Foucault, Oriental Spiritualism and Affirmative Biopolitics

Foucault’s thinking has been criticised of Eurocentrism (Said, 1988). Yet in the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault aspired to broaden his studies of 'spirituality' beyond Western culture. For instance, he was inspired by the Iranian revolution, the powerful collective mobilisation of forces against the regime of the Shah, which he saw as a sign of the entrance of ‘spirituality' into politics. What has not received much attention is Foucault’s increasing attentiveness to the traditions of Buddhism, and even more specifically, to the practices and methods of Zen meditation. Of course, Foucault’s stance remains undoubtedly ‘Western’, since he is interested chiefly in the subversive potentials of Buddhism and Zen as related to Western subjectivity and subjectivating power. Even though this project was never realised further than the preliminary outlines, the discussions with Japanese interlocutors manage to initiate some interesting insights. Indeed, the point in this paper is to substantiate their pertinence to the issue of resistant politics, as well as to the current discussion on affirmative biopolitics which has, mainly, drawn on Foucault's lectures on Cynicism. Foucault’s intuition is that Zen Buddhist spirituality uses techniques of asceticism and meditation in fact quite similar to those of Christian spirituality. Nonetheless, in Zen these techniques are applied in a different manner, spawning results that differ from and oppose not only Christian pastoral power and its secularised heirs, but also 'care of the self' of Greco-Roman origins. Through strict and meticulous commands, rules and prescriptions, Zen exercises pursue both de-individualisation and de-subjectivation. Zen spirituality, as Foucault’s understands it, uses exercises of self-mastery in a rigorously organised, planned and determinate fashion with the purpose of cracking open and dissolving the subject-interiority in any of its possible forms. At the same time, these exercises of de-subjectivation forge a new kind of affirmative relationship with the living body, between the mind and the body, and also between multiple living bodies. To expand on Foucault's remarks, through Zen asceticism, the affirmation of life means its evacuation from the negative/dualistic grid of categories. In Buddhist philosophy, such life is characterised as the utterly open and void (śūnyatā), the ’being-in-between’ that unfolds between the opposites, thus liquidating their ‘oppositeness’. Furthermore, this void being-in-between preserves life in its multiplicity instead of generating oneness. Finally, the paper discusses the intricate and ambivalent relationship of this 'Foucauldian-Zen' ethics and politics of life and 21st century Post-Fordist management, especially the latter's use of meditative techniques.