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

초록

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’. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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