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Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Lvi-Strauss, Ren Girard and Buddhism

Ilkwaen Chung

Post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Systematic Theology and interdepartmental research-

platform 'World Order - Religion - Violence' at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (2009-10)

Member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R)

Publications

Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus

Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie

28) (Mnster: LIT Verlag, 2010).

This paper proposal has been accepted by the organizing committee and will be presented at the

Annual International Conference of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion (COV&R) "Apocalypse

Revisited: Japan, Hiroshima, and the Place of Mimesis" (see http://www.japan-girard-

association.org/conference/index.htm)

Abstract

In his essay Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Lvi-Strauss and Current Critical Theory,

Girard criticizes Claude Lvi-Strauss who asserts that myth embodies a principle of differentiation

identical with language and thought and ritual, on the other hand, tries to retrieve an undifferentiated

immediacy. Girard dont agree that rituals are committed to this undifferentiated once and for all. All

great traditional interpretations, notably the Hindu and the Chinese, attribute to ritual the end which Lvi-

Strauss would reserve to myth alone: differentiation. Buddhist logic of nonduality can be grasped by this

ritual logic of the undifferentiated. Girardian notion of undifferentiated corresponds to Buddhist world-

renouncers specifically ritual and initiatory logic of nonduality for or before the (re-)differentiation of

Buddhist enlightenment.

http://www.japan-girard-association.org/conference/index.htmhttp://www.japan-girard-association.org/conference/index.htmhttp://www.japan-girard-association.org/conference/index.htmhttp://www.japan-girard-association.org/conference/index.htm

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Buddhist world-renouncer as founding victim seems to play the differentiating role for the

Buddhist world order. For Girard, the end result of ritual undifferentiation is the regeneration of

differences. The undifferentiated presents itself as preliminary to (re)differentiation and often as its

prerequisite. Buddhist undifferentiated logic of nonduality represented by the wild and forest world-

renouncer has to be thought of as preliminary to (re)differentiation. In fact, a radically anthropologicalclose reading seems to indicate that this Buddhist allegedly deconstructive logic of undifferentiating

nonduality and emptiness can be understood as a kind of la pense sauvage referring to forest,

undomesticated and 'untamed' world-renouncing thought of Buddhas in his tragic existence of tropical

wildness. At the end ofTristes Tropiques Lvi-Strauss proposes Buddhism as an alternative to the model

of knowledge as destruction of the other. In my view, Lvi-Strauss does not know the strong sacrificial

roots of this Buddhist forest and tropical logic of violently undifferentiating nothingess and emptiness

represented by world-renouncing tragic heroes (transgressive and undifferentiating Buddhas). If fire and

cooked food are symbols of culture and raw food of nature, as Lvi-Strauss has suggested, then the world-

renouncer in relinquishing fire has, in a sense, relinquished culture. This paper attempts to analyze this

violent paradox of differentiating Buddhist world renunciation.