Superficial Zizek

The racist aspect lies with the fact that Zizek either knows about – but chooses to ignore – indigenous Asian culture, or that he is not interested in any interpretive narrative that lies outside of the scope of a Eurocentric thought. In short, Zizek is a postmodern bourgeois thinker, masquerading as a post-Marxist thinker. How did the dialectical forces of history create this Zizek figure?

Last Train Home (歸途列車) Film Review

Despite many permanently resettling in the cities, and abandoning their farm land, it is estimated that around 130 million migrant workers make the trip into the cities, whilst older and younger members of their families stay on the farm land and look after the home. This army of migrant workers spend 50 weeks of the year working in factories that provide living quarters and regular food to their workers. It is only during the two-week holiday of Chinese New Year that the factories shut-down and the employees are allowed home.

Taijiquan as Advanced Rationality

As a development of higher reason, Taijiquan is a distinct activity with a unique philosophy, which is indicative of an advanced rationality. This use of the human mind has developed a set of combat effective physical exercises that are designed to complement the anatomy and physiology of the human body. No movement exists within Taijiquan that has not evolved from the requirement of optimising the inner and outer physical structures of the body.

On Seeing Behind the Eyelids – A Marxist Critique of Buddhism in the West

The Christian monastic tradition, as manifest through Western Christianity, has generally combined a stringent discipline with voluntary poverty and celibacy. The idealised image of the Buddhist monk, as it has entered the Western psyche, is one of a man who has abandoned what is here (real material life), for what is over there (imagined religious realms). Of course, as what is over there, by definition, is never here and now, its presence can never be empirically confirmed. The Buddhist rules followed by monastics and the laity take the place of Christian piety in the West, but are adhered to by most Westerners with a similar fanatic attitude that completely misses the point the rule is assumed to be designed to achieve. The physical practice of Buddhist meditation is of course the act of Christian prayer wrapped in saffron robes. Western converts meditate as if they are praying to a divine being, but with the added titillation that the divine being in question is their own imagined self-essence – or god removed from his heaven and relocated into their own head. Chanting mantras – the holy syllables of the East – replaces the singing of hymns and the chanting of monks, and sutra reading is bible study by other means. Just as god in heaven can never be logically verified, enlightenment in the head can not be seen in the environment or known to exist.

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