Angels of Desire

Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics

Jay Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781845533076
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134937950
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The idea that the human body consists of 'subtle bodies' - psycho-spiritual essences - can be found in a variety of esoteric traditions. This radical form of selfhood challenges the dualisms at the heart of Western discourse : mind/body, divine/human, matter/spirit, reason/emotion, I/other. 'Angels of Desire' explores the aesthetics and ethics of subtle bodies. What emerges is an understanding of embodiment not exclusively tied to materiality. The book examines the use of subtle bodies across a range of traditions, yogic, tantric, theosophical, hermetic and sufi. 'Angels of Desire' shows the relevance of the subtle body for religion, philosophy, art history and contemporary feminist religious studies and theories of desire.

Section 3

ETHICS

Figure 3: Marina Abramovic, Wounded Geode (1994).

To reconsider Abramovic’s installation Wounded Geode from the perspective of subtle subjectivity is to recognize that although the two viewer–participants are placed in an oppositional relationship—at either end of the table—they are engaged in a network of affective relations that simultaneously constitute and interrelate them, calling into question the bounds of their individual subjectivity. To look at the crystal placed in the centre of the table requires each viewer–participant to also meet the presence of the Other. Even if one of the seats at the end of the table remains empty, the lack of occupation is a presence affecting the experience of the work. As each viewer–participant looks at the crystal, and each other (if only peripherally), they would also be aware of a third place from which multiple gazes may scrutinize them: the other people in the exhibition space, watching them watch (even with eyes closed).

This installation has the effect of producing an acute awareness of the perceptive and affective capacities of oneself and another, of the gulf and the intimacy between subjects and objects, and the aliveness and agency of the mediating space. To draw attention to this type of perception, Abramovic has created a work which requires its viewer–participants to perform a suspension: to take up a seat—which being unusually tall, suspends them physically from the floor—in a gallery environment that suspends them outside their usual daily spaces of occupation. Poised thus, they are like the Deleuzian crystal-image, a between (which they constitute), yet its borders are nebulous and porous. In this space the viewer–participants are presented with a large crystal that mediates and focuses their relationship. It draws them into mutual contemplative exchange whilst simultaneously, the crystal’s particularity of form, its mass, enacts an interval in the space between them. Through an awareness of subtle temporal interrelations, the crystal emerges simultaneously solid and fluid: formed and formless.

The cultivation of relations with aesthetic objects—the aesthetics of durée—is not the only kind of connection being privileged by this artwork; it also highlights the cultivation of relations with other human beings: subject–subject relations. The juxtaposition of viewer–participants opens a space for exploring a modality of perception that could enable the other to be acknowledged without erasure of their alterity. This type of viewing is a witnessing that allows for recognition that is not tied to previous experience or knowledge. It is a creative, open apprehension, comfortable (without denying vulnerability) ‘sitting with’ phenomena whose entirety forever slips ‘beyond’ rational knowing and concrete expression. Through this more conscious experience of the practice of looking—with all the senses—viewer–participants are potentially made more conscious of the shifts in attitude that occur as the object of their perception changes from crystal to person, from table to gallery wall. In this process, the implicit interrelationship between aesthetics and ethics unfolds.

Chapter 7

AN ETHICS OF EMPTINESS

This section continues the consideration of the between and subjectivity that is not delineated by dialectical relations: a processural interval not book-ended by fixed terms designating its locus. In particular its focus is on transcendence–immanence and human–divine relations and the possibility of thinking/experiencing each of the dyadic oppositions as concurrent. This will be noted to be a feature of the presentation of the ‘space’ between in various Buddhist philosophies and practices and extended to a consideration of pneumatology in Western religion/philosophy that includes Irigaray’s adaptation of Hindu philosophy. Stemming from these considerations, desire will be identified as constitutive of both Buddhist interpretations of the ‘between’ and the interrelating embodied pneumatology (will–spirit–desire) that has been introduced in the preceding chapters. Accompanying these perspectives is a radical re-orientation to the experience of phenomenal reality that requires the cultivation of subtle sensitivities that are, from the outset, intertwined with a praxis of responsibility towards self and Other.

It is the aim of this entire section—Chapters 7 to 9—to open out considerations of responsibility and ethics arising from the modalities of vision and aesthetic experiences discussed in the previous sections. It will be argued that modifications to affective and aesthetic capacities and experiences result in the re-negotiation of the thinking/experiencing of the presence–absence dualism that underpins Western ontology. Considering presence–absence from a place of mutuality or concurrence is glimpsed in the temporality and fluidity of the modes of diachronic time (desire-time) previously discussed, and in the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā that is the focus of this chapter. Alien neither to embodiment nor disembodiment, a feature neither purely of this world nor a transcendent Other but not excluded from either, this negotiation of presence–absence allows for a conceptualisation of I–Other relations that maintains the mystery (as advocated by Irigaray) and allows each to approach the other without the weight of mastery directing the interaction. It evokes a subject that can be conceptualised in excess of its corporeality—a subtle subject—without denigrating its materiality; it renders each individual intimately related with one another without effacing individuality; it allows one to be both ephemeral and located, fluid and crystalline.

Śūnyatā

Śūnyatā¹—most commonly attributed with meaning “emptiness”—is a core element of Buddhist philosophy, and is understood as constitutive of both self (or more correctly self–no-self) and the universe. It will be considered here in relation to the desire-time discussed in the previous chapter. Although there are marked differences between the concepts—in particular the rejection of an ontological agency, and the reality of time as a universal category in śūnyatā—they share similarities in the figuration of subjectivity and the between, with śūnyatā containing a radical re-visioning of dialectical relations. The first part of this chapter (echoing the theme of Chapter 1) examines an ontology that challenges the predicate of the universal One. However, its ‘foundation’ of radical impermanence also challenges the dual ontology proposed by Irigaray, whilst, as will be demonstrated, concurrently figuring a radical Other.

