Jullien the Apostate

What I love about François Jullien is that he is not a sinologist. This, some will say, is a curious way to defend him against the attacks of certain colleagues, who accuse him precisely of departing from the canons of their discipline.

Hic Rhodus, hic salta, as . . . Marx used to say.

What is a sinologist? The connoisseur of a closed domain, whose intellectual owner he is. And why is this so very true? Why is it incumbent on sinologists in particular to have an expert mentality, which ensures them it will not be counterbalanced by the term ‘leftist’, a slogan of the Cultural Revolution, which conditioned one’s expertise on one’s redness? ‘Red and expert’? Certainly not. Expert and colorless most of the time. It will be objected that such is the case with all academic specialists, among them – let us say it – philosophers, in thrall to their history or to the authors they idolize, and analytic scholastics, with their stiff grammatical exercises. Diagonalizing knowledge has never been the Sorbonne’s strong suit, despite the fashion for the ‘interdisciplinary’, which in making a discipline of diagonals has quickly caused the disciplines to multiply.

Such is indeed the case, but it seems to me, amateur that I am, that sinologists take things too far, for a fairly clear reason at once material and metaphysical: the Chinese language, Chinese writing, mysterious characters stark on the white page, ringing knowledge with an almost sacred aura. Specialists of all disciplines love to duck behind the rubble of ancient, ruined Babel. Who among us hasn’t heard someone object that because we don’t know some language, be it Greek or formal logic, German or Hebrew, we can’t hope to understand any part of what’s being said. Even if we then planned an interdisciplinary colloquium on translation, there would be no change. Here again, though, sinology is extremist, for the Chinese language serves as a Great Wall concealing practices or ideas whose meaning, however superficial, only the sinologist can penetrate.

Let us now get to the crux of the issue, as I understand it. It is sometimes imputed, in so many words, that François Jullien is not quite the sinologist he claims to be. In plain words, what these masked dealers in calumny are saying is that Jullien has not delved as far into the Chinese language and Chinese thought as is ordinarily supposed. Of course, these insinuations dishonor those who spread them. There is nonetheless something to be gained for objective reason if we shed light on why the insinuations are possible – and in like manner, if I may interject a personal note, on why some believe they can level at me the unlikely, the unimaginable charge of antisemitism. Calumny is no more irrational than what it attempts to affect, or infect.

What makes it possible to take an accusatory tone with Jullien is, I think, that he puts his immense sinological knowledge at the service of an intellectual objective that goes beyond the domain in question, rather than close it off. Everyone can see that Jullien’s work unfolds a difference between Chinese thought and philosophy as it pertains to ontology, naturally, but also to strategy, moral wisdom, aesthetics, eroticism, and so forth. But this difference does not seek to isolate China, make China into a counter-paradigm, or hold that China, with its exceeding cultural transcendence, communicates with nothing. What interests Jullien about the difference is not identity but the universal space in which the difference can be thought out, such that one is neither on one side nor on the other; instead, one takes the paradoxical journey that makes, and will make, a single intelligible world out of the insuperable difference itself.

This objective is, of course, heterogeneous to sinology proper, which is the description of the difference’s differentiating elements. Crucially, though, it is heterogeneous also to a contemporary form of imperialism, the certain dismantling of differences under the homogeneity of Capital. Here the nominations should not lead us astray. When we claim that Jullien hinders China’s great modernization by magnifying the differences between philosophy and Chinese thought, or forbids China from entering the unified world of representative democracy and the free market (an end that humanism holds to be obvious), we are speaking of a unique space wholly different from what François Jullien is actually proposing. Let us come out and say it: we become, once more, the harbingers of the West’s pretentions.

And here we start to see why Jullien ends up fighting his battle on two fronts – and why, incidentally, he has twice the usual number of enemies. On the one hand, Jullien erects against academic sinology a process of thought that employs the logic of differences and identities only in order to unfence the space of the exercise. This turns sinology outwards. On the other, against ‘democratic’ propaganda, which seeks to incorporate China into our twilight ruminations posthaste, he erects a process of thought that surmounts differences and identities only in order to make their irreducibility intelligible. And the point this time is to take the surpassing of sinology and turn it back inwards.

Jullien’s paradoxical course illuminates the edge of each difference by the separation of identities, and then the identities by the spanning of differences. At the end he gives unto thought the gift of what is now a fundamental hypothesis: there is but one world, true, but the world is structured by distinct lines of thought. Those who uphold the new democratic world order, like the culturalists of multiplicity, are fiercely opposed to this hypothesis. It is thus in no way surprising that Jullien should have to cross swords. Keep right or keep left; you have no chance in the center. Your idea is too potent.

It is a magisterial and risky battle. As Spinoza said, all that is true is as difficult as it is rare. I too have my discussions with François Jullien. Some are political, because I think that the opening of the Chinese world includes the universality of certain aspects of the Maoist adventure, among them, for better or worse, the Cultural Revolution, however ‘Chinese’ that adventure might be. And some of our discussions are philosophical, because I think the Chinese difference is less external to philosophy than internal by default. Chinese thought retains some of the axioms that underlie philosophy, limitlessly magnifies certain others, and throws out a few. But to have these discussions we must acknowledge that Jullien’s diagonal studies are extremely important, novel, and fecund.

When one is a philosopher of post-dialectical dialectic (apologies, but this is how I would like to define myself), one should hold that adversity is both a natural environment and of no great importance. Yes, François Jullien, your enemies are many and entrenched, but they too are of no importance. Let us forget them and move on.

Translated by Pedro Rodriguez