Deleuze and Asia Deleuze and Asia Edited by Ronald Bogue, Hanping Chiu and Yu-lin Lee Deleuze and Asia, Edited by Ronald Bogue, Hanping Chiu and Yu-lin Lee This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Ronald Bogue, Hanping Chiu, Yu-lin Lee and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6399-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6399-5 CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Becoming Butterfly: Power of the False, Crystal Image and Taoist Onto-Aesthetics Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 Deleuze and Mah(cid:407)y(cid:407)na Buddhism: Immanence and Original Enlightenment Thought Tony See Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 48 Deleuze’s Strange Affinity with the Kyoto School: Deleuze and Kitaro Nishida Tatsuya Higaki Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 60 Theatrum Philosophicum Asiaticum Ronald Bogue Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 Sacred Listening in a Folding Space: Le Pli and Ancient Chinese Philosophy of Listening Yuhui Jiang Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 99 Hokusai, Deleuze and the Baroque Mark Donoghue Chapter Seven .......................................................................................... 121 Machinic Dopamine Junkies and the (Im)Mobile Walk(Less)MAN Joff Bradley vi Contents Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 144 East Asian Faces and Global Wonder Hsiao-hung Chang Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 163 Body/Space and Affirmation/Negation in the Films of Lou Ye and Wong Kar-wai Xiong Ying Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 182 In Search of a People: Wei Te-sheng’s Seediq Bale and Taiwan’s Postcolonial Condition Yu-lin Lee Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 197 Writing Herstory: Nu Shu as Cartography of Empowerment Amy Kit-sze Chan Chapter Twelve .........................................................................................211 Toward a Regional Literature in East Asia Hanping Chiu Contributors ............................................................................................. 232 INTRODUCTION During the last twenty years, interest in the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has increased exponentially. Over three hundred books on Deleuze and his frequent collaborator, Félix Guattari, are now available in English. Since, 2007, the journal Deleuze Studies has published over one hundred essays on Deleuze, while sponsoring international conferences in Cardiff, Cologne, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New Orleans and Lisbon, each meeting drawing 200-300 scholars from around the world. During the last decade, interest in Deleuze has grown even more markedly in Asia, as was evident at the First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference, held at Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan, May 31-June 2, 2013. Here, participants from Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Pakistan met with scholars from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Finland, Lithuania and Turkey to seek a broader perspective on the significance of Deleuze’s work for a global audience. Especially evident at the Taipei meeting was the emergence of a focus in Deleuze studies on the relevance of his thought for understanding Asian culture—a focus not limited to Asians alone, but shared by many of the Western participants. The Taipei conference, in short, brought to light a new, rapidly expanding area of research—what might be called Asian Deleuze Studies. The essays in this volume, generated by the Taipei conference, represent the first publication dedicated to this exciting, emergent field of study. The Taipei Conference topic was “Creative Assemblages.” In the Call for Papers, participants were invited to reflect on Deleuze’s concept of the assemblage and the ways in which it might foster new lines of research. The word assemblage, or agencement in French, denotes both an arrangement of entities and the process of forming such an arrangement— both an assemblage and an assembling, as it were. Assemblages bring together heterogeneous elements that cohere without constituting a whole. They form irreducible multiplicities, which coalesce, mutate, disaggregate and open toward new configurations as they change. Given that the essence of the assemblage is one of metamorphic and unrestricted connection, the concept lends itself to interdisciplinary work, and viii Introduction conference participants were asked to test the concept’s potential as an analytic tool for studying interdisciplinary connections and as a generative force for creating new connections that might reshape contemporary configurations of practice and thought. The essays collected here fulfill the spirit of the conference topic, establishing connections across fields ranging from philosophy and religion to new media studies, cultural studies, theater, architecture, painting, film and literature. The first three essays address conceptual parallels between Deleuzian thought and Asian philosophical and religious traditions. Liao’s paper explores the onto-aesthetics