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RALPH WEBER

CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN,” OR WHERE

AND WHAT IS CHINA, PHILOSOPHICALLY
SPEAKING?

Abstract

This article is about François Jullien and a controversy that arose

over the publication of a pamphlet by Jean François Billeter
entitled Against François Jullien, replied by Jullien in a volume
subtitled Reply to *** (the asterisks standing for Billeter) and
followed by collections of essays by French (and some German)
intellectuals—one of them entitled For Jullien. The controversy
assumed a weight that went beyond Jullien and the French debate
to the heart of sinology and also of philosophy. The question, what
and where China is philosophically speaking, is discussed with
regard to the role of context, the notion of heterotopy, and the
political side of talk about China.

I. Introduction

When Jean François Billeter, sinologist and professor emeritus of the

University of Geneva, sat down to write Contre François Jullien, he no
doubt meant to oppose somebody for something.1 Yet, whom or what
he was opposing is less clear than the title of his essay suggests. Surely,
he takes issue with François Jullien, the prolific writer and widely read
Parisian sinologist and philosopher. In Billeter’s view, Jullien depicts
China in a simplifying as well as idealizing manner and completely
ignores the problematic proximity of the Chinese scholar-officials (the
literati, les lettrés) to imperial power—that is, precisely the group of
people whom Jullien presents as if they had been in corpore and
largely uni sono “the carrier of ‘Chinese thought’ across the centu-
ries.”2 But Billeter is also opposing a whole line of doing sinology,
comprising Victor Segalen (1878–1919), Marcel Granet (1884–1940),
Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930), and Pierre Ryckmans (alias Simon

RALPH WEBER, Assistant Professor, Institute for European Global Studies, University
of Basel. Specialties: comparative philosophy, Chinese philosophy, political philosophy.
E-mail: ralph.weber@unibas.ch.
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41:3–4 (September–December 2014) 361–377
V
C 2015 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
362 RALPH WEBER

Leys, 1935-2014), whom he charges for having relied on and perpetu-

ated the “myth of China’s alterity” that eighteenth-century French
philosophes such as Voltaire first propagated. Jullien is one of them
insofar as he presents Chinese thought (eruditely and attractively in
form, to be sure) as the inverse of our thought.3 Finally, Billeter is also
opposing contemporary French intellectuals who embrace Jullien’s
picture of a “philosophical China” as the imaginative equivalent of a
republican elitism which they think they themselves embody. Behind
all of it, Billeter suggests to his readers, lurks a “large-scale ideological
phenomenon.”4
According to Jullien’s Chemin Faisant… Réplique à ***, this is all
mere pretence. Billeter’s essay, he contends, must be read sympto-
matically, for its author attacks precisely what he himself uncon-
sciously is guilty of, namely the positing of China as the absolute
Other.5 Both, Billeter and Jullien, hence reproach each other for pre-
senting China in terms of radical alterity and one might easily come to
think of their exchange as a matter between the two on that question.
Yet, the exchange between Billeter and Jullien has a dimension
beyond the two protagonists and beyond sinology and the question of
China’s alterity, which is clear from the many comments on the affair
(usually, particularly in France, in defense of Jullien).6 Some of the
contributors to Oser construire: Pour François Jullien, for instance, tell
us that Billeter’s critique is not leveled against fellow sinologists—in
fact it is not particularly about China or sinology at all—but it must be
understood in ideological terms as the latest attempt at promoting
bourgeois liberalism and positivism in the humanities.7 This at least is
what Alain Badiou and also Françoise Gaillard seem to claim.8 Bil-
leter, in turn, has responded in writing, emphasizing his proximity to
Hannah Arendt and pointing to “certain Parisian practices,” which
tightly link academic power to the world of media and which are based
on the mutual rendering of favors. Is it not “symptomatic,” Billeter
asks, “that François Jullien has dedicated his Réplique à *** … ‘to
some friends who doubted’?”9
Billeter’s Contre François Jullien apparently lends itself to a variety
of interpretations (a personal affair, a scholarly intervention in sinol-
ogy, an ideological intervention in French intellectual discourse, etc.)
and, given the interests involved on all sides, also to what are entirely
different uses. This is not surprising. What else could be expected of
an essay that takes issue with someone’s work about which something
very similar could be said? In a sense, the controversy over Jullien has
produced many a “Jullien,” ascribing to that figure what are different
standpoints and enlisting it in rather different camps. What cannot be
denied is that Jullien in recent years has had an impact on French
intellectual circles quite unparalleled by any other scholar writing
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 363

about China—although what precisely China stands for in his writing

is unclear and is one of the aims of this article to discuss. If we are to
believe some of the statements in support of Jullien, the stakes in the
whole affair are high. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, for instance, claims that
Jullien’s work constitutes no less than “one of the most decisive contri-
butions to contemporary philosophical thought at the international
level.”10
Looking at the international level it should be noted that, by way
of translation, Jullien has indeed become a prominent voice in the
Chinese as well as in the English-speaking academic worlds, mainly
but not only in the fields of comparative and Chinese philosophy.11
Anyone working in these fields knows of the tension there is
between emphasizing either the first or the second word in the
notion of “Chinese philosophy,” that is, between particularism and
universalism. With regard to Jullien, the tension is, for example,
manifest in the differences of opinion over whether he is to be con-
sidered a philosopher, as Jean-Marie Schaeffer obviously does, or a
sinologist, or both (Jullien has most recently referred to himself as a
“hybrid” in this regard).12 One question at the heart of this tension
between sinology and philosophy that concerns Jullien—but also
comparative philosophers more generally—is the one of where to
situate China topically.
In this article, I purposely ignore the many personal remarks on all
sides and do not deal with the peculiarities of French intellectual dis-
course, in which ad personam arguments and rhetorical flamboyancy
seem to come as naturally as they are considered inappropriate in
others. Instead, I focus on three related issues; each of which casts a
different light on the question of where and what China is philosophi-
cally speaking and each of which figures prominently in the exchange
between Billeter and Jullien as well as in other literature on Jullien. I
shall discuss each issue in terms of that literature, but also seek to offer
a problematization that goes beyond Jullien. The first issue is that of
the role and status of context when reading Chinese texts and when
writing about Chinese philosophy. The second issue concerns the
notion of heterotopy, which Jullien adopts from Foucault to answer
the question on context. The third issue, only touched upon in conclu-
sion, takes up one of Billeter’s criticism of Jullien, which brings the
whole controversy under the purview of ideology and attests to a side
of comparative philosophy that is less often discussed but is para-
mount in the controversy over “Jullien,” that is, the politics of Chinese
philosophy. These three issues obviously cannot and do not capture
the existing literature or treat Jullien’s work in any sense comprehen-
sively, but merely mirror my own purposes, that is, the use I wish to
make of the whole affair.
364 RALPH WEBER

