François Jullien

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

François Jullien (born 2 June 1951) is a French philosopher and sinologist.

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.".[1] 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.[2]

Work

Since first setting out to explore the "écart" between them, François Jullien has been organizing a vis-à-vis between Chinese and European thought, rather than comparing the two, so as to map out a common field for reflection. In so doing he has been led to examine such various disciplines as ethics, aesthetics, strategy, history, and the study of nature. His aim in conducting this "deconstruction" from without (du déhors) is to detect buried assumptions, on both sides, as well as to elucidate the unthought-of (l'impensé) in our thought. This is, moreover, a way to coax forth the fecundities (fécondités) of the two cultures, rather than consider them from the perspective of their "identity," and a way to launch philosophy anew by extricating it from the bog of its atavisms. The enterprise has not failed to raise hackles in philosophical and orientalist circles. In response to his opposition, François Jullien has argued that starting with similitude (le semblable) is fruitless and that the exploration of "écarts" is what can provide the thinker with a certain remove, bring forth a middle ground (l'entre), reveal a tension between the two sides, and thus produce commonality (le commun). François Jullien has since taken this philosophy of what lies between (pensée de l'entre) and developed a philosophy of life (philosophie du "vivre"), which departs explicitly from the philosophy of being and requires the establishment of a tension (mise en tension). Over the past few years he has in particular developed—in terms both of intimacy (l'intime) and of landscape (paysage)—a philosophy of soaring (l'essor), which he sets in opposition to the slackness (l'étale) of life. For an overview of Jullien's work, see De l'Être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée, Gallimard, March 2015.

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 against which to set his own position. The crux of Jullien's argument 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 is equally relevant, as internal heterotopia, to 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 his approach to China from fascination with strangeness or exoticism and rejects the image of China as an "other." Jullien cautions against an approach like that of Jean-François Billeter, which he characterizes as dipping into a "common fund" of thought and thus as overlooking the benefits of a diversity of human thought, which for Jullien is its very wellspring. Thus, he argues, we must reject both facile universalism and lazy relativism 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.

Works

Translations

Secondary literature

Selected articles and interviews

In Le Débat

In other languages

References

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