The Book of Beginnings 9780300213607

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The Book of Beginnings

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The Book of Beginnings François Jullien

Translated by Jody Gladding

Yale University Press

New Haven & London

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-­ speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange. English translation copyright © 2015 by Yale University. Translated by Jody Gladding. Originally published as Entrer dans une pensée, ou Des possibles de l’esprit. Copyright © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2012. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Jullien, François, 1951–­ [Entrer dans une pensée. English] The book of beginnings / François Jullien ; translated by Jody Gladding. pages cm. — (The Margellos world republic of letters) ISBN 978-­0 -­300-­20422-­3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Thought and thinking. 2. Philosophy, Chinese. I. Title. B105.T54J8513 2015  109—dc23  2014031911 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface, vii 1 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 1 2 The Elsewhere of China, 6 3 Thinking Before or Beside? 12 4 The First Sentence, 19 5 A First Chinese Sentence, 24 6 Commentary, 31 7 Hebraic Entry, 39 8 Hellenic Entry, 51 9 Undoing Our Alternatives, 65

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vi Contents

10 Where Would the Beginning Begin? 74 11 Neither God nor Myth: What Other Possibility? 80 12 When Myth Holds No Interest, When God Holds No Monopoly, 86 13 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation, 92 14 Translation, 104 15 Is There Still “Tradition”? 113 Finale: A Shift of the Truth, 122 Reference Note, 133

Preface

It is strange—but finally logical—that I am just now coming to the question with which I should have begun in my work. It is strange that after traveling for years between Chinese and European thought, I am only now turning to this question—this preliminary question—that has always bothered me, it is true, but that I have never yet approached, at least directly: What is it to enter a way of thought? Yet, as I say, it is also logical for me to be starting on it so late, even though it is the initial question, because of course it is only afterward and in retrospect that the beginning question can be approached. The same is true of the writing process: Isn’t it when the book is finished that you write the introduction? Today in the West, who would not want to enter the thought of the far “East”? But how can we enter it, since we know that it is impossible to summarize; no way of thought can be summarized, but especially not Chinese thought, as vast and varied as it is. And we also know that its principal notions are not directly translatable; that viewing it by school, that classifying and cataloguing it, might lead us to overlook its essential nature; and that following its historical development from beginning to end will not suffice either. In each case we would remain outside the inner self-­referential logic specific to this way of thought—because where did this way of thought begin? Now when I pose the question of how to enter

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viii Preface

Chinese thought, I also take the risk of addressing nonsinologists as if they could read Chinese. That is why I will practice a methodical reading of one Chinese sentence, just one, a first sentence, by gradually developing the elements that allow it to be read at once from within (Chinese thought) and from without (Western thought). Because a way of thought can be “entered” effectively only by beginning to work with it, that is, by passing through it in order to question oneself. The sentence I want to begin reading here is the first one in Chinese thought to address beginnings. I propose reading it from both close-­up and far away: reading it literally (although what does “literal” mean when there are no letters or grammar?) and reading it also from a distance, by widening the gap and bringing the contrasts into play. But stepping back to read from a distance does not mean reading in a cursory, vague manner. On the contrary, it means trying to read even more closely, using this roundabout means to get at the biases and presuppositions that lie sedimented and buried there. To show this sentence in relief and to remove it from the comfort of its “obviousness,” without which entering would be impossible, I will also read the sentence that begins Genesis, for the biblical side, as well as the first sentence from the Greek Theogony, for the mythological perspective. And tracing these perspectives in turn will necessarily lead me to pose the question that takes us directly from the local nature of such fieldwork to the opposite extreme, because I cannot imagine a more general question: What are the “possibilities” of thought? Isn’t it time to get started on this work—to write a “phenomenology of mind” that is no longer European?

Preface ix

Is that where Western philosophy finds its limit, or maybe its blind spot? In any case, that is where philosophy, which claims to reflect all—“the all”—fails to be self-­reflective. Doubt, we repeat, ever vigilant, is our entryway. But do we know what we have to doubt? “Doubt,” however methodical and even hyperbolic we consider it, always assumes something in place beforehand, in advance, beginning from which we doubt, but which, in and of itself, we do not doubt—which we do not think of doubting: where we remain without hold. In other words, what we doubt already holds us in its dependency, in the snare of the unthought. So we can doubt as much as we like, as the heroic Descartes did, but we are still doubting in our own language and concepts. Doubting lets us stay at home among ourselves. What I cannot doubt, that is, what I cannot imagine doubting, I will be able to recognize only when I encounter another way of thought to disorient me and loosen me from the—unsuspected—hold of my way of thought. Am I saying that Descartes, although he roamed Europe, did not travel widely enough? We can only dislodge the arbitrary from our way of thought by leaving it and, in order to do so, by entering another. But what is this strategic elsewhere that might loosen us from the moorings we cannot envisage? Where will we find it? What is it “to enter” a way of thought? I am proposing here that we enter Chinese thought to create a gap that reveals to us how we think, within what we “doubt”—which may make us reflect not only on our questions but, more importantly, on what made them possible and binds us to them to the point that we believe them nec-

x Preface

essary. But Chinese thought, it is true, is so vast: Can we ever finish exploring it? And then, too, we all know that today’s reader is in a hurry. Even long-­distance travels, for which not so long ago we used to pack books to fill the empty hours, now pass all too quickly. Do we still have the leisure for such labor-­intensive investments? Maybe you have only this evening free. . . . Fortunately, our purposes do not entail “knowing” Chinese thought extensively, an endless enterprise requiring two lifetimes, but something else entirely: only crossing a threshold and “entering.”

The Book of Beginnings

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o n e   ■   W h a t I s It t o E n t e r (a Way of Thought)?

To enter, if we define it most literally and introductorily, is to pass from an outside to an inside. Now Chinese thought has effectively remained exterior to our own thought in Europe for a very long time, and vice versa. We can see that outside both in the Chinese language and in Chinese history. Let us summarize the initial facts that we all know, although perhaps we have not really weighed their effects. They justify passing through China to attack obliquely what lies unthought and beyond doubt for us. First of all, we must remember that Chinese does not belong to the large family of Indo-­ European languages, whereas we are still related to India through Sanskrit, the sister language of Greek and Latin. Furthermore, let us remember that Chinese writing is ideographic and not phonetic, and especially that, among all the languages, it alone remains that way, which already indicates its singular relationship to orality as well as its inextricable interdependence on the representative power of the drawn line. How could—must—that have marked Chinese thought? Moreover, it was not until our Renaissance that Europe arrived in China; and relationships between the two ends of that great continent did not truly develop until the expansion of commercial trade in the nineteenth century, which is very late relative to the history of these civilizations, one of which then imposed its

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2 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)?

imperialism upon the other. At present, the relationship of domination between the two poles is beginning to reverse itself. Nevertheless, the question remains: Beneath power relationships and hegemonic temptations, what intellectual penetration, from either side, is in the process of taking place—or not, depending upon us? Will we be content with the mere semblance of intellectual penetration? As early as Roman times there was the Silk Road, but did the Romans know that those imported goods came from China, were “made in China”? What marks did they bear of Chinese thought? There was also Marco Polo, two centuries before the missionaries, but Marco Polo traveled overland; the strange spectacle of customs, ways of life and society, realms and languages, currencies and armies, endlessly, continuously, repeated itself before him according to the country he was passing through and without causing any rupture suddenly to appear: without any actual event, without the possibility of arriving. It was an entirely different story in the sixteenth century, when the missionaries embarked in ships and docked one fine day at a South China port. To disembark was to leave one’s ship and set foot on new soil: you knew nothing yet, appearing suddenly from “elsewhere,” and you were not expected. With a way of thought as well, to enter implies moving, leaving in order to be able to penetrate. One enters a way of thought as one enters an organization, fraternal order, or political party: it cannot take place without a certain, at least temporary, acceptance on a trial basis—haven’t I been roundly criticized for my “adherence” to the “immanence” of Chinese thought? Or one enters as into the business of others—that is, one begins to take a personal interest in them, even begins to take charge of them and make them one’s

What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 3

own. Entering into the feelings of others, into their difficulties and concerns, means putting oneself in another’s place and adopting that perspective: that does not happen without sharing and connivance; it requires complicity. Entering Chinese thought, then, is to begin to question ourselves according to its perspective, according to its implications and expectations. Now, about Chinese thought we know at least one thing, which hinders us from the outset: that it is among the oldest ways of thought and has extended over a very vast area and length of time. We also know that it has recently been subjected to increasingly strong foreign influence—our own—but it nevertheless lays claim to itself as it is, even today, even concealed or disguised. From this follows a consequence that certainly constitutes a major fact of our generation: we can no longer limit ourselves, in Europe, to the horizon of European thought. We must leave home and shake off our philosophic atavism—go “to see” elsewhere, which was already the first meaning of “theory” for the Greeks, let us remember, before theory became dully speculative. But how can one enter this way of thought? It requires so much time, we know, so much patience, “skill,” memory, to be initiated into the classical Chinese language and to venture into its immense forest of texts and commentaries. All the more so because this language offers none of the conveniences of our own: it has no morphology—neither conjugation nor declension—and has almost no syntax (classical Chinese, at least). Thus one can only do what the Chinese literati themselves did for so many centuries: learn and recite by heart. Above all, let us quickly understand, such thought cannot be summarized. No synopsis—no abridged, condensed digest— can give us access to it. You perform that reduction beginning with

4 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)?

terms that are your own, without disrupting them, without moving, without leaving: you have stayed within your initial categories—you discover nothing. Alternatively, would you like to display the principal Chinese concepts on a chart, one after another, tao (dao), yin, yang, and so on, draw up a list of them, and compile a lexicon? But your next two options amount to one: by not translating them you will leave them aglow in some distant exoticism; by wanting to translate them you will immediately enclose them within a foreign language, your own, and deprive them of their coherence, remove them from their implicitness: you are no longer sharing. This other way of thought will provide no more than a facsimile, more or less distorted, of our concepts. You have still not cleared a way, built a threshold, for “entering.” Another alternative, the desire to trace the history of Chinese thought in order to enter it, offers a reassuring feeling of totality: here we might track it from beginning to end as it unfolds, through its ins and outs; we would thus follow the ridgeline of its development. But can we forget that this would be an imposition—a presentation—that is strictly Western, that is to say, responding to a strong constituent historicity, made of resounding ruptures and confrontations, belonging to European philosophy? The Chinese themselves only adopted this approach in Western schools in the early twentieth century, at the same time as they adopted the term “philosophy,” which they translated so badly: zhe-­xue, “wisdom-­study” (in Japanese: “imitation-­application,” tetsu-­gaku)—what remains there of desire or philosophic eros? What assures us that such a history, by establishing positions, presenting theses, constructing debates and counterarguments in the thinking (of course, there were debates at

What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 5

times in China, too), does not keep us at a distance from the silently formed complicities, the “obvious facts” endlessly “reheated,” as Confucius says, that have woven this way of thought’s fund of understanding—implicitly shared but from then on remaining out of reach for us? Precisely what we hesitate to call ­“philosophy.” Or if we wanted to emphasize the diversity of schools through careful, methodical classification (“Confucianism” / “Taoism” /  “Buddhism” . . .), under those rubrics we would further exacerbate the separations that, in China even more than elsewhere, serve only to indicate membership: (philosophic) schools there are called jia, “family.” Such tabulations provide order (reassuringly) but do not give way to thought; they remain exterior to the material beneath their labels. I mean that they do not help us make use of Chinese thought to question ourselves; and even though we can thus speak of “Chinese thought,” we are still thinking in our own language, according to our own tools. One way or another, you always remain outside, at home, you still have not moved; you have not “entered.”

T W O  ■   T h e E l s e w h e r e o f C h i n a

We must take better measure of this Chinese elsewhere. And this will be even more necessary the more that which falls under the name of globalization, by spreading its standard categories everywhere, that is, by saturating the landscape—including the mental landscape—with its stereotypes, tends to pass off its uniformity as universality; that is, the more it tends to pass off as legitimate according to principle and logic what is only a convenience of production and its mediatization by portraying it as right and necessary. Or, alternatively, this will be necessary when the particular is isolated, closed off, clichéd; when it goes from residual to overrated and finds itself transformed into artificial folklore, a bait for tourists. Thus, as a form of resistance, we must now construct a geography of this Elsewhere and the possibilities of thought. This is not, God forbid, to close the cultures back down into themselves, huddled in quest of a pseudo-­identity, but very much the opposite: exploring the resources for all intelligence and exploiting them. “Intelligence,” as I understand it, is not an arrested faculty, belonging to fixed or even “transcendental” categories, as it was classically understood to be. Rather, it is activated and deployed, and it progresses in keeping with the intelligibilities it traverses. And the wider the gap between those intelligibilities, the greater the opportunities for discovery and traversal.

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The Elsewhere of China 7

Let us set out on the better-­marked path. With regard to India, the works of the last generation, of Georges Dumézil and Émile Benveniste in France, showed us what we, as Europeans, might share in terms of semantic elements as well as logical relationships, mental images as well as social functions. Because of proximity, we can also suspect that thinking was influenced on either side of the Indus in earlier periods: the influence of the gymnosophists on Plotinus, for example. With regard to Islam, whose language belongs to another family, we—still the European or, more specifically, the Christian “we”—share religions of the Book, the biblical filiation, the idea of a creator God; we share the absolute of a message delivered in a Revelation. Moreover, the histories of Europe and Islam have continually mingled. Aristotle returned to us through the Arabs; Thomas Aquinas was inspired by Averroës; Islamic monotheism can be added to the stack of precedents. Furthermore, the first outlines of the figure of the European intellectual trace back to Andalusia. But how have we thought beyond that horizon? And within that “elsewhere”—because it is elsewhere—could we have thought differently? Raised in the form of an alternative, this question suddenly becomes our question. Aren’t the various cultures throughout the world only so many infinitely varied responses to the same questions that we ask ourselves—that we cannot help but ask ourselves? In which case, their inventory is no more than a range of nuances. Or is it only in those gaps we reveal between cultures that we can detect, identifying it patiently feature by feature, reflected as what is thus found in those various encounters, what is—or rather, what “goes as”—“human”? Let us retain the open, progressive character

8 The Elsewhere of China

of this last formulation and go with the nondefinitive “going.” Let us set down no preliminary definition, especially of “Man,” which is always ideological and which thus affects, as we can see, the universality of the questions themselves. Is the Kantian summary and breviary—“What can I know?” /  “What must I do?” / “What have I the right to hope?”—so conveniently exportable itself? Those questions, which are supposed to be the most abstract questions, the ones that should best hold all that is hypothetical within their triangle—are they really so extractable from their semantic folds? And then, can they be isolated from the theoretical biases that led to them? Nothing guarantees that “to know” and “to do,” the two terms of our classical philosophy, are found a priori in other languages, and the question is even more relevant, it seems, for the eschatological “to hope.” Don’t these questions remain fixed in an implicitness they do not probe, being without (external) support for reflecting upon them? Consequently, doesn’t this diversity—the diversity of cultures—send us back into our questions, forcing us to rework them? Indeed, encountering China, I ask myself: Is it even necessary for us to think by means of questions? Is it true that to think must always be to respond to a mystery, to interrogate the Sphinx, to sound the depths, as the West has passionately wanted it to be since the Greeks? It is true that a discipline was born when the West, as explorer of the elsewhere and colonizer of resources, inquired about the diversity of cultures throughout the world—that discipline is “anthropology.” But hasn’t anthropology been given that name too hastily, at too little cost? Does it keep its promises? And furthermore, why hasn’t philosophy taken more advantage of this Elsewhere that an-

The Elsewhere of China 9

thropology reveals to us, as art has done, for example, by drawing inspiration from it? Why has philosophy found so little there to renew it? Or found renewal only at its margins? After all, there’s Montaigne (but is Montaigne a “philosopher”?). That is to say, why do we limit this inquiry on cultural diversity to such a restricted, sectored mode without letting it renew our universals? Without making it the key to what “humanity” is—or rather, what it can be? Because then we could not continue to repeat with Hegel that philosophy appeared first in the East (the “East,” oriens: where the morning sun “rises”) but, through a strangely delayed birth, got its start in Greece, with the discovery of the concept and its operativity linking the universal and the particular; or, to repeat with Husserl that if all the cultures are so many anthropological “variations” and therefore equal, nevertheless only one, the European culture, has experienced the perilous fate of turning back on itself and becoming self-­reflective; or, to repeat with Maurice Merleau-­Ponty that the East, remaining in the “childhood” of philosophy, can only maintain an “oblique” relationship with it (but, as we well know, we have so much to learn from children!). No, we could no longer conceive of “geo-­philosophy” as Gilles Deleuze did, that is, by consigning any thinking exterior to Europe to the stage of “pre-­philosophic” for not rising to the “level of immanence,” and so on. Or if we did, we would still judge that thinking according to our reasons, or rather, let us say, our pre-­reasons, which remain implicit and very much prior to our prejudgments, our “pre-­judices,” since first of all, they must be detected, which Descartes never considered; and regarding those “others,” we would still only be scratching the surfaces of clichés and labels without penetrating their coherences, without

10 The Elsewhere of China

calling into question our biases—what biases?—and, consequently, without probing the depths of our unthought, beginning from these outside ways of thought, into which we have still not entered. The usual response I get from my philosopher friends goes as follows. From the time their schools first appeared, the Greeks deployed the possibilities of thought by systematically developing debates: Heraclitus versus Parmenides, or Epicurus against Plato (or materialism as opposed to idealism, and so on). How could there be more radical options, and don’t these oppositions immediately mark off the entire field of the thinkable? That is, don’t they become one and the same, let us venture, with the very exercise of Reason itself? Yes, the Greeks did indeed conceive of all the possibilities, I would answer, but configured in a certain way, already folded according to certain choices that they were not thinking about, that they did not doubt, that they were neither suspicious of nor surprised by: that they had not thought to think about. It is true that without fold, one does not think: one only thinks backed up against the unthought. The axes privileged by the Greeks (“being,” “principle,” “causality,” “truth,” and so on), and, primarily, their deliberate choice to question, to think of thinking as a confrontation, favored certain possibilities but left others in the shadows, unexplored, lying fallow—­unexploited. Their strength, most certainly, was to take those options to a conceptual (i.e., universal) level so that, once adopted, once sedimented, they effectively imposed their “necessity” in return, the necessity of the logos of “logic.” But that does not mean that those folds—deposits—beginning from which they worked are the only ones, that other perspectives were not extricable, that other possibilities were not imaginable. It does not

The Elsewhere of China 11

mean that China’s way of thinking “in course” should be ranked below that of Heraclitus’s “all in flow,” as one would believe from a distance, or that not promoting a concept of truth in China should be confused with—or even compared to—the “phenomenology,” not to mention the skeptical disenchantment, of Protagoras.

T HRE e   ■   T h i n k i n g B e f o r e o r B e s i d e ?

