François Jullien


François Jullien is a French philosopher, Hellenist, and sinologist.

Biography

An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure and holder 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 in 1978 and his French research doctorate in Far East studies in 1983.
Since then Jullien has been head of the Antenne Française de Sinologie in Hong Kong, a guest of the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo, president of the Association Française d'Etudes Chinoises, director of the East Asia department of Paris Diderot University–Paris VII, president of the Collège International de Philosophie, 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.
Jullien has edited several anthologies for the Presses Universitaires de France 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. 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" , 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."
When Jullien was awarded the Grand Prix de Philosophie of the Académie Française, 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.

Work and concepts

Since first establishing what he refers to as his philosophical construction yard 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 of both History and nature. The aim of this "deconstruction" from without is to detect buried biases, in both cultures, as well as to elucidate the unthought-of in our thought. It serves also to bring out the resources or fecundities 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.
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 is to put écarts to work. Because they establish distance, écarts bring out "the between" and put our reflection into tension. "The similar", 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". This marks a departure from Being, the major bias of Greek philosophy. The result is a general philosophy that unfolds as a philosophy of existence. Some of Jullien's recent developments in this area include reflections on intimacy and "landscape".
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, as opposed to "plans of action"; maturation, as opposed to projected modelizations; and the initiation of silent transformations, 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" ; the distinction between the word and speech ; and the concepts of the allusive, availability, indirectness, and obliquity .
The art world has begun to adopt the concepts of silent transformation; of the "great image" ; of soaring and slackness ; of the frontal and the oblique ; of coherence, as opposed to sense ; of the allusive, as opposed to the symbolic. The art world has also begun to adopt the concepts of the écart and the between. 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 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 into English :
Currently being translated :
In French :
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:
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 and help create the conditions for a new reflexivity 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 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.