François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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when one actually looks at Foucault’s text “Les hétérotopies” (Heterotopias) in this context, other problematic aspects of the notion emerge. With the notion of heterotopia, Foucault seeks to name places that are “absolutely different”:
places that are opposed to all other places, that are destined in a way to be a kind of counter-spaces. It’s children who know those counter-spaces, those localized utopias, particularly well: it’s the back of the garden, of course; or the attic, naturally; or better even, the Indian tent set up in the middle of the attic; or also, it’s—on Thursday afternoon—the parents’ big bed. It’s on this big bed that one discovers the ocean, because one can swim there between the sheets. And this big bed is also the sky, because one can jump there on the mattress springs; it’s the forest, because one can hide there; it’s the night, because one becomes a ghost between the sheets; and it’s pleasure, finally, because, when the parents come back, one is going to be punished. (Foucault 2009, 24; emphasis original)
It’s worth asking what remains here of the “disturbing” and “threatening” heterotopia that Jullien finds in the preface to Order of Things. If the notion of heterotopia is claimed by Jullien specifically to resist those “Chinese utopias” that succumb to exoticism and orientalism, it’s surely also worth asking about the exoticism and orientalism in Foucault’s description. The association of heterotopias with children—which seems rich with nostalgia, with gardens and attics and “Indian tents”—seems problematic from this point of view. Later in the same essay Foucault suggests that “the most ancient example of heterotopia would be the garden, the millenarian creation that certainly in the Orient had a magical meaning” (Foucault 2009, 29). Another few pages later, the “hammams of the muslims” are mentioned as another example (ibid., 32). If the essay is, generally speaking, not Foucault’s strongest work, the exoticism and orientalism of Foucault’s theorization of heterotopias poses some challenges to Jullien’s adoption of the term “heterotopia” to name his own strategy; the preface of Order of Things is less problematic on this count, but there too questions can be asked.
Let’s not focus too much, however, on Jullien’s brief mentions of Foucault’s heterotopia as a name for his project. What are the terms that Jullien himself develops, and how do they relate to the exoticism and orientalism that Jullien seeks to avoid? Jullien’s project is to play out Western thought (specifically, Greek thought) and Chinese thought (specifically, pre-Buddhist, classical Chinese thought) in a divergence with each other, not to argue—as he clarifies in The Great Image—that the one is somehow better than the other but to show “how they illuminate each other, each revealing the unthought of the other” (Jullien 2009, 40; emphasis original).10 On that last count, it is important to note that Jullien would not characterize his method as comparative, even if he seems at times committed to comparativism (as critics have noted11) and even if the back covers of his books sometimes characterize his work as “comparative philosophy.” As he puts it quite simply in L’écart et l’entre, “je ne compare pas” (I do not compare; Jullien 2012, 59). Or, if he does, it’s “temporairement et sur des segments limités” (temporarily and on limited segments; ibid., 59). Certainly “comparison” does not characterize his overall approach. In The Book of Beginnings he writes that, to his mind, “‘to compare’ is another way of not moving, of not leaving, and therefore of not entering . . . One has remained within one’s own overarching categories, beginning from which one orders things; heterotopia [Foucault’s term again] and disorientation have not come into play” (Jullien 2015, 13).
Against such a “weak” (as one might perhaps call it12) understanding of comparison (which subsumes difference into one term of the comparison and then often universalizes it), Jullien aims for a “European reasoning” that would “de- and re-categorize itself . . . effectively access an elsewhere, another way of thinking” (Jullien 2015, 14; emphasis original). “Good work on Chinese thought,” he writes, “is work that ‘disturbs’ European thought” (ibid., 12). In a discussion of literary comparison (“as if . . . ”) in the Dao De Jing (referenced by Jullien as the Laozi) in The Great Image, Jullien contrasts a mode of comparison that “[aims] to render convincingly, thus allowing us to see better,” to one that “aims to make less precise”: “instead of focusing on determination and permeating us with its presence, it tends on the contrary to detach us from the order of the ‘there is’ and to make us return upstream from its actualization” (Jullien 2009, 32). Jullien captures this difference in This Strange Idea through the opposition of “variety,” which implies essence and refers to “the unitary genus diversifying itself” (Jullien 2016c, 93), and “variance,” “in which the essence of the thing dissipates” (ibid.).13 Whereas the former remains within Western ontology and metaphysics (a claim that I examine in chapter 2), the latter is outside of those. Jullien typically finds it in Chinese thought.
In view of the charge made against Jullien that he generalizes and essentializes both Western and Chinese thought,14 I should repeat that by “Western thought” Jullien mostly means Greek thought, a notion that refers for him to the tradition of philosophical thinking started by Plato. Jullien’s genealogies of Western thought frequently reach back to Plato to reconstruct Western thinking from there. Those reconstructions are hardly unaware of the differences within Western thought: he gives ample attention, for example, to Aristotle’s criticism of Platonism (he speaks in this context of the divergence between Aristotle and Plato; Jullien 2016a, 68). But ultimately he seeks to show that certain aspects of Platonism continue in Aristotle and after, all the way to the present day.
By “Chinese thought,” as I have already indicated, Jullien mostly means classical Chinese thought. He is focused on Daoism but frequently works across traditions that are generally opposed—Confucianism and Daoism, for example (see Jullien 2004b, 94–95). Ultimately, Chinese thought for him is simply all thought that is expressed in Chinese (Jullien 2012, 41). This is a wide umbrella to be sure, and there is some hopping around within his books and most certainly between books. Jullien also often allows the work of an individual author to stand in for a much larger tradition of thought.15 All of this makes Jullien vulnerable to the charge of generalization and essentialization, which (as I’ve already noted) misses the mark in view of his critical project.
No doubt partly in response to criticisms he has received, Jullien has come to lay out some of the key terms of his work—and I’m thinking now of those that relate to the orientalism debate in particular—in some of his recent, shorter books. These include the already-mentioned lecture L’écart et l’entre, which he delivered upon his inauguration as Chair of Alterity at the Collège d’études mondiales at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris on December 8, 2011. It’s worth noting, from the get-go, that “alterity” stands in tension with Jullien’s declared position. He has often noted that alterity is a philosophical construct and does not capture his approach to China; he does not work on China as “alterity,” but his work comes from the fact—rather than the philosophical construction—of China’s geographical elsewhere (whereas alterity “se construit,” China’s elsewhere “se constate”; Jullien 2012, 17). It comes from the fact that for a very long time China did not come into contact with European thought. Jullien’s thinking about China is a thinking of “ailleurs” rather than of “altérité”; as such, China marks (as he puts in the lecture’s opening pages) an “extériorité,” an “outside,” to Western thought (ibid., 15). This is what sparked his interest in it.
This also means that, through China, Jullien wanted to discover “notre étrangeté” (Jullien 2012, 17), the West’s strangeness. This latter point has to do with something else that Jullien frequently mentions—namely, the fact that he turned to China in order to better understand Greek thought (ibid., 13). The particular disturbance or threat that it brings to Greek thought he describes as a “deconstruction from the outside” (this in opposition to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, which is always already inside; 15 and 21). As the title of an interview with Thierry Zarcone has it, China operates like a “philosophical tool” for Jullien—in that, through its “detour” (and Chinese thought is a thought of the detour for Jullien), he seeks to better understand Western thought. The overall trajectory of Jullien’s work seems to confirm this project, since most of his recent