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ОглавлениеIntroduction: “Not the Exceptional, but the Unheard Of”
Étudier dé-familiarise (Studying defamiliarizes).
—François Jullien, in interview with Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire1
Points of Reference; or, François Jullien’s Second Life
Born in 1957, François Jullien obtained his degree in philosophy in the mid-1970s and left to China to study at the universities of Beijing and Shanghai. In the late 1970s, he moved to Hong Kong to take up a position at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China. Later still, in the mid-1980s, he was a researcher at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo.2 After holding several prestigious academic positions in France, both as a sinologist (president of the Association française d’études chinoises, for example) and a philosopher (president of the Collège internationale de philosophie), he became the Chair of Alterity—a peculiar title, given the criticism he develops of alterity in his work—at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Over the course of his career, Jullien has published more than thirty books in French, about half of which have been translated into English. His work has been the subject of both lavish praise and harsh criticism. While Jullien has received several major awards for this work, he does not have the same renown in the English-language world as other contemporary French philosophers. This may be because much of his work is classified as sinology and thus seems to cater to a more-specific audience than the French philosophy that is often simply marketed as (universally appealing?) “theory.” However, for contemporary Western theorists to leave Jullien aside because he is a sinologist and does not address what preoccupies Western thought would be a grave mistake. Jullien is precisely always working in between the Chinese and Western traditions of thinking, and when working on the one he is often speaking to the other directly in an attempt to draw out what he calls the “unthought” (l’impensé) of each. Sinologists, too, would be mistaken if they read Jullien solely within the limits of their discipline. The point, rather, is to always operate in between so as to see what such a balancing act might yield.
Having returned to European thought after what he often refers to as his “detour” through China, Jullien has now arrived in the late phase3 of his work, in which the full arch of his adventurous thinking is becoming clear. Marking that trajectory is a recently published and monumental Cahier de l’Herne dedicated to Jullien, which includes three sections authored by Jullien himself (they wrap up parts II, V, and IX of the volume). Titled “De l’écart à l’inouï—repères I, II, III” (From divergence to the unheard-of—points of reference I, II, III), those sections take the form of a dialogue between Jullien and an unnamed lecteur attentif (Jullien 2018, 78; hereafter “Points of reference”)—presumably Jullien himself—who questions Jullien about his entire oeuvre. As such, these sections provide great insights into Jullien’s work as a whole. I propose to spend some time with them here as a way to introduce the reader to my own study of Jullien’s thought.
I should probably note from the outset that as such a study François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction does not pretend to be comprehensive, and it does not discuss equally all of the books that Jullien has published. Rather, I focus on certain books and topics that stood out to me within Jullien’s work and in relation to the present moment as worthy of inquiry. That said, my selection of texts and topics nevertheless touches upon many of the key concerns in Jullien’s work, and in that sense the book can provide something like an overview of Jullien’s thought and provide a variety of pathways into it and some of the important debates it has triggered.
The form of Jullien’s “Points of reference” evokes, perhaps, postmodern literary experiments like Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges and I” (and Borges plays a role in Jullien’s oeuvre due to Michel Foucault’s reference to his work in a famous passage where Foucault writes about China; Foucault 1973). Or the “Points of reference” may evoke the Platonic dialogues, at the origin of the Western thinking that is central to the current phase of Jullien’s work: Jullien’s book L’Invention de l’idéal et le destin de l’Europe (The invention of the ideal and the destiny of Europe) offers a reading of Plato de Chine, “from China” (Jullien 2009b).4 Certainly the dialogue (in the form of the interview) takes up an important role in Jullien’s collected work. For this study, for example, I have drawn from innumerable interviews that Jullien has given throughout his life and that, in one case, constitute half a book (the other half is writings about Jullien by Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire, who also do the interviews; Martin and Spire, 2011).
More importantly, however, a strong philosophical notion of dialogue appears frequently in Jullien’s work about the universal, the uniform, and the common, where he argues that the West “s’est mis à ‘dialoguer’ avec les autres cultures” because “il a perdu sa puissance” (the West has begun to enter into dialogue with other cultures because it has lost its power; Jullien 2016a, 83–84). But Jullien harshly criticizes this “falsely peaceful” and “falsely egalitarian” dialogue, which is most often held in “globalized English or globish” (Jullien 2018, 84), and rejects it in favor of what he refers to as a “strong” (ibid., 85) understanding of the word “dialogue” as evoking both the “in-between” (l’entre) and a “path.” The dia in the Greek word “dialogue” marks both the in-between that distinguishes the dialogue from a “monologue of two” and the bridging path that makes the dialogue possible (ibid.). This is why to translate one of Jullien’s key terms, écart/divergence, as “gap” is not quite right, as Jullien points out; écart translates as “gap,” but it also names the bridge across (ibid., 120). That particular kind of dialogue can only develop over time, Jullien insists, since each point of view needs to slowly “reflect itself in relation to the other” so as to lead to an “effective encounter” (86). Jullien understands this as a process of developing a “common” that “does not do away with the in-between” or bring some kind of “forced assimilation”; instead such a common is produced and promoted by the in-between (ibid.).
