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, the notion of the unheard-of, which only appears in Jullien’s late thought, is a useful one, and it must be considered in relation to terms like “blandness,” “facility,” 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
