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Glenn Wallis

Cruel Theory - Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism Paperback – July 23, 2013

by Glenn Wallis (Author), Tom Pepper (Author), Matthias Steingass (Author)

8 customer reviews

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'Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice' consists of three parts. Each part addresses both theoretical and practical dimensions of Buddhism. Authored individually, each part nonetheless interacts with the concerns of the others. Those concerns include the formation of an autonomous subject in the face of Buddhism's concealment of its ideological force; the possibility of a practice that thus serves as a theory or science of ideology; the reconstitution of practice as an organon of authoritative structures, including controlling social-conceptual representations; and the perception of Buddhism as the subject of a historical process. Perhaps the most salient theme running throughout the book concerns the crucial necessity of transfusing anemic contemporary Buddhist discourse with the lifeblood of rigorous, creative thought. Will Buddhism in the twenty-first century West help fashion a liberated subject? Or will it continue to be a deceptive mythos spawning subjects who are content to rest at ease in the thrall of predatory capitalism? The three parts of 'Cruel Theory | Sublime Practice' share a common concern: to push Buddhism to the brink.

Product details

Paperback: 214 pages
Publisher: EyeCorner Press (July 23, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 8792633234
ISBN-13: 978-8792633231
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,884,956 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3953 in Religious Philosophy (Books)
- #1341 in Buddhist Rituals & Practice (Books)

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Jase_loves_books

Not even close.

July 1, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A good attempt to examine Buddhism from outside it's philosophical parameters. Unfortunately, the book is in need of a good editor. If the book is edited in the future, I'll be happy to review and perhaps upgrade my rating.

7 people found this helpful

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Sangmin Hwang

January 22, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

It's ok to read, but hard to understand the contents, it requires to be patient.. for me or only? maybe

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M. J. O'Connell

Original, discomforting, 'enlightenening' rethink of Buddhism

February 22, 2014

Format: Paperback

Many intelligent Buddhists may unfortunately stay away from this book. It provides a door out of identification with Buddhism as a self-referential system of meaning-making and therefore acts simultaneously as a door that leads to possibilities, and as a means for exiting a wall-less prison. It is an explosive work that has the potential to damage and harm, but through such harshness it can liberate in a way that few are willing to see through and take seriously.
The three sections of the book are all worthy of careful reading for those deeply embedded in Buddhism to any meaningful degree, but I find most value in Glen Wallis' work that lays out a system for rethinking Buddhism and for thinking about the hidden costs of adopting Buddhism as `the' path to salvation. If you're a happy Buddhist, this book will likely disturb you, and is best avoided unless you want to deflower your passion for the Buddha. If you are one of those that has travelled some way with Buddhism, and found yourself inspired by Buddhism's aims, but defeated by the inability of Buddhists to realise those aims, this book may provide a stimulating rethink of Buddhism as a cultural, historical and ideological machine that has immense wealth, but also many, many hidden costs.
For being such an original work, I had to give it 5 stars. It is not an easy read, however, and for us mere mortals without grounding in western philosophy, it does require patience and a dictionary. If you appreciate and, hopefully, enjoy intellectual stimulation and love a challenge, this book will definitely pay great dividends. The ideas inside do not have to be taken on as a new doctrine and one does not have to end up agreeing with all of the authors' conclusions: that would be lazy thinking and symptomatic of a lack of character. But such originality of ideas and such a commitment to seeing them through makes this a truly original work worthy of attention for anybody capable of thinking outside of the box and questioning received wisdom, not as transcendent knowledge/wisdom, but as the work of other human beings and therefore worthy of critique and much more careful consideration than is usually warranted.
It is not an exaggeration to state that Wallis' work is an act of daring intellectual adventure and sports moments of genius. It is also the most original, contemporary approach to considering Buddhism I have come across. It takes the difficult notion of Non-Philosophy as a starting point, a repositioning of one's relationship with ideas and their consequences also found in Religious Studies, and uses it to breathe fresh air into an approach to Buddhist thought that liberates the individual from the trappings of Buddhist ideas and language, whilst avoiding facile, binary opposition.
Wallis provides readers with a series of explosives that penetrate the hidden shell of Buddhist allegiance. These ideas hack away at the veneer of Buddhist identification and build on the sense of doubt concerning Buddhism's ideas as `the' ideal - the be all and end all of a human life and questioning. It challenges us to be more courageous, to think for ourselves, and not take Buddhism's claims as given truths, but as material to be explored on their own merits without the holy assumptions that usually accompany collective involvement with Buddhism across traditions.
In short, if you want a book that displays a serious commitment to understanding why Buddhism can be so wrong and why intelligent folk that investigate it often leave it on the shelf in spite of its potential, this is the book for you. It does not destroy Buddhism, but it does have at its heart the destruction of popular ways of viewing, interpreting and living Buddhism. For some, this is an horrendous prospect, for others it will be an arousing, exciting panorama to explore.