Central to Jullien’s method is translation. As he writes in This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, following a characteristic passage where he develops his criticism of a French translation of Zong Bing’s fourth-century treatise of landscape painting5:
The non-sinologist is no doubt weary of these remarks concerning translation, but it should be understood that all of these small additions, serving as compromises and rendering the translation “smoother,” mean, in the end, that we are always dealing only with variations of the same and that, while believing we are reading Chinese texts, we are still sitting at home. (Jullien 2016b, 178)
The remark comes in parentheses, but it may just as well have been bolded. One may want to turn it around: even a nonsinologist cannot fail to be engaged by Jullien’s remarks concerning translation, which seek “to restore Chinese texts to their strangeness,” to paraphrase the title of the final chapter of This Strange Idea.6 Jullien’s remark about translation arrives some ten pages after a passage in which he writes dismissively about how “the steamroller of theoretical globalization” has Westernized Chinese thought (Jullien 2016b, 165). Jullien’s translations, crucial to his work overall, seek to bring some relief, even if he also grants in Book of Beginnings that “the principal notions of Chinese thought are not directly translatable” (Jullien 2015, vii).7
If translation (and commentary on translation) has an important role in Jullien’s work, it is because for him it is the language of the in-between, as he explains at the end of Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle (There is no cultural identity): translation opens up the in-between, and “la traduction est la langue logique de ce dialogue” (translation is the logical language of this dialogue; Jullien 2016a, 88, emphasis original). The in-between is, for Jullien, associated with a “fecundity” that is generated by divergence’s “de-coincidence” (Jullien 2018, 233). It’s in this “de-coincidence” that we see “the negative” (rather than “evil”) at work as what Jullien terms the “neg-active” (ibid.). He has developed this part of his thought at length in L’ombre au tableau: Du mal ou du négatif (Casting a shadow: on evil or on the negative; Jullien 2004a). The task of philosophy is partly to separate out a “sterile negative” or “negative negative” from another, motivating negative or neg-active that is productive (ibid., 126) or intensive. Jullien in part praises G. W. F. Hegel and his dialectics (ibid.),8 even if he has also deems Hegel’s work on the negative insufficient for his own project (the neg-active “ne se range pas pour autant sous les lois de la dialectique,” “does not fit under the laws of dialectics”; Jullien 2010, 62–63):
Un des grands problèmes de notre époque est de penser le négatif fécond, ce que j’appellerais le “nég-actif,” sans le faire basculer dans une dialectique de reconciliation hégélienne. (Interview in Citot 2009, 31)9
One of the great problems of our time is to think the fecund negative, what I would call the “neg-active,” without making it tip over into a Hegelian dialectic of reconciliation.
It’s on this understanding of the neg-active that Jullien’s notion of existence is based, as what names the de-coincision of the self as the process or better: passage (to evoke the dao—道 or “path”) of living: ex-istence. Hence Jullien’s interest in the notion of “a second life” (Jullien 2018, 235), one that is lived in perpetual de-coincidence with the first and in fact enables one to live a better life.
One could, then, read these “Points of reference” in which Jullien enters into a dialogue with himself as a formalization of the idea of a second life—of the de-coincision of Jullien with himself that establishes an in-between at the same time as it produces a bridging path from the one to the other. Such an autocritical, philosophical process can only develop slowly, and it is not surprising that Jullien would engage in it only late in his career and life, at a time when he is able to assess his lifework’s full trajectory—and specifically his study of Greece after the extensive detour through China that he has accomplished.
Chapter Summaries
It is with the mention of the detour through China that the first “Points of reference” section begins, with the solicitation of Jullien’s entire work to leave behind the major philosophemes of the West—“Being, God, Truth, Liberty” (Jullien 2018, 78)—but without becoming “sinized” (ibid.). Insisting that his work is not “comparativist,”10 in the sense that it does not “proceed through resemblances and differences” (ibid., 79), Jullien points out that by working in between European thought and Chinese thought he allows both to reflect themselves in each other so as to uncover each thought’s “unthought” (ibid.). Both European thought and Chinese thought, therefore, “deconstruct” through the encounter with each other, and in Jullien’s view one can only really think from that “unthought” (ibid.). Otherwise, “on ne pense pas” (one does not think; ibid.). To philosophize means, precisely, to “sortir du chemin déjà frayé,” “to stray from the path already forged” (ibid., 120). Jullien’s friend Alain Badiou has characterized him on those grounds as an “apostate” (Badiou 2018, 97). A library, in Jullien’s view, is nothing but a “juxtaposition of divergences” that trigger thought (Jullien 2018, 120).
All of this also means there is no essentialism in Jullien’s thinking. By “Chinese thought” Jullien simply means “thought that was written in Chinese”; and to say so does not mean that Jullien adheres to a linguistic determinism, as he insists (Jullien 2018, 79). In Chemin faisant. Connaître la Chine, relancer la philosophie (Step-by-step11: getting to know China, relaunching philosophy), a book in which he explains his methodology, he suggests that language merely “predisposes” thinking in certain ways (Jullien 2007, 52). Still, from a historical point of view, it should be pointed out that by “Chinese thought” Jullien mostly means pre-Buddhist classical Chinese thought; he frequently distinguishes between Daoism, Buddhism, and contemporary Chinese thought, all of which appear in his work. His overall focus, however, is on Daoism. He will often work across traditions that are generally opposed—Daoism and Confucianism, for example—to discuss those elements on which they agree (see Jullien 2004c, 94–95). Certainly—and this has irritated some of his critics—there is ample hopping around within and between his books. Part of the problem is also that Jullien often works metonymically, allowing the work of an individual author or painter to stand in for a much larger tradition of thought or aesthetics (see Harrist 2011, 252). All of this leaves Jullien open to the charge of generalization and essentialization (though the latter would be hard to push, given the extensive criticisms of essentialism scattered throughout his work).
