François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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and—indeed—the “unexceptional” in Jullien’s work. Indeed, as a notion I think it provides a key to Jullien’s oeuvre as a whole, connecting to both the terms that established it as well as the thought that has developed from there. One could do worse, in fact, than characterize Jullien’s thought as a thought of the unheard-of and the unexceptional as I do in this book. But with that there come, of course, consequences. There is, in my view, no doubt that, while Jullien introduces the unheard-of as a characterization of his work overall—as a name for his interest in uncovering the unthought in both Western and Chinese thought—it’s a notion that clearly derives from his study of China first and foremost, and therefore it’s something that, I think, he brings to Western thought from China. The unheard-of is, first and foremost, the unthought of Western thought. Some philosophers come close, but none quite manage to think, in Jullien’s view, the silent transformations that remain unheard-of in the Western tradition.
On the other hand, it is worth noting the rethinking of the unexceptional that the notion of the unheard-of also brings, as what surpasses the imagination and what’s so boringly called “real.” This rethinking has something to do with the complicated status of the immanent and the transcendent in Jullien’s thought—and perhaps (this is at least what Jullien suggests) Chinese thought at large. While Jullien’s thought has often been presented as a completely immanent and material thought, Jullien has resisted this, distinguishing his position from Gilles Deleuze’s in at least one instance (Jullien 2004c, 183), and developing a notion of internal transcendence as a way to name the combination of the material and the spiritual in the Chinese tradition (in the sense of yin and yang, or the regulatory double movement of respiration—in/out25):
Il y a bien une transcendance en Chine, c’est ce qu’on appelle le Ciel. Mais c’est une transcendance non pas par extériorité, comme celle du Dieu biblique ou comme celle des idées platoniciennes, c’est une transcendance par, je dis souvent, totalisation de l’immanence. (Jullien interviewed in Piorunski 1998, 157)
There is for sure a transcendence in China; it’s called Heaven [tian, 天]. But this is a transcendence not by exteriority, like that of the biblical god or of the Platonic ideas; rather, it’s a transcendence by way of, as I often say, the totalization of immanence.
This may be why the notion of the unexceptional can actually be a productive one in this context: because it retains, in its naming, a trace of the exceptional that makes a bland-bland reading of the bland impossible. This is also why the “unheard-of” is such a good term in this context: because it captures precisely the idea that the bland is not just bland—that the bland always includes a kind of double tendency where a negative limit is combined with a positive one, in the same way that Jullien distinguishes the negative-negative from the neg-active.
All of this is perfectly summed up by the notion of the unheard-of, which captures both these limits. If the notion thus applies to Chinese thought in particular, it’s interesting that Jullien also uses it to characterize his thought at large, which supposedly equally draws from Western cultural resources. This is where the exceptionalism of Western thought can in certain cases draw out the unthought of Chinese thought, where Western exceptionalism can bring something to Chinese thought that is valuable. Of course it’s not entirely correct to call that contribution “exceptional,” since the unheard-of is opposed to that, as Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—notes. But it would still mark the positive tendency of the unheard-of, the way in which the unheard-of names something that stands out. Certainly in Jullien’s late work he returns to Western, European thought—Greek thought—to explore its resources: the ideal in Plato, for example, or logos in Aristotle. Jullien’s work on Christianity, which includes, for example, his book on the intimate, can be read as developing precisely such a negotiation: between the unexceptional and the exceptional.
If in his early work Jullien takes a detour through China to critically assess the Western tradition, in his late work he returns to the Western tradition to develop its resources, often in explicit relation to China (as in his Plato book, for example): “I’m now starting on a new phase, wherein I’d like to try to grasp again what seems to me to constitute the stakes of European thought in regard to Chinese thought” (Jullien 2009c, 184). “Von Griechenland nach China und zurück,” as Jullien puts it elsewhere (From Greece to China and back; Jullien 2008a, 133; emphasis mine). This last move is crucial to his thinking about the universal, which in fact rejects the notion of the universal in favor of the notion of something universalizing, a regulative idea in the Kantian sense that provides a common orientation through “work” and as the result of a “process.” Noting—and criticizing—the historical and geographical specificity of the Enlightenment universal (“je me rends compte à quel point les categories kantiennes sont, elles aussi, marquées culturellement”; I realize to what point the Kantian categories are also culturally marked; Martin and Spire 2011, 139), Jullien nevertheless also draws out the resources of this tradition. Talking about the purpose of Catholic schools in our time, for example, Jullien observes that it no longer makes sense for them to teach students to believe, to teach them the catechism, et cetera. But that does not mean they need to go: rather, the vocation of Catholic schools today can only be to teach the resources of Catholicism in the same way that one can teach the resources of Judaism or Islam in schools associated with those other religions.26
Importantly, this is not a relativist position: Jullien criticizes, as I will discuss in chapter 1, what he perceives to be the unequal position of women in Islam, as marked by the veil whose use he opposes (Jullien 2010, 18). It is the hard-won equality of women in the Western tradition that in his view needs to be valued as a resource against the role of women in Islam. One might not agree with this, of course—or at least argue that it needs nuance (equality of women in the West? Give me a break . . . )—but as a gesture, it is indicative of how Jullien in his late work seeks to play out Western cultural resources in their divergence with other traditions, some of which he might also not have studied as carefully as he has China (I will consider this in chapter 1, when I look at his travelogue about Vietnam). There are, in other words, some clear problems with Jullien’s “Greek” turn; but as a gesture that seeks to critically work with the legacy of European/Western thought—and not blindly reject it and throw out the baby with the bathwater—such a project seems valuable and perhaps especially important today, when the revolutionary emancipatory content of the Enlightenment or Western reason often risks being eclipsed by the justified attacks on its “white,” “straight,” and “male” representatives and (and this is the more substantial target of the criticism) ways of thinking. Jullien may be a white, straight male himself, and may be read in that sense as a representative of the very tradition that is under attack; but his detour through China enabled him to unwork, in my view, the European/Western tradition precisely where it is most white, straight, and male: in its exceptionalism—specifically the metaphysics and ontology associated with sovereignty.
As I have already indicated, there are problems with the use of China as a detour or philosophical tool for a project that ultimately returns to the West; there is, in this context, the risk of orientalism that I consider at length in chapter 1. Indeed, there is the specter of governmentality/biopolitics and neoliberalism that ought to be considered in this context as one economicopolitical form that the detour through unexceptionalism might take—especially in view of Jullien’s work with French businesses in China and the reception of his thought in both contemporary military and management studies (chapter 3). None of this is without risk. In the end, however, I find one of his thought’s most-important contributions precisely in the relation it entertains with postcolonial thought and the necessity to learn from its critique while not giving up on the resources of European/Western thought.
I am reminded here of Gayatri Spivak, who did not pull any punches in her criticism of Kristeva’s (orientalist) use of China, who as a postcolonialist is also a Europeanist and inscribes her work in postcolonial theory explicitly within the Western tradition and its resources. From her extensive introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology—and her early criticism (as many have since noted) of the role of China in that book (see Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015)—to, for example, her dense Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present or the monumental