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Conclusion: Reimagining Tantra in Contemporary Discourse
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Conclusion Reimagining Tantra in Contemporary Discourse This warning has been given hundreds of times: Don’t get into Tantra just like that. . . . It’s dangerous. . . . Every Tantric text . . . begins with that warning: Be careful, think twice . . . don’t take this carelessly. But interestingly, the more you put students off, the more interested they become. Chogyam Trungpa, Journey without Goal (1985) The twentieth century will undoubtedly have discovered the related categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit and transgression—the strange and unyielding form of these irrevocable movements which consume and consummate us. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” (1963) At this point, I need to try to tie together the many loose ends and dangling strands that constitute my own genealogy of the tangled threads of Tantra. Obviously, this book cannot claim to be comprehensive or complete. Concerned primarily with the imagining of “Tantra” as a modern category, I have not tried to undertake the far more difficult task of narrating the actual historical development of those particular texts, traditions, practices, and peoples who would later be identified as Tantric. Moreover, as I quickly realized when I began to delve into the contemporary popular literature on Tantra, this is a topic that is too vast for a single book. Thus I have had to leave out an enormous amount of very interesting material. I have not attempted by any means to write a definitive history of Tantra, but rather to tease out and retrace a few of the most important threads that have been woven, tangled, and 264 matted together into the complex snarl that we now call the Tantric traditions. The imagining of Tantra, it would seem, has turned out to be something more complicated, much more messy, and yet also more interesting than the simple history of an indigenous Indian category or the simple imposition of a Western category onto the passive surface of the exotic Orient. By no means a predictable Saidian narrative of Orientalism, this genealogy of Tantra offers a real challenge to much of the contemporary scholarship in postcolonial and subaltern studies. For Tantra has emerged as a conflicted, contested, and contradictory category, passed back and forth between Indian and Western imaginations, undergoing new transformations in each new historical encounter. It is in this sense that Tantra seems to be analogous, on a conceptual level, to Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image,” as a “critical constellation of past and present,” composed not of smooth historical continuities, but rather of “rough and jagged places at which the continuity of the tradition breaks down.”1 As a dialectical category, Tantra is not singular or stable; it is something that is “non-homogeneous” and “fragmented,” “which on account of its awkwardness of fit, cracks, and violent juxtapositionings can actively embody both a presentation and counter-presentation of historical time.”2 Rather than a “history” of Tantra, this book has been more like a genealogy (in Foucault’s sense) of these many shifting dialectical images of Tantra—an attempt to work backward from our contemporary imagining of Tantra, to retrace the many “accidents, minute deviations, the complete reversals” that have given shape to this complex category in the present. In simplest form, the imagining of Tantra could be outlined as in figure 14, which is adapted loosely from Benjamin’s analysis of the dialectical nature of the commodity.3 Tantra thus lies at the nexus of a series of conflicting extremes—the archaic past and the modern age of darkness ; sexual liberation and sexual depravity; political freedom and political violence—each of which is seized upon in different historical moments. Perhaps most importantly, we have found that the image of Tantra has progressively shifted from a tradition associated with secrecy, danger, and occult power to one associated primarily with sexual liberation and physical pleasure. At either extreme of this dialectic we have seen, on one hand, the Orientalists’ and reformers’ horror at Tantric licentiousness and, on the other, the contemporary celebration of Tantric freedom and empowConclusion 265 [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:42 GMT) Figure 14. The imagining of Tantra. erment. As such, this genealogy of Tantra also has turned out to be a political history of the history of religions; for the construction of Tantra has been intimately tied from the outset to particular power formations and political interests—to colonialism and anticolonial revolt; to nationalism and postcolonial identity; to the political investments of scholars of religions; and...