Many of those issues are reflected in the list of critical points that Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—raises and that I intend to address at various points in this study: the instrumental approach to China that the very phrase “China as detour” evokes, if not the essentialization then the generalization of both “Chinese thought” and “Western thought” in his work, and the fact that Jullien’s work abstracts from case studies into concepts and thereby tends to ignore specific contexts12; and some have also pointed out Jullien’s “tendency to overstate” (Wang 2008, 242). Jullien also recalls in “Points of reference” the nondebate with Swiss sinologist Jean François Billeter, who published a short polemic titled Contre François Jullien (Against François Jullien; 2006), to which Jullien responded in his book Chemin faisant (Step-by-step)—or, rather, to which he offered a reply.13 In a review of Jullien’s book The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject in Painting, Robert Harrist bluntly states that, “at the great height from which Jullien surveys [historical phenomena], far removed from the experience of making or looking at paintings, art and its critical discourse in China become as blurry as in the landscapes [Jullien] so admires” (Harrist 2011, 253). Clearly Jullien has triggered no small amount of criticism over the course of his career. In “Points of reference,” however, he notes that all of those criticisms, to which he has replied on numerous occasions, “no longer concern him”: “Je ne m’en soucie plus,” as he puts it; “C’est passé”—“they’re in the past” (Jullien 2018, 81).
I will address most of the critical issues I mentioned in chapter 1, which focuses on a problematic that has received very little sustained discussion in this context—namely, Jullien’s orientalism.14 I pursue such a consideration in part to lay out the key terms of Jullien’s late work on the universal, which seeks to capture the overall methodology of his thought. Although many points of criticism may be in the past for Jullien, they are difficult to avoid for any new reader of this work, and a responsible study of Jullien’s thought cannot but begin, in my view, with a consideration of his method and, if you will, its ethics and politics.
Having dispensed with the more-obvious criticisms, Jullien’s autocritique quickly dives into the philosophical stakes of his work—specifically, the “deconstruction from the outside” (deconstruction du dehors; Jullien 2018, 81) that all of his work pursues and that uses China to break out of Western ontological and metaphysical thinking. As I explain in chapter 1, the phrase “deconstruction from the outside” is meant in part to distinguish Jullien’s approach to China and the West from that of Jacques Derrida, who always finds deconstruction “within” (Martin and Spire 2011, 135) (and in whose work China was implicated, as I discuss in chapters 1 and 4). In Jullien’s view, Derrida ultimately remains too much within the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition, even if Islam plays a role in his work. Islam, however, does not truly provide an outside-to-Western thought, Jullien points out (“l’Islam fait partie du monde occidental”; “Islam is part of the West”; Jullien 2004b, 96); it does not provide the “exteriority” that interests Jullien. Derrida ultimately remains too “biblical” (Jullien 2008a, 155). Exteriority for Jullien is associated with distance and divergence; alterity, which Jullien rejects as a philosophical construct (rather than an objective fact) is the logic of difference and distinction (Jullien 2018, 119; 2007, 34). Alterity operates within the logic of identity and opposition, which Jullien rejects (Citot 2009, 28). Jullien turned to China not as an alterity but because of the objective fact of its elsewhere, of its language being outside of the Western languages, and of its thought having developed for a long time outside of the European tradition (Jullien 2007, 33).
In her contribution to Cahier de l’Herne, Jullien’s Chinese translator, Esther Lin, recalls that, during a conference in Pisa on the work of François Jullien, Italian philosopher Remo Bodei proposed the notion of the “exoptic” to characterize Jullien’s approach (Lin 2018, 45). Lin also explicitly mobilizes the notion in contrast to the exoticism with which Jullien is sometimes charged, and Jullien himself has taken up the notion in his work (Jullien 2007, 18). Here is Jullien in conversation with Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire, distinguishing his work from orientalism and exoticism:
J’appelle ex-optique, en revanche, le travail qui consiste à produire les conditions d’un recul permettant de découvrir du dehors ce qu’on ne perçoit plus du dedans—ce qui est une autre façon de nommer la déconstruction que j’opère. Mais attention: lire du dehors n’est pas lire de loin, comme on pourrait le croire; c’est au contraire lire de plus près, en s’appuyant sur un effet de contraste rendant plus saillant l’implicite. (Martin and Spire 2011, 171; emphasis original)
I call exoptic, by contrast, the work that consists in producing the conditions of a withdrawal allowing the discovery of an outside that one no longer sees from within—it’s another way of describing the deconstruction that I pursue. But note: reading from the outside is not distant reading, as one might believe; it’s on the contrary reading more closely, by relying on an effect of contrast that makes the implicit stand out more.
As far as the philosophical stakes of Jullien’s deconstruction go, in “Points of reference I” Jullien discusses ontology first and how l’écart (divergence) and especially l’entre (the in-between) replace the Western ontological notion of “being” in his thought. Jullien arrives at this replacement, of course, by way of China, through the detour via China, which offers in itself a thinking of the detour. Central to this kind of thought are the notions of the “allusive” and the “evasive” (Jullien 2018, 82), which are opposed to the Western ontological thinking of presence.15 In “Points of reference II” Jullien speaks of the in-between as a “deontologizing concept” (ibid., 119), a notion that recalls one of the subtitles of his book on “literati” painting, The Great Image Has No Form—“An essay in de-ontology.” “L’entre n’est pas de l’être,” “the in-between is not being,” as he puts it (ibid.; emphasis original), suggesting that in the Western world perhaps only modern art (Cézanne, Braque, Picasso) has been able to think this in-between.
This relates to Chinese thought’s criticism of metaphysics: the idea that something is beautiful because there is an ideal of beauty that stands behind it, or is above it, and that delivers the structuring rupture between the sensible and the intelligible that is so typical of Western thought. Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—points out how this “modelization of the beautiful” is “incarnated in the nude” (Jullien 2018, 83), which Jullien considers typical of Western art. In China, by contrast, the nude (or at least the nude as it is construed in the West) is missing, as Jullien discusses in his book The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics. In chapter 2, I show how a sustained inquiry into aesthetics in Jullien’s work can help to lay bare these philosophical arguments—specifically Jullien’s “Chinese” criticism of Western ontology and metaphysics. While such a project needs to pass via the nude, it also has to consider the reflection on the Chinese landscapes of the Southern “literati” school (as well as landscape in general) that extends throughout Jullien’s work, from his dissertation to some of his most-recent books. Indeed, if the nude is associated first and foremost with Western thought, landscape helps Jullien lay bare Chinese thought, and it is in the divergence between the two, in the in-between that it produces, that a philosophical dialogue between the West and China becomes possible. Still, it is in landscape that the Chinese thought of process and what Jullien calls “correlation”—the relations between things—becomes most visible (Jullien 2018, 84).
