content of the Enlightenment or Western reason often risks being eclipsed by the justified attacks on its “white,” “straight,” and “male” representatives and (and this is the more substantial target of the criticism) ways of thinking. Jullien may be a white, straight male himself, and may be read in that sense as a representative of the very tradition that is under attack; but his detour through China enabled him to unwork, in my view, the European/Western tradition precisely where it is most white, straight, and male: in its exceptionalism—specifically the metaphysics and ontology associated with sovereignty.
As I have already indicated, there are problems with the use of China as a detour or philosophical tool for a project that ultimately returns to the West; there is, in this context, the risk of orientalism that I consider at length in chapter 1. Indeed, there is the specter of governmentality/biopolitics and neoliberalism that ought to be considered in this context as one economicopolitical form that the detour through unexceptionalism might take—especially in view of Jullien’s work with French businesses in China and the reception of his thought in both contemporary military and management studies (chapter 3). None of this is without risk. In the end, however, I find one of his thought’s most-important contributions precisely in the relation it entertains with postcolonial thought and the necessity to learn from its critique while not giving up on the resources of European/Western thought.
I am reminded here of Gayatri Spivak, who did not pull any punches in her criticism of Kristeva’s (orientalist) use of China, who as a postcolonialist is also a Europeanist and inscribes her work in postcolonial theory explicitly within the Western tradition and its resources. From her extensive introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology—and her early criticism (as many have since noted) of the role of China in that book (see Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015)—to, for example, her dense Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present or the monumental volume of writings in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Spivak has precisely critically mobilized the resources of the European/Western tradition within the very field that took that tradition to task—for its heteronormativity, racism, or sexism and misogyny, for example. For Spivak, however, none of that means European/Western thought should be thrown out wholesale; indeed, where could a thought be found that is entirely free from such or other problems? (Certainly non-European/Western thought isn’t.) When a moralizing approach comes to eclipse the real contributions that a tradition of thinking has brought, we will become all the poorer for it. Moralizing without end, ad infinitum, as part of an impossible project, we will progressively become deprived of all of our cultural resources—not only those in Europe/the West—as part of a mad search for a thought without problems. Jullien can show us, rather, that all thought is problematic and unexceptional in that way—even if not equally so; at the same time, no thought is reducible to the ways in which it is problematic, and thought is unexceptional in that way as well. Thought always, unexceptionally, exceeds what it stands out for and is maybe accused of. The point of Jullien’s work is to critically cultivate, in this perspective, the cultural resources of a thought, diagnosing its problems and criticizing them, but also facilitating the democratic use of its fecundity for all.
This means that the cultural resources of European/Western thought are there not just for Europeans/Westerners. They are there for all: “Bach . . . is my heritage” (Cole 2016, 11), as Teju Cole puts it in a critical reading of James Baldwin. Jullien would argue that the same is true for any other cultural resources, although one would have to point out from a historical and political point of view that this cannot be true in exactly the same way due to histories of colonialism, for example, or the different power position of a “dominant” culture compared to a “minority” culture. Especially in view of debates about cultural appropriation, it seems some nuance may be needed when it comes to Jullien’s plea for the democratic “exploitation” of “cultural resources” across the board. Who can exploit which cultural resource to what purpose? What are the histories and politics of such exploitation? How should those histories and politics be addressed? While drawing out cultural resources requires the slow and careful study of the European/Western and Chinese traditions—if there isn’t much in Jullien addressing the issue of appropriation as such, the emphasis on study and the defamiliarization that it brings does address the issue of misappropriation and explicitly seeks to avoid it—it is clear that for Jullien those resources themselves are not identitarian. They do not mark an essential difference through which China and Europe/the West can be opposed. Rather, these are living cultural resources that are in perpetual development, as the resources of cultures that ex-ist and do not coincide with themselves. It is, in that sense, the process of cultures in which Jullien’s work situates us, as the living movement of their resource that, in identitarian approaches to culture, should be considered “dead,” like a “dead language” (as Jullien in his late work often puts it; see, for example, Jullien 2016a, 45–46). Cultures, then, are living languages that, spoken around the in-between of translation, ex-ist in a divergence that lays bare their resources for common use. Diverging from each other, their divergence also produces a bridge between them that promotes and produces true cultural dialogue, at a distance from the relativism or uniformity that have become the order of the day.
NOTES
1. Martin and Spire 2011, 245.
2. See, for example, Piorunski 1998, 151.
3. Roger-Pol Droit characterizes this late phase as “another book” or also as “book 2” in Jullien’s oeuvre (Droit 2018, 37; 40). Jullien himself might disagree with this, as he has indicated that he thinks of his work very much as “one book, whose different titles constitute so many chapters intended to back up and prolong each other” (Jullien 2009c, 181).
4. On Jullien’s complex relationship to Plato, see Potte-Bonneville 2018.
5. Jullien points out that this is one of the first-known treatises on Chinese landscape painting. The issue he foregrounds in his criticism is that the French translator systematically introduces an “I look” into the discussion of landscape, whereas the Chinese text includes nothing like this.
6. Jullien is, of course, not alone in making this point; his argument here recalls that of Lawrence Venuti in “Translation as Cultural Politics” (Venuti 1993).
7. The strongest objection to such a presentation of Jullien has probably been raised by Billeter, who charges Jullien with denying Chinese authors their specific voices and ultimately offering the reader nothing other than the point of view of Jullien himself. Billeter argues that Jullien’s translations are a key tool in this project. See Billeter 2006.
8. Jullien 2004a can be read as a lengthy engagement with Hegel’s dialectics.
9. Elsewhere, he also frequently takes Hegel to task for his racist remarks on China (see, for example, Jullien 1995, 17–18).
10. “Je ne fais donc pas de la philosophie comparée” (Citot 2009, 28). See also my chapter 1.
11. Literally, “forging a path,” no doubt referencing dao.
12. Jullien responds to this by saying that in this call for context he overhears a fear of the concept (Martin and Spire 2011, 164). To forge a concept, he indicates in another interview, “is to forge a tool . . . is to forge a weapon” (260).
13. Following Michel Foucault, he explicitly distinguishes between réponse and réplique in this context, reserving the latter for the kind of rejoinder that Billeter’s book solicits (Jullien 2007, 13).
14. One article that engages this issue, though it does so rather defensively, is Kubin 2008. Edward Slingerland’s book Mind and Body in Early China (2019) includes a highly critical discussion of Jullien’s overall thought and specifically his orientalism, which I will address in my chapter 1.
15. On this count, Jullien has made reference to Schlegel’s
