The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

17. Koan Practice of Taking Down the Test

307 17 Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test I stand on light feet now, Catching breath before I speak For there are songs in every style, But to put a new one to the touchstone [basanôi] For testing [es elegkhon] is all danger. —Pindar, Nemean 8 (19–20)1 For once In visible form the Sphinx Came on him and all of us Saw his wisdom and in that test [basanôi] He saved the city. —Sophokles, Oedipus Rex (498–510)2 Prototype 1.0 Testing the limit. In the interview accorded to Salomon Malka, Levinas announces , “I prefer the word épreuve to expérience because in the word expérience a knowing of which the self is master is always said. In the word épreuve there is at once the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene.’”3 When Lévinas overhauls experience or experiment with the type of endurance implied by épreuve, he opts for a kind of trial: a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk. The call for ‘verification’—the quotation marks indicate the provisional character of verification—announces a life submitted to incessant probes, unfaltering revision , what in Nietzsche is governed by the principle of rescindability. In The Gay Science every proposition, every subproposition, and life find themselves subjected to the rigors of the épreuve. ... 308 “Knowing is not the way.”4 The exquisite discipline and daring askesis of certain types of non-Western practice challenge the limits of what we understand by testing. By slackening the finish line and undermining the ideology of sanctioned results in favor of another logic of rigor, a number of Zen and yogic teachings at once suspend and resurrect the constitution of the test. Zen does not merely erase testing but holds it in reserve, situating it otherwise. Vast and imposing, Eastern relations to something like testing reconfigure yet steadfastly enforce the warrior poses that pervade Western registers of testing. The value of contest also shifts. In Tai Chi one learns to step aside when a hostile energy is on the loose: one is taught to let the menacing lunge collapse against the stubborn velocities of its own intentions. The engagement with opposing forces (which can no longer be conceived as opposing since, by a slight shift in energy and position, the commensurate reach is broken, the flow diverted)—indeed, the very concept of testing limits, undergoes fateful innovation. All the same, Eastern practices, including those associated with the martial arts, hold back from completely writing off the test; they do not simply oppose the West-test. In a sense, the test becomes even more pervasive because it can at no point be satisfied by a conclusive answer or a definitive response to the probe that has been put out. The difficult boundaries of the Zen trial, the characteristics of which can be at once asserted and equally disputed, are especially evident in the case of koans—the problems or inner challenges with which Zen masters traditionally have confronted their pupils. The Occident has put up other fronts, obeying quickening velocities: If such acts as going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle can be viewed as exemplifying narratives of the Western test drive, then the Eastern “test” (this quality has not yet been established) is, by comparison, shatterably slowgoing. The grail, there is no doubt about it, must be found, if only to mark out the end of a narrative journey. The Castle, at least in Kafka’s takeover narrative, cannot be properly located or possessed, though it remains the sign toward which K. strives, hoping to conclude his trial. The scenography of the Eastern counterpart tends to be characterized by that which is immobile, though pupils and monks travel to sit with one another, and there is the phenomenon of the Zen warrior to contend with as well or, in yet another tradition, one encounters the implacability of the bold-spirited Samurai. No one ranks as a weakling in these traditions, even though a place of honor is accorded in Eastern practices to the inaction hero; the koan recipient may sit for years, meditating on a word or puzzle, weighing a persistent enigma posed by the master. In view of these the fading empire of cognition 309 descriptive attributes, K. may be looked...