12). In a discussion of literary comparison (“as if . . . ”) in the Dao De Jing (referenced by Jullien as the Laozi) in The Great Image, Jullien contrasts a mode of comparison that “[aims] to render convincingly, thus allowing us to see better,” to one that “aims to make less precise”: “instead of focusing on determination and permeating us with its presence, it tends on the contrary to detach us from the order of the ‘there is’ and to make us return upstream from its actualization” (Jullien 2009, 32). Jullien captures this difference in This Strange Idea through the opposition of “variety,” which implies essence and refers to “the unitary genus diversifying itself” (Jullien 2016c, 93), and “variance,” “in which the essence of the thing dissipates” (ibid.).13 Whereas the former remains within Western ontology and metaphysics (a claim that I examine in chapter 2), the latter is outside of those. Jullien typically finds it in Chinese thought.
In view of the charge made against Jullien that he generalizes and essentializes both Western and Chinese thought,14 I should repeat that by “Western thought” Jullien mostly means Greek thought, a notion that refers for him to the tradition of philosophical thinking started by Plato. Jullien’s genealogies of Western thought frequently reach back to Plato to reconstruct Western thinking from there. Those reconstructions are hardly unaware of the differences within Western thought: he gives ample attention, for example, to Aristotle’s criticism of Platonism (he speaks in this context of the divergence between Aristotle and Plato; Jullien 2016a, 68). But ultimately he seeks to show that certain aspects of Platonism continue in Aristotle and after, all the way to the present day.
By “Chinese thought,” as I have already indicated, Jullien mostly means classical Chinese thought. He is focused on Daoism but frequently works across traditions that are generally opposed—Confucianism and Daoism, for example (see Jullien 2004b, 94–95). Ultimately, Chinese thought for him is simply all thought that is expressed in Chinese (Jullien 2012, 41). This is a wide umbrella to be sure, and there is some hopping around within his books and most certainly between books. Jullien also often allows the work of an individual author to stand in for a much larger tradition of thought.15 All of this makes Jullien vulnerable to the charge of generalization and essentialization, which (as I’ve already noted) misses the mark in view of his critical project.
No doubt partly in response to criticisms he has received, Jullien has come to lay out some of the key terms of his work—and I’m thinking now of those that relate to the orientalism debate in particular—in some of his recent, shorter books. These include the already-mentioned lecture L’écart et l’entre, which he delivered upon his inauguration as Chair of Alterity at the Collège d’études mondiales at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris on December 8, 2011. It’s worth noting, from the get-go, that “alterity” stands in tension with Jullien’s declared position. He has often noted that alterity is a philosophical construct and does not capture his approach to China; he does not work on China as “alterity,” but his work comes from the fact—rather than the philosophical construction—of China’s geographical elsewhere (whereas alterity “se construit,” China’s elsewhere “se constate”; Jullien 2012, 17). It comes from the fact that for a very long time China did not come into contact with European thought. Jullien’s thinking about China is a thinking of “ailleurs” rather than of “altérité”; as such, China marks (as he puts in the lecture’s opening pages) an “extériorité,” an “outside,” to Western thought (ibid., 15). This is what sparked his interest in it.
This also means that, through China, Jullien wanted to discover “notre étrangeté” (Jullien 2012, 17), the West’s strangeness. This latter point has to do with something else that Jullien frequently mentions—namely, the fact that he turned to China in order to better understand Greek thought (ibid., 13). The particular disturbance or threat that it brings to Greek thought he describes as a “deconstruction from the outside” (this in opposition to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, which is always already inside; 15 and 21). As the title of an interview with Thierry Zarcone has it, China operates like a “philosophical tool” for Jullien—in that, through its “detour” (and Chinese thought is a thought of the detour for Jullien), he seeks to better understand Western thought. The overall trajectory of Jullien’s work seems to confirm this project, since most of his recent books deal with European thinking, which he broached after the detour through China was accomplished. Jullien passes through China to lay bare what he refers to as the West’s “unthought”—“notre impensé” (20). By this he means “that starting from which we think and that, because of this, we do not think” (ibid.; emphasis original). It refers to the hidden assumptions of Western thought. Chinese thought helps him become alert to those.
Expanding on his rejection of the term “alterity” as a philosophical construct, Jullien also rejects the term “difference” in the context of conversations about “cultural diversity” (Jullien 2012, 24). Instead, he proposes to replace it by the notion of “écart,” “divergence” (ibid., 24). Difference, Jullien explains (and here I return to a point I made earlier on), is “un concept identitaire,” “an identitarian concept” (ibid.). There can’t be such a thing as “cultural identity,” because a culture is always a mixed, nonidentitarian formation and it is always a formation in progress; if not, it’s a dead culture, similar to a dead language. The only thing proper to culture is that it is constantly transforming and changing (26). (This applies to a notion like culture, but Jullien also applies it to the individual—or, rather, to the subject, whose “ex-istence” is given meaning within this philosophical framework as never coinciding with itself; Jullien 2016a, 57. He even argues that evolution operates in the same way; ibid., 70.) Difference is a concept that orders, he concludes; it stands in opposition to what Foucault envisioned by the term “heterotopia.” (An interesting claim, given the presence of the Greek word heteros—‘ɛτɛρoς—in “heterotopia”; indeed, this notion of heteros will return later in this chapter as well and deserves to be questioned further. Jullien seems to want to retranslate it as a geographical elsewhere rather than as a philosophically construed alterity, as distance rather than as difference, but there are moments in his work where he slips back into the logic of difference and alterity.16) All cultures are, in that sense, heterotopic (Jullien 2016a, 48). Part of the problem with difference is that it puts us “in a logic of integration,”17 “of classification and specification”—“not of discovery” (Jullien 2012, 29). Difference, when it comes to diversity, is “a lazy concept” (ibid.). Instead, Jullien opts for divergence and puts it to work.
Divergence makes us rethink cultures as what Jullien calls “fecundities.” Whereas difference establishes a “distinction,” divergence establishes a “distance”—a “separation” and a “detachment” (Jullien 2012, 32)—which productively puts that which it separates “into tension” (ibid., 34). As Jullien sees it, this is not a way of ordering but precisely of disordering, of “derangement,” which makes “fecundity” appear (35). It’s an “exploratory,” “inventive,” and “adventurous” notion that produces cultural resources (rather than “values” or “roots”; Jullien 2016a, 6 and 64) for “exploration” and “exploitation” (Jullien 2012, 37) by all. This is an approach that goes against cultural “exceptionalism,” as Jullien repeatedly points out (Jullien 2016a, 47–62). In this context, Jullien speaks of those resources’ “yield” (ibid., 38). There’s a “profit” (39) that comes from them. The language, it’s worth noting, is both agricultural and economical, a crossover that Jullien has also emphasized elsewhere (see Jullien 2007b).
All of this means that when Jullien speaks of “Chinese thought”
je ne lui suppose aucune identité, nul essentialisme de principe—faut-il encore le répéter?—mais je désigne seulement la pensée qui s’est exprimée, actualisée, en Chinois. Non que je suppose, là non plus, quelque déterminisme de la langue sur la pensée, mais parce que la langue, elle aussi—ou plutôt d’abord—est ressource. (Jullien 2012, 41)
I don’t assume it has any