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John L Murphy

In-depth review: challenging Buddhist convention

September 8, 2013

Format: Paperback

Glenn Wallis, Matthias Steingass, and Tom Pepper reevaluate Buddhism. Dismissing quiescent and supernatural states, they seek a practice grounded in liberating socially engaged agents, committed to intellectual rigor, ideological application, and political confrontation. If they push Buddhism to the brink, they may glimpse an abyss, or play among the ruins if the tipped, upended dharma shatters. Expanding ideas discussed at the Speculative Non-Buddhism online project, they deny world-transcendence while affirming a collective mind--outside the individual brain--as liberated subjects revitalized, after a truth-event named as Buddhadharma.

This esoteric, exacting study demands concentration. In cruelty, via Antonin Artaud's theater, it unnerves the practitioner. With practice, invigorated by theory, the informed and radicalized subject revives. After Wallis' précis about its individually authored chapters, Tom Pepper rejects an "ultimate cosmopolitan anti-intellectual aesthetic practice" which comprises most of Western Buddhism. In "The Radical Buddhist Subject and the Sublime Aesthetics of Truth," he equates postmodernism with "sophisticated anti-intellectualism." (22) While this appears to be applied to philosophical rather (or arguably to me better) than literary varieties, this equation would benefit from more support.

Pepper prefers to dismantle philosophical constructs which ease disengaged, dissatisfied audiences away from "the desolate landscape of postmodern thought." He castigates those Western Buddhists who eschew thought within meditation, and those who further "global capitalism" by choosing a more comforting "aesthetic negotiation" which prefers the comfort of beauty to any confrontation with an edgy, uneasy "sublime" harnessed to economic reform and radical change. (23)

Moving from David Hume's aesthetics, through Pali texts, past Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Pepper promotes as a corrective Alain Badiou's version of the sublime. He reflects on ways to start remapping worlds which stop reifying false premises.

This "sublime" may not soothe, but it can awaken. No-self, dependent arising, and conventional truth provide markers by which humans can achieve consciousness rather than submission to "reactionary or obscurantist subjectivity." (83) How this will be achieved pragmatically, as in many manifestos, remains nebulous, but the promise of philosophical and political change lingers.

Elaborating his scrutiny on the Speculative Non-Buddhism site, Glenn Wallis has moved beyond his translations of the Dhammapada (2004) and sixteen suttas as Basic Teachings of the Buddha (2007, both reviewed by me). He devises "non-buddhism" inspired by the procedures of François Laruelle. Wallis alters "critical operations" to produce "theorems that are buddhistically uninterpretable." (91) He seeks to expose the hidden syntax, the viability of the propositions, and the "ideological excess" within Buddhism. (92)

Non-buddhism, neither negating nor affirming Buddhism, incorporates a concerted strategy which "aims to stimulate the cognitive and affective conditions that render decision intelligible." (105)

X-buddhism (endless varieties of the dharma produced and perpetuated) resists these radical terms. As a counter-measure, Wallis adapts Althusser's formulation of interpellation, to show how a "contemporary Westerner" refashions into an "x-buddhist subject." (115) Liberation lets go of the "thaumaturgical refuge of x-buddhism" full of "ventriloquized subjects," as the one unthinking one's self as a non-buddhist enters into exile. (121)

Eager to defeat Buddhism as a "particular variety of sameness," Wallis escorts "x-buddhism's representatives" (136) to his "Great Feast of Knowledge." (144) There, these claimants can hold their own, albeit democratically, under the "same rules of engagement as all of the sciences and the humanities, as all local knowledges."

