Revisiting Sensing Precarity via Deleuze: Japanese Buddhist Women and Emotions during Covid-19

Anne Allison introduced “sensing precarity” in her influential 2013 book, Precarious Japan which argued for precarity as an emotional status, one characterized by an insecurity and desociality that pervades contemporary Japanese society. Sensing precarity, then, can be interpreted as an inability to move within social worlds, what Gilles Deleuze (1978) defined as sadness. Yet Allison did not consider the role religion plays in sensing precarity through practices that enable movement, what Deleuze saw as joy. In this presentation, I draw on Buddhist women’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic to revisit Allison’s sensing precarity in light of Deleuze’s concepts of joy and sadness to understand the ways that women negotiated their extreme senses of sadness through their active Buddhist practices of joy. These women turned to Buddhist teachings and practices to craft a quasi-communal life of joy that helped them battle the precarious emotional tides that threatened to overcome them.