François Jullien

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François Jullien

François Jullien (born June 2, 1951 in Embrun , Hautes-Alpes ) is a French philosopher and sinologist .

Life

François Jullien graduated from the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm from 1972 to 1977 (Agregation 1974), and studied Chinese at the universities of Beijing and Shanghai (1975–1977). From 1978 to 1981 he headed the Antenna Française de sinologie in Hong Kong . From 1985 to 1987 Jullien was a fellow in the Japanese-French House in Tokyo . In 1978 he received his doctorate in East Asian Studies, and in 1983 he received his habilitation in the humanities.

From 1988 to 1990 Jullien was President of the Association Française des Études Chinoises (French Society for Chinese Studies) and from 1995 to 1998 President of the Collège international de philosophie . From 2001 to 2011 he was "Membre senior de l'Institut Universitaire de France". From 2002 to 2011 he was “Directeur du Center Marcel Granet and Directeur d l'Institut de la pensée contemporaine”. He was also director of the “Agenda de la pensée contemporaine” at Éditions Hermann. Since 2004 he has been teaching classical Chinese philosophy and aesthetics as a professor at the University of Paris VII .

In other functions, François Jullien is also editor of the collections “Orientales” and “Libelles” (“diatribes”) at the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) publishing house in Paris. He is currently a professor at the University of Paris-Diderot (Paris VII) and holds the chair in Alterity at the Collège d'études mondiales de la Fondation de la maison des sciences de l'homme.

Various colloquia have been held around his work in France and other countries (Germany, Argentina, China, Austria, Viêt Nam), the most recent at the University of Paris-Diderot and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (December 2010, under the title “Disruptions - Notes ”), at Peking University (December 2013, entitled“ Summit Discussion ”) with Cheng Chung-Ying; in Cerisy-la-Salle (September 2013, under the title “Thoughts, the philosophical career of F. Jullien”); at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan (November 2013).

Research field

General Philosophy and Chinese Thought (the thinking of Ancient China and Neo-Confucianism; literary and aesthetic concepts of Classical China); intercultural problems.

Current research work

The work going on between Chinese thought and European philosophy aims at gaining distance from one's own thinking by exploring other lines of thought in the Far East than those developed by European thought, with the opposite direction and starting from this distance, the hidden "preliminary decisions" of European reason brought to light again and their "partiality", that is, their unthought, can again be put up for debate. By bringing the Chinese “ heterotopia ” into play, Jullien's work enables a new view of the European tradition - its thinking is de- and re-categorized and thus helps to reconfigure the field of the thinkable.

position

Jullien determines his place in philosophy as follows:

“What advantage do we gain from the (hoped-for) uprooting of thinking, an advantage that goes beyond the probing of our mind, the archeology of its ramifications, the new composition of the field of the thinkable? ... We shouldn't expect 'globalized' ... and boring thinking. ... Today we hesitate to simply speak of 'the person' and demand the definition of his being. Chinese thinking, on the other hand, if it inscribes itself comparatively in European thinking, can contribute to a self-reflection of the human. In this encounter the human can reflect itself through itself and through its changes. It no longer presupposes itself naively and beforehand, on the contrary, as the effect of this joining together, its various prior understandings can be patiently explored and new possibilities considered. "

- François Jullien

In this way, Jullien wants to get the philosophy going again.

Downsides. From evil or negative

In his political book Downsides. Vom Böse oder Negativen (2005), Jullien examines the transformation of the concept of the ›negative‹ as well as the ›evil‹ and, as in all of his works, confronts their western development with Chinese thought. In a new way, this approach enables a look at the 'productive' forces of the negative in times of worldwide homogenization.

“It seems that what is commonly traded today under the name of ' globalization ' has radically changed the conditions of the possibility of the negative. Before that, the negative was the other block or the other class. Globalization has dissolved this externality, through which the negative (which history has also worked with) could be discharged.

As soon as there is no longer the other camp on the outside, where the negative can be located, this logically leads to its internalization, because the negative does not disappear, rather it is 'suppressed' and then no longer acts openly but in secret.

It is therefore important to ask the question of the active 'logic'. Because is September 11th (2001) really an event as it has been claimed, or even the (all of a sudden) event par excellence? Does this date actually have the function of a break-in due to its surprise effect and what triggered it? I would rather see in it the sudden, but comprehensive revelation of a ›silent change‹ and take this term from Chinese thinking. "

- François Jullien : The dark side. From Evil or Negative (2005)

For the German reception, the book Dialog über die Moral , a comparison of the Chinese philosopher Menzius with the philosophy of the Enlightenment, is important.

criticism

François Jullien's work has been criticized from various quarters, notably from some sinologists, most notably Jean François Billeter . He mainly published two texts against François Jullien and his method:

  • Comment lire Wang Fuzhi ? - this article is against the book Procès ou création (1989)
  • Contre François Jullien (2006) this book criticizes the entire work of Jullien.