A digressive approach follows from Matthias Steingass. "Control" pinpoints in Thurman's salvific, Tibetan version of Buddhism a lack of ethical embedding in a "social context." (165) A disengaged version cannot impel followers to awaken.

Dissenting from Thurman's viral, slapdash "Neo-Buddhism," Steingass notes that neither a Shangri-La fairytale nor a dynastic clash of titans reveal a realistic approach towards Tibet, drifting as "oscillations in a fantasmatic landscape" mirroring a Western gaze. He nods at Tibet's noble savage as the West's preferred reflection, using Chogyam Trungpa as a case study. After looking at music and art, Steingass tries to assemble a critique of the drive in the West for an inner "authenticity" which denies any political or social reality.

Winding back to what disturbed him in finding a war photography volume in an elegant bookstore, Steingass reflects that the sudden encounter "shifted my perception and intensified it." (208) Instead of acceptance or resignation, Steingass concludes, we as liberated spectators turned wise subjects can look at each other differently, as he looked at war photos, or how museum goers look at an artist setting herself up as an installation.

Similarly, Steingass reminds us as do his co-contributors separately (this volume would have benefited from sustained cross-references), Buddhism pulses with a potency that jolts a witness. (The sublime is achieved, not the aesthetic, to apply Pepper's terms, albeit unspecified by Steingass.) Freeing viewers as actors, as those liberated from consumers to appropriators who own the art, and who create their own, radical reclamation beckons.

Each section contains documentation but each remains autonomous. A few introductory paragraphs by Wallis and three synopses of the chapters by each contributor provide a cursory overview. The authors could have transcribed a panel discussion on "what is to be done," sifting and refining their collective ideas. If appended with a cogent articulation of their plans to transform their ideological critique into a practical agenda to make headway among those students and critics of Buddhism dissatisfied with so many x-buddhisms, this anthology would have increased its utility. Moving from in theory from "x" to "non-," the next step stays shadowed in practice.

The reader, after examining three expansive exegeses, will find a few hints how to put non-Buddhism into action, in either the virtual or real worlds. Wallis's revised vocabulary as a thought-experiment coda, Pepper's admonition for an ideologically aware cadre, or Steingass's wish for an invigorated viewer's insight to adapt as a common vision offer suggestions, if inclined toward subtlety or density. The adamant tone of two-thirds of this treatise may daunt some readers, however familiar with Buddhist and philosophical concepts.

By contrast, Steingass roams into popular culture and recent history widely, but he shrouds several thematic links. What deserves keeping and what needs discarding from the dharma, after such fierce scrutiny, waits as tenuous. Context may be gleaned by inspecting the Speculative Non-Buddhism website, but this book does not duplicate (cf. a claim by another reviewer) that material--beyond the numbered elements underlying Wallis's section-- the objectives of that online project.

Pepper's hopes for a revolutionary vanguard and Steingass's concluding appeal to passive consumers turned engaged appropriators of art tend not to intersect on their respective paths to pursue the possibilities of non-Buddhism. However, with Wallis's ambitious formulations as the book's pivot, the patient reader will uncover his or her own suggestive resonances and correspondences. A tighter connection between essays and a bit more proofreading (I tally a few slips in the first section and the last) would have amplified the long-range impact of Cruel Theory/ Sublime Practice. All the same, as a reevaluation and valuation of the hidden drives within Buddhism, this strategy invites those in search of radical renewal.

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