Śūnyatā is both noun and verb, designating a characteristic of phenomena as well as a process or practice of modifying subjectivity that leads to the awareness of the ‘state’ the noun signifies. Herein, it will first be considered as a processural, multiplictious groundless ground of being/becoming as presented by Nāgārjuna and elaborated in commentaries by Masao Abe, David J. Kalupahana, Robert Magliola, Harold Coward and David Loy. This presentation on Buddhist philosophy will be referenced in relation to aspects of Deleuze’s plane of immanence and Bergson’s durée, and with Newman Robert Glass’s interpretation of the same. In this comparison it will become clear that the teachings of śūnyatā are to be distinguished from Western negative theology (a popular place from which much cross-disciplinary Christian–Buddhist scholarship commences), as it subverts the very positive–negative binary that positions these discourses. Emerging from this consideration will be an articulation of desire as ontological and ethical, that in turn (in Chapter 8) will be considered as being correlate to a pneumatology that enables the reading of human–divine relationships as concurrently transcendent and immanent. Both this chapter and the next are concerned with the realisation of śūnyatā (its practice) as an aesthetic and ethical re-visioning of subjectivity.

The understanding of śūnyatā is considered a veritable vipers nest within the practice of Buddhism, with various schools proposing diverse interpretations of its definition, range of applicability and practice.² Several of the more common “poisons” of śūnyatā³ will be referenced in this discussion, but the core focus is on its articulation as presented by Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 ce) in the Mūla–Mādhyamaka–Kārikā and the commentaries on this text by Masao Abe, David J. Kalupahana and Richard King. Amongst Nāgārjuna’s writings, the Prajāpāramitā-sūtras (sutras of the Perfection of Wisdom) are believed to have been a gift given to Nāgārjuna by the Nāgas—“a mythical race of serpents with magical powers.”⁴ It would seem the serpentine nature of the concept of śūnyatā was pre-figured in both the name and nature of its authorship.

The term is most commonly translated into English as “emptiness,” or “nothing,” although as Masao Abe implores, “emptiness” must be disassociated from the negative connotations (for example of lack, little worth or vacant space) that are present within the English usage of the term.⁵ Nāgārjuna developed his doctrine in contradistinction to the interpretations of anātman (no-abiding-self) of the Abhidharma traditions. These traditions argued there was no such entity as a self, but that the self was constituted by dharmas—“causally connected qualities.”⁶ Nāgārjuna disputed the intrinsic, substantial existence attributed to the dharmas, claiming that, like anātman, they are also dependent on other dharmas for their existence, and therefore also exist and are thereby constituted in a relation of causal dependence or “inter–dependent–origination” which is a state synonymous with śūnyatā, as the following quotation taken by King from the Mūla–Mādhyamaka–Kārikā clearly articulates.

Inter–dependent–origination is what we call emptiness

It is a dependent designation and is itself the Middle Path.⁷

Emptiness, rather than designating a lack of substance, signifies a type of relationship, that of inter-dependent-origination or codependent-origination, that will be shown to problematise not only the ascription of discrete existence to particular form, but also the presence–absence dualism: “If then, there is nothing with its own (substantial) nature, there is nothing with ‘other–nature’ (para-bhāva); and if there is no persistent reality, there cannot be non-existent reality either.”⁸

The doctrine of Emptiness, which simultaneously denies and affirms both existence and non-existence is central to the Mādhyamaka or “Middle School” of Buddhism that Nāgārjuna founded in the second century ce (and was a central and direct influence upon Mahāyāna Buddhism).⁹ Its core ideology relies on the refutation that anything exits on its own (svabhāva), and it is for this reason that the relation of inter-dependence (or co-dependence) is closely intertwined with it. Therefore as Abe describes: “In terms of a self-existing thing, the phenomenal thing is empty.”¹⁰ Emptiness is not a lack of substance per se, but the ‘state’ or relation that a thing has to self-existence (svabhāva). This is not, however, to propose that the thing exists in relation to another (not in the Levinasian sense of the Other calling the I into existence), because this then would ascribe an independent existence (svabhāva) to the Other:

In the absence of “independent-existence” (svabhāva) how can there be such a thing as “existence-dependent upon-other” (parabhāva) for “existence-dependent-upon-another” simply means the “independent existence” of that other.¹¹

Therefore, everything is conceptualised as existing in relations of mutual co-dependence having an inter-dependent-origination, and as such, nothing can be ascribed independent existence, hence Nāgārjuna concluded that phenomena was empty of essences of any kind—śūnyatā.¹² As David J. Kalupahana stresses in his commentary that seeks to establish Nāgārjuna as an empiricist, śūnyatā is a response to, and rejection of, metaphysical theory which posits an eternal substantial self-nature that cannot be verified by recourse to sense apprehension.¹³

However, it must be stressed that Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of śūnyatā is not a type of nihilism—this is one of the “poisons”—it is not a case of nothing existing, for if it was considered thus, then nothing would be attributed with an independent (non)existence as nothing. Further, it is not a negative substance founding a negative theology in which God is equated with Emptiness, which as Rita Gross notes, is oft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• Section I SUBJECTIVITY
• Section II AESTHETICS
• Section III ETHICS
• Bibliography
• Index