You should read Zizek (I'm begging people , please engage with him beyond youtube!), I think his position on Buddhism is fairly congruent with yours and he would likely give you a more in depth critique. My short circuited take is that Buddhism (and lots of (post)structuralism and Heidegger etc.) raises death to the level of the sublime (death as rendered non-antagonistic to Being, death as the mere fact of life's passing) while positing the possibility of a moment of (impossible) autopoetic harmony with life as such (through withdrawal, meditation, nirvana etc.) wherein death is torn from its sublimity, overcome, and treated as mere contingent excess to life. The issue with this sublime concept of death which is necessary for positing separation from worldliness in nirvana is that one must presuppose the world as a constituted, harmonious whole which treats life and death as a complementary duality. Of course all life must pass, but everyone of experience can attest that death's entrance into their world does anything but introduce harmony. Death is not dissonance to life's consonance, but that which dissolves harmony as such.
You should check out the podcasts Red Library and Why Theory. The latter is definitely very RadLib (lots of orange man bad and I think even a positive mention of Russiagate at some point lmao) and they critique Marxists often on the terms of a pretty vulgar understanding of Marxism, but I think they are amazing at talking clearly about Zizek, Hegel et al; plus I think that its important to understand and engage with their antagonism to some (quasi)Communist ideals because I think a proper Marxist and Dialectical Materialism has to be able combat notions of the Communist project as being utopian and naive egalitarianism. However Red Library is comrades, they're sick, but the podcast is ending soon. I'm kinda disappointed I didn't get all that involved in their little online community (I'm bad at discord), but I taught myself a fucking shitload of political theory through them and their book recs. I certainly did not take Zizek seriously before listening to them.
Also Alenka Zupancic is another Slovenian author who considers herself a part of the same project as Zizek. She writes in a much more focused manner than Zizek and doesn't often do the "I'm going to give myself the worst grounds to argue from so as to undermine it from within" thing that Zizek does a lot and which can be confusing/problematic to people ( I mean I think it's important to force readers to think in the negative, but it's hardly a natural inclination and not easy to approach). Like when Zizek criticizes AES all the time while simultaneously calling himself a Stalinist, the most difficult and radical step is not to dismiss this as charlatanism, but to take it extremely seriously.
Also the podcast Machinic Unconsciousness Happy Hour engages with Lacan and Zizek a bunch, but from a more Deleuzian/Anarchist perspective. I don't listen to them a shitload, but they seemed pretty cool and open minded.
I wouldn't trip about being pissy about the promise of nirvana tho, the main thing I like about this site is its willingness to be pissy and antagonistic towards things.
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You should read Zizek (I'm begging people , please engage with him beyond youtube!), I think his position on Buddhism is fairly congruent with yours and he would likely give you a more in depth critique. My short circuited take is that Buddhism (and lots of (post)structuralism and Heidegger etc.) raises death to the level of the sublime (death as rendered non-antagonistic to Being, death as the mere fact of life's passing) while positing the possibility of a moment of (impossible) autopoetic harmony with life as such (through withdrawal, meditation, nirvana etc.) wherein death is torn from its sublimity, overcome, and treated as mere contingent excess to life. The issue with this sublime concept of death which is necessary for positing separation from worldliness in nirvana is that one must presuppose the world as a constituted, harmonious whole which treats life and death as a complementary duality. Of course all life must pass, but everyone of experience can attest that death's entrance into their world does anything but introduce harmony. Death is not dissonance to life's consonance, but that which dissolves harmony as such.
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You should check out the podcasts Red Library and Why Theory. The latter is definitely very RadLib (lots of orange man bad and I think even a positive mention of Russiagate at some point lmao) and they critique Marxists often on the terms of a pretty vulgar understanding of Marxism, but I think they are amazing at talking clearly about Zizek, Hegel et al; plus I think that its important to understand and engage with their antagonism to some (quasi)Communist ideals because I think a proper Marxist and Dialectical Materialism has to be able combat notions of the Communist project as being utopian and naive egalitarianism. However Red Library is comrades, they're sick, but the podcast is ending soon. I'm kinda disappointed I didn't get all that involved in their little online community (I'm bad at discord), but I taught myself a fucking shitload of political theory through them and their book recs. I certainly did not take Zizek seriously before listening to them.
Also Alenka Zupancic is another Slovenian author who considers herself a part of the same project as Zizek. She writes in a much more focused manner than Zizek and doesn't often do the "I'm going to give myself the worst grounds to argue from so as to undermine it from within" thing that Zizek does a lot and which can be confusing/problematic to people ( I mean I think it's important to force readers to think in the negative, but it's hardly a natural inclination and not easy to approach). Like when Zizek criticizes AES all the time while simultaneously calling himself a Stalinist, the most difficult and radical step is not to dismiss this as charlatanism, but to take it extremely seriously.
Also the podcast Machinic Unconsciousness Happy Hour engages with Lacan and Zizek a bunch, but from a more Deleuzian/Anarchist perspective. I don't listen to them a shitload, but they seemed pretty cool and open minded.
I wouldn't trip about being pissy about the promise of nirvana tho, the main thing I like about this site is its willingness to be pissy and antagonistic towards things.
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