Contre François Jullien accuses Jullien of having seen the China that he wanted to see and of exaggerating the Chinese otherness. This subject is an ideological construction of the imperial Chinese power, which the mandarins , the learned representatives of the central power, had conveyed to the Jesuit missionaries . From then on, this 'myth' contaminated Sinology and the general image that the West has of China via Leibniz , Voltaire , Marcel Granet , Victor Segalen, etc. By perpetuating this myth, Jullien perpetuates this tradition that obscures the true political sources of 'Chinese thought'.

In response to the criticism, François Jullien published Chemin faisant, connaître la Chine, relancer la philosophie (Seuil, 2007). There he shows that Jean-François Billeter quotes freely invented formulations in quotation marks, but without reference, and in this way tries to create a picture of the work of François Jullien based on his imagination, which he then opposes with his own position. Above all, one should not confuse “exteriority” with “alterity”: the “exteriority” of China, from which François Jullien starts, can be seen both in language and in history; “Alterity”, on the other hand, is something that needs to be constructed and can also be found as an “internal heterotopia ” on both sides, the European and the Chinese. Far from isolating China as a world of its own, the work of François Jullien ties a thread of problems between China and Europe that allows the unthought to be grasped, thus helping to establish the conditions for a new “reflexivity” between cultures create.

With regard to the criticism to be made against the Chinese ideology in particular, François Jullien recalls that he carried this out in numerous parts of his work, for example in “On Effectiveness”, chap. 2; “Detour and access. Strategies of Sense in China and Greece ”Chap. 1 and 6; “The wise man is not attached to any idea” on the last pages, etc. He has nothing to do with those who did the favor of creating the image of a China that is completely “different” in order to satisfy their longing for the To satisfy strangers and exotic. However, he also distances himself from those who, like Billeter, believe that they can establish a “common fund”, but through which they cannot grasp the advantages of a diversity of human thought, which is his real resource. You have to reject frivolous universalism as well as easy relativism. And so François Jullien understands the actual "dialogue" of cultures at the same time as a "slide" of distance that brings to light the fertility of different ways of thinking, and as a "logos" that allows these ways of thinking to share a common intelligence communicate.

Several other philosophers and sinologists also commented on Billeter's criticism, namely in Oser construire, Pour François Jullien (Contributions de François Gaillard, Philippe d'Iribarne, Jean Allouch, Patrick Hochart, Philippe Jousset, Jean-Marie Schaeffer , Lin Chi-Ming , Wolfgang Kubin, Ramona Naddaff, Du Xiaozhen, Léon Vandermeersch, Bruno Latour, Paul Ricœur et Alain Badiou), Éditions Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2007.

reception

Marcel Gauchet says about François Jullien's work:

“The work of François Jullien seems to me to lie entirely in line with the, though not written, but all the more active program of what I call the Anthropological School of the 20th Century. A French school, if not exclusively, which developed the work of Durkheim, Mauss, Granet, Levi-Strauss and a few others. To put it briefly, it was the school of the decentration of the West […] These various endeavors have given us the opportunity to think from an 'outside' point of view - to use what seems to me to be a particularly successful expression of Jullien. [...] Now François Jullien was not satisfied with making a further contribution to this already extremely difficult endeavor, but has brought this decentering undertaking to completion by returning to the West. In doing so, he entered the field of philosophy, something that nobody had really done before him, by exposing himself to the Chinese otherness [altérité], which, it must be said, offered a particularly good prerequisite for this. He has taken the effort to decenter further than his predecessors. He has taught us to look at our most abstract, most theoretical thinking, that which forms the most fundamental categories that we use almost spontaneously to capture any object: he has made himself the ethnologist of our conceptual universe. "

- Marcel Gauchet : Dérangements-Aperçus, autour du travail de François Jullien, Hermann, p. 174f

On the occasion of the presentation of the Grand prix de philosophie de l'Académie Française for his complete works (2011), Angelo Rinaldi said:

“The thematic variety to which this philosopher and sinologist dedicated himself could lead one to assume that this is a widely scattered, fragmented work. On the contrary, in François Jullien we find a clear unity of thought and development. Pierre Nora summarized this in a formula: Thinking between China and Greece. In fact, it is about reflecting on the unthought of our thinking, the foundations of which were laid in Greece. For this, China offers the means of lateral access, a possibility to bend over ourselves and look at ourselves from the outside. François Jullien is concerned first of all with the constitution of this exteriority; the other side of his work is to return to the fundamentals of European thought. On the horizon of these paths, general questions await him that are of direct interest to all of us: Are there 'universal' things, what can we have in common, what are the meanings of 'unity', 'difference' and 'conformity' [conformité]? At the center of the concerns of this philosopher is actually what is now called the 'dialogue of cultures' and it is this constantly present topic that makes it topical. "

