François Jullien

François Jullien
Born 2 June 1951
Embrun, Hautes-Alpes
Era Contemporary philosophy
Main interests
 Chinese philosophy

François Jullien (born 2 June 1951 in Embrun, France) is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.

He started down his intellectual path by moving from Europe to China, which he selected specifically to be an elsewhere (ailleurs). The move was intended to disorient his thinking and thus allow him both to discover other possibilities of mind and to get beyond the givens of European thought: its "évidences," the mere expressions of its biases. In this way Jullien could call into question the very way European thought calls things into question.

This perspectival shift underlies Jullien's early work in morality, efficacy, and strategy and his conceptions of literature and painting. The resulting deconstruction proceeded not from within European thought but from without, from a separate language-thought—namely, Chinese—that had long remained external to Europe.

This vis-à-vis in turn led Jullien to think of cultural diversity no longer in terms of "differences," which presuppose the existence of cultural "identities" for their possible "comparison," but in terms of what he calls écarts. In setting cultures face to face across an écart we unfold a between, a space where the common—the mutually intelligible—comes to light. Thus the "dia-logue" of cultures suddenly becomes a pertinent notion: not through any tolerance of differences but because reason—de- and re-categorization—comes into play.

Julien has since developed this reflectivity of languages and systems of thought, and the stakes therein, into a mode of thought that promotes existence, in opposition to both the banalities of wisdom and the "personal development" market.

François Jullien is one of the world's most translated contemporary thinkers. [1]

Biography

An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and holder (since 1974) of the agrégation, France's professorial degree, François Jullien studied Chinese language and thought at Peking University and Shanghai University from 1975 to 1977. He received his French university doctorate (doctorat de troisième cycle) in 1978 and his French research doctorate (doctorat d'État) in Far East studies in 1983.

Since then Jullien has been head of the Antenne Française de Sinologie in Hong Kong (1978–1981), a guest of the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo (1985–1987), president of the Association Française d'Etudes Chinoises (1988–1990), director of the East Asia department (UFR) of Paris Diderot University–Paris VII (1990–2000), president of the Collège International de Philosophie (1995–1998), professor at Paris Diderot University, and director of both the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine and the Centre Marcel-Granet.

He was a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France from 2001 to 2011 and is the current Chair of Alterity at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris).

Jullien has edited several anthologies for the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) and for the Agenda de la Pensée Contemporaine, the latter published first by PUF, then by Éditions Hermann. Several conferences dealing with his philosophy have been held in France and abroad (Germany, Argentina, China, Vietnam). Among the most recent are:

Jullien received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in Germany in 2010 and the Grand Prix de Philosophie of the Académie Française for his body of work in 2011.

Marcel Gauchet has summed up François Jullien's work in the following terms: "The work of François Jullien seems to me to follow the grand lines of the unwritten but oh-so-influential program of what I shall call the twentieth-century anthropological school. Primarily but not exclusively French, this school came to fruition in the work of Durkheim, Mauss, Granet, Lévi-Strauss, and a few others as well. It is, in a word, the school of Western decentralization. [...] These various undertakings have made it possible for us to conceive of an "outside" ["dehors"], to borrow a particularly felicitous term from François Jullien. [...] But François Jullien is not content to contribute to this most difficult of enterprises. He has brought the decentralization to its fulfilment, for he has turned it back on the West. In particular, he has done this in the field of philosophy, something no one had ever done before, and by taking on China's alterity, which, it must be said, provided a privileged standpoint. He has thus carried decentralization further than his predecessors. He has shown us how to look from 'elsewhere' at our most theoretical and abstract thought, dealing with the fundamental categories that allow us to apprehend any object spontaneously. He has become the ethnologist of our conceptual universe."[2]

When Jullien was awarded the Grand Prix de Philosophie of the Académie Française (2011), Angelo Rinaldi presented his work as follows: "The variety of subjects this philosopher-sinologist has taken on could lead one to imagine a scattershot oeuvre. On the contrary, there is in François Jullien's work a strong unity of thought and a clear progression. Pierre Nora sums it up in a phrase: the thought that lies between China and Greece. The purpose, indeed, is to consider the unthought-of in our thought, which has arisen on the foundations laid by Greece. To this end, China offers an oblique way in, a chance to redirect our gaze upon ourselves and see ourselves from without. The priority for François Jullien is to constitute this exteriority, and the remainder of his work consists of a reevaluation of the foundations of European thought. Awaiting us at the far end of this road are the general questions that interest us all directly: does 'the universal' exist, what might we hold in 'common,' what is the meaning of 'unity,' 'difference,' or 'conformity'? What we now call the 'dialogue of cultures' is clearly at the center of this philosopher's concerns, and it is this ever-present theme that makes him relevant for us today."

