Wang, ShiPu. 2008. Review of The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics, by François Jullien. China Review International 15 (2): 234–43.
Chinese Utopias in Contemporary French Thought
But beware of fascination with China, beware of the East that would save us from the narrowness of European categories, beware of the mysticisms, beware of the East that is the obverse of the West, beware of the irrational East, beware of the gurus’ East . . . François Jullien vehemently attacks using China as “the West’s safety valve” or as “an instant solution for Europe’s theoretical aporia.
—Thierry Zarcone, in conversation with François Jullien1
Radical Chic, Radical Orientalism
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind of representational agency, call the Maoist.
—Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora 2
In Le pont des singes: De la diversité à venir (The monkey bridge: on diversity to come), a short book that appears to have been triggered by a visit to Vietnam, François Jullien refers to himself as an “orientalist” (Jullien 2010, 57). Since Jullien is not only a Hellenist but also a sinologist—a specialist of classical China in particular—the designation is technically correct: as an academic who studies China, Jullien is very much an orientalist. But as Jullien knows very well, that term—“orientalist”—comes with a lot of baggage, and so on the one occasion in his extensive oeuvre where he applies the dubious term to himself (I know of no other instance where he does), it arrives in the context, precisely, of a reflection on orientalism:
En tant qu’orientaliste, je sais ce qu’il faut, au contraire, de patience et de modestie, de décatégorisations et récatégorisations infinies, pour envisager d’entrer dans d’autres cohérences et commencer à déplier sa pensée. (Ibid.; emphasis mine)
As an orientalist, I know that what’s needed, on the contrary, is patience and modesty, infinite decategorizations and recategorizations, to envisage entering into other coherences and to begin to unwork [déplier] one’s thought.
As he indicates just before the passage I have quoted here, this is a question of breaking out of “l’hégémonie historique de l’Occident” (the historical hegemony of the occident; ibid.).
In what follows, I would like to hold Jullien’s work up to the standard he lays out here—of breaking out of the historical hegemony of the West and into what he enables us to describe as the “other coherence” of China. Part of my interest is in considering Jullien’s work as an orientalist and questioning its relationship to orientalism—a project that can hardly be avoided in this context. I will pursue such a consideration in order to lay out the key terms of Jullien’s thought as he has developed them throughout his work—but especially in the context of his reflections on the universal (which came late in his career but will be central to this chapter). English-language readers already have access to Jullien’s book On the Universal (2014a), which captures some of that thinking; but I will be working mostly with three still-untranslated texts: the already-mentioned Le pont des singes (Monkey bridge; 2010) but also the lecture L’écart et l’entre (Divergence and the in-between; 2012), later published in an expanded form as the short book Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle (There is no cultural identity; 2016a). Starting from what I understand to be the antiorientalist positions that are laid out in that book as well as the lecture, I then return to Jullien’s Vietnam book—a sort of travelogue against orientalist travelogues—to critically assess it through the lens of his own antiorientalism.
As a way to mark his own approach as a scholar of China, Jullien often refers critically to “Chinese utopias” in French thought. In L’écart et l’entre, he notes that those utopias are numerous, but he does not spell them out. Those familiar with contemporary French theory may see a reference here to the Paris-based avant-garde group of philosophers and writers who created the journal Tel Quel (As is) and who had what Jean Chesneaux characterizes as a “love affair” with “Maoist China” in the 1970s (Chesneaux 1987, 21). Ieme van der Poel writes in this context of the “maolâtrie française” (French maolatry; van der Poel 1993, 432) of Tel Quel writers Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, and François Wahl, who together undertook a three-week trip to China in 1974 and reported back about it in their writings (Jacques Lacan was supposed to go but didn’t; in an interview, Sollers points out that “the person who was most interested in China was Lacan”; Kao 1981, 34). Across their works, these writers produced a largely “idealized” and “fantasy-like” (ibid., 431, my translation; on 435, van der Poel has “phantasmatic”) image of China that has by now been well criticized. (The exception was, perhaps, Wahl, who attacked his colleagues’ “sinophilia” but was accused by them of “sinophobia,” with antiorientalist tendencies evident in both positions; Hayot 2004, 153.)
There is plenty of scholarship on Tel Quel, and my goal is not to review all of it here. Apart from van der Poel, who seeks to understand why China was able to take on “the magical aspect of a modern Utopia in the writings of the Telquelians” (van der Poel 1993, 435), United States–based critics Lisa Lowe and Eric Hayot have already explored these Chinese hallucinations (Barthes himself uses the term; Hayot 2004, 154) or dreams, with Hayot dedicating a full third of his book Chinese Dreams to Tel Quel (he writes of Tel Quel’s “dream logic” [ibid., 122] in its approach to China) and Lowe discussing Tel Quel as a separate case alongside Kristeva and Barthes in Critical Terrains (Lowe 1991). Both Hayot and Lowe refer in this context to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” which skewered Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women, a direct result of Tel Quel’s China trip (Spivak 1981). Spivak arguably played a leading role in the later debates about Tel Quel as well as Western representations of China in general not just due to this review but also due to her critical comments, in her introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, about Derrida’s use of China in that book (see Chow 2001 and Bohm, Staten, and Chow 2001; see also Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015).3
Lowe’s account in particular can be said to continue Spivak’s argument in that it criticizes the orientalist features of Kristeva’s, Barthes’, and Tel Quel’s accounts of China (the ways in which they are “disturbingly reminiscent of [earlier French orientalism’s] postures and rhetorics”; Lowe 1991, 137). Those features are all the more damning given the antiorientalism of some of Barthes’ work before Empire of Signs (his book about Japan) or his writings on China—specifically the entry “Continent perdu” (Lost continent) in Mythologies. This “irony” leads Lowe to speak of a “postcolonial form of orientalism” to describe such orientalist antiorientalist formations. Lowe criticizes Kristeva and Barthes for “constitut[ing] China as an irreducibly different Other outside Western signification and the coupling of signifier and signified” (ibid., 138). She further criticizes them for construing China as “feminine or maternal” and “disrupt[ing] the ‘phallocentric’ occidental social system” (139). Lowe’s analysis of Barthes is particularly provocative in that it traces the shift in his writing “from the targeting of orientalism as an object of criticism in the late 1950s to the dramatic practice of orientalism as a writing strategy in the mid-1970s” (153) in an attempt to escape the dominant Western point of view:
Ironically, Barthes’ attempt to resolve the dilemma of criticizing Western ideology while escaping the tyranny of binary logic takes a form not unlike that of traditional orientalism: through an invocation of the Orient as a utopian space, Barthes constitutes an imaginary third position. The imagined Orient—as critique of the Occident—becomes an emblem of his “poetics of escape,” a desire to transcend semiology and the ideology of the signifier and the signified, to invent a place that exceeds binary structure itself. (154)
Lowe