of Deleuze’s philosophy and the Taoist worldview enunciated in Zhuangzi’s well-known reflection on his dream of a butterfly (who is dreaming of whom, the butterfly or I?). Rather than interpreting Zhuangzi’s dream as a simple meditation on illusion and reality, Liao reads it as an expression of the concept of you, which he translates as “roam-revel.” You, Liao demonstrates, provides a Chinese counterpart to Deleuze’s “atheistic mysticism,” one that views the cosmos as simultaneously an ontological and an aesthetic domain of thought, action and feeling. See’s contribution likewise investigates Deleuze’s ontology, in this case via the concept of immanence. Through a detailed tracing of Deleuze’s remarks on immanence in Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche, See argues that Deleuzian “univocity of being” bears remarkable similarity to the teachings of Mah(cid:407)y(cid:407)na Buddhism, especially that of the “Original Enlightenment Thought” promulgated by Nichiren, Saich(cid:448) and their successors. Higaki also touches on ontological questions in his essay, but his attention is drawn to the important twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishida and the similarities between Deleuze’s and Nishida’s engagements with Leibniz, Bergson and Neo-Kantian philosophers. Leibnizian monadism, Bergsonian becoming, and the “logic of the predicate,” Higaki shows, play essential roles in the development of the thought of Deleuze and Nishida. Nishida, unlike Deleuze, draws on Asian as well as Western metaphysical traditions, yet ultimately Deleuze and Nishida are both modernists who embrace a mode of “Natural thought” that stresses becoming and poiesis. The next three essays approach Deleuze via the arts of theater, architecture and painting. Bogue’s concern is that of Deleuze’s thought as theater and Deleuze’s thought about theater. After sketching the theater Deleuze envisions as a model for thought and as an exemplary practice, Bogue shows that the Asian theaters of Beijing Opera, Kathakali Dance Drama and N(cid:448) Drama resemble Deleuze’s ideal theater much more closely than do traditional Western dramatic forms. He argues further that these Asian theaters offer exemplary instances of the Deleuzian distinction Deleuze and Asia ix between emotion and affect, and that the theoretical texts that inform the practices of Kathakali and N(cid:448) may help to extend Deleuze’s investigations of emotions/affects and of the relationship between theater and thought. Jiang’s interest is in the aesthetics of space enunciated by Deleuze in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1989). Jiang notes the visual orientation of Deleuze’s notion of the Baroque “fold,” and the way in which that visual aesthetic shapes Deleuze’s remarks on architecture. Jiang argues, however, that implicit in Deleuze’s thought is an aural dimension to the fold, and that such aurality may be brought to bear on contemporary architectural theory’s concern with the affective dimension of space. In Jiang’s view, the fold as affective concept is given its most powerful expression in the sacred spaces of Chinese temples, which in traditional Buddhist practice are treated as sonic spaces of disciplined chanting and listening. In the third essay of this cluster, Donoghue gives another reading of the Deleuzian “fold,” in this case as a means of exploring the space rendered in Hokusai’s “Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji.” Donoghue argues that Hokusai deliberately presents irreconcilable spatial systems in his art, and that Hokusai’s object is to disclose a world replete with multiple perspectives. In this regard, Hokusai’s aesthetic is close to that of the Western Baroque, Donoghue shows, and Deleuze’s concept of the fold provides the most direct means of demonstrating this parallel between Eastern and Western art. The next two studies offer insightful contributions to contemporary media studies. Bradley’s meditation on the Walkman as motif in Deleuze, Guattari and other French philosophers, and as quintessentially Japanese cultural object, draws out the tensions inherent in global information- culture, while at the same time elucidating the dynamics of Japanese anomie. Rather than simply condemning the effects of technology, however, Bradley offers cautious guidance toward a positive utilization of such forces. Chang takes a similar stance in her analysis of the manipulation of the face through plastic surgery, cosmetics and digital tools such as Photoshop. Focusing on a specific internet event involving Korean beauty contestants, Chang goes beyond the usual critiques of the event in terms of capitalism, standardization, commodification, and so on, asserting instead that all the modifications and manipulations of the face exemplified in this internet phenomenon are symptomatic of a global uneasiness over the reproducibility and malleability of the face and the body that transcends its Korean context. Ying’s and Lee’s essays are devoted to film, Ying’s to the cinema of Lou Ye and Wong Kar-wai, and Lee’s to the Taiwanese blockbuster Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011). Ying’s study uncovers the