François Jullien’s
Unexceptional Thought
Global Aesthetic Research
Series Editor: Joseph J. Tanke, Professor,
Department of Philosophy, University of Hawaiʻi
The Global Aesthetic Research series publishes cutting-edge research in the field of aesthetics. It contains books that explore the principles at work in our encounters with art and nature, that interrogate the foundations of artistic, literary, and cultural criticism, and that articulate the theory of the discipline’s central concepts.
Titles in the Series
Early Modern Aesthetics, J. Colin McQuillan
Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Catherine M. Soussloff
Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali
Living Off Landscape, or, the Unthought-of in Reason, Francois Jullien, translated by Pedro Rodríguez
Between Nature and Culture: The Aesthetics of Modified Environments, Emily Brady, Isis Brook, and Jonathan Prior
Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins, Zoltán Somhegyi
François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction, Arne De Boever
François Jullien’s
Unexceptional Thought
A Critical Introduction
Arne De Boever
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-575-6
PB 978-1-78661-576-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN: 978-1-78661-575-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78661-576-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78661-577-0 (electronic)
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction: “Not the Exceptional, but the Unheard Of”
1 Chinese Utopias in Contemporary French Thought
2 In Between Landscape and the Nude
3 In Management as in War
4 François Jullien in Dialogue
Conclusion: For Future François Julliens
Index
About the Author
This book grew out of a long-standing research interest of mine—namely, the presence of the Far East in contemporary French thought. The book wouldn’t have happened without Joseph Tanke’s recommendation, offered one fine evening in Honolulu, that I read François Jullien’s book In Praise of Blandness, which Joseph described as “one of the most beautiful books ever written in the French language.” He understood, before I did, the connections between that book and my critique of Western exceptionalism. I followed his recommendation and read In Praise of Blandness—and many more books by Jullien. I think it’s only fitting that this book ended up in the Global Aesthetic Research series that Joseph edits.
Olivia C. Harrison kindly picked up some Jullien books for me in Paris and discussed the introduction and chapter 1 of this book with me. I am also grateful for Olivia’s extensive written comments on chapter 1. Martin Woessner heard me out about chapter 3 and provided comments on an early version of chapter 2. He also commented on early versions of chapters 1 and 3.
During the 2018–2019 academic year, I was able to work closely with my graduate student research assistants Carl Schmitz and Clara Wenrong Lee on each of the book’s chapters, which helped push the book forward at a steady pace. Some of the work I did with my graduate student Rose Sheela on critical surf studies also resonates in this book’s third and fourth chapters. I am grateful to the provost’s office at the California Institute of the Arts and its Research and Practice Fellowship Program that helped support that work.
A version of chapter 2 was originally published as “François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought” in boundary 2 47 (1) (2020): 1–42 (republished by permission) and benefited from the peer review that I received as part of that process. Some of my early thoughts on Jullien ended up in Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (2019), and writing that short book contributed significantly to the work that ultimately ended up in this volume.
In an interview, François Jullien resists the notion that because one writes a lot the work must by necessity be of poor quality. I hope my work, too, can contribute to that resistance.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this book are mine.
Introduction: “Not the Exceptional, but the Unheard Of”
Étudier dé-familiarise (Studying defamiliarizes).
—François Jullien, in interview with Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire1
Points of Reference; or, François Jullien’s Second Life
Born in 1957, François Jullien obtained his degree in philosophy in the mid-1970s and left to China to study at the universities of Beijing and Shanghai. In the late 1970s, he moved to Hong Kong to take up a position at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China. Later still, in the mid-1980s, he was a researcher at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo.2