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———. 2010. Le Pont des singes: De la diversité à venir. Fécondité culturelle face à identité nationale. Paris: Galilée.
———. 2012. L’écart et l’entre: Leçon inaugurale de la Chaire sur l’altérité. Paris: Galilée.
———. 2015. The Book of Beginnings. Translated by Jody Gladding. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2016a. Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle; mais nous défendons les ressources d’une culture. Paris: L’Herne.
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———. 2018. “De l’écart à l’inouï—repères I, II, III.” In François Jullien, edited by Daniel Bougnoux and François L’Yvonnet, 78–88; 119–127; 233–241. Paris: L’Herne.
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Chinese Utopias in Contemporary French Thought
But beware of fascination with China, beware of the East that would save us from the narrowness of European categories, beware of the mysticisms, beware of the East that is the obverse of the West, beware of the irrational East, beware of the gurus’ East . . . François Jullien vehemently attacks using China as “the West’s safety valve” or as “an instant solution for Europe’s theoretical aporia.
—Thierry Zarcone, in conversation with François Jullien1
Radical Chic, Radical Orientalism
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind of representational agency, call the Maoist.
—Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora 2
In Le pont des singes: De la diversité à venir (The monkey bridge: on diversity to come), a short book that appears to have been triggered by a visit to Vietnam, François Jullien refers to himself as an “orientalist” (Jullien 2010, 57). Since Jullien is not only a Hellenist but also a sinologist—a specialist of classical China in particular—the designation is technically correct: as an academic who studies China, Jullien is very much an orientalist. But as Jullien knows very well, that term—“orientalist”—comes with a lot of baggage, and so on the one occasion in his extensive oeuvre where he applies the dubious term to himself (I know of no other instance where he does), it arrives in the context, precisely, of a reflection on orientalism:
En tant qu’orientaliste, je sais ce qu’il faut, au contraire, de patience et de modestie, de décatégorisations et récatégorisations infinies, pour envisager d’entrer dans d’autres cohérences et commencer à déplier sa pensée. (Ibid.; emphasis mine)
As an orientalist, I know that what’s needed, on the contrary, is patience and modesty, infinite decategorizations and recategorizations, to envisage entering into other coherences and to begin to unwork [déplier] one’s thought.
As he indicates just before the passage I have quoted here, this is a question of breaking out of “l’hégémonie historique de l’Occident” (the historical hegemony of the occident; ibid.).
In what follows, I would like to hold Jullien’s work up to the standard he lays out here—of breaking out of the historical hegemony of the West and into what he enables us to describe as the “other coherence” of China. Part of my interest is in considering Jullien’s work as an orientalist and questioning its relationship to orientalism—a project that can hardly be avoided in this context. I will pursue such a consideration in order to lay out the key terms of Jullien’s thought as he has developed them throughout his work—but especially in the context of his reflections on the universal (which came late in his career but will be central to this chapter). English-language readers already have access to Jullien’s book On the Universal (2014a), which captures some of that thinking; but I will be working mostly with three still-untranslated texts: the already-mentioned Le pont des singes (Monkey bridge; 2010) but also the lecture L’écart et l’entre (Divergence and the in-between; 2012), later published in an expanded form as the short book Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle (There is no cultural identity; 2016a). Starting from what I understand to be the antiorientalist positions that are laid out in that book as well as the lecture, I then return to Jullien’s Vietnam book—a sort of travelogue against orientalist travelogues—to critically assess it through the lens of his own antiorientalism.
As a way to mark his own approach as a scholar of China, Jullien often refers critically to “Chinese utopias” in French thought. In L’écart et l’entre, he notes that those utopias are numerous, but he does not spell them out. Those familiar with contemporary French theory may see a reference here to the Paris-based avant-garde group