We can now better understand why anthropology, despite its display of generality, has remained confined to its sector, without philosophical stakes: because what remains a given is the idea that the cultures and the thinking of elsewhere, as complex and varied as they may be, cannot or can only marginally call into question European questioning. Hasn’t European thought, that is, the questioning of science and truth, adequately proven its effectiveness through the mastery that it ensures? These ways of thought from elsewhere can certainly enrich it, and even divert us from it (as exoticism does), but not make us relinquish it. European thinking does not divest itself. Upon encountering ways of thought from elsewhere, it ought to forge new concepts, expand its categories, and, in doing so, better yield to perceiving its own locality, but instead it retains its perspective—it has that tool. The Quai Branly Museum of indigenous arts fascinates us by making us see what we could have not become, but it does not disturb us. I would even say that the more spectacular and showy the “elsewhere” is, the less disturbing it is. The problem with China is that its elsewhere is discreet. There are no myths to reconstruct there, no arcane oral traditions to probe, no strange customs to revisit (except foot binding?). Chinese culture developed in text and history just as our own European culture did. Thus its elsewhere subtly escapes the anthropologists’ hold. Anthropology with-

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Thinking Before or Beside? 13

draws within its (minority) borders; or else its only other option is to put China and Greece in the same bag, or the same box, as Philippe Descola did, labeling it “analogism.” But the consequences are still the same: the “naturalism” that follows after “analogism” arises in Europe alone. The thinking of the Enlightenment had already encountered this problem, let us remember: into which box on our chart to put what was then called the “Chinese case.” And what if the “Chinese case” surreptitiously undermined our classifications and our display? Montesquieu experienced such a moment of vertigo. The problem posed by this Chinese Elsewhere becomes all the more thorny now that we are no longer sure we can declare it outstripped (by the West). China effectively missed the classical scientific revolution, the one that produced the mechanist-­causalist physics of Galileo and Newton that, within a few centuries, so abruptly changed material life on the entire planet; likewise and conjointly, it missed the ascent of the bourgeois Individual of the Enlightenment and the thinking of the political contract. But perhaps it can nevertheless be put in European culture’s—outdated—Before box, as so many other cultures have been? And here is a still more delicate question: Is its elsewhere, for that matter, so different? It is true that as soon as we have defined the difference, separated the “same” from the “other,” we have returned home. We know this, don’t we—that “to compare” is another way of not moving, of not leaving, and therefore of not entering? One has remained within one’s own initial overarching categories, beginning from which one orders things; heterotopia and disorientation have not come into play. Conclusion (the one that has separated me from other sinologists): as long

14 Thinking Before or Beside?

as European reasoning refuses to de- and re-­categorize itself, that is, to reconsider what is implicit in it, to question it and to probe its “obviousness,” it cannot effectively access an elsewhere, another way of thinking; and philosophy, despite its “doubt,” will no longer be able to be self-­reflective. Let us remember, however: Wasn’t it this Elsewhere, not yet marked by difference (categorized), that so surprised the first missionaries who landed in China after having discovered the New World, the Americas? The New World appeared empty to them, or they would, in any case, empty it, without resistance, through extermination or conversion. In Europe one could only wonder— an ambiguity cultivated with delight over centuries—whether the specimens discovered beyond the seas represented a humanity that had not yet progressed, or else had not yet fallen and become corrupt. Does the “good savage” disturb us? It confirms our ethnocentrism one way or another, and even our critical awareness of it cannot undo this obvious fact: that that form of humanity belongs definitively to the past, and henceforth the West alone remains the single reference point. In China, on the other hand, the missionaries came upon a “full” world; and for a long time the Chinese Literati would not be taken in by them—not that they refuted those evangelists who came from their “Far West,” but they could hardly be bothered: Did they need this imported Message? Was it meant just for them? Euclid’s Elements could certainly be put to good use, but the News of salvation hardly seemed to concern them; rather, it left them indifferent. Now indifference, between ways of thought, is much more difficult to surmount than difference. Thus we now find ourselves in an ambiguous historical situa-

Thinking Before or Beside? 15

tion, but perhaps we have not yet sufficiently analyzed the nature of this “crisis,” to use the term proposed by Husserl, and this shift, not to call it, more alarmingly, an upheaval. Because it is precisely at this moment, at the end of the theoretical globalization it began more that a century ago, that the West believes it is seeing its conceptions definitively triumph across the planet, not only its hypothetico-­ deductive conception of science with its model-­making logic (with mathematics as universal language in the background), but also, on the economic and political level, its conceptions of capitalist productivity and democratic right. It is precisely at this moment that this culture, the “West,” is suddenly amazed: If a culture, the Chinese culture for instance, is no longer located only before, but experienced its own development on many levels beside and parallel to the European culture, isn’t it therefore also true that Europe occupies only one side (of the possibilities of thought)? Indeed, this perspective can be reversed: What if European culture’s choices did not only push it forward, as it has believed about itself for the past few centuries, considering its success, but also move it to the side, off its mark, cause it to “go wrong,” as the expression goes? But to the side of what? In any case, the dualisms beginning from which its logic has so continuously operated now become a burden to it: “mind” / “matter,” “subject” / “object,” “God” / “the world,” and so on—who in Europe today is not trying by some means or other to shake off their yoke, to slip free of it? Could this set of tools be outdated? Might it now obstruct the way forward? Also, the message of salvation that European culture constructed and passionately proffered in its History, that it made so many desire, now loses its hold; or perhaps the ideals, like the

16 Thinking Before or Beside?

“Beautiful,” that it established, to which it sacrificed so much, now seem to it too costly, if not a wretched sham. Both perspectives simultaneously intrigue it (“it” being European culture, which believes itself to be universal): Through its choices, and first of all its choice of “clarity,” didn’t it miss a certain connected complexity of things, and this at the risk of a complication leading it ever on, which it would no longer have to pursue? And thus, wouldn’t it have problematized uselessly, carried along as it is by this enthusiasm for analytical “reason,” from which it can no longer step back? To the point that the elemental henceforth escapes it, that it no longer knows how to access it? Europe is suddenly, retrospectively, surprised by the great sacrifice that it has thus made, committed as one commits a crime, and first of all from the perspective of what it can only, from now on, dramatically call “existence” and no longer life: indeed, the desire to penetrate the secret of the biological never ends, but we no longer know how to live (how to die)—have we even thought about breathing (which China has thought about constantly)? We never stop wanting to master time, planning it ever more conveniently, but we no longer know how to think about the opportunity of a moment—China began by thinking about the seasonal “moment,” and so on. By relentlessly promoting knowledge, the complicities were broken; and the Individual condemned to confinement within his individualism. What is most fundamental escapes us, a disintegration gets under way, which goes from the social to the metaphysical (the famous “nihilism”), and the mastery acquired will finally leave us destitute. Thus, but too easily, of course, too lazily, what Western thought vaguely glimpsed of that Elsewhere of the Far East fascinated it as that which could henceforth serve to name for it what it repressed.

Thinking Before or Beside? 17

Might it even offer itself as a remedy? At least, it is no trouble to concoct this compensatory Elsewhere. To do so, it is enough just to invert the terms—another way of not disturbing oneself: projecting one’s fantasy in order not to enter. Beneath the heterotopia reappears the utopia: the logic of regulation (in China) would thus prevail over modelization (so praised by the West); or the relaxing of the principle of noncontradiction (belonging to wisdom) would prevail over the need for the excluded middle (required by logic); or again, the global (grasped by intuition) would prevail over the general (defined by concept); or harmony with the world, over autonomy of the subject, and so on. All the way up to where the most contemporary science bumps up against it, there is nothing that would not find a trace of itself at least in harmony with, if not originating from, the insights of ancient China. This holds as much with regard to “space-­time” revealing itself to be infrangible as with the— now necessary—renunciation of the very idea of “matter.” Since that is where we are, historically speaking, it is clear that from now on, sinology can no longer be considered protected territory. Or perhaps it is sinology itself that, in so often limiting itself to erudite monographs, has thus “protected” itself. Hasn’t it too hastily slipped into, settled into, the habitus and connivances of the within of its discipline? Hasn’t it passed too naively from the other side, too hastily straddling the passage, to still be able to allow entry? Likewise and conversely, “sino”-­logy, a variant of anthropology, can no longer continue to be considered from without, as a specialty, as philosophy still too often does. It is not only China’s importance today, and above all its economic importance, that compels us; and all the hybridizations and superimpositions of globalization will not let us avoid the great disentangling that has become necessary. We must

18 Thinking Before or Beside?

indeed enter into Chinese thought, actually enter, in order to exit that ideological outlet that threatens and allows European reasoning to examine itself, both its rich and its exhausted resources— there is nothing worse, on the other hand, than when it makes itself feel guilty. Or else we risk lapsing into the inanities of personal development and “happiness according to Confucius” that are today’s big winners. The fact remains that we cannot enter into Chinese thought without first approaching it through and in its language. Because “Chinese thought”—I am responding here to the objections of those who are afraid of confining cultures within worlds—is, first of all and essentially, thought that is expressed in Chinese. It is in the articulation of the sentence, even before ideas and thus prior to the effects of construction, that the folds are sketched. If language does not determine thought, to think, nonetheless, is to activate the resources of a language. Now, as I have cautioned, learning classical Chinese requires infinite time and patience. Is there a shortcut to propose? Here I am inviting nonsinologists to read one simple Chinese sentence, but so “simple” that it takes much time to reveal it— to read it simultaneously from within and without, from close-­up and from a distance—in order, by “entering,” by exiting and reentering again, by excavating that gap, to open underneath the many expedients of retreat and reflexivity, which is very different from believing it is possible to arrange naively side by side, to trace a parallel and “compare.” I am offering a reading both in what it says and what it does not say, both in what it engages and what it turns away from, in what it does and does not lead us to think. To dispel vague generalities and whiffs of fantasy, nothing is better than fieldwork.

F OUR  ■   T h e F i r s t S e n t e n c e

I do indeed believe in the sentence as the modality belonging to thought. I do not know if philosophers have a style, according to the question so often debated; no doubt “style” is too personal (isn’t it, as Buffon said, “the man himself ”?), too intimately tied to individuality, and the philosopher might thus have a style despite himself; his style might in fact work against him. But I find there to be a sentence belonging to each philosopher insofar as he is a philosopher. A philosopher is recognized by his sentence more than by his concepts. That is even what makes him a great philosopher: when he has his sentence—this “great” being understood less as a word of praise than as a trademark. Plato quite obviously has a sentence, the one that he fully deploys and joyfully affirms his command over in Gorgias or the Republic. In other words, what makes Plato Plato is his way of developing his sentence, much more than his theory of “ideas,” which he calls his great invention, or rather, the theory finds itself already included there, already understood. Aristotle has an entirely different sentence. It is through his sentence and its construction, his method of inventory and allocation, of anonymity and collective opinion, that Aristotle opens a gap between himself and his master, much more so than through ideas, arguments, or conceptions-­convictions, as much as these find themselves involved. Merleau-­Ponty has a sentence and does not have a

19

20 The First Sentence

concept (the “flesh” is hardly a concept). I can recognize a sentence, each different, for Paul Ricoeur as for Alain Badiou. But what is a sentence? Let us be clear: a sentence has nothing to do with form in the sense of putting a thought “into form,” because the sentence is its very deployment—in other words, its condition of existence. From beginning to end, or from one period to another period, whether or not sentences are marked (ancient forms of writing, we know, did not mark them), they are the means by which the thought arises, gets going, expands, builds tension, perhaps loses its balance and regains it, promotes itself in any case, and then must end, or at least land, offering some pause or some breakaway. The Greek sentence, as in Plato, with its an, its ara, and its optatives, all its combinative play of hypotheses and relatives, but also its anacoluthons (traditionally identified with the syntactical freedom of the Greek language), is a sentence that builds, but in a risky fashion, through perilous balancing acts, by going to the limit with audacity, just for the sake of it—it is adventuresome. It is exactly this audacity that gave a shot of energy, insolence, and detachment to what has since been called philosophy in Europe. Kant has a Latin sentence in German. Hegel, at least in Phenomenology, develops a sentence that splits apart and turns in circles all the diverging, combining elements of German semantics, like a great mill that can grind everything: that is what gives Hegel his power. As for Heidegger, he is so taken up with his sentence that he makes himself untranslatable. The same is true, and even more so, for the first sentence. That sentence operates as a curtain raiser. It does not say where it comes from, and advances unjustified, a true “throw of the dice” present-

The First Sentence 21

ing us retrospectively with this enigma: Through where—that is, through what hold or according to what means—can elucidation begin, can a beginning take place? But at the same time, as discretely as it presents itself, that first sentence establishes, exudes, an order that can no longer be undone; henceforth one can only think within its orbit or in its wake. It happens just like that: a horizon is already sketched. A first sentence enlists the thinking that follows in a such way that detachment or disengagement will no longer be possible, whatever inventiveness is brought to bear; we remain dependent on it or ensnared by it. At the same time as it arises, it folds the thinkable; that inaugural act, because of its scope, already amounts to completion. In some sense, we will do nothing afterward but explain that initial, ventured gesture. Or, put more negatively, hardly has this first sentence begun to be uttered—to be set in motion— than it becomes a rut, than it projects its shadow or its fate over all future developments. We never exit a first sentence. In Proust’s first sentence, the memorable “For a long time, I used to go to bed early,” isn’t everything already definitively advanced? There the die is cast for Remembrance of Things Past; and Proustians will endlessly discover, with pleasure, all that it sets in motion. Like a parasol or a canopy that is opened, and under the shelter of which one remains, that “long time” immediately establishes, without wait or hurry, the sovereign order of duration. Facing that expanse, the “I” that points to and responds to it holds the position of a singular subject but already overflows with its own exiguity: it is tenuously anecdotal but is inscribing opposite the empty available form where everything will come to collect and take shape. Above all, to begin by going to bed is already to take the opposite

22 The First Sentence

approach, to set in motion a conversion that will not end. It is to begin to present the interior dimension that lies below the diurnal, dissolute, soon forgotten daily experience—the nocturnal, in other words, where, in the silence and refusal of agitation, events and feelings will finally be able to release a clear sound as they settle; where the impressions then set free will never stop tunneling underground to reconnect, through “Time,” in order to escape their dispersion and be rejoined—by way of which the entire work will find its revelation. Thus, after the “long time” gong is struck, the octosyllable that follows demands a pause that makes it resonate—suspense-­silence; but the framework is already established, the loom is strung. One may counter that this is a matter of a “literary” sentence and that it is not the same for a philosophical abstraction. But let us take the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is more than a threshold; it is already a kind of prescription for what follows: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and every choice, aims at some good, it seems.” In the framework of this opening sentence alone, we can see that an array of concepts is organized, a first line is traced for systematically inventorying an order of things within its grid, and in the most economic, strictly enumerative fashion, without leaving room for any escape, supposition, or possible disorganization. A system of impersonal generality is established that immediately suppresses the mysterious or strange. Everything is already methodically, serially arranged—all the more so since it is a matter of marks, shown in equal, steady light, so that there is no longer anything to fear, anything that stands out, shadowy, disconcerting. The requirement of an aim is posited in a perspective from which there is no exit; everything will forever

The First Sentence 23

be returned to it by that same raking motion: an orbit is fixed, that of telos, toward which everything “aims” (according to that Greek construction that serves as matrix: ephiesthai + genitive). Consequently, Aristotle will endlessly repeat that if my action has no goal, it is futile; and whether material is submitting to form, or power to action, or the world to God, this is very much what he will endlessly afterward organize “theoretically.” Similarly, to the generality so drily opened and allowing no shadow or fissure to remain, the final “seems” (dokei ) adds, before closing, an empirical flat note that will be heard endlessly, as a continual echo, the one of general “opinion,” in other words, the doxa’s support, which is dangerous to give up. This is Aristotle’s way of issuing warning and immediately marking his distance from the dangerous—Platonic—flight into ideality. In this brief inaugural sentence, in its way of analytically seizing things and organizing, flatly, with no further intrigue, all of Aristotle is already present.

F I V e   ■  A F i r s t C h i n e s e S e n t e n c e

This first Chinese sentence I will take from the beginning of China’s oldest book, which is also its most fundamental book, the Yijing (I Ching), or “Classic of Change,” if we translate the title literally (yi, “change”; jing, “classic”). But is it a “book,” strictly speaking? If there is a book, a text accumulating successive layers from the beginning to the end of the first millennium BCE, that book takes form beginning not from a Word but from a line: a complete line or a broken line (“—”or “– –”) symbolizing the two factors in correlation, yin and yang, simultaneously opposite and complementary and holding all reality. Those horizontal lines, superimposed, combine into figures of three or six lines (for a total of sixty-­four hexagrams) such that they derive from one another and form a mechanism that, stemming from ancient divination practices and used for drawing lots, is both a chance operation and, as such, manipulatable. According to their arrangement and the intermingling of the two types of lines, these figures allow the consultant to identify and analyze the lines of force at work in each situation encountered, which must be turned to good advantage in order to succeed. Given its material, we can see immediately what makes this “book” original. It does not teach a Message or claim to deliver a Meaning (about the enigma of the world or the mystery of life— what do I know?) but presents for examination, going from the bot-

24

A First Chinese Sentence 25

tom to the top of each figure and line after line, how this or that situation is deployed and inflected in a positive or negative way, “luckily” or “unluckily,” as a function of the tendencies and interactions detected, which continue to evolve. Each of these successive figures, considered as a whole and considering each of its lines, through a macro- and a micro-­reading, makes appear in its coherence a moment of the transformation under way. On the other hand, the first two figures stand apart because they are each composed of a single type of line: the initial figure is formed only out of yang lines, evoking the capacity of Heaven (䷀); the second is formed only out of yin lines, evoking the capacity of Earth (䷁). Yin and yang originated as the north-­facing and south-­facing slopes of the mountain, its dark and its lit sides. Forming a pair, with the six yang lines facing the six yin lines, these two initial figures comprise the total stock of the lines composing the series—or the energies invested—and represent the polarity of the whole. The first embodies what I will translate as the initiatory capacity, Qian 乾, and the second, as the receiving capacity, Kun 坤: as counterparts, they form the double door (門) through which the process of things endlessly passes. Once this mechanism is in place, what can we imagine to be the opening formula or the first sentence put forward? But first of all, once again, is it a sentence, strictly speaking? Just four Chinese sinograms follow one another side by side, without anything to indicate rection or relationships of coordination or subordination between them. These four monosyllables are all equal, without anything arranging or hierarchizing them, but in their series they form a complete whole. In such a formula, is it even a matter of verbs, nouns, adjectives, or whatever function these words have? Nothing

26 A First Chinese Sentence

can mark it grammatically; there is no more morphological specification here than there is syntactical rection. I will choose to translate this parataxis using minimal punctuation: Initiatory capacity (Qian): beginning expansion profit rectitude yuan heng li zhen 元 亨 利 贞

Or just as good: “to begin—to expand rapidly—to profit / to turn to good account—to remain sound (solid).” Such an opening sentence, as we can see, does not construct; it is content with simultaneously unbinding and binding. Each successive term takes over from the preceding one and deploys it; it proceeds from it, renews it, and carries it further: like four points or pieces on an otherwise empty checkerboard, tracing a curve by themselves. Faced with so much non-­alternative (compared with that series of alternatives that syntax imposes upon us in our languages), I wonder: Can we imagine an opening formulation that is less inventive, less postulated, and less adventuresome—less risky? Can we imagine a proposition less moved by choices, and especially those grammatical choices required by other languages (choices of person, gender, number, time, and so on), that is to say, advancing itself less as an option— hypothesis/hypothetical—taken on what might be called “reality”? This utterance does not refer to anything in particular, it has no subject or complement, but it marks the stages and the justification of all development: it less has a meaning, strictly speaking, than it develops a coherence.