François Jullien is among the most translated of contemporary thinkers, with works appearing in some twenty-five countries. More than twenty of his essays have been translated into German, Italian, and Spanish, and a dozen have been translated into English, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Portuguese.[3]

Work and concepts

Since first establishing what he refers to as his philosophical construction yard (chantier) to explore the écart between Chinese and European thought François Jullien has been organizing a vis-à-vis between cultures, rather than comparing them, so as to map out a common field for reflection. His work has led him to examine such various disciplines as ethics, aesthetics, strategy, and the systems of thought (pensées) of both History and nature. The aim of this "deconstruction" from without (du déhors) is to detect buried biases, in both cultures, as well as to elucidate the unthought-of (l'impensé) in our thought. It serves also to bring out the resources (ressources) or fecundities (fécondités) of languages and cultures, rather than consider them from the perspective of their "difference" or "identity." Moreover, it launches philosophy anew by extricating it from the bog of its atavisms and purging it of facile notions (évidences). The enterprise has not failed to raise hackles in both philosophical and Orientalist circles. Jullien has argued in response that the way to produce the common (produire du commun) is to put écarts to work. Because they establish distance, écarts bring out "the between" ("l'entre") and put our reflection into tension. "The similar" ("le semblable"), on the other hand, produces only what is uniform, which we then mistake for "universals." Within this construction yard between the languages and systems of thought of China and Europe, Jullien has since developed a philosophy of "living" (philosophie du "vivre"). This marks a departure from Being, the major bias of Greek philosophy. The result is a general philosophy that unfolds (se déploie) as a philosophy of existence. Some of Jullien's recent developments in this area include reflections on intimacy ("l'intime") and "landscape" ("paysage"). For a survey of Jullien's work, see De l'Être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée, Gallimard, 2015. The readership for Jullien's work has been expanding of late beyond the disciplines of Orientalism and philosophy. The world of management has begun to adopt such concepts as situational potential (potentiel de situation), as opposed to "plans of action"; maturation (of conditions), as opposed to projected modelizations; and the initiation of silent transformations ("transformations silencieuses"), to induce change rather than impose it. Cf. A Treatise on Efficacy, 2004; Conférence sur l'efficacité, 2005. The world of psychology and analysis has begun to adopt the concept of "silent transformation" (cf. The Silent Transformations, 2011); the distinction between the word and speech (cf. Si parler va sans dire, 2006); and the concepts of the allusive (l'allusif), availability (la disponibilité), indirectness (le biais), and obliquity (l'obliquité) (cf. Cinq concepts proposés à la psychanalyse, 2012). The art world has begun to adopt the concepts of silent transformation; of the "great image" ("The great image has no form"); of soaring (l'essor) and slackness (l'étale) (slackness is what is determined, what has completely come to pass, and has therefore lost its effect; soaring is the upstream of the effect, when the effect is still occurring, still at work, and has not yet gone slack); of the frontal and the oblique (evocation, being oblique, might be preferable to representation, which is frontal: "paint the clouds so as to evoke the moon"); of coherence, as opposed to sense (if a work does not deliver a "sense," then is it not co-herence that confers the work's con-sistency, that makes it "hold together" as a work?); of the evasive, as opposed to the assignable); of the allusive, as opposed to the symbolic. The art world has also begun to adopt the concepts of the écart and the between (l'entre). Because it is based on distinction, difference specifies an essence and stores it away as knowledge. An écart, however, establishes a distance and thus maintains a tension between the things it separates. Even while producing its disturbance, the écart brings forth a between, precisely because of the distance established. If the "between" is the thing of which ontology cannot conceive—because it has no in-itself: i.e., no essence—it is also the space through which [the thing] passes, or occurs: the space of the operatory and the effective. Cf. In Praise of Blandness, 1997; The Impossible Nude, 2007; The Great Image Has No Form, 2012; This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, 2016.

Works

Translated in english :

Now being translated :

In french :

Translations

Secondary Literature

Selected Articles and Interviews

In Le Débat

In Other Languages

Criticism

François Jullien's work has been criticized by certain sinologists, chief among them Jean-François Billeter. The two principal texts published by Billeter against Jullien and his method are:

Replies and Arguments

François Jullien at the International Geography Festival of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, October 2013

François Jullien's reply to the charge that he portrays China as "an alterity" appears in Chemin faisant, Connaître la Chine, relancer la philosophie. There he argues that the unreferenced quotations used by Jean-François Billeter are fabrications and that Billeter attempts to construct an imaginary version of François Jullien's work to argue against. The crux of the matter for Jullien is that exteriority and alterity are not to be conflated. China's exteriority, Jullien's point of departure, is, he argues, evident in its language as well as in its history, whereas alterity must be constructed and, as internal heterotopia, is to be found in both Europe and China. Rather than relegate China to a separate, isolated world, Jullien claims to weave a problematics between China and Europe, a net that can then fish out an unthought-of (un impensé) and help create the conditions for a new reflexivity (réflexivité) between the two cultures.

Jullien has dealt with the question of criticizing Chinese ideology several times in his work: La Propension des choses, chapter II; Le Détour et l'accès, chapters I to VI; Un sage est sans idée, final pages; etc. He thus separates himself from those who, out of fascination with strangeness or exoticism, have upheld the image of China as an "other." He separates himself also from those who, like Jean-François Billeter, permit themselves to dip into a "common fund" of thought and thus miss a chance to benefit from the diversity of human thought, which for Jullien is its true resource. He argues that we must reject both facile universalism (which springs from ethnocentrism) and lazy relativism (which leads to culturalism) in favor of a "dia-logue" of the two cultures: the "dia" of the écart, which reveals the fecundity of multiple lines of thought, and the "logos," which allows these lines to communicate through a common intelligence.

For a collective reply to the criticism of Jean-François Billeter, see Oser construire, Pour François Jullien, with notable contributions from Philippe d'Iribarne, Jean Allouche, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Wolfgang Kubin, Du Xiaozhen, Léon Vandermeersch, Bruno Latour, Paul Ricœur, and Alain Badiou.

References

  1. ↑ http://francoisjullien.hypotheses.org/biographie/credits
  2. ↑ Gauchet, Marcel, Dérangements-Aperçus, autour du travail de François Jullien, Hermann, p. 174, 175.
  3. ↑ http://francoisjullien.hypotheses.org/biographie/credits
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