II. Which Context? What For?

One point of contention between Billeter and Jullien is whether Chi-

nese texts should always be read with a view to their contexts, for
example, historical and sociological (Billeter), or whether they may or
should serve—besides a moderate contextual concern expressed by
intertextual reading—as a toolbox for doing philosophy (Jullien).13
This is of course a familiar and fundamental problem and has been the
source of many disputes across disciplines, past and present. Let us,
therefore, see what arguments we find on both sides, before finally
offering some more general remarks on the issue of the role and status
of context in comparative and other philosophy.
Billeter is straightforward in how he thinks one should go about
reading Chinese texts. These texts, he writes, “must be explained,
commented and placed in their contexts to be fully understood.”14
However, he does not mean generally to advocate a contextualist
understanding of text. To the contrary, in Billeter’s view, context is
clearly more important in the case of Chinese texts (thus, of course,
presupposing some alterity). He writes:
We can talk in the abstract about the thought of Pascal or that of Des-
cartes because we know more or less who these men were and in
what environment they lived. A sinologist who quotes Chinese
thinkers must remedy our ignorance about their deeds and their ges-
tures, about the society in which they operated. When he does not ful-
fil that obligation, what he teaches us about their thought risks being
dissipated in empty circles.15

And to fulfill that obligation is precisely what Jullien, according to Bil-

leter, fails to do. More so, he denies the Chinese thinkers their own
voice and does not let them develop their arguments in their way. In
fact, as Billeter claims, “it is always him [Jullien] who talks”; when Jul-
lien quotes Chinese thinkers, it is always done for no other purpose
than to complement his own discourse.16
Billeter sees the failure to take into account context even exempli-
fied in Jullien’s 1989 book Procès ou Création, which prominently
engages with Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) and of which Billeter otherwise
thinks highly, conceding that Jullien exposes the ideas of Wang “bril-
liantly”; yet, the merit, Billeter writes, would have been still higher
had he explained the self-understanding of Wang, the passions that
drove him and the dramatic epoch in which he lived.17 This is not a
new criticism but one that Billeter had expressed in more detail in an
article in 1990, which largely is an extended review of Jullien’s Procès
ou Création and to which Jullien in turn had responded in the next
issue of the same journal.18 In that response, Jullien makes clear that
whereas for Billeter, the book is (or should be) on the philosophy of
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 365

Wang Fuzhi, he is rather interested in “the reasons that have led Chi-
nese thought to grasp reality in terms of process rather than following
an optics of creation” and to this end, rather than getting lost in gener-
alities, he has decided to draw on the reading of one author which to
him “seemed particularly pertinent”—and happened to be Wang
Fuzhi.19 For Jullien, hence, Procès ou Création is not a book about
Wang Fuzhi, but a book starting out from Wang Fuzhi.20
It seems as if the issue between Billeter and Jullien could be framed
in terms of a decision as to whether Wang Fuzhi should be treated as
an end in itself (Billeter) or rather as a means for something else
(Jullien). That each of them has decided differently could simply
express that they pursue different interests. And these interests, if we
follow that line of reasoning a bit further, seem not to have changed
much since the 1990 exchange. This for instance shows when Billeter
records the reaction by fellow sinologists reproaching Jullien for hav-
ing made “such a dubitable contribution to the knowledge of China.”21
For Billeter, it is about knowledge of China. Jullien, by contrast, insists
that he does “in his view not at all seek to give a philosophical inter-
pretation of China,” nor for that matter any other kind of interpreta-
tion. Rather, Jullien explains:
My problem … is to make a philosophical use out of a passage
through Chinese thought. It is about knowing, in the case at hand,
whether one can philosophically exploit other configurations of
thought than those that have been elaborated all along the history of
what one calls, because it is convenient, ‘European thought’. It is
hence about a completely other matter. I do not pretend that ‘regula-
tion’, ‘propensity’, etc. are concepts, or even pre-concepts, of Chinese
thought; what I am interested in, on the contrary, is to make concepts
from it: to glean coherences of thought, to try to explain them, and –
along the way, I insist on this ‘along the way’ – to open them up to a
possible conceptual use.22

Jullien does not have to provide the context that Billeter wishes for
because no such context is required when philosophically using Wang
Fuzhi as a tool. Yet, using him in that manner still implies that the tool
is put to work in a specific context, and that context in Jullien’s case is
philosophy or more precisely if one may dare say “European thought”
or that thought which Jullien refers to as “our thought” (this at least
may be said of the Jullien devoted to the project of taking the detour
via China to gain better access to Greek philosophy;23 as will become
clear below, Jullien today may be said to pursue a different project).
Billeter and Jullien are strictly speaking not so much different in that
one is opting for a contextual approach whereas the other pursues a
noncontextual or “philosophical” approach. Jullien’s philosophical
use of “Chinese thought” is clearly aimed at a specific and
366 RALPH WEBER