A First Chinese Sentence 27

Thus it is less a matter of a sentence, exactly, than of successive phases of an unfolding: we can read these four terms one by one and one after the other. A seasonal illustration: the “beginning” is spring; the “expansion,” summer; the “profit” (harvest), autumn; the “rectitude” (both solidity and tenacity), winter, which allows the capacity to endure, through burial, until renewal. But we can also read the terms two by two, already forming a polarity: to the release of a “beginning” responds the “expansion” that spreads the effect; or (then) the “profit” of the harvest calls for the integrity of the “rectitude” in order not to be exhausted. There, in any case, is the key formula—drawn from the old funds of divination operations and repeated many times throughout the book—for that which continually makes reality, in its incessant process, and which nothing can call into question, can neither reduce nor contradict. “Beginning” does indeed mark that which first detaches itself and comes at the start, as the “initiator” of things (ji ), when a configuration is barely suggested but its orientation can already be perceived, which applies equally to everything that comes into the world and takes on existence, involves nature as well as humanity, is understood on the physical as well as the moral plane. As the commentators will elaborate, it applies to every formation of “breath,” of vapor, or of energy (qi 气), beginning by individuating and actualizing itself, through condensation and concretion: thus the plant germinates or the insect hatches, thus the clouds and rocks are formed, thus things and events alike come about. But it applies as well to the slightest incitement of the inner depths rising in reaction to what we view as unbearable occurrences in the world and triggering in us a first spark of “humanity”: from that initial feeling of pity

28 A First Chinese Sentence

(ren 仁), as non-­insensibility with regard to what happens to others, the possibility of virtue begins. In relationship to which the time of “expansion” that follows is one of diffusion and maturation or, more precisely, according to the image, the time of inner, invisible “cooking,” of completing the development, then resulting in full manifestation. In this stage, the initial shock deploys itself throughout and spreads, promotes communication from within and leads to increase and growth: what has just begun is propagated, united, becomes a ball of snow or a spot of oil, the effect of which promotes and deploys itself. With these two first terms we can already see that what makes this opening sentence original is that it refrains from—rids itself of—all originality and confrontation: that it is careful not to introduce any sort of intrigue or offer any opposition; that it puts nothing aside, involves no reference, establishes no preference or proper order, allows nothing be considered as external or elsewhere. If no subject is indicated here, as the Chinese language permits, it is because nothing effectively distinguishes itself as the subject, serving as substantial medium and destined for predication. Neither does anything escape this phenomenal perspective, that is, this perspective on the formation of phenomena: it is equally true for me and for the world; the subjective and the objective are not separated in it. Because, in all my manifestations of existence, internal as well as external, “I” too am a momentary actualization of this dynamism or this impulse that spreads throughout, invests itself, interacts, and transmits energy. This perspective, or angle—although it does everything precisely in order to do away with anything like an “angle”—is thus that of every process activated and propagating itself, caught in its

A First Chinese Sentence 29

advent and its deployment. Thus to translate the following term (li) as “profit” is a bit reductive, or, I might say, too invested. In its usual written form, the ideogram is composed of an ear of grain and a scythe 利: it signifies what there is to harvest henceforth, as long as the expansion succeeds, or, in other words, that this expansion, in deploying itself, is both “pointed” (protruding) and “favorable” (the double meaning of li), that there is thus capital to be made out of that shock leading to the sharpening of the effect. But such profit is only durable precisely because it favors nothing in particular, is inclined toward no special bias, respects a just balance, neither deviates nor overflows. It maintains its immanent capacity through its “rectitude,” the last term of the sentence (zhen); and this fecundity at work does not run dry. If we come back to our original inquiry, we will already begin to understand it in a less innocent or more trenchant way: How does one enter into the thinking? By what means or first maneuver does one open a way? What can be a start there, a first step that is both effective and that one privileges, but after which, I am afraid, no more can be done but to develop and accept the consequences? In fact, I wonder whether, with this simple opening sentence, “Beginning → expansion → profit → rectitude,” the die is not already cast, whether everything is not already decided. And that is precisely because this first sentence does not draw up the expected originary scene, does not establish the first instant or agent, is without story and without drama and does not even make anything emerge; because, furthermore, it offers nothing to suppose or to construct, leaves room for neither argumentation nor narration— neither muthos nor logos. Can we even imagine being disturbed by its truth? What is an utterance that does not even call for justifica-

30 A First Chinese Sentence

tion? Which leads to the question: Can our minds grasp what, in establishing itself, presents so little passion or resistance, fissure or contraction, through which meaning can be produced or emotion filtered? Can this sentence, in its equal, steady unwinding, without suspense or tension, speak to our desire? Does it even let us discern some doubt or some question? And if so, I repeat, can we think without questioning? Chinese thought effectively started from there—not from Being or from God. It did not start from the opposition of Being and becoming, or of truth and appearance, as did Greek metaphysics by splitting the world in two; rather, it conceives of the initiatory capacity (“Heaven”), invested in the formation of every process, developing in polarity (with “Earth”) and going its way, so that the process initiates itself—is deployed—makes good—renews itself without deviating from its course, which is the virtue of Heaven, being the condition of its renewal (but already I am glossing by justifying . . .). Neither did it start from a first Subject, author, or Creator, as represented in the biblical account, but conceives the operativity involved in every course—discreetly, in silence, tenaciously, whether that course is one of the world or of behavior. This sentence that moves so little, risks or ventures so little, in a certain way already says everything. It circles back in its progression from “rectitude,” where it draws to a close, to a new “beginning.” What could it leave pending? There is no enigma to decipher or worry to resolve: What could there be to add that is not already commentary?

SI X   ■   C o m m e n t a r y

That first sentence is so complete, comprehensive, and definitive, so clear and calm, leaving nothing pending, that there is nothing left to do but explain it; the only way of adding to it would be to gloss it. So many ancient Chinese texts are constructed beginning from basic formulas that serve as core or matrix, and all the elaboration that follows does nothing but exploit their richness. Here, this opening formulation, stating a “judgment” on the first figure of the Classic of Change, is traditionally attributed to King Wen, the civilizing king par excellence, founder of the Zhou dynasty in early Antiquity (turn of the first millennium BCE); and the commentary that follows it was attributed to Confucius but belongs instead to “the literati” of the end of Antiquity (in the fourth century BCE). The commentary begins like this: Vast is the capacity of Qian [the initiatory capacity]! The ten thousand beings find their resources there to begin: so that it commands Heaven. This exhaustive introductory formula is one of celebration. What is there at the beginning, am Anfang, as Goethe said, or what is this first “there is,” this es gibt? What is there to start out from to say things? From nothing other, it is proposed here as if presenting the obvious, than the invested—“initiatory” (Qian)—to which all

31

32 Commentary

that exists owes its becoming and its developing: finding in it source and resource (the notion of zi), and finding simultaneously its point of departure, its reserve or its “capital,” and its support. And what term to begin with, what first term to venture? That “vast” (“great”) comes first; that “vast” is enough to name here that generous capacity which, opening its arms, can form a wide embrace (look at this mark for “vast” with its horizontal line tracing a man 人 opening his arms 大); that “vast,” in a certain way, already says it all. Or else that “vast” is the opening word, the first qualifier projected, chosen from among the possibilities—and is there any going back? Simply to name this “vastness” in the face of the world, in the face of life, is to keep from awakening surprised panic in the face of what might be, beyond all beyond, infinity: the vertigo that seized Job facing divine Creation’s incommensurability is immediately disposed of. Similarly and conversely, this sufficient, satisfying “vast” dispenses with the need to posit some border or edge; it does not raise questions, as in Greek, with regard to the “limit,” peras: one is diverted de facto from the worry of having to name the “all” of the world, to holon, which the first Ionian thinkers raised as an enigma. Thus this “vast” or “great,” posted first, does not question. This “ample,” so generously deployed, but without extending to any boundary and thus to confrontation, already buries any question of why. It opens widely but does not bump up against anything. It obliterates any abyss as it dissolves any fixation. Fascination with the Extreme and its impossible beyond is drowned in it, quieted in it, as, conversely, any temptation to withdraw or focus—contract—into the narrowness of the singular is defeated. Through such an open-

Commentary 33

ing, all those ways are already closed. Throwing this “vast” out at the beginning is enough to create a gap. What I have translated as “being” (wu 物) is indeed the most “ample” term for naming both “beings and things” captured in all their variety (the “ten thousand beings,” wan wu). Etymologically this term (the graph ) depicts an ox ( ) and plowing ( : a sack and bit of earth?). But how did we get from there to the “ten thousand” as the number of the innumerable? Could it be because the clods of plowed earth are multicolored or because the ox is an animal whose corpulence spreads amply in our eyes (as before the expert butcher in Zhuangzi)? In ancient inscriptions, in any case, the word is attested to designate a particular kind of ox with a multicolored coat that could be offered in sacrifice. We can gather at least that reality is approached as living, in its mass and its diversity of appearance, forming a scene and destined for use, perceived in activity. Here again, beneath this most ordinary naming, choices are already indicated which the language does not reflect. To name what we most commonly call “beings” is just this “plow ox,” that the Chinese language graphically employs, making it the medium for a multiplicity: this term blocks the path of speculation; the way of thought is immediately directed toward function and appearance, not toward essence or existence. Thus, to translate it as “being(s)”— as I have just done, but how else to translate it?—ineluctably throws us off course. Because once the perspective is projected, once the day has dawned, we are not allowed to consider “what” (noun) the beings and things “might be,” nor “from what” they come. Instead, they

34 Commentary

situate us in the fundamental, earlier stage, the one of stock or root (ben 本). They do not leave room for the question “What is that?” (the ti esti of the Greeks) nor for an investigation of origin: it will be enough to note that the incitation is constantly at work, on a wide scale, and the course is continually getting under way. A capacity is invested, in every place as at every moment, that never stops “providing for,” endlessly spreading, promoting, without exhausting itself. That is why it is called “vast” and why it is celebrated. It commands from end to end that continuum of becoming—of flow—that is called “Heaven” (tian 天, “vast,” “great,” 大, with a second horizontal line above indicating that it embraces by covering). Now such a “Heaven,” at the time of this commentary, is no longer deified nor separate, strictly speaking, but already serves to name that generous initiatory energy, never running dry, that is found to be involved in every process. The commentary continues: Clouds pass—rain spreads: the beings, according to their category, flow [into] their actualization. Such is the progress, or rather, such is the in progress, the “expansion” (heng) after the “beginning” (yuan) that prompts it and governs it. For the passing of what takes form in turn, deploying itself in a purely processive way, what is more obvious indeed than clouds? Not clouds exiled beyond the horizon, prompting nostalgia, deepening into infinity, but clouds that condense diffuse energy into vaporous appearances and begin actualizing it by sketching contours with their swells. And for that capacity to spread through-

Commentary 35

out and, crossing straight through, to assist in the ripening process, what better to evoke than rain—the fertile rain that does not target or spare anything? Now we also understand that the same is true of everything that is so “fine”—“light”—“subtle”—“compact” that it becomes imperceptible, but operates all the more easily at the core of all development, as one commentator on this commentary notes (Wang Fuzhi, at the end of the seventeenth century). Indeed, what is life, the world, reality, whatever we call it, if it is not that: the actualization that deploys itself through interaction into specific individuations, each according to its rubric, and that thus flows and follows from itself, without any other pretext? What could be added to this pure, simple phenomenality, the Chinese ask us, that would not weigh it down or coat it? What could be assumed to be behind or beyond it? Why must “something”—being or substance—more (than this continuous passage) exist? And in particular, what need is there to conceive of a Cause for this constant promotion, to posit a Mover, to invoke an Agent? This commentary, as we can clearly see, asks nothing, it explains nothing, and it even makes any questioning moot. It neither claims nor justifies—which is to say that it only presents the obvious in which we are already engaged, and it does so in a strictly self-­referential fashion, by relying solely on the six lines, or six “positions” (“dragons”), of the figure that it summarizes: Vast clarity—end beginning: the six positions, according to their moment, come to pass; according to the moment, to mount the six dragons so as to drive Heaven.

36 Commentary

The way of Qian [the initiatory capacity] modifying-­ transforming, each renders [holds] correct its nature-­destiny. To retain unity; vast harmony. From which, profit and rectitude. Each “moment” comes in its time, opportunely, and that is why, after the “beginning” and the “expansion” come the “profit” (harvest) and the “rectitude.” What better image of this dynamism extending from itself and renewing itself than the body of the dragon? There is successive development indeed, as from the lower line to the upper line of the figure, at the same time that light, “vast” as well, accompanies this unfolding throughout, leaving no room for suspecting any hole or break. What place is there for worry in what is bound together so well that the possibility of death or interruption, at this level, is inconceivable? It does not even say “beginning and end,” but “end-­beginning” (which translators often wrongly correct): this beginning is not inscribed in a single moment in time but is at work in all activation, and likewise there is no final end, neither a raising nor a lowering of the curtain. Thus every end is also a beginning; what is completed gives birth again as well. We have only continuous transitions to deal with. Or again, there is indeed endless mutation, “modification” and “transformation” (bian-­hua), so that stable or Eternal being cannot be invoked, but nevertheless this becoming does not deviate. All that is individuated is called to follow in “correct” fashion what makes up its “nature” and forms its “destiny.” In other words, what is invested in it as capacity also commands in it its “rection,” the

Commentary 37

“mandate” according to a fate that sets its destination: whether it is that of “Heaven” as a whole or that of each singular advent, this course can develop only insofar as it is regulated. It could not follow one particular moral code or, conversely, fall outside the framework of this processivity. “Harmony” (he), the master word of this evocation, in keeping “profit” inseparable from “rectitude,” deals with them both: it assumes simultaneously that nothing can intervene from outside the world or secede from within the world. That this “harmony” is also called “vast” means that it holds in all respects, as inner value, unique value, without leaving expectations of a beyond or fears of rebellion or exception. Facing so much coherence, which dissolves all metaphysical surprise at this point—that is to say, makes “Heaven” spill into the natural at this point—we ourselves are surprised. I cannot help but wonder: Will there never be any place here for the Rupture? Will nothing ever come to break in, to rise up in confrontation? In any case, we must note that the Chinese thinker recognizes nothing specific here, nothing exclusive, and that he keeps everything connected: according to our own terms, the ethical goes hand in hand with the cosmological, and it is the same with the political, which makes it all the clearer what strictly ideological order serves as foundation, or rather, let us say, as seal. The commentary continues and comes to an end in this way: [From the] head to tower over the throng of beings: the ten thousand realms are at peace. It is clear, according to all the glossators, that what comes “at the head” here, what emerges “from the head,” refers back to what

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was said at the start of the beginning-­command (yuan): that is, to the wise Sovereign who embodies that capacity which is both initiatory and regulatory and whom there is no need even to name as such, since he is so much one with the good order of things. In fact, in this processive logic, impossible to disturb, is there still a place for a political Subject, unique as he might be? Because the sovereign himself is only the medium or the office through which the social order comes to plug into the order of the world, aligns itself with it, and harmony is translated into “peace.” Can our earlier surprise thus turn finally only to suspicion? Doesn’t such well-­regulated order serve as the engine of obedience? Or, to overcome the latter and be freed of it, isn’t it necessary to posit an External to the world, ektos tou kosmou, as the Greeks were already saying, and invent an ideality detached from situations? In other words, if Freedom has servitude as its opposite, as we know, isn’t this in conflict with “Harmony”? And thus, if such a development works so hard to unfold the obvious, and does not allow for rupture or dissonance, it is up to us, readers from Europe, to organize the protest from without, to make the confrontation arise from elsewhere. With regard to this “obvious” that the Chinese sentence weaves as if it were only unfolding it: we must take a step back to put it into perspective, to take it out of its unthought, to read not only what it says there but also what it does not say: to disturb it.

