François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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thinking in favor of elements of Chinese thinking (alterity and difference, for example, are replaced by divergence and its associated concepts). At the same time, Jullien also maintains notions of Western/European thought and insists on the resources of Western culture (the notion of the ideal, for example, in his book on Plato). Still, because it was anchored in being (ontology) and focused on metaphysics (on ideal, geometrical forms hiding behind shadow reality, if you follow Plato), Western thought was unable to grasp the in-between that Jullien proposes: it always wanted to go beyond and access the truth of the idea rather than participate in the flow of all things (Jullien 2012, 53). This separates “life,” as a metaphysical notion, from “living” (ibid., 57; see also Jullien 2016b). The in-between, rather, makes us “de-ontologize” (Jullien 2012, 56). Some in the Western tradition were attuned to this: the painter Braque, for example, who said—in a quotation Jullien mentions often—“that which is between the apple and the plate should also be painted” (ibid., 56). But by and large, Western thought did not think the in-between.
For Jullien, the (Chinese) in-between becomes a tool for working on both Chinese and Western thought. As a Western thinker, he deconstructs Western thought from the outside, as a sinologist; but as a sinologist, he does not “sinize” himself, which, he notes “disappoints orientalists” (Jullien 2012, 60). Instead, he is on neither side, working between the two. It’s this in-between that prevents him from succumbing to those “utopies chinoises” that are so common in France (ibid., 61) and that I discussed in the first section of this chapter. It’s at this point that he now also criticizes Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (ibid.) and its exoticist and orientalist tendencies: Instead Jullien posits China as perfectly intelligible. It’s exterior to the West, but it can perfectly well be understood. This seeks to end phantasmatic constructions of China as some mythological, enigmatic outside to Western comprehension. It’s outside to the West, yes, but it’s not outside comprehension. There can be, as Foucault says about heterotopias but also seems to deny in his text, a “science” of China’s heterotopia. Translation is where the “atopian” (Jullien now shifts to this term, critically reappropriating it from Barthes) work of the in-between is most marked, as a practice that both assimilates and disassimilates (63). It’s the logical language for the cultural dialogue that he envisions (Jullien 2016a, 88).
In the final section of his lecture, he also suggests a perhaps-surprising realm of application for his theory of divergence: gender studies (Jullien 2012, 76). Noting gender studies’ desire to do away with sexual difference, he considers the potential fecundity of thinking a divergence between the sexes, a divergence even within a single sex itself, to see what resources this might yield. This would entail a shift from a thinking of sexual difference to a thinking of sexual divergence, which surely deserves more explanation. But the suggestion is not developed.
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