determinable context. For someone competently to judge whether or

not, say, Jullien’s discussion of “propensity” is opening up new con-
ceptual space requires considerable knowledge about that space,
which is a sort of contextual knowledge, namely of (Greek/Euro-
pean?) philosophy. In that sense, Jullien is himself drawing on a spe-
cific sort of contextual knowledge to which he wishes to contribute—
and “China” he thinks serves him well as a means to reach that end.
Are Billeter and Jullien hence merely talking at cross purposes? Is
there at all a common problématique with regard to which they are dif-
ferently positioned? Or can the exchange really be pinned down to
whether or not one is engaging with China as an end in itself or as a
means toward other ends? Jullien surely would not want to understand
his use of Wang Fuzhi as nothing but instrumental. In his book Procès
ou Création, Jullien introduces Wang as a thinker whose works “repre-
sent something like the ultimate explication of Chinese thought”
before there was contact with the West.24 There is a direct link
between Wang and China for Jullien. And to that extent, it is doubt-
lessly a matter of considerable importance for Jullien what Wang
really meant to say (regardless of whether we can somehow conclu-
sively find out what it was that he “really” meant to say—we probably
cannot). The situation would be different if Jullien were to read Wang
for whatever he may find in his texts that is philosophically interesting
or merely inspiring. The argumentative link between Wang and Chi-
nese thought and between Chinese thought and China renders that
option invalid. In the conclusion of Procès ou Création, Jullien offers a
reflection on the use of comparison and the utilization of “China.”
There, he makes it clear that “China” is “inevitably the most different
from what we have known about ourselves,” even if that is not to say
that it is “definitively other”; it is not a utopia, but, “following Fou-
cault” rather “a heterotopy.”25 This is a reference (authoritative, if
you accept Foucault as authority) and an answer to both where and
what China is, given by Jullien time and again until very recently.

III. From Heterotopy to Atopy

The topic of “heterotopy” is a second point of contention between

Billeter and Jullien. Billeter criticizes Jullien in rather harsh words,
writing:
The ambition is no longer to encounter an ordinary reality, but to put
into [mutual] presence ‘thought’ and ‘thought’, and from there to
draw out ‘effects’. François Jullien borrows Michel Foucault’s ‘heter-
otopy’, that ‘other place’ where the philosopher is supposed to place
himself in such manner so as to consider from without his own
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 367

thought – but this ‘other place’ is at the end no more than a topos of
his own discourse. Across the years, his work has taken a course more
and more auto-referential and risks one day to speak but of itself.26

To understand the thrust and potential force of Billeter’s criticism,

Jullien’s general approach and use of heterotopy must be presented in
more detail. His approach is generally one of deconstruction, but,
unlike Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida in whose steps he sees himself
following, Jullien does not proceed from within but from without
(déconstruction du dehors)—or, as he also sometimes puts it, from
askance (moving like a crab, as Lyotard observed).27 In fact, this
“from without” involves two different claims about China, one consid-
ered unproblematic, the other admittedly a construction.28
The supposedly unproblematic claim holds that China is elsewhere
(ailleurs), it is exterior, that is, exterior to “us.” This exteriority (exteri-
orité) is in Jullien’s view a given (une donnée), something merely to be
noticed (constaté), and comprehends three aspects: language, history,
and geography. The historical exteriority relates to pre-Jesuit seven-
teenth-century China.29 The linguistic exteriority is based on the Chi-
nese language allegedly being without grammar, being ideographic or
nonphonetically written, and being altogether of a non-Indo-
Germanic kind. The geographic exteriority is not further elaborated.
The extent to which all three aspects are exterior in Jullien’s sense of
the term as something given could probably be questioned, but espe-
cially his characterization of Chinese language seems far from stating
a consensus among sinologists.30
Be that as it may, some exteriority regarding these aspects may still
be validly argued, and Jullien is not claiming an absolute exteriority.
As a matter of fact, China boasts reflected thoughts—textual, com-
mented, and explicated—as does “ours in Europe” (que la nôtre en
Europe). Jullien considers Japan not a different case from China for
the latter’s influence on the former. Other parts of the world, some
potentially even more exterior than China, say, Hawai’i or some pla-
ces in central Africa do not even figure as a rejected option since Jul-
lien did not set out to be an anthropologist, but a philosopher.31 China
is an “elsewhere” of the same weight (un “ailleurs” du même poids) as
“European culture.”32 It is at this juncture that Jullien brings in heter-
otopy, although in slightly differing ways. In 2007, he writes that China
is “elsewhere,” but that he would not yet know whether it is “other”
(autre), in the sense of Foucault’s heterotopy, which he more precisely
sees instanced by the fact that there is no common page on which “the
two thoughts” have jointly written (obviously excepting the equally
reflected, that is, textual, commented, and explicated, nature of their
thoughts).33 In 2011, he says that he assumes the Foucauldian concept
of heterotopy, simply, “when the place is an other place” (quand le
368 RALPH WEBER

lieu est autre), but continues to add that “China is that ‘elsewhere’ that
is not utopic but ‘heterotopic.’”34
The admittedly constructive claim regards alterity (altérité), which
is what Billeter reproaches Jullien of basing his writings on as a sort of
myth, turning Chinese thought into our counterpart (l’envers de la
nôtre).35 But is that what Jullien is really doing? Jullien, moving from
study to study, producing new concepts and forging his way ahead
(chemin faisant), admits of gradually constructing China’s alterity in
ever more dense coherences. Doing so, he is not simply comparing, as
he insists over and again, because that would mean that one had not
displaced oneself, had not left at all and therefore had not entered; one
would still be stuck with one’s own categories; “the heterotopy and the
change of scenery (dépaysement) would not have played.”36 Compar-
ing, in Jullien’s view, functions by way of positing identity and differ-
ence. Any “irruption from without” (understood by Jullien as another
way of putting Foucault’s heterotopy) is quickly resorbed under the
purview of a logic of integration (une logique d’intégration).37 Alterity,
that is the gist of Jullien’s argument, is out of reach for a comparative
approach, and thus he proposes to substitute the concept of distance-
deviation (l’écart) for the concept of difference.38 Working on that
distance-deviation, which viewing Europe through the perspective of
China establishes, opens up a “reflexive space” (un espace de réflexi-
vité) between the two cultures and thoughts and permits a reciprocal
gaze that is both productive and inventive. For Jullien, the concept of
distance-deviation is adventurous (aventureux). Viewing the inner (le
dedans) from the distance-deviation of the outer (le dehors) brings into
focus the folds (Deleuze’s plis) that inform what is so familiar that it
cannot be deconstructed from within. It is thus that the occupation
with Chinese thought may indirectly bring out internal tensions within
European thought, a “heterotopy that is no longer from without, but
has carried its development from within.”39 By way of distancing him-
self and deviating from European thought, Jullien seeks to assume a
position of in-betweenness: “l’écart produit de l’entre.”
Recently, and this is why above I have suggested that Jullien is now
pursuing a different project (or has deviated from his earlier project),
he has emphasized increasingly this position of in-betweenness, which
is no longer attached to the starting-point of Europe, but has him cir-
culate between both China and Europe. This more recent stronger
emphasis on in-betweenness has prompted Jean-Jacques Melloul to
suggest that Jullien is not really deploying a heterotopy but rather an
intertopy: drawing on the metaphor of a spider’s net, Melloul writes
that it is “neither heterotopic, nor atopic, but intertopic.”40 Perhaps
due to this intervention, Jullien has come in the course of the last two
years to reconsider his position on Foucauldian heterotopy, which he
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 369

