François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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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