From Arborescence to Rhizome: West Thinks East at the Intersection of the Buddhist and Deleuzian Subject

• In Event: Roundtable Session 52
  In Roundtable Session: On Learning, Thinking, and Being: Asian Wisdoms and Western Philosophies

Abstract

This paper explores the resonance between the Deleuzian subject and Buddhist interbeing. In the West, the terrain of the self, the subject, is much contested. Conversely, the Eastern subject is neither contested nor bound by grounding metaphors–the subject is liberated, fluid, dynamic, blissfully folding and unfolding in relationship with all things. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) instigate a shift from the arborescence of Enlightenment thinking and usher in a Western era of thinking East. More specifically, I argue emanating from their conception of rhizomatics, lines of flight, Bodies without Organs, and assemblages are the generative Buddhist onto-epistemological foundations of interbeing: impermanence–interpenetration–insubstantiality. Finally, this new understanding of subjectivity opens the discursive field for a reconceptualization of the Western subject.

Author

• David Wayne Robinson-Morris, Louisiana State University