Authenticity, aggressivity, self-doing: next thoughts on what poets might do

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’.

KEYWORDS:

• Aggressivity
• creativity
• imago
• méconnaissance
• mindfulness
• prajñã

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.