had always claimed to have adopted (as early as 1989, in his Procès ou
Création).41 In a recent publication (his inaugural lecture for the Chair
of Alterity), he sets out to warn against the danger of the immobility of
heterotopy, evidenced by Foucault’s statement in Les mots et les choses
(The Order of Things) about the “stark impossibility of thinking that”
with regard to the heterotopy represented by Borges’s Chinese ency-
clopaedia. The “that” of “thinking that,” Jullien asserts, is precisely the
“Chinese distance-deviation” and therefore a possibility, not an impos-
sibility. This, he adds, “after all,” might well be his criticism of Foucault
in this matter. He now embraces atopy (l’a-topie)—of no place (de
nulle part, en aucun lieu)—meaning “that in-between that is never iso-
latable, that has nothing of its own, that is without essence and without
quality, but is nonetheless functional and communicational, as Chinese
puts it (yong 用, tong 通), and allows to operate.”42
Jullien’s dissociation of Foucauldian heterotopy is certainly in order,
given that he always had a particularly appropriating understanding of
what is and remains a complicated and “somewhat confusing” notion
in Foucault’s works.43 He seems to have taken full benefit of Fou-
cault’s offer to have his writings function as a “kind of tool box,” to be
used at will.44 Jullien was exclusively drawing on heterotopy as pre-
sented in Les mots et les choses (1966), particularly on the contrast
between utopias that “afford consolation” and heterotopias that “are
disturbing.”45 But this is the famous Chinese encyclopedia, a textual,
fictive, and eventually mental heterotopy that posits no claim whatso-
ever to invoking Chinese thought in the sense that Jullien draws on it
by way of studying texts written in Chinese.46 Jullien’s assertions in
one and the same passage of Foucault having had the “ingenious intu-
ition of applying [heterotopy] to China,” on the one hand, and of Fou-
cault’s China of the mid-sixties as the “fictive” one of Borges, on the
other hand, are quixotic, to put it mildly.47 He also seems entirely to
ignore Foucault’s more explicit treatment of heterotopy in “Des
E-space Autres” (1967), where heterotopias are defined as:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real
places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding
of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effec-
tively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites
that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places,
even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.
Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that
they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to
utopias, heterotopias.48

Far from the fictive heterotopy that Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia

invokes, heterotopias are now “real places” in a “society,” “culture,”
370 RALPH WEBER

or “civilization” that function as “counter-sites.”49 Whereas the prob-

lem with the heterotopy that Jullien refers to is that China ends up
being a fiction and no real place, the problem with Foucault’s real-
place heterotopias is that they are clearly places in the “society,”
“culture,” or “civilization” to which they are “counter-sites.”50 What-
ever way one tries to draw on Foucault’s heterotopy, Jullien’s version
can hardly be accommodated, but emerges as an appropriation. What
is more, in his recent turn from heterotopy to atopy, Jullien seems
aware of the fact that he hitherto has been advocating a sort of external
heterotopy, as when he credits Bruno Latour for his doubt about
“internal heterotopy” (hétérotopie interne).51
What to make of Jullien’s repositioning from heterotopy to atopy?
It seems that the extent to which Jullien’s China had always been an
admitted construction, and not only a noticed exteriority, through the
repositioning, if anything, gains in emphasis. As early as in 2000, Jul-
lien asserted that “from the point of history, there is something fic-
tive” about such an “artifact” and that to have the two thoughts meet,
a gesture of breaking and entering and operations of assembling
(montage) are required in view of the desired “contrastive effect”
(effet contrastif); furthermore, “there is always something arbitrary in
a heuristic gesture.”52 In a recent interview, Jullien has elaborated on
this theme and on his “initial choice of exteriority which he has never
abandoned”:
In order to achieve such an extraversion that permits one to stand
back in one’s mind, a decision of departure, like departing in China,
is required. Such a decision actually cannot work without an aleatory
element, or even, I dare say, an arbitrary element. But thinking
always means to begin with something aleatory, and even with a cer-
tain arbitrariness, which one then is driven afterwards to construct
and justify: in developing from this what I call a ‘building site’ [chant-
ier], that is to say a work that, giving form to this arbitrariness, pro-
gressively reduces it by exploiting from it the fruitful.53

If this is what Jullien’s project is now about, then it has become

increasingly unclear why the search for something fruitful based on
arbitrariness at all requires an asserted exteriority. And Jullien really
stretches one’s imagination when he claims that “it is by continuing to
weave coherences that I begin to do away with the stumbling block of
the aleatory.”54 Jullien, of course, would at this juncture point to his
close reading of texts and the establishment of coherences that
emerges from moving from one text to the other.55 But emphasizing
the amount of construction (aleatory and arbitrary construction),
which Jullien himself emphasizes, might at least suggest that Billeter’s
criticism in this matter (that Jullien’s work has become more and
more auto-referential across the years) is not baseless. From this
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 371