SE V EN  ■  H e b r a i c E n t r y

Let us deliberately exit this sentence in order to be able to enter it all the more operationally. To read from without, to arrange an encounter between ways of thought that are unaware of one another, to put the gap to work, and to play with the constrastive effect, is, as I have said, to make apparent the biases that are implicit, buried, unlit, by which such thinking has prospered. This approach applies even more particularly to this first sentence of the Classsic of Change, whose power stems from its apparent ignorance of all other possibilities, from its seeming to remain on this side of any option, to pose no question and thus not to have to propose any solution either, since it only unfolds the obvious and consequently does not constitute a point of view, since it is neither original nor unique, nor hardly even distinctive. Thus, over two millennia, it has been constantly cited, glossed, explained, endlessly referenced, but never has it been disturbed. Not only has the extent of its unthought never been measured, but contesting it has never been imagined. It is so completely assimilated that it is no longer read: there is no hold on it. What sinologist today is still interested in it? Thus it will not be a matter here of comparing but, through the intrusion of an Outside, of making protrude and react what is so deeply enfolded inside that it is no longer even suspected of being there. But what exteriority is there to introduce opposite this sentence, to shake it from its con-

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sensus, to reveal it to itself—that is to say, that can adjust to it and reflect it? The Bible also begins with a “beginning.” It is possible to begin otherwise? We also know that the Bible and the Classic of Change are the same age, extend over as many centuries, that the two books—these foundational books—carry the same weight in each civilization, were there at the start of equal traditions. Thus a parallel emerges. But for all that, what is a “beginning”? Is there only one way of considering it? Or isn’t it rather that in this “beginning” the gap is already widening, to the point that henceforth it could no longer be stopped? If it does not create itself out of nothing (ex nihilo) in Genesis, this “beginning” by which the Bible begins nonetheless introduces a rupture. Such a beginning, we calculate, is an irruption without precedent that likewise, in this block of primordial history, remains unreconcilable with all that follows, isolating itself from what follows, even if it plays a fundamental role in it. There it is, suddenly, abruptly, looming up, this beginning become event, and it is toward that fracture that it is aimed. In face of which we can begin to perceive how the beginning evoked in the opening of the Classic of Change is of a different nature: it is not considered from the point of view of the discontinuity that it could introduce but from that of the release it activates or, a better way to say it, that it “initiates” and that, from there, can expand and develop. Thus if we are to enter into Chinese thought, we first of all have to make this differentiation: to conceive of what I will call the initiator (the notion of ji in the Classic of Change) as opposed to the event. What does “to initiate” mean? To initiate does not signal a break-­in, the break-­in of “creation,” bara’, a Hebrew term referring

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to something new, marvelous, and unprecedented. “To initiate” can be understood to mean that something “bites,” “takes,” and in passing is put on its path, is set in motion, makes its way: that a course is discreetly begun, brought into development—that the infinitesimal can become infinite. It is not that an action takes place there, gratuitously, unjustified, definitively separating the before and the after and making an otherness suddenly appear; rather, an interaction is subtly produced, an incitement occurs; an orientation evolves and begins to make its way. On the Chinese side, the beginning evoked does not detach itself but engages. Whereas the event of Genesis has inaugural value, whereas a first day breaks with splendor and majesty, this other beginning sets in motion—and, most important, in an imperceptible fashion—an operativity. The Genesis beginning opens a way of thinking of Time (and, first of all, the framework of the week); the Chinese beginning, a way of thinking of processes (claiming only unfolding and duration). Moreover, let us notice this initial fact, as restricting as it is unobtrusive, inscribed as it is in the language: unlike Indo-­European languages and Hebrew, Chinese is not conjugated; it is expressed, as it were, in the infinitive (which I have only occasionally been able to retain in my preceding translation). Thus the indexation or temporal localization, as well as the assignation to a subject, are not necessarily indicated. Do I dare say that under those conditions, “God” would exist only as consequence? Or, in other words, that “God” depends upon the way one thinks of the beginning? Because the biblical beginning is conceived as a break-­in, it is perceived as intervention; it makes a Subject (of the creation) suddenly appear, Elohim: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth . . .” God, posited as the Other

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in this unique beginning, remains external to and uncontaminated by what he makes, “creating” the world but not dependent on it. A sign of his presence and an instrument of his power, both wind and breath, ruah, his spirit, “hovered over the waters”: he must precede and follow his orientation alone, he cannot be subjected to influence in return, he does not enter into the play of interactions. On this initial scene he projects his sovereign will as he verifies the results of it afterward at each stage: “and God saw that it was good.” As a result, we can read better, by contrast, what was understood on the Chinese side: if there really is a celebration of the initiatory Capacity, from which what makes the world endlessly proceeds, it is no longer necessary that a Subject emerge, that an Agent be distinguished. Moreover, let us not forget that the Chinese language does not distinguish between active and passive voices; also that it privileges the point of view of functionality, or, more precisely, of “processivity.” Nothing, consequently, can suddenly rise up separated from the course of things; no instance is isolated. If there is an absolute, it is not dissociated from the world but it is in the “way” of it, the tao, borne along at full speed: no Will presides there, but what makes up its viability is continually ensured. China had no need to posit “God.” On the biblical side, however, one usually insists upon the abstract, impersonal nature of this “sacerdotal Document,” didactic and not dramatic, concerned with nomenclatures and classifications, presenting the first account of the Creation. Whereby it actually does come closer in its ritual aim to the type of preoccupations that belong to the Classic of Change. On either side, wouldn’t the concern be the same: to make a world order appear, a Weltordnung,

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to be renewed in the community or society? Attention is thus focused, for both sides, on the specifications: “The beings, according to their category, flow [into] their actualization,” says the Chinese; and God created the beings “according to their kind,” the biblical side repeats. But in the first pages of Genesis, the established order is progressive, issuing from a repeated separation—“to separate” is the verb that organizes this opening, and the priority granted to the otherness of the Creator can only call for a creation represented in terms of space and time that structure one another by deploying one another. That is why this “sacerdotal Document” evokes an initial chaos in the second verse: “there was darkness above the Void.” This darkness is nothing but a vestige, unexpurgated, drawn from the old cosmogonic resources; otherwise it would be illogical: since the order of Creation is affirmed by rupture and something like break-­in, it must necessarily detach itself from an earlier disorder, a mumbo jumbo of the unformed. It could not otherwise make an event that could be announced. With all this in mind, we can more easily take measure of what, in contrast, makes the processive order so original on the Chinese side: it is not brought from Beyond, not introduced, but neither is it progressive; rather, it is deployed in an internal mode, sua sponte, which could be called “natural.” In short, it is not a matter of introduction but of what we must think of as “regulation.” From there arise these gaps that follow from one another. In the Bible, the light comes to oppose the darkness, even if it then combines with it to establish an alternation. In its bursting forth, the light gives rise to the first day of Creation, even before the stars are created. Whereas, according to the first sentence of the Clas-

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sic of Change, the light accompanies all unfolding in its continual transition, from the “end” to the “beginning.” That “vast light” illuminates the course of things without allowing shadow; it does not have to liberate from negative powers, like a weapon brandished upon encountering them. It does not have to save from the darkness. In the Bible, heaven is reduced to being no more than a solid surface, the dome of the firmament separating, on either side, the waters that will form the ocean from those that will fall as rain. Whereas, in China, “Heaven” becomes the first term establishing our confidence in this continuum issuing forth reality-­viability (tao, the “way,” both terms say at once). “Heaven,” which prevailed over the idea of a Lord above, or Shangdi, until it was edged out at the end of Antiquity, comes to name this bottomless Fund of Process, which, because it does not deviate, is led by itself to renew itself: because the capacity for “beginning” “commands” in it, it is not threatened with drying up, and that is why it is celebrated. I will turn my attention to this idea of regulation that the Chinese Heaven embodies because that is where, it seems to me, the gap with the Bible is concentrated. But how to expand this notion, which in our usage has remained local, technical, or physiological, into what would make it an ultimate, global concept that, in the face of Revelation, comes to name the absolute? Just as process is opposed to progress, regulation is thought of in contrast to orientation (destination), an idea that prevails in the biblical revelation. In the account in Genesis, this orientation takes us from dwelling place to dweller: a world must be laid out, separate from its elements, so that God can then populate it with living beings who are its ornaments and constitute his “army.” We can read there all the more

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clearly what I have not yet sufficiently explained: why, in contrast, it says in the Classic of Change commentary that each “position” the initiatory capacity occupies comes “in its time”; or each of the six lines that it “mounts” like “dragons” in the figure (of the hexagram) equally comes to pass “according to the moment.” Promotion and deployment are very much present there, and not a cycle, as we usually believe as soon as we abandon a linear progression; rather, the same “harmony” is maintained throughout the unfolding. What distances this from the Bible is that it is not toward perspective or End—meaning both time limit and goal and thus naming each stage as it is passed—that this process can lead. The biblical account, on the contrary, leads to man: alone created in the image of God, he is given dominion over the rest of Creation, which finds its end in him. That the world is conceived with a view toward man is even more pronounced in the Yahwist account, in which God makes the garden of Eden for him. From there, what has gone unperceived by us until now emerges distinctly: that “man” is not posited or even named as such in the Chinese sentence or in its commentary, not that he is absent of course, but that he remains included, does not stand out in this web of countless knots—“warp and woof ” as the Chinese metaphor says (jing-­wei)—as it weaves the process of the world. Man is immediately part of the ten thousand beings, wan wu (the original referent, we will recall, is the plow ox). He is then implicit in the idea of individuation that renders “nature” correct in forming itself into “fate”; and finally he is found again in the “ten thousand” of the ten thousand realms or principalities for which, within this regulation of the whole, “peace” is ensured. But he does not, apart from other beings

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and in isolation from them, give rise to destiny itself. Even if it may be said elsewhere that he is inscribed “as a third party with Heaven and Earth,” he does not emerge as subject bearing within himself the vocation of the world. Because the “separation” that Genesis brings into play does not involve just the physical elements. It also stems from the fact that man, from the moment he was created, exists separate from God: whether he is then doomed to exile, or whether it is God himself who withdraws, the result henceforth is an absence that widens into enigma. With the loss of proximity (to God) comes the simultaneous discovery of access to a responsibility (reverting to man) that sets History in motion, and thus ensues an essential ambiguity in which the human condition is played out. More generally, we know that Creation sees itself only in relation to the quest for Salvation that it opens. It cannot be understood separately from the question of the outcome of the History that it starts, the end shedding light on the beginning, or the eschatological alone effectively accounting for the origin. In Creation we can perceive messianism already making its way. Indeed, we could consider how this account of the before was only composed after; faith in salvation projected itself onto the beginning in order to better grasp where its potential came from. This account of the Creation is already, theologically speaking, an interpretation, as we know: it calls for deciphering a Meaning. Now I think it is time to wonder in return: In the Chinese sentence that we set out to read, is it really a matter of “meaning”? Or rather, couldn’t that be precisely where our difficulty in reading it arises—difficulty that does not stem from its complication, from what would constitute its ambiguity, from what would

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open it into enigma, but from their opposites? This sentence escapes us because nothing catches, nothing resists in it. There is no “grain,” Barthes would say, because it unwinds its obviousness without causing disturbance, brings its correlations into play without wanting to take risks. We feel no lack there, no appeal to (of) the Other, not even the rustle of an Exteriority. It unfolds and refolds without faltering. Let us pause here to notice what, leaving us no fissure to perceive, thus also leaves us nothing to fill in: how much more captivating is the origin scene of the Creation—Urszene—cracked by evil and deepening into parable! This sentence, I admit, revealing no desire or disquiet, cannot interest us. That is why sinologists today, as I have said, so willingly set it aside, even though they know that the basis for understanding Chinese thought is woven there, that it constitutes the matrix, and that the tradition will never escape it. The same is true in China: how much more captivating for its play—lively, intriguing, ironic, eccentric—is the anticonformist sentence of Zhuangzi. Yes, exactly, I would answer: the Yijing’s sentence does not explore a meaning, it elucidates a “coherence.” Meaning and coherence—which we ordinarily take to be equiva‑ lents (we speak of an “increase in meaning or coherence,” Sinn and Zusammenhang)—seem to me, in this light coming from China, in fact to be opposites of one another, even to expel and exclude one another, like Revelation and Regulation. Meaning appeals, incites; it takes root in the lack, opens onto a beyond, signals toward the absent or the unknown. For this reason it provokes tension, responds to anxiety. Coherence, for its part, is not and does not get excit/ed/ ing; it does not want to discover anything hidden, curtails nothing, extends nothing, aims at nothing; it neither awaits nor arouses. It is

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indissociable from what is traditionally so potent in China but so flatly rejected by our culture: ritual, but only ritual that is properly (truly) functional. By removing itself from what might suddenly emerge as orientation, by cutting itself off from the wish for a destination, the regulation embodying this Coherence does not in fact leave room for the dramatic; it does not trust the pathetic. Because this “co-­herence” literally “holds together,” instead of pursuing the rupture and adventurously exploring, instead of setting in motion a History (from Fall to Salvation), it puts in place a mechanism (that of reality-­viability, ti-­yong); far from responding to a why, it proposes to dissolve the strangeness. Can it still speak to us? In the Bible, this perspective of Meaning finds itself immediately conveyed by the Word. In the final analysis, what makes this sacerdotal account so highly original, what constitutes its greatest invention, what, in any case, produces its principle zone of homogeneity is, as we know, that God creates by the word. His word commands, names, and blesses. Its efficacy lies in both sorting out confusion and summoning forth existence. If there is break-­in, creating event, it is very much through the irruption of the Word; and because God makes the world come into being through his word, all man’s word can be understood only as response to God: it is in and through the word that they encounter one another. It is all the more striking to compare, on the Chinese side, the eternal silence of the processes (let us recall the “life in the silence of the organs,” as René Leriche said regarding health . . .). In the Chinese entry, not only does the word not intervene, but it is not even expected. If the word has no place in that opening sentence of the Classic of Change, that is clearly no mere detail. This fundamental book of Chinese civili-

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zation is not, as I have said, a matter of the word but of the line, the line formed, even prior to the ideograms, by the elementary lines of the hexagrams, which themselves find their source in the traces fissured into the bones of sacrificial animals or tortoise shells subjected to fire, according to the most ancient divinatory procedures. Already these did not indicate a meaning but let an adequacy appear: they portended whether the sacrifices were well or badly executed, whether the enterprise contemplated could be integrated into the course of things without disturbing its coherence, whether it could or could not find its place within the regulation. Thus I believe that one of the features we most need to consider in order to “enter” Chinese thought, where we can best perceive what may be another possible split between Chinese and Western thought, is that we do not see the theme of the “interior voice” penetrating ancient China, vox rather than via, the “way,” the tao of viability. What is God in the last analysis if not the Other who speaks to me, to whom I can address myself ? We can provide all the definitions or justifications of God we like, just as we can also conceive, conversely, of all the possible refutations of God, but I believe both sides are obliterated in the face of this postulate—or is it an affidavit?—that God “exists” insofar as I address myself to him and he addresses himself to me. It is this function that constitutes “God.” Or “God” merges with this possibility of appeal. Thus to believe in God is not to trust in some dogma; rather, it is supported by granting a founding status to the word, by considering, as the theologians remind us, that it is through the word that man most intrinsically comes forward as subject—as the Creation account already says. “God” is—before (behind) any intraworld procedure of ex-

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change and communication—the One through which the word is affirmed, fundamentally, as a power that comes from elsewhere and that thus is not contained by the regulations of processes. This definitively separates “God” from the initiatory capacity and its combinatory of lines, in the figure of the hexagram, as markers and vectors of energy. Because Chinese thought clearly knew the demand for an Unconditioned, otherwise called an absolute, they named it “Heaven,” but “Heaven,” says Confucius, “does not speak” (Analects, XVII, 19). The seasons “follow their course,” beings, so numerous, “come to pass”: “what need would Heaven have to speak?”

EI G H T   ■  H e l l e n i c E n t r y

The biblical account of the Beginning, which opens the course of Time, announces itself without justifying itself: it does not proclaim where it comes from or what authorizes it; it is uttered without author and without witness. The Greeks would ask themselves, on the contrary, how to begin; they were conscious of the beginning as a question and even as a challenge for thought. Hesiod, who is the first among them to give a systematic account of the genesis of the world and the gods, opens his Theogony by evoking the Muses who inspire it: “Of the Muses of Helicon let us begin to sing.” “To begin,” as the opening verb (archometha), is spoken by the author to himself in the first person plural imperative, as this author introduces himself and overtly accepts his decision to begin. Because Hesiod does not want to celebrate the Muses in his poem so much as be authorized by them to express himself, he invokes them as both source and support for his statement at the same time as he is aware, from the outset, of the ambiguity belonging to speech: the Muses know how to speak “lies exactly like realities” just as they are able, when they desire, “to proclaim truths” (alethea gerusasthai ). The “beginning” becomes the object of an interrogation as early as these opening Greek verses appear; likewise, as we can see, the stakes are immediately set for truth and its cleavage: we have entered into philosophy. A problematic orientation is adopted that

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Greek thought will continually explore and that will become its mark. The Greek concern will be how to begin to speak of the beginning. Indeed, the process can be twofold, and two options cross: either one begins with an inaugural event (as the Bible does) beginning from which one enters the course of time and which does not claim justification, or one works back from the present to the most distant past, enigmatic as it appears, and the investigation thus becomes a hypothetical one of the origin and subsequently of the foundation. That is why Hesiod in his poem presents not one but two beginnings, considered successively. As a basis for his statement, he begins first by starting from the present and working backward, this side of the Muses and the Olympian gods, to the origin of the world and the first gods. Then he begins by starting from this beginning itself (ex arches, l. 115) and by evoking what happened “at the very first” (protista) and from which the future of the world and the gods, up to the present reign of Zeus, ensued. Such a “beginning,” the two directions competing with one another, is not, we can well imagine, without ambiguity: the return journey to the origin seeks an eternal foundation, whereas the account of the advent of the world follows the temporal development or opens with it. How to articulate them both henceforth, the Being and the becoming, which emerge from divergent planes? Hesiod, we note, is already facing this difficulty, even if he is not yet thinking about it. He reports on gods who “are forever” (aei on) at the same time that he has made the account of their begetting successive. Thus Kronos knows that his fate is to succumb one day to his own son, that is to say, “by the will of the great Zeus,” even though this son Zeus is not yet born (l. 465): so the reign of

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Zeus exists before Zeus’s coming into the world. In making his re— port, Hesiod discovers the tension—the fertile tension—born of this difficulty; philosophy will begin with this difficulty and will be deployed to take it over, which will effectively allow philosophy, operating between these planes, to construct in thought (ideate), working to separate the “ontological” from the “genetic,” or what is principle from what makes its appearance. Arche means both, in Aristotle’s appraisal, but through the efforts of Greek thought, the first meaning finally becomes detached from the second. Now we may ask ourselves: Is this rupture between the temporal and the eternal, as it structured Greek thought, logically necessary (as the Greeks believed)? In other words: When we are faced with these dual levels that the Greeks wanted to clarify, what about the Chinese “beginning”? Thus we can make another entry here, although still from the side, from the Hellenic and not the Hebraic side this time, to probe further into what “beginning” means in the opening of the Classic of Change. Here we will find a new means, a fresh means, formed this time by the tool of philosophy, to question what Chinese thought does not question—not that this difficulty that the Greeks created is resolved in Chinese thought; rather, it is dissolved there: in this strange bath, it is no longer recognizable. This processive “beginning” that deploys itself, in Chinese thought, into “expansion,” into “profit,” and into “rectitude” is not principle, external to becoming, since the incitement that it activates is very much the first stage— coming “at the head,” yuan, of an unfolding. But neither is it a factual beginning, an event, one of a first day or a first time, since this discreet initiation of a course of things does not create rupture, as

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in the biblical account, but is an “operation” (yong, the Chinese would say) that occurs everywhere at every moment: the least process gets under way before our eyes, and this “initiation” is inexhaustible. Even though under the sign of “Heaven,” the sum of all process, Chinese thought does not conceive of the “eternal” (what is forever) but rather conceives of the “without end” (what, in the course of continually renewing itself, never runs dry, wu qiong); nor does it let itself defer to thought of the “future” and its blind course, nor to that of a unique History and its destination. The coherence of regulation that this Classic of Change endeavors to restore, from figure to figure, makes a “constancy” of change (chang) appear that is precisely what elevates it to a “classic” (Yijing). Now it is time to wonder: What is a “classic” of what never ceases to “change”? At least we can already see, from this initial encounter, what the outcome could be. This processive “beginning” will not let itself be grasped according to those categories that are familiar to us, whether they belong to one side or the other: from the temporal-­factual (biblical) side, revealing to us a History, or from the self-­essential, ontological (Hellenic) side, as a function of model and archetype. As wrenching and powerful as this duality of perspectives is, it cannot speak to us once we have passed into China. It “no longer speaks to us”—that is, it no longer encounters anything that integrates it and allows it to take on meaning and truth. Now, this remark applies more generally. We can see that China does not fit into the opposition that the great tension between Greece and the Bible raises in our minds, between Athens and Jerusalem, which has continually inspired European philosophy, even into the modern period (Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard: Happiness (Greek) or unhappy

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Conscience (Jewish), or Abraham facing Socrates, the “Greek” / the “Jew,” and so on). It does not find its place in this ­debate.

