Politicizing Cognition: Antigone, Yogācāra, and the Politics of Not One Less

In recent critiques of Žižek’s revolutionary politics, the ethical act as exemplified by Antigone has figured as a typical example of the excessiveness of Žižek’s approach. Žižek’s insistence on Antigone’s act of pure desire is suspected either of privileging irrational blind faith or of indulging in passive withdrawal from the domain of practice. Zhang Yimou’s film, Not One Less, seems to follow the terms set up by such critiques. Minzhi, the protagonist, displays unmitigated persistence in pursuing duties given to her as a substitute teacher. On the other hand, the story also unfolds as a blatantly conformist affirmation of the benevolence of post-Maoist state power. Minzhi, in so far as she acts in her symbolic role, is both too uncritical of the paternal authority behind her act and too powerless in the face of the flexibility of a system which comfortably hides social inequality behind fortuitous good will. This study argues, however, that a political reading of Not One Less should not stop at such apparent conformism. Indeed, both the reading of blind obedience and that of conformism assume direct causal connection between the ethical act and social/political practice. In Not One Less, however, there is a gap of causal uncertainty indicating that Minzhi’s act, though fully immersed in conformist practice, does open up a degree of cognitive freedom within the very uncertainty of causative agency. I will use the theory of “three natures” in Yogācāra thought to further examine how such uncertainty indicates the presence of a cognitive ethics which points to a different kind of causality in much the same way as the Lacanian/Žižekian act. Here effectivity is more radical because less predictable.