François Jullien's Unexceptional Thought. Arne De Boever
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within the very field that took that tradition to task—for its heteronormativity, racism, or sexism and misogyny, for example. For Spivak, however, none of that means European/Western thought should be thrown out wholesale; indeed, where could a thought be found that is entirely free from such or other problems? (Certainly non-European/Western thought isn’t.) When a moralizing approach comes to eclipse the real contributions that a tradition of thinking has brought, we will become all the poorer for it. Moralizing without end, ad infinitum, as part of an impossible project, we will progressively become deprived of all of our cultural resources—not only those in Europe/the West—as part of a mad search for a thought without problems. Jullien can show us, rather, that all thought is problematic and unexceptional in that way—even if not equally so; at the same time, no thought is reducible to the ways in which it is problematic, and thought is unexceptional in that way as well. Thought always, unexceptionally, exceeds what it stands out for and is maybe accused of. The point of Jullien’s work is to critically cultivate, in this perspective, the cultural resources of a thought, diagnosing its problems and criticizing them, but also facilitating the democratic use of its fecundity for all.
This means that the cultural resources of European/Western thought are there not just for Europeans/Westerners. They are there for all: “Bach . . . is my heritage” (Cole 2016, 11), as Teju Cole puts it in a critical reading of James Baldwin. Jullien would argue that the same is true for any other cultural resources, although one would have to point out from a historical and political point of view that this cannot be true in exactly the same way due to histories of colonialism, for example, or the different power position of a “dominant” culture compared to a “minority” culture. Especially in view of debates about cultural appropriation, it seems some nuance may be needed when it comes to Jullien’s plea for the democratic “exploitation” of “cultural resources” across the board. Who can exploit which cultural resource to what purpose? What are the histories and politics of such exploitation? How should those histories and politics be addressed? While drawing out cultural resources requires the slow and careful study of the European/Western and Chinese traditions—if there isn’t much in Jullien addressing the issue of appropriation as such, the emphasis on study and the defamiliarization that it brings does address the issue of misappropriation and explicitly seeks to avoid it—it is clear that for Jullien those resources themselves are not identitarian. They do not mark an essential difference through which China and Europe/the West can be opposed. Rather, these are living cultural resources that are in perpetual development, as the resources of cultures that ex-ist and do not coincide with themselves. It is, in that sense, the process of cultures in which Jullien’s work situates us, as the living movement of their resource that, in identitarian approaches to culture, should be considered “dead,” like a “dead language” (as Jullien in his late work often puts it; see, for example, Jullien 2016a, 45–46). Cultures, then, are living languages that, spoken around the in-between of translation, ex-ist in a divergence that lays bare their resources for common use. Diverging from each other, their divergence also produces a bridge between them that promotes and produces true cultural dialogue, at a distance from the relativism or uniformity that have become the order of the day.
NOTES
1. Martin and Spire 2011, 245.
2. See, for example, Piorunski 1998, 151.
3. Roger-Pol Droit characterizes this late phase as “another book” or also as “book 2” in Jullien’s oeuvre (Droit 2018, 37; 40). Jullien himself might disagree with this, as he has indicated that he thinks of his work very much as “one book, whose different titles constitute so many chapters intended to back up and prolong each other” (Jullien 2009c, 181).
4. On Jullien’s complex relationship to Plato, see Potte-Bonneville 2018.
5. Jullien points out that this is one of the first-known treatises on Chinese landscape painting. The issue he foregrounds in his criticism is that the French translator systematically introduces an “I look” into the discussion of landscape, whereas the Chinese text includes nothing like this.
6. Jullien is, of course, not alone in making this point; his argument here recalls that of Lawrence Venuti in “Translation as Cultural Politics” (Venuti 1993).
7. The strongest objection to such a presentation of Jullien has probably been raised by Billeter, who charges Jullien with denying Chinese authors their specific voices and ultimately offering the reader nothing other than the point of view of Jullien himself. Billeter argues that Jullien’s translations are a key tool in this project. See Billeter 2006.
8. Jullien 2004a can be read as a lengthy engagement with Hegel’s dialectics.
9. Elsewhere, he also frequently takes Hegel to task for his racist remarks on China (see, for example, Jullien 1995, 17–18).
10. “Je ne fais donc pas de la philosophie comparée” (Citot 2009, 28). See also my chapter 1.
11. Literally, “forging a path,” no doubt referencing dao.
12. Jullien responds to this by saying that in this call for context he overhears a fear of the concept (Martin and Spire 2011, 164). To forge a concept, he indicates in another interview, “is to forge a tool . . . is to forge a weapon” (260).
13. Following Michel Foucault, he explicitly distinguishes between réponse and réplique in this context, reserving the latter for the kind of rejoinder that Billeter’s book solicits (Jullien 2007, 13).
14. One article that engages this issue, though it does so rather defensively, is Kubin 2008. Edward Slingerland’s book Mind and Body in Early China (2019) includes a highly critical discussion of Jullien’s overall thought and specifically his orientalism, which I will address in my chapter 1.
15. On this count, Jullien has made reference to Schlegel’s notion of Anspielung and how there may be connections between the German Romantic tradition in general and Chinese thought (Jullien 1997, 208).
16. It is not clear in the review to what extent Spivak considers these points to apply to “Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and the like,” as well.
17. My position is in that sense very different from Jullien’s, who stands neither within Western thought, as its deconstructor, nor in Chinese thought, as fully sinized (Jullien 2012, 60). Instead, Jullien operates between the two.
18. Consider, for example, a review of Jullien’s book on “literati” painting, The Great Image Has No Form, which objects that Jullien’s “arguments take place in an intellectual vacuum . . . without reference to almost anyone else in the field” (Lachman 2011, 233). While Jullien “quotes extensively from early treatises by Zong Bing, Guo Xi, and Jing Hao,” “no previous scholarship on these authors and texts is engaged or acknowledged”; “this near total lack of acknowledgment of Chinese art history as a discipline will cause those from other fields to credit Jullien with far more originality than he deserves” (ibid.).
It’s worth noting that this particular reviewer appreciatively mentions Billeter’s Contre François Jullien (2006) and echoes many of Billeter’s charges, ultimately accusing Jullien of beginning “with his conclusions firmly in hand and . . . casting about to justification for them wherever he can” (Lachman 2011, 234). Or, as another reviewer puts it with respect to the same book, “Jullien himself appears to have avoided almost all recent scholarship in the fields of Chinese art and intellectual history. Indeed, rarely does one encounter a publication by a major university press that displays such disengagement from the ongoing scholarly discourses with which it might reasonably be associated. The book is best approached, perhaps, as a work of belles lettres intended for an audience outside academe” (Harrist 2011, 252).
19. See Billeter 2006.
20. See Fieni 2018. The original French was published in 1976, with the English translation first appearing in 2017.
21. When in an interview Jullien and his work are characterized as “exceptional,” he responds that this may appear so but then immediately moves away from the term and counters it with his notion of écart or “divergence” (Martin and Spire 2011, 214–15).
22. It is perhaps Barthes’