ABSTRACT
Exploring the practice of vipassanā meditation as a heuristic path toward new modes of engaged creative production, this ficto-critical paper seeks for possible responses to the question, ‘what’s so good about authenticity?’ Reading Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan alongside a range of Buddhist scholars (Anthony Molino, Gary Snyder, Polly Young-Eisendrath) and against the grain of poems by Robert Hass and Wallace Stevens, central to this investigation is the Buddhist notion of prajñã, or ‘knowing-forth’: demarcating a difference between (a) rhetorical inauthenticities, which Adorno calls ‘identity thinking’, and (b) the prognosticatory ‘self-doing’ of meditators, knowing-forth is characterised here as an immanent mode of non-linguistic possibility. This paper asserts meditative processes as not only quieting all the usual syntagmatic organisations of the subject; speculatively, knowing-forth may also enable creative producers to traverse Lacan’s three stages of ego-consciousness, shifting toward domains the psychoanalyst asserts as ‘the Real’.
Acknowledgements
This paper is dedicated to the memory of the Venerable Māhāsi Ovadacariya Sayadāw Bhandanta Jatila, who died peacefully in his sleep on 28 January 2016
a raindrop, a footstep >>> a passing shower, a life
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dan Disney teaches with Sogang University’s English Literature Programme, in Seoul. A selection of his critical writing, ficto-criticism, co-translations, and book reviews is located here: https://sogang.academia.edu/DDisney. Collections of poetry include and then when the (John Leonard Press, 2011), Mannequin’s Guide to Utopias (flying island books, 2013), Report from a border (co-devised with John Warwicker; light-trap press, 2016), and either, Orpheus (UWA Publishing, 2016). He is the editor of Beyond Babel: Exploring Second-language Creative Writing (John Benjamins Publishing, 2014) and co-editor of Writing to the Wire (with Kit Kelen; UWA Publishing, 2016), an anthology of poetry responding to the dehumanisation of people seeking asylum in Australia.