One of the more-peculiar aspects of Jullien’s work is its contributions to both military studies and management studies. This can be traced back to Jullien’s study of the Chinese notion of efficacy, which extends over three books: the dense academic study The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (1995); the much-shorter study of the Chinese art of war, titled A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (2004c); and, finally, Jullien’s still-untranslated Conférence sur l’efficacité (Lecture on efficacy; 2005), which summarizes Jullien’s Treatise as a “lecture for managers,” as I discuss in chapter 3. Carefully considering the transfer between military theory and management theory in Jullien’s work as well as its reception, I derive from Jullien’s approach a Chinese managerial conception of sovereignty that, I argue, provides a useful lens through which to view not only the current global economicopolitical situation but also Jullien’s insistence, in this context, on European approaches to both war and management (Jullien 2018, 85) that can be played out critically in relation to Chinese thought.
Central in Jullien’s analysis of efficacy is the Chinese notion of “silent transformations”—or slow, gradual process. One of the issues Jullien has with Hegel is that, even though Hegel thought the motivating force of the negative, he did not think its silent transformations—Hegel was too event focused, too focused on a history made by great men, to consider this. This also means that Jullien is no fan of writing history through its revolutions (Jullien 2004a, 144ff.). The notion of silent transformations operates in a divergence with the Western notion of the event, which has thrived in European philosophy. Whereas the latter is associated with the European thinking of sovereignty, the former—especially in its association with management—is much closer to what Michel Foucault analyzes as governmentality/biopolitics and its central, liberal/neoliberal imperative of “laissez-faire.” Historically, this notion translates (as I discuss in chapter 3; but the translation ought to be criticized as well) the Chinese notion of wu wei (無爲), which names the efficacy that rules without exertion and enters into Western economic thought via the physiocrats’ eighteenth-century work on Chinese politics. Jullien opposes such a Chinese model of political manipulation and regulation to the Western/Greek model of politics through persuasion (rhetoric). It’s the tragic, head-on clash familiar from Greek theater versus the Chinese oblique approach—and Jullien clearly seems to prefer the latter, as Roger-Pol Droit, for example, has noted (Droit 2018, 38).
As critics will note, Jullien is not the only one to have developed such a criticism of Western thought via China. In her article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that “French theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and the like have at one time or another been interested in reaching out to all that is not the West because they have, in one way or another, questioned the millennially cherished excellences of Western metaphysics: the sovereignty of the subject’s intention, the power of predication, and so on” (Spivak 1981, 157). But should Jullien’s work be inscribed in this lineage of “French theorists . . . reaching out”? Spivak’s specific charge in this context becomes that Julia Kristeva, whose book About Chinese Women is the example she analyzes, does not have any deep knowledge of the Far East and ends up speaking only about herself in her attempt to “[touch] the other of the West” (Spivak 1981, 158; emphasis original).16 What is launched in Kristeva’s book as speculation becomes fact over the course of less than one hundred pages; the reader is treated to “the most stupendous generalizations about Chinese writing” based on no evidence whatsoever, “no primary research” (ibid., 160). Chinese thought is distorted so as to assimilate it into the West, exactly as eighteenth-century sinophiles did (ibid.). Kristeva criticizes those—but she is guilty of the same (ibid.). Is this Jullien’s situation as well, as the already-mentioned Jean François Billeter, for example, as well as some of Jullien’s reviewers have argued? Or is Jullien a different kind of philosopher, and do his references to Chinese thought ultimately lead elsewhere? Furthermore, is this situation mine? Dear reader, might it be yours?
Let me be very clear about my own project: I seek to offer a study about Jullien’s oeuvre in order to explore the divergences it lays out between Western and Chinese thought (thought written in various European languages and thought written in Chinese). I myself am largely assessing Jullien’s oeuvre from the Western side, in view of the divergence it opens up in relation to Western thought. In other words, my ultimate reference point is “the West,” and I think this ought to be possible without falling prey to the kinds of distortions that Spivak (and Kristeva, oddly) draws out. In Jullien’s thought, the criticism of Western thought is developed through a study of Chinese thought. But I myself come to Chinese thought as a nonsinologist, with limited knowledge of the Chinese materials that Jullien studies.17 I note, however, that, contrary to the work of the theorists that Spivak mentions, Jullien is known as a sinologist and his work is based on primary research into Chinese materials (as well as secondary research in Chinese, I should add; I say this even if Jullien’s work overall—like the work of many of his French colleagues—appears to be a little thin on the secondary sources, which were either not consulted or may have remained unacknowledged so as to not overburden the work with reference notes18). Additionally, Jullien’s already-mentioned use of translation as a method appears to reveal more than basic linguistic competency in Chinese. (I should add that I know no Chinese.) Certainly it appears that part of what Jullien attacks in his work is precisely superficial references to Chinese thought in Western philosophy—and, more generally, Western culture at large—that claim to find the other where, in truth, they only promote the self. I explore this at length in chapter 1, where I investigate the role of orientalism in Jullien’s work. Against the (orientalist) effort to, once and for all, find the other, Jullien emphatically works between thoughts-in-progress.