Let us now consider only Hesiod’s second account of the advent of the world, inscribed in direct parallel with the one of Genesis. Let us put aside for now the problematic, preliminary, uniquely Greek distinction between origin and beginning, according to which the Theogony is divided, proem and poem; as well as the conflict that we can see already suggested there between Being and becoming, which will widen the gap between the Bible and philosophy. It is here that the opposition between those two prospective accounts of the beginning, Hebraic/Hellenic put side by side, reappears and even becomes explicit. In the final count in all of ancient literature, that is to say, before the affirmation of science and regardless of which culture we consider, there are only four ways of representing the advent of the world: through generation, combat, fabrication, and speech. Someone (some agent) either engenders or fights or fashions or commands—we can thus arrange them, from one operation to the next, according to the activity that is the most external. In this typology by case, the Greek and the biblical accounts perfectly contradict each other. In the sacerdotal account, God creates strictly by speaking and commanding (there is more fashioning in the Yahwist account and sometimes there is combat in the Psalms); there is never generation. Whereas in Hesiod’s Theogony, everything is made through generation; then those engendered powers turn against one another and come to blows. But there is never fabrication and especially not creation through speech.

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How does Hesiod actually begin, and what is inscribed parallel to the biblical Bereshit (l. 116)? Assuredly, at the very first, came the Abyss, then followed Earth with its wide bosom, ever sure foundation for all, As well as Eros, the most beautiful among the immortal gods, The one who breaks limbs under desire . . . Thus, even what comes “at the very first,” the original abyss, Chaos, is also (already) a matter of “becoming” (genato). Even the first physical elements then evoked—after Earth: Heaven, sea and rivers, mountains and stars—come about through engendering. That is why Love, Eros, the one who mingles bodies and “tames hearts,” is the first god to be celebrated. Then the same is true for the gods who succeed one another generation after generation and who overcome one another in turn to the point of threatening the world, both through their proliferation and through their rivalry, until Zeus finally brings good order by definitively establishing his reign and by blocking this becoming, stabilizing it into eternity. What do these two operations signify, dominant throughout but mutually exclusive: creation (Hebraic) and generation (Hellenic)? “Creation” (in the account of Genesis) says that a subject acts from outside the world and projects his will onto it. “Generation” (in Hesiod’s Theogony beginning with cosmogony) expresses, conversely, that everything is done from within the play of powers that make the world, without intervention from outside being considered, because from what—strictly inconceivable—“Outside” could the world be made? Whereas it is only because “God” is completely exterior to the world, not contaminated by it, that he can be

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absolutely good; conversely, as long as the divine remains engaged in the power relationships that make the world, it remains as mixed as it is, marked by its impurity and inclined toward multiplicity. Like the gods in Homer, Hesiod’s gods, including Zeus, who reigns definitively over them, are as greedy, deceitful, perverse, and libidinous as men are; they display the whole gamut of human feelings and are distinguished only by their immortality and power. Thus let us note once again that what has, historically, so sharply split the culture that would become “Western”—the split between “God” or “the gods,” either singular or plural (monotheism or polytheism)— effectively exists only as a consequence. If God is absolutely pure, being exterior to the world and separated from it, he can be conceived only in the singular, without the heterogeneity that shapes him, disperses him, and opposes him to himself, as is the case with the biblical God. As soon as Plato himself conceives of the divine as absolutely good, he can then only envision it in a unitary mode (to theoin). But conversely, if the divine is as mixed and varied as the world to which it belongs, it is inevitably as diverse and multiple as that world—and then how to stop this diversification and multiplication in which it is carried along? Even if Hesiod finally establishes the reign of Zeus to overcome it, he finishes his Theogony in suspension; or rather, he can only leave it unfinished, with the gods, through their proliferation, about to lose themselves in the human and arising in the bed of men, thus giving birth to the race of “heroes” or demigods, where the boundary between divine and human begins to be erased. On the contrary, the sacerdotal account of the Creation is set to close down on itself, leading immediately to its outcome. From the beginning, it

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is directed toward its End. The seventh day of the week, God’s day of rest, the Sabbath day, on which creation is completed, since that is the full term of its unfolding, even proclaims that this End, in a certain way, is already there; and that all the history that follows is messianically fraught henceforth by the quest for access to this separate order, pure and no longer dispersed, and free of all tension and contradiction, starting from which God began his creation. If Chinese thinking on the beginning, as we find it in the opening of the Classic of Change, does not let itself be ordered according to this Hebraic/Hellenic opposition between the accounts of Genesis and the Theogony, that means it escapes the alternatives that the latter have constructed in our mind. Might these alternatives have been too hastily sealed? We could even go a step further in the reading of the first sentence of the Chinese classic by following how such alternatives are led to their undoing in the face of it: how their contradiction must be smoothed out, their opposition unfolded, in order to “enter” there. That they become null and void and effectively dissolved when we pass into China, forcing us out of our typology, lets us better perceive where the originality of the Chinese utterance lies, and this is true as much from one side as the other. Because first of all, since this “beginning” in the Classic of Change cannot be conceived on the model of creation, as we have seen, we will logically be tempted to conceive it according to the opposite model, as a matter of generation. But if, in the first figures of the book, yin and yang effectively distinguish themselves from one another, and couple, as feminine/masculine, all reciprocal incitement between them nevertheless abstracts itself into polarity: an interaction is continually deployed, sua sponte, between these two

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opposed and complementary factors, without Eros, the beautiful God of love, having to mingle them, prompting the event of individual desire and its disorder. Or consider it the other way around: if, in Hesiod, the male and female powers and divinities serve as opposite factors (destabilizing engenderment on the female side, perpetuating order on the male side), those polarities that Hesiod’s account brings to light nonetheless fight among themselves as individuals and in a violent fashion. The Greek poet takes pleasure in recounting these continual battles at great length: they are what gives the story tension. Whereas in the Chinese view, harmonious regulation immediately extinguishes the possibility of this personifying drama and conflict. Or again, let us proceed from the opposite direction: let us take as our base the biblical account, freed of all compromise and entanglements. Once more, we can first perceive a comparison, but the longer we consider it, the more it widens the gap. The initiatory capacity, Qian, which the first figure of the Classic of Change contains in isolation and which the first sentence of the book presents, is very much “pure” and “unitary” (chun yang 纯阳); that is, at this stage it is not mixed with any yin element that would create tension or corrupt it; it is separate from the series of figures that follow and that themselves account for the diversity of situations encountered and of the world as it runs. Moreover, it is only this capacity for incitation and expansion that will be the source of all “good” (shan 善); notably, as later thinkers will comment, mixing in the Book of Mencius, it is this reaction deep within that prompts our sense that the misfortune of others is unbearable to us, thus establishing the feeling of pity at the origin of all altruism. Incarnated in

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“Heaven,” it has absolute moral value; it is elevated to the unconditioned and bears within it the infinite. Have we suddenly toppled back over to the Hebraic side? But this goodness engaging every process is without Will; this positivity is without intention. This initiatory capacity is completely internal to the great Process of the world and remains immanent there, developing sua sponte: it calls for no Other, explores no Beyond, implies no Separation. Whereas, it is because the biblical God remains exterior and transcendent to his creation that he preserves his absoluteness and his purity.

This parallel between the Bible and the Theogony can be endlessly unwound to see how Chinese thought undoes or eludes it. Being the work of a perfect God, the biblical Creation cannot be faulted; thus we hear only this one theme repeated throughout: “and God saw that it was good.” However, as soon as this goodness penetrates the world, it is no longer tenable. If the initial allusion to original chaos only appears in passing to better highlight the creative event and the force of that rupture, from this first perfection on, no other possibility exists for the evolution of the world henceforth but to sink into ruin: hardly is Creation completed before temptation insinuates itself, before the assigned limit is transgressed (or else it is assigned to be transgressed and thus to get History under way), before death and condemnation arise in response, before harmony is broken and Eden is lost forever. For what remains of our humanity, the only way out of this de-­creation, culminating in the Flood, is to renew our alliance with God and his Word, to work toward a re-­creation.

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From the perspective of Hesiod, in comparison, chaos is very much the initial stage, void, indeterminate, without possible qualification and purely negative, starting from which the world will come about and organize itself, and, in doing so, progressively determine itself as a function of the Greek postulate that determination alone makes “being.” Since no plan is projected on the world, and no power directs it, the powers that engender one another can do nothing but enter into conflict among themselves, in order to win sovereignty and try to supplant one another. Eros, the god who couples, soon finds a rival in Eris, who compels separation, and it requires all the political acuity of Zeus, incorporating Metis, to impose a lasting order, by force or by ruse, neutralizing the oppositions as though holding them at bay, his children and his parents alike: not only by overthrowing the earlier gods, like the Titans, and taking them out of the game but also by blocking the expansion of the divinities born of him, who encroach upon his power and already threaten him. Now what strikes us when we enter into Chinese thought is that we no longer find any place for “chaos” there, however it is viewed, as residual or principle. The first sentence of the Classic of Change is ignorant of it, and the rest of the book as well. It ignores it—that is to say, it does not let itself be disturbed by it in any way. That tension between order and disorder that we already see looming in the background of the biblical creation, and starting from which Hesiod, too, organizes his whole theogony, is not encountered there. If there is no “Chaos,” can there be “Cosmos”? What is an orderly world that has not had to triumph over chaos or even needed to differentiate itself from it? Don’t we run into “evil” in Chinese thought? Let us

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go one step further and ask: Could it be so unrealistic? In any case, we do not encounter Evil there as a principle and as a power in and of itself, whether in the figure of rebellion or of temptation. Because if the initiatory capacity, purely yang, is totally positive, the capacity that is coupled with it, the receiving capacity, yin (Kun, the second figure of the book), is equally so—at least insofar as it respects its nature, which is “to welcome” and “to conform to” the initiatory capacity that penetrates and directs it. In a logic of regulation, yin is bad, or rather, not-­good, only through inadequacy. From there it follows that, if we do indeed encounter “unlucky” (xiong 凶) figures and positions over the course of the book (“Decline,” “Retreat,” “Dissolution,” “Deprivation,” “Elimination” . . .), there is nevertheless not one that is irresolvable or truly dramatic: even in the worst situation, it would still be possible to perceive, even if only in a latent state, an “initiator” of renewal (a yang line) through which the initiatory capacity discretely reengages the process (the viability) by re-­inciting and getting (itself) under way again. Thus all one must do is make oneself “supple” and receptive enough, which is the yin virtue, to make room for this initiatory factor of renewal and to allow for its full “expansion” to the point of being able to “profit” from it. Now if there is no chaos that threatens and must be vanquished, if there is no opposing force that must be confronted, neither is there any possible account. As soon as there is no dramatic, agonistic tension at work, there is no longer anything to relate. In order for something to happen, something that can be recounted, there must be evil to deal with or at least resistance to encounter. No negative means no “story.” This first Chinese sentence, as we can see, opens

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no account; likewise, in all of the Classic of Change we will not find the least element of narration. We therefore find neither crime nor punishment: there is no tragedy to fear or salvation (a way out) to hope for. There is (are) neither agent(s) nor story(ies). I wonder: Isn’t that in fact where the gap with the traditional literature of Beginnings most obviously opens? And this time, facing China, the Bible and Hesiod again find themselves very much on the same side. Because if in the sacerdotal account we are actually only dealing with a half-­story, since the mother cell of the “first day” is systematically reported in the following days, and only discursiveness makes sequence necessary (God, at least from man’s perspective, not being able to pronounce everything at the same time), the real story opens as soon as evil appears, as soon as the order of the Creation is cracked. The same is true for Hesiod: since the engendered powers are in ever-­renewed conflict with one another, the story is fully developed; hand in hand with the genealogical series, this is what weaves the theogonical web. It is true that the stabilization brought about by Zeus draws the becoming toward Being and consequently tends to make an exit from the story. But Chinese regulation, as we can see clearly from its side, is not stability at all: it does not establish a permanent order but maintains in equilibrium that which must continually transform itself. Thus, instead of exiting dramatic History, it never makes an entrance there. It is clear that conceiving of coherence in this way does not let event stand out as a bearer of meaning around which the story would take shape; in other words, a logic of regulation in and of itself dissolves all possibility of narration. Now our modernity (or postmodernity) has often been presented as the exit of the great Narratives. What to think

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then, or I would ask, in what historicity does one live when, as in China, one has passed alongside those great Accounts? By posing this question, we will at least verify something that began for me as a consignment and that is now nothing more than a truism (or is considered only a banality as long as it has not been experienced): “to enter,” it is necessary to exit; to penetrate into Chinese thought, it is necessary to leave a “home” way of thought and let oneself be disturbed. Because when we pass into China, not only do our traditional representations lose their relevance—that is, our representations that oppose Being and becoming, or creation and generation, or monotheism and polytheism—but the contradiction around which Western thought takes shape and which underlies those oppositions is undone as well, the contradiction of muthos and theos: of the theological (promoted by the Bible) and the mythological (deployed by Hesiod). What other possibility can we enter, then, that is neither one nor the other—in other words, that escapes their alternative: a possibility of thought that, all told, is perhaps no stranger than the others but that the others have not conceived, according to their enlisted choices, or even just simply imagined.

NIN e   ■  U n d o i n g O u r A l t e r n a t i v e s

At this point the question of beginning is turned around—let us point it back at ourselves: Circulating among so many beginnings, have we ourselves properly begun? Did we begin with the beginning when we chose to “enter” into Chinese thought starting from the first account of Genesis and Hesiod’s narrative, passing alternately from one to the other—that is to say, both by positing the two of them as the first and by opposing them to one another? Wasn’t I too quick to resume this convenient match established by tradition? Because for more than a century we have discerned—and this knowledge is confirmed with each new discovery by paleographers and archaeologists—that neither the sacerdotal account of Genesis nor the Greek poem of the Theogony burst forth all at once like single blossoms at the dawn of humanity. They reflect a much vaster cultural whole, both external and anterior, that sets us journeying throughout the Near and Middle East, from Sumer to the Hittites to Mesopotamia; we must thus move from history to geography. We have opposed them as two different sides, in their construction and their intention—theological on the one hand, mythological on the other; but don’t they draw from a common fund, as does the Babylonian poem Enuma Elish? Coming later as they do, aren’t they akin to or influenced by each other? It is through contamination by Greek speculation on origin, we should note, that the biblical cre-

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ation story was finally conceived—and logically, that is to say, according to the requirements of logos—as creating itself out of nothing, ex nihilo, in the second book of the Maccabees. Let us remember, moreover, that the sacerdotal Document with which the Bible opens is not the first; that the Yahwist account of Creation, which appears after it, preceded it. Commentators have delighted in emphasizing how material and anthropomorphic the creative act of God seems in the Yahwist account, how unrefined: the creator is only dealing with a garden plot, a stream watering his land, a man who takes his place as farmer or tenant farmer. He makes water well up from that land like a well digger, he puts in plants like a gardener, he shapes the human body like a potter. . . . We are still far from a God conceived as external to the world and transcending it. Now, even if the sacerdotal Document subsequently takes care to erase those anecdotal and excessively imagined representations, it cannot make us forget that they preceded it, that it is nevertheless their heir, and that the Bible, in the end, was not averse to retaining them. Because from this common fund shared with Babylonia, there remains not only the image of a God producing men as one molds clay, the “tree of life,” the garden of “Eden.” Jean Bottero makes clear to us as well, when we follow him among those cultures, how the protoscientific knowledge of the Babylonians served as support for the sacerdotal account itself of Genesis, placed at the beginning but already decanted. Whether the transmission was diffuse, via Syria and Phoenicia, or occurred directly at the time of the Babylonian exile of the Jews, the contamination, as we have been shown, is obvious. This raises the question that has been advancing insidiously

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for more than a century and that the exegetes have not been able to escape: Wouldn’t such an influence dissolve the originality of the biblical account of the “Creation,” undermining both its status as exception and the authority it assumes as “Revelation”? So deeply do these analogies and intersections affect the very act of the Creator: for example, that the biblical God proceeds by “separation,” the master word of this account, and first of all within the aqueous mass itself, may recall the separation of Tiamat’s body into two parts—one becoming the sky, the other the earth—in the Babylonian epic. And most important, the biblical God does not begin his work starting from nothing but has to organize an original chaos, which goes back to the Babylonian cosmogonic conception, according to which everything is perceived in becoming: to the point of blurring any first opening from which Creation, as an event, could have absolutely begun. The carefully elaborated reflections of theologians faced with this difficulty seem to me revealing in terms of our inquiry into the possibilities of thought. Once stripped of all apologetics, these reflections pose the question of how to view cultural singularities: it is precisely because Israel shares many representations with the Near and Middle East that its own choices might be all the better perceived. These cultural singularities stand out, as we are shown, as material to revisit; and the successive accounts that rewrite the Creation make them more and more apparent in the Bible, from the Yahwist narrative to the book of Job. The monotheistic requirement that comes to assert itself may be thus all the more striking as it breaks with the ambient polytheism and isolates itself from it: a theological conception of Genesis is revealed there that distances itself

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from the original burgeoning of the cosmogonies and, at the same time, condemns them. Instead of the divinities’ evolution remaining included within the world’s, God establishes himself outside the cosmos more and more strongly through the course of the rewritings, even as he presides over its continuation through his wisdom alone. Or again, as sexuality and generation find themselves transferred solely to the side of creatures, the conflict inherent in the development of life no longer affects God. “It is not within the universe that you created the universe,” Augustine would conclude in a decisive remark. That God no longer has to struggle to impose his power, his word being sufficient to make everything come about, lets a gratuitousness then appear within the world, free from the constraints of phenomena and from the relationships of forces. Similarly, the act of creation is pure of the various violent, self-­interested feelings that marked the Babylonian accounts; and in return, it is no longer up to man to sustain the life of the gods, as one appointed to sacrificial service, but instead to recognize that generosity that made his being: his very vocation becomes responding to this invitation. Thus resources are there, as clear choices and options, increasingly in concert, extracting themselves at once from the cosmogonical and from the mythological (from the cosmogonical as conception and from the mythological as representation): they constitute what I would call a possibility for thought. Barely glimpsed, the idea that supports “Moses” works and makes its way; such a way of thinking about God can deepen only according to a unitary and monopolizing mode and, consequently, by absolutizing itself. Discerned in the tangle of primitive imaginings, this thread lets itself be separated out; indeed, by affirming itself, this option turns itself around into

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a requirement. In short, once discovered, this lode (theological becoming) lends itself to being indefinitely exploited: Would it let its richness be exhausted? Because as we can already see through the biblical rewritings of the Beginning, the need to de-­cosmogonize God and demythologize his Creation will never end: the need to block what any representation can only ever describe in terms of “world”; what our categories, even the most abstract ones of space and time, can only ever apprehend in an internal mode and as an internal order, thus letting their incomprehensible Beyond escape, as Job discovers as he gives his support to transcendence—support that the “Creation,” from the outset, already solemnly wanted to grant. We may thus proclaim the “death of God” as much as we like, but it only prevents an approach to the thinkable from a simultaneously monopolizing and absolutizing perspective. Just as Genesis begins to produce “God” starting from the One—from the Other— from the External—from the Infinite, so this production will no longer let God be resorbed, or reduced by any counterargument, or disposed of. The affirmation, even the demonstration, that God “is not” does not supplant God. Have we turned our attention fully enough to this resistance? Has our rationalism sufficiently contemplated it? Such a possibility, or fecundity, is indeed supported by an internal coherence, of both self-­justification and self-­deployment, that never renders it completely accessible to some inquisition from outside. The discussion is stopped at this border; and philosophy is wrong to believe that such a gulf can be completely spanned by reason (but Plato already knew this). The seemingly preliminary question—whether God “exists” or not—seems of another order and, finally, out of place beside this; it has no hold over and never

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encounters this: “God” is effectively rendered present as soon as I introduce in myself that tension that can take in “everything” and to which the Bible, as early as its account of the Creation, serves as vector and invitation. That Nietzsche himself endlessly circled around this difficulty is very much what gives his philosophy its power. Although we can denounce in the tradition originating in the Bible a destructive appeal for vengeance against life, the cultivation of resentment and decadence, an inspiration appears there, nevertheless, that has not only “refined,” but again, in its fashion, deployed humanity; and once this theological resource is discovered, can it let itself run dry? Not that a place must be saved for mystery (condemned on principle to the residual, in face of the progress of knowledge), but does the possibility remain open that no reason is any longer in a position to reclose: that “God” serves to name the Other, becoming “You,” to whom an “I” can always immediately address itself—and isn’t it even what renders useless, null, and void any mediation, at the same time that it removes any constraint or condition? “God” will name the Infinite that, through its irruption, mentally uncloses all finitude, liberates from all fear or frustration, or else will name that Exterior that at the same time discovers itself in the depths of a “me” as that which is most intimate, or rather, as that which continually deepens that “me” into an intimacy-­infinity (from which European romanticism drew such great effect). Would such a dimension of what will deploy itself in the history of the culture as consciousness have been able to develop if God had not been posited as the great Guarantor? Because we know that what is called “consciousness” is a fruit, poisonous perhaps, but slowly ripened; and it is owing to

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“God,” more than the object, that something like “subjectivity” was brought to light, even if it later meant calling him the “Great object,” as in the Classical period, when science triumphs. Because once engaged, this possibility can make use of experience (or experience can make use of it) and is sufficient for reconfiguring it.

