The heart of a dog: the liminal ontology of bardo in the optics of kenotic posthumanism

Abstract

In this article, I propose a postsecular interpretation of the Buddhist phenomenology of bardo. This allows us to recognize Laurie Anderson’s experimental essay film Heart of a dog as an audiovisual reflection of this mystical and apophatic process. By applying the perception of bardo to the cinematic medium, the director stages a form of „inner vision” that moves between the registers of life and death, the human and the animal, waking and dreaming, the conscious and the unconscious. Most importantly, however, I argue that Anderson’s film may be read as a transposition of selected elements of Buddhist thought into contemporary Western discourse, which I define as postsecular kenotic posthumanism. In this perspective, Buddhist insights are subjected to reinterpretation.