perspective, China seems to end up as a fiction firmly upheld and

updated in Jullien’s head.56

IV. Conclusion: Ideology and the Politics of Chinese

Philosophy

Why bother about Jullien’s use of China? Hardly anybody bothered

about the use of China in the Chinese encyclopedia of Borges, and if
Jullien’s use eventually discloses itself as no less an invocation of a fic-
tion, all the better, it would seem. But remember that Billeter also
reproaches Jullien on ideological grounds. Although he does so
mainly from a liberal standpoint (in an Arendtian version) and for his
uncritical embrace of immanence, it is and remains an instance of
Ideologiekritik. Henry Zhao, in his review of Billeter’s pamphlet, has
readily followed up this aspect and has suggested that Jullien’s “ideali-
zation of early Chinese philosophy could help to provide this ‘fever’
[guoxue re 国学热] with an innocently apolitical veil” and that “philo-
sophical speculation on otherness, once pushed to an extreme, risks
becoming dangerously attractive.”57 Zhao, of course, assesses the mat-
ter from a left perspective and his readiness to take up the ideological
criticism comes as little surprise. Much greater is the surprise if one
learns that the French left proved to be less ready, perhaps because
the Ideologiekritik in the case of Billeter was formulated from a decid-
edly liberal democratic perspective.
Alain Badiou gives a good example of the larger implications of Jul-
lien’s use of China. Early in his text in support of Jullien entitled “Jul-
lien, the apostate,” Badiou (rightly I assume) reveals himself as an
“amateur” with regard to sinology, but proceeds to mention and, by
implication, positively affirm Jullien’s “immense sinological knowl-
edge” (son immense science sinologique) in an argument against the
disciplinary doubt and indignant tone Jullien finds himself confronted
with by “the sinologists”; given that Jullien’s objective is to go beyond
sinology, Badiou admits, however, that it is “evidently heterogeneous
to sinology itself” (évidemment hétérogène à la sinologie proprement
dite), noting that it is also “heterogeneous to this contemporary form
of imperialism that is the certitude of dismantling differences under
the homogeneity of Capital.”58 Despite the oddity that a self-declared
amateur can pass judgment on the immensity of sinological knowl-
edge, Badiou is here also following exactly the criticism of sinology as
enclosed specialized scholarship that Jullien himself has repeatedly
advanced—complemented only by Badiou’s ideological analogy of
heterogeneity.59 Reading the many non-sinologist French supporters
of Jullien who have spoken out for him in print, it is conspicuous how
372 RALPH WEBER

many of them seem blindly to take Jullien as a sinological authority

(the argument often takes the form of Jullien is right and Billeter
wrong because Jullien says about China that…).60 Interestingly, they
take Jullien as an authority on the China of sinology that one might
come to think that Jullien is about as when his book Procès ou Créa-
tion is subtitled “Une introduction à la pensée chinoise,” but that his
entire approach, whether heterotopy or atopy, proves him not to be
about. Rare is the kind of critical reflection by supporters of Jullien
that Bernard Sichère showcases when clarifying: “I am not here dialo-
guing with ‘China’ in general (what is that elsewhere of ‘China in gen-
eral’?), but with that particular region of being which is the China of
François Jullien, that is to say what he makes of it, what it permits him
to construct and to propose.”61
Then again, Jullien often comments on contemporary China, as
when he writes in a section on how the concepts that he “makes” may
throw light on contemporary China: “It seems to me that China still
today does not draw up a plan for the future, does not pursue a given
or desired, perhaps even imperialistic goal, but as well as possible, day
by day, takes full advantage of its situational potential.”62 Note that
“situational potential” precisely is one of Jullien’s concepts gleaned
from “Chinese thought,” in this case from Sunzi 孫子 and the combi-
nation of xing 形 and shi 勢.63 Nothing in Jullien’s approach of posi-
tioning himself in-between the two thoughts of Europe and pre-
seventeenth-century China warrants this kind of conceptual transfer
to contemporary China. If anything, Jullien’s comment is a wonderful
token of the confused exposition of where and what China in his view
is.

UNIVERSITY OF BASEL
Zurich, Switzerland

Endnotes

Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Credentials: This article has benefited from presen-
tations and subsequent comments and criticism on the occasion of the 2012 Vienna meet-
ing of the Forum für Asiatische Philosophie, German Philosophical Society, August 2–5,
2012, and the World Conference on Sinology at China Renmin University in Beijing,
November 2–5, 2012. Also, I should particularly like to thank for the very helpful written
comments by Stéphane Feuillas and Romain Graziani, the remarks by the Editor-in-
Chief, as well as the reports by the reviewers.
1. Jean François Billeter, Contre François Jullien (Paris: Allia, 2006).
2. Billeter (2006), 12–13, 37, 41. The political function of Chinese literati is a key theme
in Jean François Billeter, Li Zhi, philosophe maudit (1527–1602). Contribution à une
sociologie du mandarinat de la fin des Ming (Paris and Genève: Droz, 1979).
3. Billeter, (2006), 9–12, 61–62.
4. Ibid., 15.
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 373

