François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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I ultimately do not have the full competency to judge this.
Although most of those particular issues are addressed in chapter 1, I return to them in chapter 4, where I explore the relations of Jullien’s thought on China—and the divergence with Western thinking that it opens up—to the work of certain thinkers within the Western tradition. Jullien has occasionally been criticized for writing “in an intellectual vacuum” (Lachman 2011, 233), without referencing other scholars who have done important work in his field. While this is partly due to his essayistic style, this is also because Jullien has tended to privilege concept over context and has focused on logical connections that translate between disciplines rather than on issues that, for example, apply within sinology alone. Chapter 4 draws out some of Jullien’s less-recognized interlocutors within the Western tradition, creating a genealogy for his work in Western thought that has largely remained silent in his own writing. It also raises related critical questions about how some of what is characterized as “new” in the Western tradition—I focus on speculative materialism/realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism—can in view of the Chinese tradition only be characterized as new based on a Eurocentric lineage of thought. Finally, the chapter argues that Jullien’s most-important interlocutors are not necessarily “philosophers” (in other words, thinkers in the Greek, and by extension Western, tradition) but precisely those thinkers who have worked at the limits of Greek philosophy, specifically in postcolonial studies and black studies. There are important resonances, for example, between Jullien’s thought and the work of Moroccan poet and theorist Abdelkébir Khatibi (who was very interested in Daoism, as indicated by his long poem from 1976, Class Warrior—Taoist Style)20 and Martiniquan writer and theorist Édouard Glissant (Sam Coombs has in his book on Glissant explored the Jullien/Glissant connection; Coombs 2018), as well as the work of Fred Moten. This will also allow me to close the main chapters of this book with a return to the discussion of orientalism (theorized by postcolonial critic Edward Said; 1978) with which I began.
The Unheard-Of
Toward the end of “Points of reference III,” Jullien establishes both a terminological contrast and ultimately a terminological shift in his work through the introduction of the notion of l’inouï—“the unheard-of.” The ambiguities of the notion are not quite the same in French as in English. The French word inouï comes from the Latin inauditus—“unheard.” According to the French/English dictionary of Le Robert & Collins, inouï can refer to unprecedented or previously unheard of events or circumstances, extraordinary or incredible news, or incredible or unbelievable speed, audacity, or force. The Trésor de la langue française indicates that inouï refers to something that one hadn’t previously heard of; something that one had never before heard mentioned, that is unknown, unprecedented; something that’s extraordinary, surprising, uncommon. It refers to something unbelievable or astounding, something extraordinary and derailing. It’s associated with strangeness. The English “unheard-of” covers much of the same territory but includes in both its American (US) and British uses the meaning of unacceptable or outrageous, highly offensive. In English, “unheard-of” tends to have a more negative meaning than in French: in most of the sentences that the dictionary offers to illustrate the term’s usage, “unheard-of” has a negative connotation. It’s the French Trésor that sticks most closely to the literal and in both English and French nearly forgotten meaning of inouï/unheard-of: the fact that it references something that is, quite simply, not heard—hasn’t been heard before, as the Trésor puts it, although obviously when the term is used it’s usually in reference to something that’s just been heard, that’s come out of obscurity as something shocking and new. As such—but this is my interpretation—it also seems to have a hint of futurity built in, since even if it were previously unheard-of, what’s just been heard sets a new precedent and seems to anticipate such future occasions of the same.
The unheard-of is both what is ordinary and not heard of in that sense (too ordinary to be heard or noticed) and what is extraordinary and stands out as never before or extremely rarely heard of (possibly with a negative connotation in English). But the status of this “extraordinary” needs to be nuanced. It’s Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself, from his second life—who suggests the opposition between the exceptional and the unheard-of: when thinking the fecundity opened up in the in-between that divergence produces and promotes, it seems one needs to think of this fecundity or resource precisely “not as exceptional . . . but as unheard-of” (“Non pas l’exceptionnel . . . mais l’inouï”; Jullien 2018, 241). The exceptional only has value as a rarity, Jullien explains, and in that sense it is a relative notion—unless it takes on an abusive, absolutist form (ibid.). The attention it attracts is bound to peter out (ibid.). The unheard-of, by contrast, is an infinite resource that, without loudly announcing itself, arises from the very heart of both thought and life (ibid.). It’s what remains unseen, or unheard—as well as, to hearken back to an earlier part of this introduction, unthought. At the same time, Jullien points out that it “surpasses the imagination,” “dépasse l’imagination” (ibid.). In that sense, the unheard of is “the other name of what is so boringly called ‘real’” (“L’inouï est l’autre nom de ce si lassant ‘réel’”; ibid.).
The challenge is to break with characterizations of the surpassing of the imagination that Jullien evokes as “exceptional.” If there is a surpassing, which suggests some kind of rupture or break as well as an upward movement, it is a surpassing into the unheard-of that can be characterized as “unexceptional.” This is not so much about a Western thinking of the rupture or break, or what’s also called the event; instead, it is about what Jullien analyzes as “the silent transformations”—“silent” as in “not heard of.” At the same time, if the phrase “silent transformations” is meant to name the unexceptional, it is worth pointing out the need to rethink the unexceptional as precisely “what surpasses the imagination”—“upward,” if you will, but not into exceptionalism.21
The particular kind of negotiation that develops here is reminiscent of Jullien’s work on “the bland” (dan, 淡), a notion that he critically adopts from Roland Barthes’ writings about China, which were based on a trip Barthes took to China in the mid-1970s with a small group of other writers and thinkers associated with the journal Tel Quel. With its seemingly ironic title, which echoes (as the book’s translator has pointed out; Jullien 2008b, 12–13) both Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (West) and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (East), Jullien’s book In Praise of Blandness evokes Barthes through its essayistic style. Contrary to Barthes, Jullien praises blandness as the aesthetic that comes closest to Chinese thought.22 It is worth noting, however, that A Treatise on Efficacy (originally published in French in 1996, which is five years after the first French publication of In Praise of Blandness) ends with a chapter titled “In Praise of Facility,” in whose opening paragraph the “unexceptional” is praised as a key feature of Chinese thought. As such, it is associated in the paragraph with “the evident ‘facility’ of that which is ceaselessly realized in an unremarkable and unnoticed fashion” (Jullien 2004c, 184). There is a close connection, then, between the facility that is praised in this chapter and the unexceptional—and between the unexceptional and the blandness that Jullien praises as “Chinese” and that has been associated with writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Haruki Murakami (see Kang 2018; Row 2012).
By calling Jullien’s thought “unexceptional” I want to draw out the unexceptionalizing tendency that Chinese thought brings to Western thought,23 which Jullien shows to be exceptionalist through and through. Undoing exceptionalism in Western thought—specifically, unexceptionalizing or deexceptionalizing Western thought, as Jullien might put it—can lead us away from some of the more problematic exceptionalisms that have constituted it. The ultimate goal here is not so much to oppose the West and China on this count as two identities—one of which could be discarded in favor of the other (there is unexceptionalism in the West just as there is exceptionalism in China); rather, it is to play out their respective resources in their divergence with each other so as to see what that might yield.24 As Dirk Baecker in a text about Jullien has pointed out, we are dealing here with different “accents” rather than with completely opposed worlds (Baecker 2008, 32).
For such a project, then,