François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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in-between) replace the Western ontological notion of “being” in his thought. Jullien arrives at this replacement, of course, by way of China, through the detour via China, which offers in itself a thinking of the detour. Central to this kind of thought are the notions of the “allusive” and the “evasive” (Jullien 2018, 82), which are opposed to the Western ontological thinking of presence.15 In “Points of reference II” Jullien speaks of the in-between as a “deontologizing concept” (ibid., 119), a notion that recalls one of the subtitles of his book on “literati” painting, The Great Image Has No Form—“An essay in de-ontology.” “L’entre n’est pas de l’être,” “the in-between is not being,” as he puts it (ibid.; emphasis original), suggesting that in the Western world perhaps only modern art (Cézanne, Braque, Picasso) has been able to think this in-between.
This relates to Chinese thought’s criticism of metaphysics: the idea that something is beautiful because there is an ideal of beauty that stands behind it, or is above it, and that delivers the structuring rupture between the sensible and the intelligible that is so typical of Western thought. Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—points out how this “modelization of the beautiful” is “incarnated in the nude” (Jullien 2018, 83), which Jullien considers typical of Western art. In China, by contrast, the nude (or at least the nude as it is construed in the West) is missing, as Jullien discusses in his book The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics. In chapter 2, I show how a sustained inquiry into aesthetics in Jullien’s work can help to lay bare these philosophical arguments—specifically Jullien’s “Chinese” criticism of Western ontology and metaphysics. While such a project needs to pass via the nude, it also has to consider the reflection on the Chinese landscapes of the Southern “literati” school (as well as landscape in general) that extends throughout Jullien’s work, from his dissertation to some of his most-recent books. Indeed, if the nude is associated first and foremost with Western thought, landscape helps Jullien lay bare Chinese thought, and it is in the divergence between the two, in the in-between that it produces, that a philosophical dialogue between the West and China becomes possible. Still, it is in landscape that the Chinese thought of process and what Jullien calls “correlation”—the relations between things—becomes most visible (Jullien 2018, 84).
One of the more-peculiar aspects of Jullien’s work is its contributions to both military studies and management studies. This can be traced back to Jullien’s study of the Chinese notion of efficacy, which extends over three books: the dense academic study The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (1995); the much-shorter study of the Chinese art of war, titled A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (2004c); and, finally, Jullien’s still-untranslated Conférence sur l’efficacité (Lecture on efficacy; 2005), which summarizes Jullien’s Treatise as a “lecture for managers,” as I discuss in chapter 3. Carefully considering the transfer between military theory and management theory in Jullien’s work as well as its reception, I derive from Jullien’s approach a Chinese managerial conception of sovereignty that, I argue, provides a useful lens through which to view not only the current global economicopolitical situation but also Jullien’s insistence, in this context, on European approaches to both war and management (Jullien 2018, 85) that can be played out critically in relation to Chinese thought.
Central in Jullien’s analysis of efficacy is the Chinese notion of “silent transformations”—or slow, gradual process. One of the issues Jullien has with Hegel is that, even though Hegel thought the motivating force of the negative, he did not think its silent transformations—Hegel was too event focused, too focused on a history made by great men, to consider this. This also means that Jullien is no fan of writing history through its revolutions (Jullien 2004a, 144ff.). The notion of silent transformations operates in a divergence with the Western notion of the event, which has thrived in European philosophy. Whereas the latter is associated with the European thinking of sovereignty, the former—especially in its association with management—is much closer to what Michel Foucault analyzes as governmentality/biopolitics and its central, liberal/neoliberal imperative of “laissez-faire.” Historically, this notion translates (as I discuss in chapter 3; but the translation ought to be criticized as well) the Chinese notion of wu wei (無爲), which names the efficacy that rules without exertion and enters into Western economic thought via the physiocrats’ eighteenth-century work on Chinese politics. Jullien opposes such a Chinese model of political manipulation and regulation to the Western/Greek model of politics through persuasion (rhetoric). It’s the tragic, head-on clash familiar from Greek theater versus the Chinese oblique approach—and Jullien clearly seems to prefer the latter, as Roger-Pol Droit, for example, has noted (Droit 2018, 38).
As critics will note, Jullien is not the only one to have developed such a criticism of Western thought via China. In her article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that “French theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and the like have at one time or another been interested in reaching out to all that is not the West because they have, in one way or another, questioned the millennially cherished excellences of Western metaphysics: the sovereignty of the subject’s intention, the power of predication, and so on” (Spivak 1981, 157). But should Jullien’s work be inscribed in this lineage of “French theorists . . . reaching out”? Spivak’s specific charge in this context becomes that Julia Kristeva, whose book About Chinese Women is the example she analyzes, does not have any deep knowledge of the Far East and ends up speaking only about herself in her attempt to “[touch] the other of the West” (Spivak 1981, 158; emphasis original).16 What is launched in Kristeva’s book as speculation becomes fact over the course of less than one hundred pages; the reader is treated to “the most stupendous generalizations about Chinese writing” based on no evidence whatsoever, “no primary research” (ibid., 160). Chinese thought is distorted so as to assimilate it into the West, exactly as eighteenth-century sinophiles did (ibid.). Kristeva criticizes those—but she is guilty of the same (ibid.). Is this Jullien’s situation as well, as the already-mentioned Jean François Billeter, for example, as well as some of Jullien’s reviewers have argued? Or is Jullien a different kind of philosopher, and do his references to Chinese thought ultimately lead elsewhere? Furthermore, is this situation mine? Dear reader, might it be yours?
Let me be very clear about my own project: I seek to offer a study about Jullien’s oeuvre in order to explore the divergences it lays out between Western and Chinese thought (thought written in various European languages and thought written in Chinese). I myself am largely assessing Jullien’s oeuvre from the Western side, in view of the divergence it opens up in relation to Western thought. In other words, my ultimate reference point is “the West,” and I think this ought to be possible without falling prey to the kinds of distortions that Spivak (and Kristeva, oddly) draws out. In Jullien’s thought, the criticism of Western thought is developed through a study of Chinese thought. But I myself come to Chinese thought as a nonsinologist, with limited knowledge of the Chinese materials that Jullien studies.17 I note, however, that, contrary to the work of the theorists that Spivak mentions, Jullien is known as a sinologist and his work is based on primary research into Chinese materials (as well as secondary research in Chinese, I should add; I say this even if Jullien’s work overall—like the work of many of his French colleagues—appears to be a little thin on the secondary sources, which were either not consulted or may have remained unacknowledged so as to not overburden the work with reference notes18). Additionally, Jullien’s already-mentioned use of translation as a method appears to reveal more than basic linguistic competency in Chinese. (I should add that I know no Chinese.) Certainly it appears that part of what Jullien attacks in his work is precisely superficial references to Chinese thought in Western philosophy—and, more generally, Western culture at large—that claim to find the other where, in truth, they only promote the self. I explore this at length in chapter 1, where I investigate the role of orientalism in Jullien’s work. Against the (orientalist) effort to, once and for all, find the other, Jullien emphatically works between thoughts-in-progress.
For all of those reasons, Jullien strikes me as a more reliable reference than those that Spivak attacks. He himself in fact mentions dismissively the numerous “utopies Chinoises” (Chinese utopias) in which French thought has been caught up (Jullien 2012, 61). Still, some