5. François Jullien, Chemin faisant, connaı̂tre la Chine, relancer la philosophie: Réplique

à *** (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 68–69: “My opponent solemnly puts the blame on all alterity
as a matter of principle ‘posited’ between Chinese and European thought; but is this
not exactly what he himself surreptitiously, in his fashion, is about to impose?” (Mon
contradicteur s’en prend solennellement à toute altérité de principe ‘posée’ entre pen-
sée chinoise et européenne; mais n’est ce pas là justement ce qu’il est lui-même en
train subrepticement, à sa façon, d’imposer?) See also Jullien, (2007), 17–18 and 85.
6. A notable exception, discussing the controversy in a welcomingly balanced manner
and with a view to anthropology, is Frédéric Keck, “Une querelle sinologique et ses
implications: À propos du Contre François Jullien de Jean-François Billeter,” Esprit 2
(2009): 61–81. For a rare pro-Billeter contribution, see François Danjou. June 21,
2006. “Contre François Jullien.” Retrieved November 15, 2012, from http://www.
questionchine.net/contre-francois-jullien.
7. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond (eds.), Oser construire: Pour François Jullien
(Paris: Seuil, 2007).
8. Gaillard, “Du danger de penser,” Oser construire: Pour François Jullien, eds. Les
empêcheurs de penser en rond (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 9–11; Badiou, “Jullien l’apostat,”
Oser construire: Pour François Jullien, eds. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond (Paris:
Seuil, 2007), 149–50.
9. Jean François Billeter, “François Jullien, sur le fond,” Monde chinois 11 (2007):
67–74.
10. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “De la philosophie à l’anthropologie,” Dépayser la pensée:
Dialogues hétérotopiques avec François Jullien sur son usage philosophique de la
Chine, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil,
2003), 77–94.
11. In the People’s Republic of China, Du Xiaozhen has been the most prominent pro-
moter of Jullien, see, for example, his Du Xiaozhen, 杜小真, To Go Afar and to
Return: Dialogue between Greece and China 《远去与归来:希腊与中国的对话》,
Zhongguo Renmin Daxue Chubanshe, 2004. For English translations, see François
Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York:
Zone Books, 1995); François Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in
China and Greece (New York: Zone Books, 2000); François Jullien, Treatise on Effi-
cacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2004); François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and
Aesthetics (New York: Zone Books, 2007); François Jullien, Vital Nourishment:
Departing from Happiness (New York: Zone Books, 2007); François Jullien, The
Great Image Has No Form, Or on the Nonobject through Painting (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2009).
12. For Jullien’s self-description, see François Jullien, L’écart et l’entre (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 2012), 13. Jean Levi, in an incisive criticism of Jullien, suspects a strategy
behind the double-qualification that capitalizes on mutual ignorance: “He is a sinolo-
gist for the philosophers and a philosopher for the sinologists” (Il est sinologue pour
les philosophes et philosophe pour les sinologues). See Jean Levi, “Réponses à un
questionnaire sur François Jullien pour un journal vietnamien,” in Réflexions
chinoises: Lettrés, stratèges et excentriques de Chine (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel,
2011), 213.
13. Jullien (2007), 57–58 and 65–66.
14. Billeter (2006), 46.
15. Ibid., 72–3: “Nous pouvons parler dans l’abstrait de la pensée de Pascal ou de celle de
Descartes parce que nous savons à peu près qui ont été ces homes et dans quels milieu
ils ont vécu. Un sinologue qui cite des penseurs chinois doit suppléer à notre igno-
rance de leurs faits et gestes, de la société dans laquelle ils ont agi. Quand il ne remplit
pas cette obligation, ce qu’il nous apprend de leur pensée risque de se dissiper en vol-
utes gratuites.” Jullien has an interesting passage in an interview, which is not directed
at Billeter but questions the standpoint defended by Billeter with regard to Pascal and
Descartes: “Why should one treat Chinese and ‘our’ references differently? When
one reads Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, one does not necessarily
374 RALPH WEBER

occupy oneself with the history of the love affairs of the author, nor with the context
of the work. Insofar as my relation to the Chinese texts is of a philosophical order,
why should it be any different? When you tell me about Heraclitus, you do not insist
on his life or epoch. And what do we know about Heraclitus?” (Pourquoi traiterait-on
différemment les références chinoises et les ‘nôtres’? Quand on lit les Méditations
métaphysiques de Descartes, on ne se préoccupe pas nécessairement de l’histoire des
amours de leur auteur ni même du contexte de son œuvre. Dès lors que mon rapport
aux textes chinois est d’ordre philosophique, pourquoi en irait-il autrement? Quand
vous me parlez d’Héraclite, vous n’insistez pas sur sa vie ni sur son époque. Et que
sait-on d’Héraclite?) in Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire, Chine, la dissidence de
François Jullien, suivi de Dialogues avec François Jullien (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 165. For
a similar passage in direct riposte to Billeter, see Jullien (2007), 68.
16. Billeter, (2006), 45: “…c’est toujours lui qui parle.”
17. Ibid., 36. See also François Jullien, Procès ou Création: Une Introduction à la Pensée
Chinoise (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
18. Jean François Billeter, “Comment Lire Wang Fuzhi?” Études Chinoises 9, no. 1,
(1990): 95–127; François Jullien, “Lecture ou projection: Comment lire (autrement)
Wang Fuzhi?” Études Chinoises 9, no. 2, (1990): 131–49.
19. Jullien, (1990), 134.
20. Ibid., 135.
21. Billeter, (2006), 45.
22. François Jullien and Thierry Marchaisse, Penser d’un dehors (La Chine): Entretiens
d’Extrême-Occident (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 258: “Mon problème … c’est de
tirer un usage philosophique d’un passage par la pensée chinoise. Il s’agit de savoir, en
l’occurrence, si l’on peut exploiter philosophiquement d’autres configurations de pen-
sée que celles qu’a élaborées, tout au long de son histoire, ce qu’on appellera, pour
aller vite, la ‘pensée européenne’. Il s’agit donc de tout autre chose. Je ne prétends pas
que ‘régulation’, ‘propension’, etc. soient des concepts, ou même des ‘préconcepts’,
de la pensée chinoise; ce qui m’intéresse, en revanche, c’est d’en faire des concepts: de
repérer des cohérences de pensée, et d’essayer de les expliciter, et, chemin faisant, j’in-
siste sur ce ‘chemin faisant’, de les ouvrir à un usage conceptuel possible.”
23. See François Jullien, Le détour et l’accès: stratégies du sens en Chine, en Grèce (Paris:
Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1995), particularly 345–52.
24. Jullien, (1989), 9: “… représente ainsi comme une ultime explicitation de la pensée
chinoise.…” Strictly, Jullien would have probably wanted to use élucidation instead of
explicitation, since “Chinese thought does not explain itself, it elucidates itself.” (La
pensée chinoise ne ‘s’explique’ pas, elle ‘s’élucide’.) See Jullien, (1989), 20.
25. Ibid., 300.
26. Billeter, (2006), 60: “L’ambition n’est plus de rencontrer une quelconque réalité, mais
de mettre en présence ‘de la pensée’ et ‘de la pensée’ et de tirer de là ‘des effets’.
François Jullien emprunte à Michel Foucault ‘l’hétérotopie’, ce ‘lieu autre’ où le phil-
osophe est censé se placer pour considérer du dehors sa propre pensée – mais ce ‘lieu
autre’ n’est plus à la fin qu’un topos de son propre discours. Son œuvre a pris, au fil
des années, un tour de plus en plus autoréférentiel et risqué de ne plus parler que
d’elle-même, un jour.” Interestingly, Jullien, in reaction to Billeter, had a text of his
included in a collection of essays the title of which seems to support Billeter’s
reproach as Jullien decides to write about Jullien. See François Jullien, “Unterwegs.
Strategie und Risiken der Arbeit François Julliens,” in Kontroverse über China: Sino-
Philosophie (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2008), 77–122.
27. Jean-François Lyotard, “L’efficience du crabe,” in Dépayser la pensée: Dialogues hét-
érotopiques avec François Jullien sur son usage philosophique de la Chine, ed. Thierry
Marchaisse (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2003), 17–22; Martin
and Spire, (2011), 135.
28. See, for instance, Jullien, (2007), 86.
29. That Jullien in a sense reduces “Chinese thought” to “pre-seventeenth-century Chi-
nese thought” has major consequences. Fabian Heubel has in my view correctly
pointed out that “doubt about the understanding of China as heterotopy arises from
the theoretical passage from a historical ‘mutual indifference’ to the construction of
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 375

