François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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how the Bernsteins, in the aftermath of the party, quickly become the object of criticism: the New York Times, which published two noncritical accounts of the party, followed up with an editorial that attacks the Bernsteins’ “romanticization” of the Panthers and deems it “an affront to the majority of Black Americans” (ibid.). The party creates, according to the editorial, “one more distortion of the Negro [sic] image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People [i.e., New York’s Park Avenue elite] create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful” (ibid.). Things got even worse for the Bernsteins when Black Power groups turned out to be voicing “support for the Arabs against Israel” (ibid.), ultimately forcing Bernstein to distance himself from Black Panther politics while he insisted nevertheless that it has a place in democratic culture.
Much in Wolfe’s piece, it’s worth noting, revolves around the representation of the Black Panthers, who are hailed in Wolfe’s satirical account of “Lenny’s Party” as “real”: “they’re real, these Black Panthers . . . who actually put their lives on the line . . . [with] real Afros . . . these are real men” (Wolfe 1970). Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” thus stages a problem of representation that’s not entirely separate from the orientalist issues that haunt Tel Quel’s love affair with Mao: there, too, the issue is, if not so much with the reality of China, with its hallucinatory and dreamlike construction, its psychotic projection, as “real”—more real than the West. As Robeson Taj Frazier in his book The East Is Black has shown, China furthermore plays an important role in “the black radical imagination” itself, precisely during the same three decades that I’ve discussed (Frazier’s book ranges from the 1950s to the 1970s). This means that the historically and philosophically parallel cases that I’ve just laid out (“the black panther” and “the dragon of China,” to draw from William Worthy’s 1967 Esquire magazine article; Worthy quoted in Frazier 2015, 109) need to be considered as imbricated into each other as well. Frazier notes early on in his book that orientalism is a real issue in this context (ibid., 64) and in fact uses the phrase “radical orientalism” as part of his discussion (16). He does not consider, however, how, for example, the Black Panthers themselves were exoticized and orientalized in the United States.
Chesneaux’s final judgment on Tel Quel does not pull any punches:
The whole affair was certainly a strange combination of affectation and naivety, of misinformation and self-complacency, which deserves blame and regret and nothing else. We [French intellectuals] were definitely lacking intellectual rigor, caution, and integrity. Not only did we satisfy ourselves with a rosy picture of China . . . We failed completely to assess properly our responsibility towards French public opinion. (Chesneaux 1987, 23)
When Lisa Lowe quotes Tel Quel’s statement from 1971 that in regard to the Chinese Cultural Proletarian Revolution they will do everything “to illuminate it, to analyze it, and to support it” (Lowe 1991, 136), she surely does so to draw out the extent to which they failed (and perhaps also to shed light on her own project, which, while exposing the orientalism of Tel Quel, would never purport to speak the truth about China; Said had of course already taught us as much in Orientalism). Chesneaux uses the occasion of his text, which is based on the “Morrison Lecture” that he delivered in 1987 in Canberra (it’s worth noting Chesneaux himself refers to it as “a kind of unofficial ‘Victor Segalen Lecture’”; I will return to the importance of Segalen for the broader context and especially reception of Jullien’s work in chapter 4), to express—quite modestly—his regret about this. Noting that “We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society,” he also adds, however, that “we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China—namely, France itself” (ibid., 24). In other words, Tel Quel’s project—however flawed—may still have some value beyond its erroneous engagement with China as a critical approach to France.
China as Heterotopia; or, Why Jullien Is Not an Orientalist
Assuming that we now have a good understanding of what Jullien in his work on China does not want to do—he does not want to participate in the tradition of Chinese utopias that is common in French contemporary thought and beyond it—how does Jullien describe his own approach to China? Does it manage to avoid the orientalist trap?
Criticizing the use of China as utopia, Jullien frequently refers to his own understanding of China as a heterotopia, a term he explicitly borrows from Michel Foucault’s Order of Things. This reference, for which Jullien never provides a footnote, goes back to Foucault’s famous preface to Order of Things, where he claims that the
book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (Foucault 1973, xv; emphasis original)
The passage referenced here quotes “a certain Chinese encyclopedia”8; in other words, we get here Foucault’s take on “China”—and “without so much as a hint,” as Zhang Longxi has pointed out, “to suggest that the hilarious passage from that ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ may have been made up to represent a Western phantasy of the Other and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage can be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind” (Longxi 1988, 110).9
“China,” by Foucault’s acknowledgment (although it’s worth noting that this is “China” by way of Borges, an Argentine!), has the capacity not just to shatter Western thought (for surely that is what Foucault means by “our thought”) but also to “disturb and threaten with collapse” the oppositional logic of “the Same and the Other” that we’ve seen is essential to orientalism (orientalism constructs the orient in opposition to the West). Jullien seizes Foucault’s “disturbing” and “threatening” characterization of China and aligns it for his purposes.
Disturb and threaten: That is, as Foucault explains later in the preface, what heterotopias do. It’s what sets them aside from utopias. Jullien’s relationship to China is not a love affair. When looked at carefully, China is much too disturbing and troubling to allow for the exoticization and orientalization that the term “love affair,” in Chesneaux, is meant to evoke. In Order of Things, Foucault writes that
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter, or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” (Foucault 1973, xviii; emphasis original)
The heterotopic collapse, in Foucault’s description, is not just at the level of the sentence—or of the relation signifier/signified. It also affects the syntax of words and things, words and their referents (not their signifieds). While this needs to be read negatively first and foremost as a disturbance of and threat to Western thought, it also lays out an implicit, positive image of China as the cause of such threat and disturbance.
How exactly that’s supposed to be, Foucault does not make clear: it appears to have something to do with “the wild profusion of existing things”—a weird, vitalist phrase that does not tell us much—and how such wildness challenges the Western order of things, which Foucault suggests is rooted in language. It is, indeed, on the count of language that Foucault in the preface lays out his reference to China just a little bit more. In between the discussion of Borges and his use of the term “heterotopia,” Foucault situates China between the consoling utopia of another kind of order (that the passage in Borges lays out, and a heightened order at that, associated with walls—he is thinking of the Great Wall of China, presumably?—that are reflected, Foucault rather flippantly suggests, in the verticality of Chinese writing) and what Foucault characterizes as the more-disturbing heterotopia that would present a fundamental undermining of the attempt