For all of those reasons, Jullien strikes me as a more reliable reference than those that Spivak attacks. He himself in fact mentions dismissively the numerous “utopies Chinoises” (Chinese utopias) in which French thought has been caught up (Jullien 2012, 61). Still, some have argued that Jullien mistakenly construes China as the West’s absolute other and participates in a long (French) tradition of China’s exoticization.19 In this book I have tried to provide a more nuanced point of view, but I should grant that I ultimately do not have the full competency to judge this.
Although most of those particular issues are addressed in chapter 1, I return to them in chapter 4, where I explore the relations of Jullien’s thought on China—and the divergence with Western thinking that it opens up—to the work of certain thinkers within the Western tradition. Jullien has occasionally been criticized for writing “in an intellectual vacuum” (Lachman 2011, 233), without referencing other scholars who have done important work in his field. While this is partly due to his essayistic style, this is also because Jullien has tended to privilege concept over context and has focused on logical connections that translate between disciplines rather than on issues that, for example, apply within sinology alone. Chapter 4 draws out some of Jullien’s less-recognized interlocutors within the Western tradition, creating a genealogy for his work in Western thought that has largely remained silent in his own writing. It also raises related critical questions about how some of what is characterized as “new” in the Western tradition—I focus on speculative materialism/realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism—can in view of the Chinese tradition only be characterized as new based on a Eurocentric lineage of thought. Finally, the chapter argues that Jullien’s most-important interlocutors are not necessarily “philosophers” (in other words, thinkers in the Greek, and by extension Western, tradition) but precisely those thinkers who have worked at the limits of Greek philosophy, specifically in postcolonial studies and black studies. There are important resonances, for example, between Jullien’s thought and the work of Moroccan poet and theorist Abdelkébir Khatibi (who was very interested in Daoism, as indicated by his long poem from 1976, Class Warrior—Taoist Style)20 and Martiniquan writer and theorist Édouard Glissant (Sam Coombs has in his book on Glissant explored the Jullien/Glissant connection; Coombs 2018), as well as the work of Fred Moten. This will also allow me to close the main chapters of this book with a return to the discussion of orientalism (theorized by postcolonial critic Edward Said; 1978) with which I began.
The Unheard-Of
Toward the end of “Points of reference III,” Jullien establishes both a terminological contrast and ultimately a terminological shift in his work through the introduction of the notion of l’inouï—“the unheard-of.” The ambiguities of the notion are not quite the same in French as in English. The French word inouï comes from the Latin inauditus—“unheard.” According to the French/English dictionary of Le Robert & Collins, inouï can refer to unprecedented or previously unheard of events or circumstances, extraordinary or incredible news, or incredible or unbelievable speed, audacity, or force. The Trésor de la langue française indicates that inouï refers to something that one hadn’t previously heard of; something that one had never before heard mentioned, that is unknown, unprecedented; something that’s extraordinary, surprising, uncommon. It refers to something unbelievable or astounding, something extraordinary and derailing. It’s associated with strangeness. The English “unheard-of” covers much of the same territory but includes in both its American (US) and British uses the meaning of unacceptable or outrageous, highly offensive. In English, “unheard-of” tends to have a more negative meaning than in French: in most of the sentences that the dictionary offers to illustrate the term’s usage, “unheard-of” has a negative connotation. It’s the French Trésor that sticks most closely to the literal and in both English and French nearly forgotten meaning of inouï/unheard-of: the fact that it references something that is, quite simply, not heard—hasn’t been heard before, as the Trésor puts it, although obviously when the term is used it’s usually in reference to something that’s just been heard, that’s come out of obscurity as something shocking and new. As such—but this is my interpretation—it also seems to have a hint of futurity built in, since even if it were previously unheard-of, what’s just been heard sets a new precedent and seems to anticipate such future occasions of the same.
The unheard-of is both what is ordinary and not heard of in that sense (too ordinary to be heard or noticed) and what is extraordinary and stands out as never before or extremely rarely heard of (possibly with a negative connotation in English). But the status of this “extraordinary” needs to be nuanced. It’s Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself, from his second life—who suggests the opposition between the exceptional and the unheard-of: when thinking the fecundity opened up in the in-between that divergence produces and promotes, it seems one needs to think of this fecundity or resource precisely “not as exceptional . . . but as unheard-of” (“Non pas l’exceptionnel . . . mais l’inouï”; Jullien 2018, 241). The exceptional only has value as a rarity, Jullien explains, and in that sense it is a relative notion—unless it takes on an abusive, absolutist form (ibid.). The attention it attracts is bound to peter out (ibid.). The unheard-of, by contrast, is an infinite resource that, without loudly announcing itself, arises from the very heart of both thought and life (ibid.). It’s what remains unseen, or unheard—as well as, to hearken back to an earlier part of this introduction, unthought. At the same time, Jullien points out that it “surpasses the imagination,” “dépasse l’imagination” (ibid.). In that sense, the unheard of is “the other name of what is so boringly called ‘real’” (“L’inouï est l’autre nom de ce si lassant ‘réel’”; ibid.).
