In Buddhist terms, the Lacanian act is the exact structural obverse of Enlightenment, of attaining nirvana: the very gesture by means of which the Void is disturbed, and Difference (and, with it, false appearance and suffering) emerges in the world. The act is thus close to the gesture of Bodhisattva who, having reached nirvana, out of compassion—that is, for the sake of the common Good—goes back to phenomenal reality in order to help all other living beings to achieve nirvana.The distance from psychoanalysis resides in the fact that, from the latter’s standpoint, Bodhisattva’s sacrificial gesture is false: in order to arrive at the act proper, one should erase any reference to the Good, and do the act just for the sake of it. (This reference to Bodhisattva also enables us to answer the “big question”: if, now,we have to strive to break out of the vicious cycle of craving into the blissful peace of nirvana, how did nirvana “regress” into getting caught in the wheel of craving in the first place? The only consistent answer is: Bodhisattva repeats this primordial “evil” gesture. The fall into Evil was accomplished by the “original Bodhisattva”—in short, the ultimate source of Evil is compassion itself.) Page 23, Short Circuits, Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, editor, The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 07:46:55 +0000
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