cultural alterity. As soon as the passage from the relation between China and hetero-
topy to the significance of Chinese thought for European philosophy is accomplished,
a disconcerting blindness towards the problem of Chinese modernity becomes mani-
fest.” (Der Zweifel gegenüber dem Verständnis von China als Heterotopie erwächst
aus dem theoretischen Übergang, der dabei von einer historischen‚ wechselseitigen
In-differenz‘ hin zur Konstruktion kultureller Andersheit vollzogen wird. Sobald der
Übergang vom Verhältnis zwischen China und Heterotopie hin zur Bedeutung chine-
sischen Denkens für die europäische Philosophie erfolgt, tritt befremdliche Blindheit
für das Problem der chinesischen Moderne zutage.) See Fabian Heubel, “Foucault
auf Chinesisch – Transkulturelle Kritik und Philosophie der Kultivierung,” Polylog,
Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren 19 (2008): 23.
30. Sinology seems split into two camps as regard the question of grammar, but not many
would still adhere to the description in terms of ideographs (80 percent phonetic-
semantic compounds already in the Han and ever more since). Viviane Alleton,
“L’écriture chinoise: mise au point” in Anne Cheng, La pensée en Chine aujourd’hui
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2007), 242, quoting Jullien from Penser d’un dehors, p. 154,
and criticizing him for depicting the Chinese written language as ideographic. Still, the
non-Indo-Germanic nature of the language is firmly established. Jullien’s account of
historical and linguistic exteriority poses a series of interesting puzzles: What, for
instance, about Buddhism? Can Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming, but also Wang Fuzhi, really
represent the same degree of exteriority as Kongzi, given the impact of Sanskrit-based
Buddhism on the Chinese language and philosophical debate? Jullien makes much of
the Western impact, but does he not underestimate the Buddhist impact?
31. François Jullien, Entrer dans une pensée ou Des possibles de l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard,
2012), 29.
32. Martin and Spire, (2011), 134.
33. Jullien, (2007), 34–35. It is unclear in this passage whether Jullien relates Foucault’s
heterotopy to the ailleurs or to the autre. Using the very same phrasing in almost ver-
batim manner (not a rarity in Jullien’s work) in 2012, the reference clearly is to ail-
leurs, cf. François Jullien, L’écart et l’entre (Paris: Galilée, 2012), 17. In the same book,
he refers to heterotopy as the place that is strictly autre, cf. Jullien, L’écart, (2012), 61.
34. Martin and Spire, (2011), 134 and 135.
35. Billeter, (2006), 9 and 11.
36. François Jullien, Entrer dans une pensée ou Des possibles de l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard,
2012), 29.
37. Jullien, L’écart, (2012), 28.
38. Ibid., 24 and 31ff. “… l’écart procède d’une distance…” The concept of distance-
deviation has been introduced by Jullien earlier. See, for instance, Jullien, (2007),
112–13; François Jullien, De l’universel, de l’uniforme, du commun et du dialogue entre
les cultures (Paris: Fayard, 2008), chap. XII.
39. Jullien, L’écart, (2012), 44.
40. Jean-Jacques Melloul, “L’écart et le commun: l’intertopie de François Jullien,” in
Dérangements – Aperçus: Autour du travail de François Jullien, eds. Cécile Serrurier
and Bernadette Bricout (Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2011), 25.
41. Cf. François Jullien, Procès ou création: Une introduction à la pensée chinoise (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1989), 300.
42. Jullien, L’écart, (2012), 61: “…cet ‘entre’ qui n’est jamais isolable, ne possède rien en
propre, est sans essence et sans qualité, mais par là même est ‘fonctionnel’, dit le chi-
nois, ‘communicationnel’ (yong 用, tong 通), et permet d’opérer.” As an aside,
“atopy” is of course a term that Foucault himself also uses in The Order of Things. Cf.
also Martin and Spire, (2011), 245.
43. Peter Johnson, “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘different spaces,’” in History of the Human
Sciences 19, no. 4 (2006), 75 and 81.
44. “… that my books be a kind of tool-box others can rummage through to find a tool
they can use for whatever good they wish, in their own area… I don’t write for an audi-
ence, I write for users, not readers.” (…que mes livres soient une sorte de tool-box
dans lequel les autres puissent aller fouiller pour y trouver un outil avec lequel ils
pourraient faire ce que bon leur semble, dans leur domaine… Je n’écris pas pour un
376 RALPH WEBER