Now as soon as we take this truant path and begin to circulate ever so slightly, here and there, among the cultures, the Greek Theogony poses the same problem to us as Genesis does: Treating the beginning of the world itself, could it serve to mark a beginning? Am I even permitted to treat the “Greek” beginning in this way, isolating it, excessively perhaps? Did the “Greeks” indeed ever exist? Haven’t they been constructed by our Humanities? Because as recent documentation reveals ever more clearly, Hesiod’s poem also possesses an Eastern background. In the Kumarbi myth, for example, the god of lightning was considered, like Zeus, to be the supreme figure in the Hittite pantheon; as in the Theogony, it is reported there not only his entry into the world after generations of gods but also his elevation to the kingship of the heavens. We can go even further into the details here: we find a god who, like Kronos, swallows a stone in place of his son, and we find that just as Ouranos, Hesiod’s Sky, is castrated by Kronos, so is Anu castrated by Kumarbi. In both myths, scenes of plotting, vengeance, and Titanesque fighting among the gods follow one after another. If we turn once again to Mesopotamia, we likewise learn that the Enuma Elish epic celebrates in young Marduk a counterpart of Hesiod’s Zeus; he eliminated his rivals and triumphed over the monsters like Tiamat, who

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corresponds to Typhon. Like Zeus, Marduk eventually imposes his justice and peace upon the world. Could this be the very archetype from which the Hittite myth, as well as Hesiod’s Theogony, is derived? Setting out in search of sources and parallels, we could in any case make an endless list of them: but beyond transmissions and influences, could the human imagination prove to be so limited when it comes to evoking the beginning of the world? What other large-­scale possibility might thus emerge that the biblical “Creation,” for its part, might have worked to separate itself from and that, because it does not disengage itself from a cosmogonical becoming, would thus constitute the web of its episodes and events? Hesiod’s poem, through its poetic development, might thus mark one point in it, not a starting point but already a point of completion. To consider this possibility mythological, as opposed to theological, in fact brings to light another resource, forming an alternative; and we must again wonder whether its richness, though condemned by the other alternative, is indeed exhausted. To what extent would the “myth” thus let itself expire? Because in the case of myth, presenting a beginning of the world is no longer a matter of extracting an Outside that can support transcendence, as in the Bible, but of testing, in the figures of the gods and begetting, the lines of tension and agency; it is no longer a matter of yielding to the vertigo of the infinite but of providing narrative schemas, muthoi, that may also be explicative. This resource, so magnificently exploited by Hesiod, is not mystical but already symbolic: it is grounded on what will come to be, not “faith,” but fiction (for the purpose of exploration)—rival categories, henceforth, to the point of mutual ex-

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clusion; and creating a following, in this case, will depend on the pleasure produced by the imaginary. Because instead of distrusting the narrative, as we can see that the sacerdotal document already does, myth invites it. Instead of refraining from offering representations in worldly terms, it delights in the representation of a world deploying the play of its internal powers, of which the “gods” are the convenient incarnation, and of which the finite, this time, allows the beauty of a formal evocation to be leisurely traced. The tension produced henceforth no longer stems from absolutization but from variation (of passions and situations alike, but enlarged and theatricalized to the cosmic scale); it no longer stems from exaltation (sublimation) but from dramatization: throughout the poem, Hesiod exploits the convincing charm of the Muses as well as the monsters, of the amiable as well as the terrifying. Also, since his poem is denounced fairly early on as not being truth but fabrication, Hesiod immediately protecting himself from that ambiguity, the possibility of the mythological is only apparently subject to harm. These “calculated imaginings,” evocatory-­exploratory attempts to clarify the ever enigmatic beginning of things, will find their future, as well as their revenge, in what the sacerdotal account of Genesis, already running counter to its Yahwist precedent and in reaction to it, tried precisely to dispose of. They already play into what will be affirmed in and will authorize literature. Running parallel to the dogmatic, to which the theological is led, and compensating for it, the vein of this possibility could not, any more than that one, be exhausted.

T EN  ■   W h e r e W o u l d the Beginning Begin?

“To enter” is operative. Entering proceeds in a single time, makes clear its ins and outs, comprises the two ends of its journey. On the other hand, “to compare” is endless: comparing is inexhaustible. We can go on forever counting off the intersections, searching farther and elsewhere for the parallels. Doesn’t comparing already admit to growing tiresome—because, setting out as we have in search of a beginning of the beginning, where could we come to a stop? Considering one civilization behind another and each time pushing the horizon further back, wouldn’t we finally have to go all the way back to Egypt? And even to the edge of the Nile rather than to Babylon? Isn’t that where we would have to seek that beginning of the thinking on beginnings? In Egypt, we notice, the accounts of the “beginning” multiply, as cyclical time does: they vary from place to place, stretch over a lengthy course, and are expressed in a variety of documents that range from hymn to funeral phrase, from dedication to ritual, without any one text assembling them in a unitary, didactic fashion, even if afterward we could look to find something compatible there. So many times and in so many various ways, the “First time” is evoked. . . . What city hasn’t established its local god, its ancient tribal god, as universal creator? There-

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fore, to establish a parallel, what more orderly conception could we make emerge from this juxtaposition and this pileup? Nonetheless, once the two possibilities of the theological and the mythological are established opposite one another, as two colonnades, can’t we hope to get our bearings by filing this welter of representations between them? As soon as this polarity is posited, it would be only a matter, from one case to the next, of shifting the cursor to pinpoint each instance of originality. Egypt’s mythological treasures strike us immediately, but could the theological possibility also come to light there? Because all things did not emerge from darkness there, still less out of nothing, through the action of a god external to the world and supposedly “atemporal,” properly creative. They emerge, the Egyptologists report, from a latent state that, unmarked by any determination, is chaotic, as in all mythological resources, and that is first represented by an expanse of water. This expanse contains the seeds of becoming, and every potential demiurge is found submerged there—such is the Nun: a motif common to so many ancient cultures but that finds its landscape naturally in the Nile, which periodically floods and fertilizes the land with its waters. With the exception of water, everything might have a beginning on the shore of the Nile. But how can we hope to set some limit to the possible variations as soon as we imagine this advent in terms of the “world”? Is it the sun that sets the genesis of the universe in motion (Re, but Atum before him, according to the syncretism of Heliopolis), its heat making vegetation germinate, its light making all the distinctions emerge? Or is it the first emerged land, the ini-

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tial hillock, the island that finally appeared, that “earth that rises up” and provides life with its matter (Ptah, at Memphis)? Or again, is it the luminous atmosphere (Shu) that separates earth and sky, that puts the world’s props in place and raises the vault of the heavens? Or is it Thoth, who is also the god of writing, or is it . . . ? Indeed, must that originary scene be imagined, even before the birth of the sun, as the emergence of a cow from the Nun to give birth to divinity, or as a hatched egg, or as a lotus that opens one morning on the surface of the waters, or as a snake winding through the marshes, or as . . . ? Once opened, the array of mythological representations can be closed again only arbitrarily. Nevertheless: let this god be born of no one, let him be called the Solitary or the Unique One, and he already moves closer to the other shore, in all its inexpressible mystery, the shore of the theological lode and inspiration. Thus in Egypt, on the one hand, we have physical representations fertilizing the mythological, whose richness and diversity we could endlessly inventory: those gods and all the beings are born of the demiurge’s first masturbation, from its spittle, or from the tears of the sun. And as we find so commonly elsewhere, this demiurge shapes or works with clay on the wheel, he is modeler and potter (Khnum at Esna). But on the other hand, this divine creation is perfect, a unique god, as in the Bible, “ordering absolutely nothing defective”; it is only starting with man’s revolt and the first mythological battles that death—physical or moral evil—is introduced into the cosmic order. Because as this god implements the plan for creation conceived in his heart, he has only to pronounce the word for the thing to exist. His creation is realized through the word and

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the mind; and as Bottero notes, this advent through speech might thus even be what is remembered in the Bible, the sacerdotal account of creation finding support in Egypt to promote its theological inspiration.

Where could we, as we head off elsewhere, learn something else of “beginning”? How do we not succumb to that temptation, which drives all travel, that makes us believe that by going farther we will discover something new—as if, because something is distant, it is different . . . ? Bridging the cultural resources of the ancient West and East, the immense work of Georges Dumézil allows us to reach India and to get our bearings ever so slightly in its burgeoning forest of myths and speculations. In India, we are warned, as in Egypt or even more so, we are dealing with an expanse of time, a multiplicity of conceptions, and a proliferation of divergent interpretations that even willingly contradict one another. Doesn’t the thought of beginning itself finally dissolve, or at least become relative, by being repeated in various ways over the course of genealogical undertakings: “In the beginning . . .”? In any case, in India we find again, as the Indian experts confirm, that whole stock of images, motifs, and explanatory schemas that henceforth seem to constitute the required paraphernalia for all thinking about a beginning of the world: the egg (golden), the lotus (rising from Vishnu’s belly), the seed, and especially the primordial waters, that first vagueness made up of darkness and escaping all characterization; but also the universal artisan or the Demiurge, whether he is Prajapati or Brahma; and

78 Where Would the Beginning Begin?

also the etymological promptings as well as the power to utter just the name to call the thing into existence: “Bhur, he pronounced; and this earth appeared.” In India even more than elsewhere, the mythological lode is abundant, its flowering lush; the cosmogonical web is endlessly rewoven according to school and genre. All the same, does this output that gives carte blanche to the imagination know how to open other ways, to depart from certain schemas? Not that the so-­called fertile imagination finally admits to being sterile, or that it is internally ruled by archetypes, but it is nevertheless true that the very idea of beginning, as soon as it is represented physically, is subjected to that limit. As early as in the Vedic hymns, creation is often the work of a god embodying a natural principle: always either fire or the sun or water. . . . “In the beginning, in truth, there was only water . . .”; or is it creative ardor . . . ? Or if not that, the universe might be considered the work of all the gods together, each one producing some part of it. Or else it is from the dismemberment of the cosmic man, at once victim and sacrificer, of whom “all beings are a segment,” that the world is born. . . . Or else it is the elements gradually pulling away from one another through progressive heating, so that Prajapati finally appears, who, in turn, creates the universe. Or else . . . Once again, originality will come from elsewhere through the shaping of this mythological material. An eternal impersonal principle emerged early in Indian speculation, from behind the throng of divinities; existing before creation, it rendered it phantasmagorical: Is the idea of creation still relevant, or rather, isn’t it on the point of disintegrating? Brahman, of whom the created world is only appearance, is anterior both to Being and to Nonbeing, to

Where Would the Beginning Begin? 79

the point that either could be equally and successively affirmed as having been “at the beginning.” In the end I would ask the Indian experts if India won’t lead the idea of beginning—through proliferation—to exhaustion? The result in any case is that, if an originary scene of creation really exists, here as elsewhere, we learn that in India it is led to repeat itself, the unique principle from which the world is derived thus periodically tending to resorb it. And so the curtain falls on the great drama of creation and returns it to silence: Vishnu sleeps on his serpent, then once again awakens after millions of years, again setting in motion the creative process.

e LE V EN  ■  N e i t h e r G o d n o r M y t h : W h a t Ot h e r P o s s i b i l i t y ?

After making turns and detours and cutting short inexhaustible comparisons, there is this, at least, that ought to suffice once again to make us enter. Having parted from those different shores, from all those Easts pouring out their treasures of images and speculations, couldn’t we finally, in returning to Chinese thought, see more clearly what threshold we are thus crossing? A door gradually emerges from the row where, between those side posts, thought lets itself be framed. Will we perceive another possibility there, or, first, wouldn’t the perspectives previously established have to be engulfed? Because after shifting the lines of the foreign and the familiar as far as possible in order to see the cleavages align, after starting from the West to cross through this gallery of the Near, Middle, and then Far East, and all in search of a typology that is at once refined and enlarged, the fact is that, coming “to China,” we might suddenly be more inclined to undo than to add, to subtract than to supplement. Finally we can penetrate the first sentence of the Classic of Change as though entering an astonishingly cleared site. We can take measure of what, without realizing it, that sentence has avoided; we can read it (from outside) in what (it does not know) it does not say. “Beginning—expansion—profit—rectitude,” and that is all: could we dream of anything more pure? This sentence does

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Neither God nor Myth 81

not allow for imagining or speculation, for mythologizing or theologizing, and steers as clear of cosmogonical becoming as of eternal Being; of the inventory of elements, components, and materials as of the ineffable One. It neither dramatizes nor creates the hope of salvation. It neither recounts nor constructs; it summons no Agent, artisan, or even bestiary; it draws up no originary scene—wherein lies, first of all, its originality. The whole Classic of Change will say no more of this. It is not one book among others within Chinese civilization, a book that the others could challenge or criticize or simply vary or complete. This sentence is the start of a reflection that more than two millennia have not altered. Can it even elicit debate, something other than gloss and explanation? Wang Fuzhi, a thinker from the seventeenth century, who is undoubtedly one of the most powerful in the whole history of Chinese thought, offers this commentary on it at the beginning of his last work devoted to the Classic of Change, upon which he meditated continually throughout his life. A life so perilous and dramatic! In a China fallen prey to great peasant revolts and then coming under the yoke of the Manchus, he yielded neither to the court intrigue of rival factions nor to the temptation of a monastic retreat and remained a resister, a resister confident in the coherence of History, whom nothing weakened or drove to despair: confident because the Classic of Change was what he read and practiced. We can, I believe, now read the beginning of his commentary from start to finish: The initiatory capacity (Qian) is the deployment of the breath-­energy (qi ).

82 Neither God nor Myth

The concentration of the yin energy constitutes the tangible and the opaque: coagulating as it does over time, the result is materiality. The yang energy, circulating within and without the tangible and the opaque, constitutes the animating energy and the spirit: over time, it deploys (itself ) and communicates throughout, promotes and sets in motion, in relationship with the yin, and renders positive its modification-­transformation: there is no magnitude that it does not attain, no smallness that it does not penetrate, its functioning is harmonious and gentle, but it leaves nothing unfinished— that is why it is called persevering (jian). For this first figure all the lines are yang: their own nature and the effect that results are all deployment and effusion and pure in this perseverance . . . The Classic of Change establishes the initiatory Capacity (Qian) and the receiving Capacity (Kun) both at once as the great beginning: with that complete sufficiency of yin and of yang, it has control over the modification-­continuation of the sixty-­ two other figures. In the immensity of the past to the present, in the vastness of the between Heaven and Earth, whether it is a matter of the constituent nature of the least thing,

Neither God nor Myth 83

the efficacy-­capacity of the least course of action, there is never yin without yang, never yang without yin, just as there is not Earth without Heaven nor Heaven without Earth, so that it is not suitable to establish a single figure purely yang and without yin. But here, since pure yang is considered to be the initiatory capacity, it is to highlight, within the evolution where yin and yang are combined, the vast, burgeoning course of yang. The sixty-­two other figures each have their proper moment, but the initiatory and receiving capacities are without specific moments. The initiatory Capacity, touching vast creation, constitutes the evolutionary course of Heaven; touching men and all beings, it constitutes the spirit animating their nature; touching the multitude of affairs, it constitutes the penetration of knowledge; touching study and apprenticeship, it constitutes the inner capacity to master (oneself ) and to make order reign; touching the alternation of good and bad luck, of order and disorder, it constitutes the burgeoning of administration and management:

84 Neither God nor Myth

that is why it is established hand in hand with the receiving capacity and why this initiatory capacity possesses its own structure and operation. Thus some twenty-­five centuries later, with regard to this first sentence of the Classic of Change, it is still a matter in China of elucidating the single phenomenon that is at once beneficial incitement and polarity. Because it is only from the internal play of this energy correlated to the other, opposed and complementary—yang and yin, “initiatory” and “receiving” capacities—that all reality derives, that reality may be considered from the perspective of animated beings, encountered situations, or activities. Could we thus be content with calling this other possibility that we discover in China “cosmological,” as is customary? In any case, we can see that it forms a triangle equally with the mythological as with the theological and that its purpose is to capture the coherence belonging to every process, whatever the scale or mode. The question here is very much that of “great beginning” (tai shi), of the Book as of phenomena, but that beginning has nothing of fact or event about it. It is very much a matter of “vast creation” (da zao), but that is nothing other than the course of things in continuous actualization— “modification and transformation” (bian-­hua 变化). Such an initiatory capacity is very much conceived as separate in its purity and its specific nature, hence its absolute capacity to “positivize” the process of things (shan qi bianhua), but nonetheless it never ceases to inhabit the least situation and does not refer to any Outside of the world; nor does it conceive of a cosmos drawn out of chaos any more than it does a creator God.

