François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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helps him become alert to those.
Expanding on his rejection of the term “alterity” as a philosophical construct, Jullien also rejects the term “difference” in the context of conversations about “cultural diversity” (Jullien 2012, 24). Instead, he proposes to replace it by the notion of “écart,” “divergence” (ibid., 24). Difference, Jullien explains (and here I return to a point I made earlier on), is “un concept identitaire,” “an identitarian concept” (ibid.). There can’t be such a thing as “cultural identity,” because a culture is always a mixed, nonidentitarian formation and it is always a formation in progress; if not, it’s a dead culture, similar to a dead language. The only thing proper to culture is that it is constantly transforming and changing (26). (This applies to a notion like culture, but Jullien also applies it to the individual—or, rather, to the subject, whose “ex-istence” is given meaning within this philosophical framework as never coinciding with itself; Jullien 2016a, 57. He even argues that evolution operates in the same way; ibid., 70.) Difference is a concept that orders, he concludes; it stands in opposition to what Foucault envisioned by the term “heterotopia.” (An interesting claim, given the presence of the Greek word heteros—‘ɛτɛρoς—in “heterotopia”; indeed, this notion of heteros will return later in this chapter as well and deserves to be questioned further. Jullien seems to want to retranslate it as a geographical elsewhere rather than as a philosophically construed alterity, as distance rather than as difference, but there are moments in his work where he slips back into the logic of difference and alterity.16) All cultures are, in that sense, heterotopic (Jullien 2016a, 48). Part of the problem with difference is that it puts us “in a logic of integration,”17 “of classification and specification”—“not of discovery” (Jullien 2012, 29). Difference, when it comes to diversity, is “a lazy concept” (ibid.). Instead, Jullien opts for divergence and puts it to work.
Divergence makes us rethink cultures as what Jullien calls “fecundities.” Whereas difference establishes a “distinction,” divergence establishes a “distance”—a “separation” and a “detachment” (Jullien 2012, 32)—which productively puts that which it separates “into tension” (ibid., 34). As Jullien sees it, this is not a way of ordering but precisely of disordering, of “derangement,” which makes “fecundity” appear (35). It’s an “exploratory,” “inventive,” and “adventurous” notion that produces cultural resources (rather than “values” or “roots”; Jullien 2016a, 6 and 64) for “exploration” and “exploitation” (Jullien 2012, 37) by all. This is an approach that goes against cultural “exceptionalism,” as Jullien repeatedly points out (Jullien 2016a, 47–62). In this context, Jullien speaks of those resources’ “yield” (ibid., 38). There’s a “profit” (39) that comes from them. The language, it’s worth noting, is both agricultural and economical, a crossover that Jullien has also emphasized elsewhere (see Jullien 2007b).
All of this means that when Jullien speaks of “Chinese thought”
je ne lui suppose aucune identité, nul essentialisme de principe—faut-il encore le répéter?—mais je désigne seulement la pensée qui s’est exprimée, actualisée, en Chinois. Non que je suppose, là non plus, quelque déterminisme de la langue sur la pensée, mais parce que la langue, elle aussi—ou plutôt d’abord—est ressource. (Jullien 2012, 41)
I don’t assume it has any identity, I don’t assume any essentialism in principle—must I repeat myself once more?—but I designate only the thought that was expressed, actualized, in Chinese. Nor does it mean that I assume some linguistic determinism of thought, just that language itself is also—or rather first of all—a resource.
“Babel,” he adds, is “the chance of thought”—a quotation to which I will return in chapter 4 (ibid.).
As Jullien points out, his position also takes us out of what he describes as “easy universalism” and “lazy relativism” (Jullien 2012, 44): a universalism that is identity-driven and exports a certain property to the rest of the world, flattening it, rendering it uniform; or a relativism that allows all cultures to exist in their isolated bubbles (ibid.). These points about universalism are further developed in his later text Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle, subtitled “mais nous défendons les ressources d’une culture” (but we defend the resources of a culture). There, as well as in his book On the Universal (2014a), he distinguishes between a bad universal—which he characterizes as the general, which renders uniform—and a good, stronger conception of the universal as what has been developed in the context of European thought as an “exigency of thought” (Jullien 2016a, 8). This universal does not name a generality but a necessity: something that cannot be otherwise, in the sense of “the universal laws of nature.” (In philosophy, part of the question of course was whether such universality could be found in the realm of morality as well.) Jullien draws out, however, that in spite of the universality of such a strong universal, such a universal is singular, in the sense that it is local, developed within the context of a specific thought (European thought). It derives from European reason. The uniform, by contrast, is not derived from reason but from production (ibid., 11): it’s the standard and the stereotype (ibid.), not a necessity but a commodity. The good, strong universal is turned toward the ideal; the bad universal is merely the repetition of the one. It’s an “extension of the market” (ibid.). The good universal’s political articulation, Jullien argues, is “the common” (12), which—contrary to the uniform—is precisely not what is similar. Here we see its connection to divergence, which separates and detaches and thereby constitutes the condition for an “active and intensive” (73) common. It gives new meaning to the term “dialogue” (79).
The universal thus must be conceived, Jullien writes later in this lecture, “in an encounter with universalism” (Jullien 2016a, 27). Unlike the latter,
L’universel pour lequel il faut militer est, à l’inverse, un universel rebelle, qui n’est jamais comblé; ou disons un universel négatif défaisant le confort de toute positivité arrêtée: non pas totalisateur (saturant), mais au contraire rouvrant du manqué dans toute totalité achevée. Universel régulateur (au sens de l’idée kantienne) qui, parce qu’il n’est jamais satisfait, ne cesse de repousser l’horizon et donne indéfiniment à chercher. (Ibid.)
The universal for which one must militate is, on the contrary, a rebellious universal, which is never filled; or let’s say a negative universal that undoes the comfort of all arrested positivity; not a totalizing (saturating) [universal] but on the contrary one that reopens the lack in all accomplished totality. A regulative universal (in the Kantian sense) that, because it is never satisfied, never ceases to push back the horizon and indefinitely leads to further searching.
This requires, as Jullien puts it, a certain “care” (souci) of the universal as “promoting its ideal aspect into a never-obtained ideal, which asks the common not to limit itself too quickly” (Jullien 2016a, 27). A slightly stronger way of putting it is that the universal may require “defending,” as the subtitle of Jullien’s book has it. But the notion of “defending” requires some explanation here: in Jullien’s dictionary, it means to “activate” its resources; it doesn’t have, he insists, a fearful and defensive (in that sense) meaning.
Divergence ultimately produces what Jullien calls l’entre, “the in-between.” Such an “in-between escapes,” as he explains, “the determination of ‘Being’”—“l’entre échappe à la determination, elle qui fait être” (Jullien 2012, 51). Or, in a pithier formula, “L’entre n’ ‘est’ pas” (“the in-between ‘is’ not,” Jullien 2016a, 39; emphasis original). In philosophical terms, it escapes “ontology” (Jullien 2012, 51), an escape that Jullien also associates with Chinese thought (as I explain in chapter 2). He notes at this point that Chinese language-thought did not isolate the notion of “being” in the way that Western thought has. Instead it has developed a notion of “nothingness,” which he takes care to explain is not simply the opposite of being: it’s a nonontological nothingness (ibid., 52)—the nothingness of the dao, of the flow of all things (the nothingness of life between birth and death, for example).
This