The challenge is to break with characterizations of the surpassing of the imagination that Jullien evokes as “exceptional.” If there is a surpassing, which suggests some kind of rupture or break as well as an upward movement, it is a surpassing into the unheard-of that can be characterized as “unexceptional.” This is not so much about a Western thinking of the rupture or break, or what’s also called the event; instead, it is about what Jullien analyzes as “the silent transformations”—“silent” as in “not heard of.” At the same time, if the phrase “silent transformations” is meant to name the unexceptional, it is worth pointing out the need to rethink the unexceptional as precisely “what surpasses the imagination”—“upward,” if you will, but not into exceptionalism.21
The particular kind of negotiation that develops here is reminiscent of Jullien’s work on “the bland” (dan, 淡), a notion that he critically adopts from Roland Barthes’ writings about China, which were based on a trip Barthes took to China in the mid-1970s with a small group of other writers and thinkers associated with the journal Tel Quel. With its seemingly ironic title, which echoes (as the book’s translator has pointed out; Jullien 2008b, 12–13) both Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (West) and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (East), Jullien’s book In Praise of Blandness evokes Barthes through its essayistic style. Contrary to Barthes, Jullien praises blandness as the aesthetic that comes closest to Chinese thought.22 It is worth noting, however, that A Treatise on Efficacy (originally published in French in 1996, which is five years after the first French publication of In Praise of Blandness) ends with a chapter titled “In Praise of Facility,” in whose opening paragraph the “unexceptional” is praised as a key feature of Chinese thought. As such, it is associated in the paragraph with “the evident ‘facility’ of that which is ceaselessly realized in an unremarkable and unnoticed fashion” (Jullien 2004c, 184). There is a close connection, then, between the facility that is praised in this chapter and the unexceptional—and between the unexceptional and the blandness that Jullien praises as “Chinese” and that has been associated with writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Haruki Murakami (see Kang 2018; Row 2012).
By calling Jullien’s thought “unexceptional” I want to draw out the unexceptionalizing tendency that Chinese thought brings to Western thought,23 which Jullien shows to be exceptionalist through and through. Undoing exceptionalism in Western thought—specifically, unexceptionalizing or deexceptionalizing Western thought, as Jullien might put it—can lead us away from some of the more problematic exceptionalisms that have constituted it. The ultimate goal here is not so much to oppose the West and China on this count as two identities—one of which could be discarded in favor of the other (there is unexceptionalism in the West just as there is exceptionalism in China); rather, it is to play out their respective resources in their divergence with each other so as to see what that might yield.24 As Dirk Baecker in a text about Jullien has pointed out, we are dealing here with different “accents” rather than with completely opposed worlds (Baecker 2008, 32).
For such a project, then, the notion of the unheard-of, which only appears in Jullien’s late thought, is a useful one, and it must be considered in relation to terms like “blandness,” “facility,” and—indeed—the “unexceptional” in Jullien’s work. Indeed, as a notion I think it provides a key to Jullien’s oeuvre as a whole, connecting to both the terms that established it as well as the thought that has developed from there. One could do worse, in fact, than characterize Jullien’s thought as a thought of the unheard-of and the unexceptional as I do in this book. But with that there come, of course, consequences. There is, in my view, no doubt that, while Jullien introduces the unheard-of as a characterization of his work overall—as a name for his interest in uncovering the unthought in both Western and Chinese thought—it’s a notion that clearly derives from his study of China first and foremost, and therefore it’s something that, I think, he brings to Western thought from China. The unheard-of is, first and foremost, the unthought of Western thought. Some philosophers come close, but none quite manage to think, in Jullien’s view, the silent transformations that remain unheard-of in the Western tradition.
On the other hand, it is worth noting the rethinking of the unexceptional that the notion of the unheard-of also brings, as what surpasses the imagination and what’s so boringly called “real.” This rethinking has something to do with the complicated status of the immanent and the transcendent in Jullien’s thought—and perhaps (this is at least what Jullien suggests) Chinese thought at large. While Jullien’s thought has often been presented as a completely immanent and material thought, Jullien has resisted this, distinguishing his position from Gilles Deleuze’s in at least one instance (Jullien 2004c, 183), and developing a notion of internal transcendence as a way to name the combination of the material and the spiritual in the Chinese tradition (in the sense of yin and yang, or the regulatory double movement of respiration—in/out25):
Il y a bien une transcendance en Chine, c’est ce qu’on appelle le Ciel. Mais c’est une transcendance non pas par extériorité, comme celle du Dieu biblique ou comme celle des idées platoniciennes, c’est une transcendance par, je dis souvent, totalisation de l’immanence. (Jullien interviewed in Piorunski 1998, 157)
There is for sure a transcendence in China; it’s called Heaven [tian, 天]. But this is a transcendence not by exteriority, like that of the biblical god or of the Platonic ideas; rather, it’s a transcendence by way of, as I often say, the totalization of immanence.
This may be why the notion of the unexceptional can actually be a productive one in this context: because it retains, in its naming, a trace of the exceptional that makes a bland-bland reading of the bland impossible. This is also why the “unheard-of” is such a good term in this context: because it captures precisely the idea that the bland is not just bland—that the bland always includes a kind of double tendency where a negative limit is combined with a positive one, in the same way that Jullien distinguishes the negative-negative from the neg-active.
All of this is perfectly summed up by the notion of the unheard-of, which captures both these limits. If the notion thus applies to Chinese thought in particular, it’s interesting that Jullien also uses it to characterize his thought at large, which supposedly equally draws from Western cultural resources. This is where the exceptionalism of Western thought can in certain cases draw out the unthought of Chinese thought, where Western exceptionalism can bring something to Chinese thought that is valuable. Of course it’s not entirely correct to call that contribution “exceptional,” since the unheard-of is opposed to that, as Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—notes. But it would still mark the positive tendency of the unheard-of, the way in which the unheard-of names something that stands out. Certainly in Jullien’s late work he returns to Western, European thought—Greek thought—to explore its resources: the ideal in Plato, for example, or logos in Aristotle. Jullien’s work on Christianity, which includes, for example, his book on the intimate, can be read as developing precisely such a negotiation: between the unexceptional and the exceptional.