public, j’écris pour des utilisateurs, non pas pour des lecteurs.) Cf. Michel Foucault,
“Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir,” in Dits et Ecrits, vol. 2 (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1994), 523–24.
45. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), xviii.
46. This is not to say that something vaguely along the lines of the classification of animals
in Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia could not be found in Chinese texts, for example, in
the Huainanzi (19.5), but that is neither the claim nor the function of the list in Fou-
cault. Cf. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical
Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2004), 106.
47. Jullien and Marchaisse, (2000), 16: “‘Hétérotopie’: le ‘lieu’ est ‘autre’. Foucault a
même l’intuition géniale de l’appliquer à la Chine…”; “Toutefois, à l’époque des
Mots et les Choses, c’est-à-dire au milieu des années soixante, la Chine de Foucault est
tout au plus celle – fictive! – d’un Borges.”
48. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986), 24.
49. Whether Foucault had changed his position on heterotopy from the preface of The
Order of Things to the essay “Of other places” or in the latter has simply comple-
mented his previous position is unclear. Johnson, (2006), 84, sees the two treatments
of heterotopy as complementary, which seems possible by his functional definition of
heterotopias as “draw[ing] us out of ourselves in peculiar ways; they display and inau-
gurate a difference and challenge the space in which we may feel at home”—which is
a definition that could even subsume Jullien’s use of the notion. Françoise Gaillard,
(2007), 14, writing in support of Jullien, however, sees a more fundamental change in
position, arguing that Foucault has in the later essay made the notion of heterotopy
“more precise,” that they are not about “fictive places.”
50. Foucault distinguishes different types of heterotopias, crisis heterotopias (privileged,
sacred, or forbidden places, boarding schools, honeymoon hotel), deviation heteroto-
pias (rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons), compensation heterotopias (colonies,
Puritan societies in America, Jesuit colonies in South America), and mentions plenty
of further examples such as the cemetery, theater, cinema, garden, museums, libraries,
fairgrounds, vacation villages, brothels, the ship as “the heterotopia par excellence”
(27), but also the Oriental garden, the hammam of the Muslims, the Scandinavian sau-
nas, bedrooms for guests in Brazilian farms, and American motel rooms.
51. Jullien, Entrer, (2012), 188. A similar criticism aimed at Foucault’s work in general
can be found in Deleuze’s second part “Topologie: ‘penser autrement’” of his book on
Foucault, cf. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986).
52. Jullien and Marchaisse, (2000), 262.
53. Martin and Spire, (2011), 150–51: “Pour engager une telle extraversion permettant de
prendre du recul dans son esprit, il y faut bien une décision du départ, comme de partir
en Chine, qui ne va pas en effet sans une part d’aléatoire, ou même, j’ose le mot,
d’arbitraire. Mais penser, c’est toujours partir d’un aléatoire, et même d’un certain
arbitraire, qu’on est conduit ensuite à construire et justifier: en développant à partir
de lui ce que j’appelle un ‘chantier’, c’est-à-dire un travail qui progressivement, don-
nant forme à cet arbitraire, le résorbe en en exploitant la fécondité.”
54. Martin and Spire, (2011), 151: “C’est donc en continuant de tresser des cohérences
que progressivement je commence à lever l’hypothèque de l’aléatoire.”
55. Martin and Spire, (2011), 158.
56. Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, examining Jullien’s works in the light of Deleuze and Fou-
cault, comes to formulate a similar point, albeit without taking it to be a particularly
negative feature: “… one here has to study the way in which Foucault affirms never to
have written anything else than fictions, or the way in which Deleuze anchors his anal-
yses in a primary scattering of his research object, in putting forth an enumeration
that is sustained by nothing (…). The same holds with F. Jullien, who seems less to
manifest a cultural differentiation than a profound philosophical hostility towards an
undefined justification from the starting-point, to the benefit of a thinking that shows
the movement while walking.” (… il faudrait ici faire droit à la manière dont Foucault
affirme n’avoir jamais écrit que des fictions, ou à la façon dont Deleuze ancre ses
 CONTROVERSY OVER “JULLIEN” 377

analyses dans une dispersion première de son objet d’étude, dans la mise à plat d’une
énumération que rien ne vient soutenir […]. Chez F. Jullien de même, nous paraı̂t
moins se manifester un différentialisme culturel, qu’une profonde hostilité philoso-
phique à la justification indéfinie du point de départ, au profit d’une pensée qui
prouve le mouvement en marchant.). See Matthieu Potte-Bonneville, “Versions du
platonisme: Deleuze, Foucault, Jullien,” eds. Serrurier and Bricout, (2011), 64.
57. Henry Zhao, “Contesting Confucius,” New Left Review 44 (2007): 142.
58. Badiou, (2007), 148 and 149.
59. For an interesting and bold remark by Jullien about how he sees his work being differ-
ent from conventional sinology, but being more “ambitious” and “riskier” than it, see
Martin and Spire, (2011), 209.
60. The phenomenon is certainly not confined to non-sinologist French supporters as is,
for instance, evidenced by the German sociologist Dirk Baecker, who in his contribu-
tion to Kontroverse über China: Sino-Philosophie, builds his entire argument about
cybernet(h)ics on an opposition between China and Greece exclusively relying on Jul-
lien’s writings on “China” (with the exception of two single and slightly dated referen-
ces to works by Karl A. Wittfogel and Max Weber). See Dirk Baecker,
“Sinndimensionen einer Situation,” in Kontroverse über China: Sino-Philosophie,
(2008), 31–47.
61. Bernard Sichère, “L’histoire de la métaphysique en tant qu’histoire de l’Être vue de
la Chine: qui écrit et dans quelle langue?” eds. Serrurier and Bricout, (2011), 85: “Je
ne dialogue pas ici avec ‘la Chine’ en général (qu’est-ce d’ailleurs que ‘la Chine en
général’?), mais avec cette région particulière de l’être qu’est la Chine de François
Jullien, c’est-à-dire ce qu’il en fait, ce qu’elle lui permet de construire et de proposer.”
62. François Jullien, “Umweg über China oder wie man zu den Voreingenommenheiten
der europäischen Vernunft zurückkehrt,” in Kontroverse über China: Sino-Philoso-
phie, (2008), 21: “China scheint mir noch heute keinen Plan für die Zukunft zu
entwerfen, kein gegebenes oder angestrebtes, vielleicht sogar imperialistisches Ziel
zu verfolgen, sondern so gut wie möglich, Tag für Tag, sein Situationspotential
auszunutzen.”
63. François Jullien, Traité de l‘efficacité (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1996), 33.
One of Jullien’s earlier work on the The Propensity of Things had already centered on
shi, see François Jullien, La propension des choses: pour une histoire de l’efficacité en
Chine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992).