- Angelo Rinaldi

François Jullien is one of the most widely translated thinkers today (in around 25 languages); more than twenty of his essays have appeared in German, Italian and Spanish, and a dozen in English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Portuguese.

position

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On his construction site in the “between” China and Europe, François Jullien did not stop instead of comparing them, organizing their confrontation in order to spread a common field of reflection between them. Drawn to wander between fields as different as those of morality, aesthetics, strategy, the thinking of history and nature, he ultimately aims to track down the partial pre-decisions buried on both sides through this "destruction" carried out from outside thus bringing our unthought to light. This is also a way of looking at cultures in terms of their possible “fertility” rather than from the point of view of their “identity”, and thus to free philosophy from its atavistic repetition compulsion.

This approach has of course led to disturbances in both philosophy and oriental studies. On the other hand, François Jullien has shown that what is “in common” is not so much brought about through what is “similar” [semblable], which remains fruitless, but rather by allowing the “distances” [les écarts] to work, by enabling a distance, letting an “in-between” emerge and putting it in tension.

In the meantime, François Jullien has developed a philosophy of “life” [vivre] from this thinking of the “between” and the demand for “putting in tension”, which enables a departure from thinking about being. In recent years he has especially developed the idea of ​​the "upswing" [essor] both in the area of ​​the "intimate" and the landscape, which opposes the "flat standstill" [étale] of life.

A summary of this work can be found in his work “De l'Être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée”, Gallimard, 2015.

membership

  • Since 2001: Institut Universitaire de France

Awards

Visiting professorships

  • 1993: University of Montreal
  • 1996: Chaire Perelman at the Free University of Brussels
  • 1996: Beijing University
  • 2011: Institut Polytechnique Zurich
  • 2013: Jiaoyu daxue, Taipei

Publications

  • About the effectiveness. Merve , Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-88396-156-9 .
  • About the fade - an eulogy . Thinking and aesthetics in China. Merve, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-88396-151-4 .
  • Detour and access. Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece. Passagen, Vienna 2000 (original title: Le détour et l'accès. Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce. Grasset, Paris 1995. Translated by Markus Sedlaczek), ISBN 978-3-85165-407-3 .
  • The wise man is not attached to any idea. Fink, Munich 2001.
  • The detour via China. Merve, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-3-88396-177-4 .
  • About the essence of the naked. Diaphanes, Berlin / Zurich 2003sequencia, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-935300-42-1 .
  • Dialogue about morals. Merve, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-88396-184-2 .
  • Over time". Diaphanes, Zurich / Berlin 2004.
  • with Karine Chemla and Jacqueline Pigeot: The Art of Making Lists. Merve, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-88396-201-6 .
  • Downsides. About the bad and the negative. Diaphanes Zurich / Berlin 2005.
  • A deconstruction from the outside. From Greece to China or how to explore the entrenched ideas of European reason. (Bilingual: German and French) in the series: German-French interactions , translated by Felix Heidenreich, published by DVA-Stiftung , Stuttgart 2005 (therein: List of major works in French up to 2004, p. 54f.)
  • Feed his life. Away from happiness. Merve, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-88396-219-1 .
  • Lecture to managers about effectiveness and efficiency in China and the West. Merve, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-88396-223-8 .
  • The universal, the uniform, the common and the dialogue between cultures. Merve, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-88396-262-7 .
  • The silent changes. Merve, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-88396-284-9 .
  • The monkey bridge. Passagen, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-85165-972-6 .
  • The strange idea of ​​the beautiful. Passagen, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7092-0050-6 .
  • China and Psychoanalysis. Five concepts. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-85132-703-8 .
  • Philosophy of life. Passagen, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-7092-0018-6 .
  • The way to the other. Alterity in the age of globalization. Passagen, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-7092-0117-6 .
  • Thoughts. Possible ways of the mind. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-95757-020-8 .
  • From landscape life, or the unthought of reason , Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2016
  • There is no such thing as a cultural identity. We defend a culture's resources. Translated from the French by Erwin Landrichter. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-12718-6 .
  • De-coincidence. Art and existence. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-85132-934-6 .
  • From the intimate. Far from noisy love. Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-85132-940-7 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Jullien, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher and sinologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Embrun , Hautes-Alpes