do—he does not want to participate in the tradition of Chinese utopias that is common in French contemporary thought and beyond it—how does Jullien describe his own approach to China? Does it manage to avoid the orientalist trap?
Criticizing the use of China as utopia, Jullien frequently refers to his own understanding of China as a heterotopia, a term he explicitly borrows from Michel Foucault’s Order of Things. This reference, for which Jullien never provides a footnote, goes back to Foucault’s famous preface to Order of Things, where he claims that the
book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (Foucault 1973, xv; emphasis original)
The passage referenced here quotes “a certain Chinese encyclopedia”8; in other words, we get here Foucault’s take on “China”—and “without so much as a hint,” as Zhang Longxi has pointed out, “to suggest that the hilarious passage from that ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ may have been made up to represent a Western phantasy of the Other and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage can be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind” (Longxi 1988, 110).9
“China,” by Foucault’s acknowledgment (although it’s worth noting that this is “China” by way of Borges, an Argentine!), has the capacity not just to shatter Western thought (for surely that is what Foucault means by “our thought”) but also to “disturb and threaten with collapse” the oppositional logic of “the Same and the Other” that we’ve seen is essential to orientalism (orientalism constructs the orient in opposition to the West). Jullien seizes Foucault’s “disturbing” and “threatening” characterization of China and aligns it for his purposes.
Disturb and threaten: That is, as Foucault explains later in the preface, what heterotopias do. It’s what sets them aside from utopias. Jullien’s relationship to China is not a love affair. When looked at carefully, China is much too disturbing and troubling to allow for the exoticization and orientalization that the term “love affair,” in Chesneaux, is meant to evoke. In Order of Things, Foucault writes that
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter, or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” (Foucault 1973, xviii; emphasis original)
The heterotopic collapse, in Foucault’s description, is not just at the level of the sentence—or of the relation signifier/signified. It also affects the syntax of words and things, words and their referents (not their signifieds). While this needs to be read negatively first and foremost as a disturbance of and threat to Western thought, it also lays out an implicit, positive image of China as the cause of such threat and disturbance.
How exactly that’s supposed to be, Foucault does not make clear: it appears to have something to do with “the wild profusion of existing things”—a weird, vitalist phrase that does not tell us much—and how such wildness challenges the Western order of things, which Foucault suggests is rooted in language. It is, indeed, on the count of language that Foucault in the preface lays out his reference to China just a little bit more. In between the discussion of Borges and his use of the term “heterotopia,” Foucault situates China between the consoling utopia of another kind of order (that the passage in Borges lays out, and a heightened order at that, associated with walls—he is thinking of the Great Wall of China, presumably?—that are reflected, Foucault rather flippantly suggests, in the verticality of Chinese writing) and what Foucault characterizes as the more-disturbing heterotopia that would present a fundamental undermining of the attempt to order, including the ordering drive of language itself and the relation between words and things. But this is not based on any serious study of Chinese. It’s hard to imagine Jullien agreeing with this characterization of the Chinese language.
Moreover, when one actually looks at Foucault’s text “Les hétérotopies” (Heterotopias) in this context, other problematic aspects of the notion emerge. With the notion of heterotopia, Foucault seeks to name places that are “absolutely different”:
places that are opposed to all other places, that are destined in a way to be a kind of counter-spaces. It’s children who know those counter-spaces, those localized utopias, particularly well: it’s the back of the garden, of course; or the attic, naturally; or better even, the Indian tent set up in the middle of the attic; or also, it’s—on Thursday afternoon—the parents’ big bed. It’s on this big bed that one discovers the ocean, because one can swim there between the sheets. And this big bed is also the sky, because one can jump there on the mattress springs; it’s the forest, because one can hide there; it’s the night, because one becomes a ghost between the sheets; and it’s pleasure, finally, because, when the parents come back, one is going to be punished. (Foucault 2009, 24; emphasis original)
It’s worth asking what remains here of the “disturbing” and “threatening” heterotopia that Jullien finds in the preface to Order of Things. If the notion of heterotopia is claimed by Jullien specifically to resist those “Chinese utopias” that succumb to exoticism and orientalism, it’s surely also worth asking about the exoticism and orientalism in Foucault’s description. The association of heterotopias with children—which seems rich with nostalgia, with gardens and attics and “Indian tents”—seems problematic from this point of view. Later in the same essay Foucault suggests that “the most ancient example of heterotopia would be the garden, the millenarian creation that certainly in the Orient had a magical meaning” (Foucault 2009, 29). Another few pages later, the “hammams of the muslims” are mentioned as another example (ibid., 32). If the essay is, generally speaking, not Foucault’s strongest work, the exoticism and orientalism of Foucault’s theorization of heterotopias poses some challenges to Jullien’s adoption of the term “heterotopia” to name his own strategy; the preface of Order of Things is less problematic on this count, but there too questions can be asked.
Let’s not focus too much, however, on Jullien’s brief mentions of Foucault’s heterotopia as a name for his project. What are the terms that Jullien himself develops, and how do they relate to the exoticism and orientalism that Jullien seeks to avoid? Jullien’s project is to play out Western thought (specifically, Greek thought) and Chinese thought (specifically, pre-Buddhist, classical Chinese thought) in a divergence with each other, not to argue—as he clarifies in The Great Image—that the one is somehow better than the other but to show “how they illuminate each other, each revealing the unthought of the other” (Jullien 2009, 40; emphasis original).10 On that last count, it is important to note that Jullien would not characterize his method as comparative, even if he seems at times committed to comparativism (as critics have noted11) and even if the back covers of his books sometimes characterize his work as “comparative philosophy.” As he puts it quite simply in L’écart et l’entre, “je ne compare pas” (I do not compare; Jullien 2012, 59). Or, if he does, it’s “temporairement et sur des segments limités” (temporarily and on limited segments; ibid., 59). Certainly “comparison” does not characterize his overall approach. In The Book of Beginnings he writes that, to his mind, “‘to compare’ is another way of not moving, of not leaving, and therefore of not entering . . . One has remained within one’s own overarching categories, beginning from which one orders things; heterotopia [Foucault’s term again] and disorientation have not come into play” (Jullien 2015, 13).
Against such a “weak” (as one might perhaps call it12) understanding of comparison (which
