The task of philosophy is partly to separate out a “sterile negative” or “negative negative” from another, motivating negative or neg-active that is productive (ibid., 126) or intensive. Jullien in part praises G. W. F. Hegel and his dialectics (ibid.),8 even if he has also deems Hegel’s work on the negative insufficient for his own project (the neg-active “ne se range pas pour autant sous les lois de la dialectique,” “does not fit under the laws of dialectics”; Jullien 2010, 62–63):
Un des grands problèmes de notre époque est de penser le négatif fécond, ce que j’appellerais le “nég-actif,” sans le faire basculer dans une dialectique de reconciliation hégélienne. (Interview in Citot 2009, 31)9
One of the great problems of our time is to think the fecund negative, what I would call the “neg-active,” without making it tip over into a Hegelian dialectic of reconciliation.
It’s on this understanding of the neg-active that Jullien’s notion of existence is based, as what names the de-coincision of the self as the process or better: passage (to evoke the dao—道 or “path”) of living: ex-istence. Hence Jullien’s interest in the notion of “a second life” (Jullien 2018, 235), one that is lived in perpetual de-coincidence with the first and in fact enables one to live a better life.
One could, then, read these “Points of reference” in which Jullien enters into a dialogue with himself as a formalization of the idea of a second life—of the de-coincision of Jullien with himself that establishes an in-between at the same time as it produces a bridging path from the one to the other. Such an autocritical, philosophical process can only develop slowly, and it is not surprising that Jullien would engage in it only late in his career and life, at a time when he is able to assess his lifework’s full trajectory—and specifically his study of Greece after the extensive detour through China that he has accomplished.
Chapter Summaries
It is with the mention of the detour through China that the first “Points of reference” section begins, with the solicitation of Jullien’s entire work to leave behind the major philosophemes of the West—“Being, God, Truth, Liberty” (Jullien 2018, 78)—but without becoming “sinized” (ibid.). Insisting that his work is not “comparativist,”10 in the sense that it does not “proceed through resemblances and differences” (ibid., 79), Jullien points out that by working in between European thought and Chinese thought he allows both to reflect themselves in each other so as to uncover each thought’s “unthought” (ibid.). Both European thought and Chinese thought, therefore, “deconstruct” through the encounter with each other, and in Jullien’s view one can only really think from that “unthought” (ibid.). Otherwise, “on ne pense pas” (one does not think; ibid.). To philosophize means, precisely, to “sortir du chemin déjà frayé,” “to stray from the path already forged” (ibid., 120). Jullien’s friend Alain Badiou has characterized him on those grounds as an “apostate” (Badiou 2018, 97). A library, in Jullien’s view, is nothing but a “juxtaposition of divergences” that trigger thought (Jullien 2018, 120).
All of this also means there is no essentialism in Jullien’s thinking. By “Chinese thought” Jullien simply means “thought that was written in Chinese”; and to say so does not mean that Jullien adheres to a linguistic determinism, as he insists (Jullien 2018, 79). In Chemin faisant. Connaître la Chine, relancer la philosophie (Step-by-step11: getting to know China, relaunching philosophy), a book in which he explains his methodology, he suggests that language merely “predisposes” thinking in certain ways (Jullien 2007, 52). Still, from a historical point of view, it should be pointed out that by “Chinese thought” Jullien mostly means pre-Buddhist classical Chinese thought; he frequently distinguishes between Daoism, Buddhism, and contemporary Chinese thought, all of which appear in his work. His overall focus, however, is on Daoism. He will often work across traditions that are generally opposed—Daoism and Confucianism, for example—to discuss those elements on which they agree (see Jullien 2004c, 94–95). Certainly—and this has irritated some of his critics—there is ample hopping around within and between his books. Part of the problem is also that Jullien often works metonymically, allowing the work of an individual author or painter to stand in for a much larger tradition of thought or aesthetics (see Harrist 2011, 252). All of this leaves Jullien open to the charge of generalization and essentialization (though the latter would be hard to push, given the extensive criticisms of essentialism scattered throughout his work).
Many of those issues are reflected in the list of critical points that Jullien’s interlocutor—Jullien himself—raises and that I intend to address at various points in this study: the instrumental approach to China that the very phrase “China as detour” evokes, if not the essentialization then the generalization of both “Chinese thought” and “Western thought” in his work, and the fact that Jullien’s work abstracts from case studies into concepts and thereby tends to ignore specific contexts12; and some have also pointed out Jullien’s “tendency to overstate” (Wang 2008, 242). Jullien also recalls in “Points of reference” the nondebate with Swiss sinologist Jean François Billeter, who published a short polemic titled Contre François Jullien (Against François Jullien; 2006), to which Jullien responded in his book Chemin faisant (Step-by-step)—or, rather, to which he offered a reply.13 In a review of Jullien’s book The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject in Painting, Robert Harrist bluntly states that, “at the great height from which Jullien surveys [historical phenomena], far removed from the experience of making or looking at paintings, art and its critical discourse in China become as blurry as in the landscapes [Jullien] so admires” (Harrist 2011, 253). Clearly Jullien has triggered no small amount of criticism over the course of his career. In “Points of reference,” however, he notes that all of those criticisms, to which he has replied on numerous occasions, “no longer concern him”: “Je ne m’en soucie plus,” as he puts it; “C’est passé”—“they’re in the past” (Jullien 2018, 81).
I will address most of the critical issues I mentioned in chapter 1, which focuses on a problematic that has received very little sustained discussion in this context—namely, Jullien’s orientalism.14 I pursue such a consideration in part to lay out the key terms of Jullien’s late work on the universal, which seeks to capture the overall methodology of his thought. Although many points of criticism may be in the past for Jullien, they are difficult to avoid for any new reader of this work, and a responsible study of Jullien’s thought cannot but begin, in my view, with a consideration of his method and, if you will, its ethics and politics.
Having dispensed with the more-obvious criticisms, Jullien’s autocritique quickly dives into the philosophical stakes of his work—specifically, the “deconstruction from the outside” (deconstruction du dehors; Jullien 2018, 81) that all of his work pursues and that uses China to break out of Western ontological and metaphysical thinking. As I explain in chapter 1, the phrase “deconstruction from the outside” is meant in part to distinguish Jullien’s approach to China and the West from that of Jacques Derrida, who always finds deconstruction “within” (Martin and Spire 2011, 135) (and in whose work China was implicated, as I discuss in chapters 1 and 4). In Jullien’s view, Derrida ultimately remains too much within the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition, even if Islam plays a role in his work. Islam, however, does not truly provide an outside-to-Western thought, Jullien points out (“l’Islam fait partie du monde occidental”; “Islam is part of the West”; Jullien 2004b, 96); it does not provide the “exteriority” that interests Jullien. Derrida ultimately remains too “biblical” (Jullien 2008a, 155). Exteriority for Jullien is associated with distance and divergence; alterity, which Jullien rejects as a philosophical construct (rather than an objective fact) is the logic of difference and distinction (Jullien 2018, 119; 2007, 34). Alterity operates within the logic of identity and opposition, which Jullien rejects (Citot 2009, 28). Jullien turned to China not as an alterity but because of the objective fact of its elsewhere, of its language being outside of the Western languages, and of its thought having developed for a long time outside of the