If in his early work Jullien takes a detour through China to critically assess the Western tradition, in his late work he returns to the Western tradition to develop its resources, often in explicit relation to China (as in his Plato book, for example): “I’m now starting on a new phase, wherein I’d like to try to grasp again what seems to me to constitute the stakes of European thought in regard to Chinese thought” (Jullien 2009c, 184). “Von Griechenland nach China und zurück,” as Jullien puts it elsewhere (From Greece to China and back; Jullien 2008a, 133; emphasis mine). This last move is crucial to his thinking about the universal, which in fact rejects the notion of the universal in favor of the notion of something universalizing, a regulative idea in the Kantian sense that provides a common orientation through “work” and as the result of a “process.” Noting—and criticizing—the historical and geographical specificity of the Enlightenment universal (“je me rends compte à quel point les categories kantiennes sont, elles aussi, marquées culturellement”; I realize to what point the Kantian categories are also culturally marked; Martin and Spire 2011, 139), Jullien nevertheless also draws out the resources of this tradition. Talking about the purpose of Catholic schools in our time, for example, Jullien observes that it no longer makes sense for them to teach students to believe, to teach them the catechism, et cetera. But that does not mean they need to go: rather, the vocation of Catholic schools today can only be to teach the resources of Catholicism in the same way that one can teach the resources of Judaism or Islam in schools associated with those other religions.26
Importantly, this is not a relativist position: Jullien criticizes, as I will discuss in chapter 1, what he perceives to be the unequal position of women in Islam, as marked by the veil whose use he opposes (Jullien 2010, 18). It is the hard-won equality of women in the Western tradition that in his view needs to be valued as a resource against the role of women in Islam. One might not agree with this, of course—or at least argue that it needs nuance (equality of women in the West? Give me a break . . . )—but as a gesture, it is indicative of how Jullien in his late work seeks to play out Western cultural resources in their divergence with other traditions, some of which he might also not have studied as carefully as he has China (I will consider this in chapter 1, when I look at his travelogue about Vietnam). There are, in other words, some clear problems with Jullien’s “Greek” turn; but as a gesture that seeks to critically work with the legacy of European/Western thought—and not blindly reject it and throw out the baby with the bathwater—such a project seems valuable and perhaps especially important today, when the revolutionary emancipatory content of the Enlightenment or Western reason often risks being eclipsed by the justified attacks on its “white,” “straight,” and “male” representatives and (and this is the more substantial target of the criticism) ways of thinking. Jullien may be a white, straight male himself, and may be read in that sense as a representative of the very tradition that is under attack; but his detour through China enabled him to unwork, in my view, the European/Western tradition precisely where it is most white, straight, and male: in its exceptionalism—specifically the metaphysics and ontology associated with sovereignty.
As I have already indicated, there are problems with the use of China as a detour or philosophical tool for a project that ultimately returns to the West; there is, in this context, the risk of orientalism that I consider at length in chapter 1. Indeed, there is the specter of governmentality/biopolitics and neoliberalism that ought to be considered in this context as one economicopolitical form that the detour through unexceptionalism might take—especially in view of Jullien’s work with French businesses in China and the reception of his thought in both contemporary military and management studies (chapter 3). None of this is without risk. In the end, however, I find one of his thought’s most-important contributions precisely in the relation it entertains with postcolonial thought and the necessity to learn from its critique while not giving up on the resources of European/Western thought.
I am reminded here of Gayatri Spivak, who did not pull any punches in her criticism of Kristeva’s (orientalist) use of China, who as a postcolonialist is also a Europeanist and inscribes her work in postcolonial theory explicitly within the Western tradition and its resources. From her extensive introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology—and her early criticism (as many have since noted) of the role of China in that book (see Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015)—to, for example, her dense Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present or the monumental volume of writings in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Spivak has precisely critically mobilized the resources of the European/Western tradition within the very field that took that tradition to task—for its heteronormativity, racism, or sexism and misogyny, for example. For Spivak, however, none of that means European/Western thought should be thrown out wholesale; indeed, where could a thought be found that is entirely free from such or other problems? (Certainly non-European/Western thought isn’t.) When a moralizing approach comes to eclipse the real contributions that a tradition of thinking has brought, we will become all the poorer for it. Moralizing without end, ad infinitum, as part of an impossible project, we will progressively become deprived of all of our cultural resources—not only those in Europe/the West—as part of a mad search for a thought without problems. Jullien can show us, rather, that all thought is problematic and unexceptional in that way—even if not equally so; at the same time, no thought is reducible to the ways in which it is problematic, and thought is unexceptional in that way as well. Thought always, unexceptionally, exceeds what it stands out for and is maybe accused of. The point of Jullien’s work is to critically cultivate, in this perspective, the cultural resources of a thought, diagnosing its problems and criticizing them, but also facilitating the democratic use of its fecundity for all.
This means that the cultural resources of European/Western thought are there not just for Europeans/Westerners. They are there for all: “Bach . . . is my heritage” (Cole 2016, 11), as Teju Cole puts it in a critical reading of James Baldwin. Jullien would argue that the same is true for any other cultural resources, although one would have to point out from a historical and political point of view that this cannot be true in exactly the same way due to histories of colonialism, for example, or the different power position of a “dominant” culture compared to a “minority” culture. Especially in view of debates about cultural appropriation, it seems some nuance may be needed when it comes to Jullien’s plea for the democratic “exploitation” of “cultural resources” across the board. Who can exploit which cultural resource to what purpose? What are the histories and politics of such exploitation? How should those histories and politics be addressed? While drawing out cultural resources requires the slow and careful study of the European/Western and Chinese traditions—if there isn’t much in Jullien addressing the issue of appropriation as such, the emphasis on study and the defamiliarization that it brings does address the issue of misappropriation and explicitly seeks to avoid it—it is clear that for Jullien those resources themselves are not identitarian. They do not mark an essential difference through which China and Europe/the West can be opposed. Rather, these are living cultural resources that are in perpetual development, as the resources of cultures that ex-ist and do not coincide with themselves. It is, in that sense, the process of cultures in which Jullien’s work situates us, as the living movement of their resource that, in identitarian approaches to culture, should be considered “dead,” like a “dead language” (as Jullien in his late work often puts it; see, for example, Jullien 2016a, 45–46). Cultures, then, are living languages that, spoken around the in-between of translation, ex-ist in a divergence that lays bare their resources for common use. Diverging from each other, their divergence also produces a bridge between them that promotes and produces true cultural dialogue, at a distance from the relativism or uniformity that have become the order of the day.
