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’ work in The Neutral that comes closer to Jullien’s appreciative work on the bland: see Hansen 2008.
23. I am certainly not the only one to have noted this. In their commentary on the Dao De Jing, Ames and Hall, for example, hint several times at the book’s challenges to exceptionalism: see, for example, Ames and Hall 2003, 70, 84.
24. Jullien has written most clearly about this methodological point in his most recent works. My sense is that he has focused on clarifying it in response to the charge that he operates within an opposition between Western and Chinese thought and construes China as the absolute other, either to embrace it over the West or to reject it. But Jullien insists this is not so: his is not a thought of identity and difference but of resources and divergence. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to avoid the suggestion of opposition in his thinking, as Marcel Gauchet in his questioning of Jullien has pointed out (Jullien 2009c, 183), and that difficulty will appear in my reconstruction of his thought here as well.
25. See Jullien 2007, 60; Martin and Spire 2011, 194.
26. Collège des Bernardins 2018.
References
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Fieni, David. 2018. Review of Class Warrior—Taoist Style, by Abdelkébir Khatibi. boundary 2, September 12. https://www.boundary2.org/2018/09/david-fieni-review-of-abdelkebir-khatibis-class-warrior-taoist-style/.
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