States provided weapons and training in Afghanistan, and to the hijackers that actually perpetrated the September 11 attacks and contends that the 9/11 attacks were the manifestation of this suicidal paradox.

He observes the same failure of autoimmunity regarding the problematic expression of a "war on terrorism," because it tends to generate a "vicious circle of repression". In other words, by evoking a "war against terror," the United States terrorizes itself.

So too, the Joker tried to activate this psycho-logic in the passengers of the two ferries.

It didn't work. They stopped the cycle.

They grasped that the only way was a third way: throwing the detonators out the window. They'd have only been blowing themselves up anyway.

Yay for Hollywood naivete! Sometimes it's kinda wise. Never tell an entertainer to shut up and sing--they'll invariably surprise you.