NOTES
1. Martin and Spire 2011, 245.
2. See, for example, Piorunski 1998, 151.
3. Roger-Pol Droit characterizes this late phase as “another book” or also as “book 2” in Jullien’s oeuvre (Droit 2018, 37; 40). Jullien himself might disagree with this, as he has indicated that he thinks of his work very much as “one book, whose different titles constitute so many chapters intended to back up and prolong each other” (Jullien 2009c, 181).
4. On Jullien’s complex relationship to Plato, see Potte-Bonneville 2018.
5. Jullien points out that this is one of the first-known treatises on Chinese landscape painting. The issue he foregrounds in his criticism is that the French translator systematically introduces an “I look” into the discussion of landscape, whereas the Chinese text includes nothing like this.
6. Jullien is, of course, not alone in making this point; his argument here recalls that of Lawrence Venuti in “Translation as Cultural Politics” (Venuti 1993).
7. The strongest objection to such a presentation of Jullien has probably been raised by Billeter, who charges Jullien with denying Chinese authors their specific voices and ultimately offering the reader nothing other than the point of view of Jullien himself. Billeter argues that Jullien’s translations are a key tool in this project. See Billeter 2006.
8. Jullien 2004a can be read as a lengthy engagement with Hegel’s dialectics.
9. Elsewhere, he also frequently takes Hegel to task for his racist remarks on China (see, for example, Jullien 1995, 17–18).
10. “Je ne fais donc pas de la philosophie comparée” (Citot 2009, 28). See also my chapter 1.
11. Literally, “forging a path,” no doubt referencing dao.
12. Jullien responds to this by saying that in this call for context he overhears a fear of the concept (Martin and Spire 2011, 164). To forge a concept, he indicates in another interview, “is to forge a tool . . . is to forge a weapon” (260).
13. Following Michel Foucault, he explicitly distinguishes between réponse and réplique in this context, reserving the latter for the kind of rejoinder that Billeter’s book solicits (Jullien 2007, 13).
14. One article that engages this issue, though it does so rather defensively, is Kubin 2008. Edward Slingerland’s book Mind and Body in Early China (2019) includes a highly critical discussion of Jullien’s overall thought and specifically his orientalism, which I will address in my chapter 1.
15. On this count, Jullien has made reference to Schlegel’s notion of Anspielung and how there may be connections between the German Romantic tradition in general and Chinese thought (Jullien 1997, 208).
16. It is not clear in the review to what extent Spivak considers these points to apply to “Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and the like,” as well.
17. My position is in that sense very different from Jullien’s, who stands neither within Western thought, as its deconstructor, nor in Chinese thought, as fully sinized (Jullien 2012, 60). Instead, Jullien operates between the two.
18. Consider, for example, a review of Jullien’s book on “literati” painting, The Great Image Has No Form, which objects that Jullien’s “arguments take place in an intellectual vacuum . . . without reference to almost anyone else in the field” (Lachman 2011, 233). While Jullien “quotes extensively from early treatises by Zong Bing, Guo Xi, and Jing Hao,” “no previous scholarship on these authors and texts is engaged or acknowledged”; “this near total lack of acknowledgment of Chinese art history as a discipline will cause those from other fields to credit Jullien with far more originality than he deserves” (ibid.).
It’s worth noting that this particular reviewer appreciatively mentions Billeter’s Contre François Jullien (2006) and echoes many of Billeter’s charges, ultimately accusing Jullien of beginning “with his conclusions firmly in hand and . . . casting about to justification for them wherever he can” (Lachman 2011, 234). Or, as another reviewer puts it with respect to the same book, “Jullien himself appears to have avoided almost all recent scholarship in the fields of Chinese art and intellectual history. Indeed, rarely does one encounter a publication by a major university press that displays such disengagement from the ongoing scholarly discourses with which it might reasonably be associated. The book is best approached, perhaps, as a work of belles lettres intended for an audience outside academe” (Harrist 2011, 252).
19. See Billeter 2006.
20. See Fieni 2018. The original French was published in 1976, with the English translation first appearing in 2017.
21. When in an interview Jullien and his work are characterized as “exceptional,” he responds that this may appear so but then immediately moves away from the term and counters it with his notion of écart or “divergence” (Martin and Spire 2011, 214–15).
22. It is perhaps Barthes’ work in The Neutral that comes closer to Jullien’s appreciative work on the bland: see Hansen 2008.
23. I am certainly not the only one to have noted this. In their commentary on the Dao De Jing, Ames and Hall, for example, hint several times at the book’s challenges to exceptionalism: see, for example, Ames and Hall 2003, 70, 84.
24. Jullien has written most clearly about this methodological point in his most recent works. My sense is that he has focused on clarifying it in response to the charge that he operates within an opposition between Western and Chinese thought and construes China as the absolute other, either to embrace it over the West or to reject it. But Jullien insists this is not so: his is not a thought of identity and difference but of resources and divergence. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to avoid the suggestion of opposition in his thinking, as Marcel Gauchet in his questioning of Jullien has pointed out (Jullien 2009c, 183), and that difficulty will appear in my reconstruction of his thought here as well.
25. See Jullien 2007, 60; Martin and Spire 2011, 194.
26. Collège des Bernardins 2018.
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