Neither God nor Myth 85

Because the spiritual and the material are bound together here, indissociably linked, continuously dependent; or rather let us translate these terms as the “spiritualizing” and the “materializing.” They are the dual, joint dimension of all process and do not let themselves be formed into separate levels or domains. Or, to be closer to the Chinese formulations, let us designate them as the animating breath and the reifying opacity, acknowledging that the latter is unmired as soon as it lets itself be traversed and incited by the former. Because if there were no receiving capacity opposite it, what could the initiatory capacity touch and set in motion? So this Chinese conception has no need either to represent, in terms of the world, or to resist representation to make way for transcendence. Nevertheless, even while exposing the faults of our inherited categories, perhaps it is no more surprising to us than any other conception, as I have said, or even not surprising at all. Because such a conception, in the end, invents nothing or as little as possible, whether figuratively or theoretically. But as soon as it thus quiets all anxiety, can it still excite us, or even simply “speak” to us?

T W EL V e   ■   W h e n M y t h H o l d s N o I n t e r e s t , When God Holds No Monopoly

Could China thus have totally ignored the question of a beginning of the world? Could it have completely missed what everyone so eagerly reminds us of, including the theologians: “that it is always through myth that man names his origins and thus locates himself in the world, facing death or the enigma of evil, and facing his gods”? This is how Pierre Grisel presents it in his book on the Creation. Arriving in China, can we still maintain such a generality, whatever the comfort it offers and however it nourishes an easy humanism? The sinologist Max Kaltenmark, at the end of his collective work on “the birth of the world,” gives us immediate warning. After follow‑ ing the required itinerary—beginning his survey with Egypt, Sumer, the Hittites, and Canaan, continuing his inventory through Israel and Iran, through India and the Mongols, and finally completing his tour in China—he opens this last chapter by anticipating disappointment: “The documents that inform us about ancient Chinese mythology are distinguished by their paucity”; “there are only scattered fragments, usually corrupt” because “the oldest texts preserved no legendary tradition regarding the origin of the universe.” What gets reported to us, on the other hand, in a historicized and moralizing fashion, are the beginnings of Chinese civilization (as is the case in the “Great Commentary” of the Classic of Change,

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When Myth Holds No Interest 87

B, 2). Now this is very much what China presents us with, even if we look beyond the Classic of Change: China retains just vague traces of the mythological, but neither does it deepen theological reflection, as if recognizing that neither orientation was interesting, that is, neither seemed to be a path worth venturing down. It goes without saying that these eroded mythological remnants, when they are found in China, where they have only occasionally been preserved, inexorably bring us back to the familiar: the egg, the separating of elements, clay molded to fashion humans, waters covering the land. . . . One isolated passage from a lost work, dating from after Antiquity and retained only in encyclopedias, reports to us that Pangu grew inside the undifferentiated source as in an egg, broke his way out of it with an ax, and separated Heaven from Earth. Beginning from which, Heaven, each day, grew a zhang (ten feet), and Earth, each day, thickened by a zhang, which strangely enough might recall, or rather, foretell, what the physicists are now saying about an expanding universe, the modern (scientific) version of the Creation. . . . Let us remember, however, that the Chinese literati never paid much attention to this account; and that, moreover, it is much less narrative than it might seem at first glance, since it is based, as ever, on the conception of yin and yang forming a polarity and underlying the world, as well as on the uninterrupted chain of transformations. Likewise, we find here that “after Heaven and Earth became separate beings,” Nüwa “modeled the yellow mud and made men from it.” “But,” the passage continues, “despite all the energy she put into it, she could not see her work through, so she soaked a rope in the mud and, raising it into the air, created other men.” Here we see

88 When Myth Holds No Interest

that, hardly has this figure of the artisan appeared than the egalitarian theme of the creation of men, which leads so easily to universalism, is lost, and we slip back into a hierarchical vision, which is common in China. “That is how,” the explanation reads, “the nobility and the rich came from the earth and the common people were produced with rope.” Furthermore, if such a narrative schema, lending itself easily to representation, was able to serve as figurative element, a memory of which the iconography retains, did it, in fact, fertilize thinking? What intellectual trace did it leave, beginning from which Chinese thought would be developed? This motif is only mentioned in a few lines in a dictionary and is found reported only in one General Anthology of Customs (Ying Shao’s Fensu tongyi ), which is itself cited in a later compilation. . . . This is scant vestige, in truth, in a culture where the Text dominated. The remains, therefore: the mythological resources that China might have known encountered hardly any use or possible deployment there, starting very early on, with thinkers of Antiquity. Also, those remains themselves only rarely emerge and are immediately diverted, altered in their perspective. So what was it that resisted and blocked the mythological vein here, that we are so quickly—­ imprudently—informed should be the bedrock for all cultures worldwide? We see it, for example, in Mencius (III, B, 9). If in one sentence he recalls that “in the time of the sovereign Yao” (thus already within dynastic history), water flooded all the principalities of the Center, it is not to ponder this de-­creation but rather to better justify the logic of regulation, according to which, in his eyes, historical time is periodically renewed: from the great Yu, who, by digging out the riverbeds, releases the earth from its waters and drains

When Myth Holds No Interest 89

them toward the sea, to Mencius himself, who—another time, another task—finds himself forced to participate in the debate of the schools to correct their ideological excesses. . . . This Flood scene, hardly touched upon, far from lending itself to dramatization or opening the question of Evil and punishment, emerges from the side of a necessary alternation of “order” and “disorder,” thus less from the side of Meaning than Coherence, and does not lead to more anxiety. Might it be different on the so-­called taoist side? Emphasizing the One, the Isolated, the Unnamed, might the taoist side open the way to transcendence by detaching it from the mythological? Might it join up with the other (theological) side? The Laozi may evoke “a reality confusedly formed,” “born before Heaven and Earth, silent and empty, rising up solitary without being altered,” that “could be considered the mother of the whole world” (chapter 25). After which, “not knowing its name,” the speaker “calls it tao,” the “way”; “being forced,” he names it “vast,” “great” (da 大). We might think we have fallen back into the idea of an ineffable Divine, isolating and deepening it in its mysterious unity. But it immediately follows that “vast” means “going away,” that “going away” means “far away,” and that “far away” means “coming back.” . . . “Coming back”: it is not from Elsewhere or from Outside where this way, tao must lead; and if the tao is called “vast,” “great,” Heaven, Earth, and the Sovereign, are immediately called “great” as well: all these “greats” find themselves “within the world” (yu zhong). More clearly still, it concludes, as if it were a matter of blocking the way of the theological as well as the metaphysical, that if “man imitates Earth, Earth Heaven and Heaven the tao,” the tao, for its part, at the height of

90 When Myth Holds No Interest

this progression, “imitates the spontaneously so”—in other words, it follows immanence (dao fa ziran). Thus, far from being constituted as a separate entity, apart from the world, the tao refers back to the natural: that undifferentiated Fund, from which everything proceeds and to which everything returns, never leaves a logic of processivity. We can at least glimpse a vestige of cosmogony when the Laozi (chapter 42) says that “the tao engenders the One, the One the Two, the Two the Three” and that “the Three engenders the ten thousand beings.” But it immediately adds that “all the beings bear yin on their backs and hold yang in their arms” and that, from this “blend of energies,” “harmony results” (chong qi yi wei he). Chinese thought will not free itself from the framework of generative polarity and regulation, even when, as in the Laozi, every effort is made to cast off ritual demands. Indeed, the commended “way” is in the resorption of differences and the return of the undifferentiated, and not in the separation and individuation to which Creation tends, which lead to contradiction and exclusion. When the Zhuangzi (chapter 7) reports—not at the beginning but in the last lines of what is considered to be the authentic work—that the sovereign of the South Sea and the sovereign of the North Sea, having been well received by their host of the Center, the Undifferentiated, started amiably to pierce openings in him to thank him for his hospitality, to enable him to see, hear, eat, and breathe like men, it happened inadvertently that, with the last pierced hole, he died. . . . Far from taking from the required exit from the undifferentiated state, breaking the originary egg, Zhuangzi lightheartedly adopts the op‑

When Myth Holds No Interest 91

posite position—in fine, signaling, ironically, not a threatening de-­ creation but what might be a regressive, beneficial un-­creation. That these vestiges survive but are not deployed, that they are hidden, buried, or disguised in China by a coherence that prevails over and shatters them, only makes clearer, in fact, what holds for every culture: that it is shaped by the relationships of forces and makes certain possibilities triumph by fully deploying them, to the detriment of others that are left lying fallow or pushed back into unthought. Let us take into account here the territorial diversity of “China” so as not to be fooled by this too unitary appellation, which makes us believe in too much homogeneity. Because it is in the cultures of China’s South that the cosmogonical schemas were most diffuse, as is evident still today in traditions like those of the Lao, whereas the cultures of the North, less attached to the oral than to the drawn line, and especially to hexagrams even before ideograms, have favored in their conceptions the ritualist bias of harmonic adequacy that eventually imposed itself. This bias is not explicative or “etiological” but tends to discern the evolutionary line of things in order to read in it a proclivity to which to conform. By making this perspective the key principle of all administration as well as all understanding, Chinese thought held the mythological motifs in check and buried them within so-­called popular culture, under the heading of folklore, to the point that they would only be mentioned in isolated fragments. Unlike the resource of the Greek tool, they were not retained in what would make up, beginning with the Classic of Change, the formulary repertoire of the literati.

T HIR T E e N  ■   G r e e k T o o l   /  Chinese Formulation

Tool is what I call all that serves to construct in a way of thought. Which does not apply only to a notion becoming a concept, thus rendering operative the generality that it manages, but, equally and in an even more basic way, to language itself, the whole array of morphological and syntactical means, of declension and conjugation, as well as prefix and suffix, preposition and conjunction, starting from which the option chosen in each case system makes a meaning arise and articulates it through the singular coordination of all these structuring elements. Let us pause at this banality about our languages before we must move on: such a tool allows for composing a “sentence,” that is, for organizing in a conjoined fashion a certain number of functions according to the rules of rection and subordination—for establishing the desired relationships of determination or explication, finality or consecutiveness, temporalization or spatialization, hypothesis or deduction, and so on. This tool makes the sentence into an assemblage erected on the base of distinct cases among which one chooses. This panoply is grammar. Opening wide the gamut of its modalities, the Greek language in particular developed this system of choices, starting from which one thinks. Didn’t the Greek legein (from which comes logos) originally mean both “to gather” and “to choose”?

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Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 93

Now, is the same thing true for Chinese, a language almost without grammar, a language that neither declines nor conjugates, that marks morphologically neither passive nor active, neither plural nor singular, neither time nor mood, that thus barely conceives of itself as a case system? Since its array of prepositions and coordinating conjunctions is so limited, it recognizes, classically, only “full” words and “empty” words, the latter coming into play between the former and orienting them in their usage while simultaneously allowing for breath in these interstices. It is not enough just to mention this fact, which I have already noted. We must still take measure of its effect to illuminate from the reverse direction the gaps we have just explored regarding the advent of the world and the question of the beginning, since the way of thought, as I have said, exploits the language. Because we must not fear the question that is so plainly basic it always gets forgotten: What does the (classical) Chinese language offer for “constructing” a sentence? I would say that instead of bringing this function of tool into play, it aims at “formula,” or what I will call, thus repurposing the term, formulation. I will call formula that reduced “form,” as concise as possible, which, having once reached this point of purity and functionality, is definitive and no longer has to vary. Whether the formula is algebraic, poetic, or, first of all, ritual, it establishes relationships among its terms in a global fashion that may be adapted most efficiently. The formula condenses a solution in a typical way, as a process, and once adopted, it only has to be memorized and reused—the formula serves and is antispeculative. It does not venture. A formula is viable or valid rather than true; its criterion is functionality. Now let us consider the first sentence of the Classic of Change: it is very

94 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation

much a formula (even the formula of all process). Let us recall the commentary (from the Confucian tradition) that it was given: it is a formulary progression that constructs no further. We may wonder: What possible relationship is there between this gap we perceive, starting from language, between tool and formula, between construction (of a meaning), on the one hand, and what I would call condensation (of a coherence), on the other, between all that and the way of thinking about “beginning,” primarily, the beginning of the world? We will notice a perfect example of the relationship in considering the way Plato reports such a genesis in the Timaeus (27–30): truly, there is no more beautiful “construction,” nor a better implementation of what I have called the Greek tool. Approaching the genesis from the prepositionally specified angle of the “through” which (hupo + genitive), Plato consequently considers it starting from a way of thinking about cause (aitia) and in an explicative mode. Causality is the first tool with which he works and builds his account of the creation, argument after argument, from one stage to another: “All that arises arises necessarily through a cause, because it is impossible that whatever there is can arise without a cause” (see Phaedo, 98C). From there it follows—unlike in the biblical Creation story, conceived instead as the reverse side of cause, or according to what would be called “grace” (creatio est gratia, the church fathers would say)—that it is according to the category of causality that Plato is to led to think about God—first cause and intelligent cause: “Let us thus say through what cause (dia entina aitian) the one that formed the future and the world formed them. . . .” Now “cause” is a concept that, presented thus, definitively secures the continuation of the thought. It

Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 95

is precisely because Plato needs to establish this first Cause as the point of departure for his explanation that he is led to posit—to sup-­ pose—God (see Republic, 379c): this world being “the most beautiful of things,” wouldn’t its artisan, as a result, be “the most beautiful of causes”? His “God” (demiurge) is an effect of construction. To which responds consequently, in Plato, the conception of the creation as a plan contemplated in advance and conducted through finality (causality and finality being connected, or rather, finality being to conceive prospectively starting from causality, as Kant would establish: “the object is the end of a concept, insofar as that concept is considered the cause of that object”). Because God is good, “God wanted all things to be good,” Plato logically continues: the Platonic artisan no longer has his hands in clay; instead, his gaze is steadily fixed on the ideal model whose “idea” and “power” he transposes into this world. Thus, “by virtue of these reflections,” it is after putting the intellect into the soul and the soul into the body that he fashions the world “in order to make of it a work that was by nature the most beautiful and the best” (according to the Greek construction hopos + optative). Indeed, what could “explaining” consist of, if not this capacity to deploy the intelligible according to this dual dimension, regressive/prospective, of the same terms, of causes and ends? This is where the classical West, starting from the Greeks, drew its intelligence, which was promoted exemplarily in its physics. Now, of what does the Classic of Change speak to us? Or rather, with what? (This with what in fact determines the of what). Neither in the initial formula nor in its Confucian commentary (contemporary with Plato), nor even in the seventeenth-­century commentary

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(by Wang Fuzhi, before the intrusion of Western thought), does causality appear (causality only enters Chinese thought in the Mohist movement, which would fail to develop, which in itself is already significant). If these utterances do not “explain,” what do they do? Nor, consequently, is some finality contemplated. “Profit” (or “harvest,” li: the scythe next to the ear of grain 利) is not the “end,” much less the “aim.” This is so because “profit” is the internal result of the unfolding, just as it follows from it, whereas the end is projected by the mind beyond the contemplated action and justifies it, starting from its conclusion telos. From which it follows that the positivity (shan) developed by the course under way cannot be confused with the Good as it is viewed in Plato, especially in relation to the divine plan. That is also why, instead of “explaining” the advent of the world through causality, Chinese thought clarifies what I earlier called its processivity, that is to say, its capacity to be in process, which renews itself by itself, from phase to phase, and does not deviate (and wisdom, we are told repeatedly throughout the Classic of Change, is to put oneself in phase). That is also why, instead of conceiving of the world’s processivity as an “action” that assumes a subject (ergon, this Agent being the “demiurge”), it considers it an impersonal operativity, manifesting itself in “modification-­transformation” (bian-­ hua). And that is why, finally, instead of positing God at the beginning of the world’s creation, it conceives of the tao, the “way” of viability, according to which this process, by regulating itself, can once again—indefinitely—initiate itself. Because Plato has that tool “logic” (generating from logos) at his disposal, not only prepositions and conjunctions but also, start-

Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 97

ing from them, explicative means like cause and finality, as well as a whole, very diverse set of verbal modalities ranging from the factual to the conditional, from the indicative to the subjunctive to the optative, he can build the thinking about the beginning of the world into a question. And first of all, as with Hesiod, this question is one of the good beginning of the beginning. “Now the most important thing, in all matters,” he warns, “is to begin with the natural beginning”—that is to say, according to the logical place to begin for the good development of the question. On the other hand, if it is no longer up to Hesiod’s Muses, it falls to Timaeus in particular in the Platonic prologue to have the first word—because he is “most the astronomer” among the participants and because he has accomplished the most work toward knowing the “nature of everything.” Having the most authority and “starting from the genesis of the world,” a logical debut, it falls to Timaeus to conclude “by approaching the nature of men.” Having forged a useful tool for itself thus allows this Greek initiative of thought, most fully assumed by Plato, through which the philosopher personally asserts himself; “in order that I myself declare as clearly as possible what I conceive throughout (dianooumai ) on this subject.” Thus this beginning is a deliberately “posited” one, that is, like a “thesis,” starting from which the interrogation can be reconfigured and wresting itself immediately from the conventions of language as well as from the rut of usages and traditions—which makes it philosophical; it thus considers the question in its full right or purity, that is to say, in its greatest generality and according to its own order: “Whether it is all the heaven or the world, or, if it could receive some other more

98 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation

appropriate name, let us give it that name. Let us first pose, in this regard, the question that, we would say, must be posed in the beginning for all things. . . .” Plato knows at the same time that this question of the beginning (of the world) promises to be quite risky, detached as it is from any adherence or horizon, that it will be perilous to venture there, and that it retains the status of enigma: the author and the father of this universe will have to be “found,” “discovered” (heurein). This thesis, as well justified as it may be afterward, could not rid itself of its original underlying nature, of hypo-­thesis. If Plato problematizes the thinking on the beginning from the outset, it is because, just as the (Greek) language presents itself as a case system, the thinking on the beginning of the world organizes itself by alternative. An initial or even preliminary question, the most radical one, concerning the beginning and questioning the question itself, is knowing first of all whether there is a beginning. By whatever name we call it, “has it always been,” without a beginning (principle) of genesis, “or did it come into being, having begun starting from a certain beginning”? This disjunctive instrument of Greek thought was necessary, pushing the interrogative branching back as far as possible (precisely that disjunction that Chinese thought abhors) to consider the question of the beginning in its properly “theoretical” condition of possibility, which, as we know, came to influence the Bible when it began to conceive of the Creation starting from nothing, ex nihilo. Henceforth, according to the Greeks, to think will be to make successive cuts into an organized series of alternatives, each implied by and following from the others, opting for one solution and re-

Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 99

jecting the other (these are the procedures of definition by division, we may recall, from the Sophist), so that Greek thought is constituted by “throwing out ahead” or “projecting” the difficulties to resolve—in other words, it is constituted “problematically” (this problematic that China so willingly ignores in favor of the “mystery” in which one is allowed to flow as into bottomless depths, xuan 玄, to reemerge at ease in greater simplicity, like the divers-­swimmers in Zhuangzi). Not only does one have to choose in Plato between the domain of that which always “is” and is never “born” and the domain of that which is always “becoming” and never “is,” but one also has to choose between what is model and what is copy or, again, between those two regimes of utterance and relevance: choosing what the “truth” is that one “knows” (fixed, irrefutable) and what is only “plausibility,” in which one “believes” or “trusts” (pistis). Once again Plato conceived of any account of the advent of the world as only being able to belong to the second category: it could only be muthos, marked by uncertainty and controlled by probability, since it involves the domain of becoming and not of immutable Being, which nevertheless does not impede the story or account. Plato would like to string the account together (hepomenos) in a necessary and demonstrative mode—this muthos thus becoming logos: not only by starting with methodological distinctions allowing preliminarily “analysis” of the question (“one can, to my mind, first make the distinctions that here . . .”) but also by developing a hypothetical-­deductive reasoning that will pave the way for Western knowledge. Let us say, “posits” Timaeus, that in effect there are two models (the one of eternal Being, the other of

100 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation

becoming) according to which the world could have been made; since this world is beautiful, it could only have been conceived in relationship to the eternal model, because in the opposite case, the artisan would have looked to the model that is born, which is not possible, since he would not have then been able to produce “the most beautiful of things,” that is to say, created starting from “the most beautiful of causes,” and so on. Now, in contrast, can we see what is done in the initial formula of the Classic of Change? We will notice a pure parataxis that absolutely nothing coordinates: “Beginning—expansion—profit—­ rectitude.” And then what is done as well in the Confucian commentary—contemporary with Plato—that develops it? We find formulas of four words that nothing links together (with two formulas out of seven constituting a variation: four + one empty word + two, the only two coordinates [nai, yi] thus expressing consecutiveness: “to the point that,” “in such a way that”). What internal order, if not logic, does the linkage thus obey? On the one hand, by responding to one another, the formulas bring polarity into play—for example: cloud(s) pass // rain(s) spread On the other hand, rather than deduction (reasons), there is (formulary) unwinding, or “stringing together” (the image is one of string threading through the interior and throughout, guan); that is to say, one formula follows from the preceding one, marking a new stage or phase of the elucidation: the sentence is processive as well. Also, instead of the thinking about the advent of the world being problematized, it is unfolded according to an obviousness that—

Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 101

because no tool or support is available—nothing threatens to disturb. We encounter no operative distinction here, no case system, no play of hypothesis and conclusion; that is to say, from one end of the sentence to the other, no other possibility is ever left to be imagined: critical consciousness does not appear (accounting for the lesser development, in China, of the philosophical). Also, to take up our earlier tools again, instead of producing a meaning, which is risky, this thinking about the advent, which is not of the “world” but of all process, maintains its coherence or cohesion throughout: it does not let itself be taken or split apart: thus, neither does it let itself be “analyzed.” Because it does not problematize, does not raise itself to the level of reasoning, resorbs the interrogation instead of deploying it, this Chinese thinking about the beginning escapes the question of its truth. I have already asked this: Can it still interest us (speak to the desire for intrigue in thought)? The tool offers a hold, brings out a perspective, or provides a means (to implement and to ponder). But the formula, by validating itself, folds back on itself, so that what proceeded it is cut off and forgotten. Isolating itself in establishing its internal relationship, it dispenses with external justification. In the image of the ritual form, it normalizes (channels: thought or behavior) without having to invent or argue. Its perfecting stabilizes it and makes it available for use; all that counts is its functionality: more than two millennia of literate thinking has continuously turned to that stock of basic formulas, provided by that first sentence, that are endlessly reiterated. Conversely, what the Greek tool discovers (I say tool and not “mind,” the famous “Greek mind” so often invoked)

102 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation

is a power of reflexivity of thought, making it turn back on itself, by which the Greeks were able to follow the question back to its source as well as to question its conditions. From there we can understand that if (Greek) philosophy chose to think of “Being,” it is because “Being” could be extracted (abstracted) onto the operative plane, either of work or of thought, where thought can radically separate concepts one from another as well as make them stand out in a unitary fashion (kata mian idean, says Plato), without their being hampered anymore by ambiguity; without one always being mixed up with and dependent upon another (as in Chinese thought, which, in contrast, has drawn coherence from this through correlation). It is on this plane that it may have to, through its own intervention or on its own authority, construct and coordinate (but that is also exactly what Heidegger would regret: that “Being” may have become, with Plato, that operative plane of thinking . . .). Or if Greek thinking thought of God (either “God” or “nature”: either it “theologizes” or it “physiologizes,” Aristotle summarizes), it is to posit a starting point for its deduction, allowing itself a marked beginning (such as the principle, arche), the key to the vault of the speculative, although its hypothetical nature is rarely concealed (and consequently unrelated to the personal God of the Appeal and of prayer). “God” and “Being” are products of this tool, or at least, this tool establishes them as alternatives which impose (not unarbitrarily, or, in any case, not without a share of construction) their necessity upon us: “To be, or not to be?” (whereas, China tells us, there is only “transformation,” including in death). Or, “Does God exist or not exist?”; whereas, we read in Chinese, that there is only the—joint—

Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 103

dimension of spiritualization (yang) or of opacification (yin). Let us not fail to notice this, no matter how it vexes us: that in one case as in the other, whether it is a question of the promotion of Being or of God, it is a matter of demands or effects coming from our (European) syntax, at once linguistic and logical. But the question then resurges: How to translate into our languages a way of thought, like the Chinese, without syntax and without construction?

f o u r T E e N  ■   T r a n s l a t i o n

Let us come back to the virtue of fieldwork. Let us consider, as a countercheck, the most common translation, which is also the most recent one, of the Confucian commentary that we have read. It is by Richard Wilhelm, whose 1924 German translation was translated into English, then (re)retranslated by Étienne Perrot into French. It may be surprising that so short and so major a text, traditionally attributed to Confucius and making up part of the canonical book, as well as being universally recognized as basic to Chinese thought because it provides a set of formulas and coherences that have been readopted and exploited ever since, would have drawn so little attention from translators. But I have already discussed this: in sum (in the land called the Middle [Country] or the “centrality”), the utterance is too elementary, not outstanding or troubling enough, not partial enough; in short, it offers too little hold or angle to stimulate desire or capture interest. Would that be the only reason, however? Isn’t it also that, since it lends itself so conveniently to stereotypical usage, since it invents or forges nothing, is at stage zero of theoretical function and fiction, it is most difficult for a European reader to apprehend: because it does not allow for divergence or give way to speculation. Wilhelm introduces it with these words:

104

Translation 105

In the Chinese, the sentences of this commentary are for the most part rhymed, probably in order to make it easier to remember them. These rhymes have not been reproduced in the translation because they are of no material significance. However, it is well to remember the circumstance, because it explains much of the abruptness in the style, which is often somewhat forced. Strange: these expressions are rhythmic, inviting scansion, and are easy to memorize, but they are scarcely rhymed. (Is it true, moreover, that a rhyme would not be significant?) Stranger still: the “abruptness” of the style and its “forced” nature, although it is obviously a matter here of an unwinding that offers precisely no texture, where nothing conflicts or deviates or abrades; and it is exactly because nothing resists here, nothing strains, that this utterance is so difficult to grasp. The distinctive feature of the formula is to dissolve all roughness and to smooth: What is there to grab hold of? Nonetheless, as the translator does not leave the horizon of our syntactical and logical tool, as he does not perceive that the operation here is not one of construction (of meaning and of conceptions) but one of formulation and elucidation, he can only share his discomfort in approaching this text. The translation inevitably suffers the consequences. In place of what I translated as “Vast is the initiatory capacity! / The ten thousand beings find their resources there to begin: / so that it commands Heaven,” Wilhelm-­Perrot translates: Great, verily, is the success of the creative, to which all things owe their beginning and which penetrates all heaven.

106 Translation

Let us pass over the overly evangelical “verily,” which is purely the invention of the translator (let us not forget that Wilhelm was a Protestant minister). But here the “initiatory” factor (of all process: Qian) is understood as “the creative,” and since the dimension of that capacity at work (de 德) is not understood, the strange idea of “success” is introduced—as if to compensate? The notion of “resources” (“funds,” “capital,” zi 资), on the other hand, is omitted; furthermore, it is not a matter of “penetrating heaven” (meaning what?) but of “commanding” the course of heaven by conducting throughout its processive unfolding. Finally, the sentence is rendered syntactically, relying heavily on determiners and relatives, which wreaks havoc with its formulary unwinding without constructing anything. Is this only a matter of translation (even if, let us acknowledge, the distance between the two proposed versions is so great that we might wonder if the same text is at issue)? In any case, the commentary that follows leaves no doubt about the work the translator engaged in: In the explanation, the two pairs of properties are divided into four distinct attributes of the creative power, whose visible form is heaven. The first is success, which, as first and original cause of all that is, constitutes the most important attribute and the most ample principle of the creative. In light of what is said here, understanding Chinese thought would thus mean immediately reinterpreting and rectifying it in Aristotelian terms, which, via scholasticism, formed the intellectual equipment of our classical Western reason. Beginning from

Translation 107

which, everything is indeed projected: the notion of “properties” or “attributes” referring to an inferred substance they serve to qualify; “cause” (“first,” “original”) paired with “principle” (according to the Platonic-­Aristotelian conjunction arche-­aitia); the plane of Being (“all that is”), finally, forming the base for this conception. Here, then, are the makings of a system—Being—cause—property—and what in effect “explains” the sentence to us. But once it has fallen under Aristotle’s categories, once they have been allowed to colonize it, what remains to us of Chinese thought? Traduttore, traditore (“translator, traitor”), but here it is not so much treason as travesty. Now could we discern what, more fundamentally, is at the core of this travesty, rendering it at once so logical and so complete (but which this translator of course fails to analyze)? Without warning, an interpretation has been added that is at once ontological and predicative, that is to say, at once a matter of the construction of Being and of Meaning, which is the dual characteristic of classical European thought, which paired the two but which our modernity wanted to break apart (thus the rupture and violence done to rationalism—witness the art and poetry of this past century). To construct a “meaning,” the translator really does need a “subject” here, in the precise sense that Aristotle uses the term, that is, grounding itself in “Being” and “supporting” the stated qualification. Because from the ontological perspective, the one of Being, the “sub-­ject” is that which is “extended under” (hupokeimenon) the various qualities that are supposed to be related to one another there in a unitary fashion as “properties,” and for which it is the support or substratum—in other words, what holds together “below”: the “sub-­stance.” The subject is thus what is sup-­posed “to remain”

108 Translation

one and the same “under” the change (hupomenon) and “in what” the change can take place (Physics I, 190a). From the perspective of meaning, or the predicative, on the other hand, the subject is the subject of the proposition, for which the rest is attribute, or, as Aristotle defines it, “that of which everything else is predicated, while it itself is not predicated of anything else” (Metaphysics, Zeta, 3, 1028b). These two versions of the subject, coming from Being and the language that utters it, fit together in the logos, to which the latter owes the relevance of its utterance—to the point that, in order to construct a meaning, the Chinese translator himself has so great a need for such a substantial and grammatical, ontological-­ predicative subject, which would immediately reestablish European intelligibility, that he invents one here. . . . Thus, what next would translate literally as Vast clear end beginning six positions moment to happen moment to mount six dragons so-­as-­to conduct heaven is rendered by this translator as: Because the holy man possesses great clarity on the end and the beginning, as well as on the way in which the six degrees complete themselves each in its own time, he rides them like six dragons to mount to heaven. Nothing in the Chinese text points to this “holy man” posited here as the subject of the utterance. This is a matter of an introduction-­ intrusion that nothing justifies, or rather, by which everything is diverted, but which we can clearly see is necessary as soon as we want

Translation 109

to construct the sentence syntactically. Because why establish, or, worse, personify, a “what” that would be vast and clear, from the end to the beginning, or that would mount the six dragons so as to conduct heaven? (Likewise, Wilhelm translates what follows: “This is what furthers and what perseveres . . .”) This is indeed a criti‑ cal question: Is it always necessary, as in good Aristotelian logic, to have a “what” support-­substratum of the utterance? Instead, let us acknowledge that in the Chinese sentence, the predicative relationship remains loose, not rigorous or not constraining: not assigned (to some assumed subject); the question of the “what” comes undone there. Because in this figure of the initiatory capacity, it is a question of an operativity, developing from phase to phase, or from one “moment” to the next (like the six dragons symbolizing the six successive lines of the figure considered here together as a single team): as such, this operativity is precisely without subject (which, we know, is the distinctive feature of a process) but beneficially conducts the course under way. That is why, since Chinese verbs are not conjugated, I prefer to translate into the infinitive. To import or impose a subject, on the other hand, to invent it, is not so much superfluous (or reductive) as it is an immediate barrier to understanding. This translator was nonetheless very wary of wanting to act as an importer, and he would never have considered treason. Indeed, missionary though he was, he supposedly admitted his “satisfaction,” not without humor, as Jung, who was his friend, reports to us, at “having never baptized a Chinese. . . .” This evangelist, Perrot adds, “made himself a disciple”; he was supposedly the first European to “have received the living science of the Yi King [Yijing],” whereas the others before him were supposedly “too sure of their knowledge,

110 Translation

of the universal value of their mental categories.” Let us thus do him justice by appreciating his good intention to be free from ethnocentrism. But it is nonetheless true that without knowing it, this translator converted Chinese thought into Western thought, although the conversion was no longer religious but syntactical and logical, and not done in an incidental but in a systematic way, as we can already note in these few lines. Let us consider how difficult it is to call into question one’s own “categories,” suspecting them of containing a bias beneath their “obviousness”; how difficult it is not to project one’s preconditions and inferences, lurking just this side of all questioning: so much more difficult to discern—­because they are what thought is backed up against—than the famous “prejudices” that, through one’s doubt, philosophy is supposedly intended to dispose of. Or rather, the former would not be uprooted or neutralized, as the latter are, so much as scrutinized: to interrogate not what one thinks (which, all told, is terminal and resultative) but rather with what one thinks: not, any longer, the object of the thinking but rather its tool. Which is conceivable, as I warned at the beginning, only through the encounter with other possibilities of thought—at least, if one does not come back home from such encounters too early. If this translator ontologizes the sentence here without even noticing it, projecting onto it “being” and the “what,” substantial and substantive, at the same time as he projects the triangle of “cause,” “principle,” and “property”; if he also theologizes it by projecting a “creator” there in place of the continual initiation of all process, as well as a “holy man” who rides dragons “to mount to heaven” (finality, once again, and behind it, eschatology); if, finally,

Translation 111

he makes a European sentence out of it by introducing into it syntactical articulations: “The Way of the creative,” he translates next, “works by means of change and transformation . . .” (but where does this “by means of ” come from, which the Chinese would not dream of saying?)—it is because, in order to translate, he wanted to adapt. To translate, for him, is to integrate and to return as soon as possible to the familiar. He does not consider that a translation, at the same time as it accommodates, can make available what resists such accommodation. He does not consider that, in order to translate, he must thus rework his own language there, recast it and put it back under construction: with a view to making it more receptive and opening it to what it would not dream of saying, by making new possibilities arise there. He does not consider that to translate, in short, can involve de-­assimilating at the same time as assimilating, de-­categorizing and re-­categorizing. At the risk, otherwise, of not having moved, of not having confronted from without, of never having entered. At which point, of course, the question turns around, and I myself become its target. Beginning by “explaining” in this way, in my language and subjected to its constraints, am I not also in the process of betraying, ineluctably, and of diverting? No, that is not inevitable, I would answer, if I consider that to translate is to clarify, along the way, what possibilities had to be closed in passing from one framework to the other, and also what others had to be opened in the language of arrival; if at the same time as I clear (and force) a passage from one language to the other, I am already beginning to retrace my steps to clarify what I did (I cannot imagine translating without commenting); in short, if at the same time as one “trans-

112 Translation

lates,” one returns to the conditions of possibility for what one produces. Translating then no longer constitutes a loss (I say this to counter so many long-­winded lamentations on that inevitability: “translation is treason,” and so on). Rather, it is the means and the opportunity for a new reflexivity: Babel is definitely a stroke of luck for thought—the chance to be able to leave one’s language and one’s idioms (atavisms), a chance, in any case, to be able to probe them. Again, in order to translate, it is necessary to help another possibility get through, and not to hurry this transition; not to step over the difficulty, not to mask it, but, on the contrary, to unfold it. Because to translate is not to land flatly from one side or the other any more than it is to dream of a meta-­language, beyond the two, that would integrate and reconcile them; it is, rather, to develop and deploy a threshold between the outside and the inside that effectively allows entry. There are no insurmountable walls between languages any more than there are premade bridges. Which is to say that translating is not deceptive but effective, and thus is not falsifying but fascinating: it is a matter of maintaining oneself at the breach as long as possible, perilously but patiently, being open equally to both sides and maintaining the encounter between them until the possibility of one is equally recognized by the other and progressively finds there what, as a reflected condition, can also make its way in it.

F I F T E e N  ■  I s T h e r e St i l l “ T r a d i t i o n ” ?

But what remains of these gaps today? This is the retort I hear. Isn’t it obvious that cultures no longer exist apart from one another? (What is more, did they ever?) They mix together, hybridize, and interbreed—what elsewhere still remains? We can even see how this phenomenon is accelerating: What you have just described of the possibilities of thought, is it still relevant? Or are there only traces and vestiges of it in the ancient texts, which are in the process of fading away and becoming uniform? Starting from the theoretical globalization coming from the West a century ago, our ways of thought have been becoming both unified and standardized. China adopted the European categories of science, as of philosophy, and translated them into its language, often via Japanese: Haven’t they been assimilated there? And we ourselves, when we learn Chinese, don’t we integrate it progressively into the horizon of our thinking? What gap could still survive? In short, at the very most you have made a work of memory, because the scene has changed. The world of communication that is ours today, where everything interferes with and spreads—responds—to everything else across the planet, no longer knows an outside. How could there still be an “entry”? “Tradition” is the term usually advanced to counter these questions and to name the residue of these changes (chuan-­tong, the Chinese call it, who themselves make such great use of it). Now,

113

114 Is There Still “Tradition”?

convenient as this notion is, does it really hold? Because it is precisely that transmission or filiation operating more or less in isolation, away from others, that in today’s connected world is doomed to disappear—that is the gift of History. As for the past, such a notion has already found itself denounced for decades, even within the human sciences, as a catch-­all or soft underbelly that only serves to idly collect as remnant what has escaped more precise definition: thus supporting the idea of a vague causality that could be called endemic and that, in its wide embrace, dispenses with having to provide for analysis. Because by definition “tradition” does not belong to one precise moment, does not let itself be delimited by chronology: it serves only to name the evasive; it cannot be formed into a subject, much less a tool of knowledge. Might it only serve as alibi in the end, or as coverall to hide our inability to go further and to discern more clearly, thus as a way to adorn—or to conceal—a renouncement? “Tradition” might be guilty, in fact, of a double dissimulation. First, the notion may obscure the ruptures and discontinuities that it is the archaeologist’s task to spot and make stand out, in contrast to the smoothing by which History is transmitted (the critique that we inherit from Foucault). And in another fashion, no longer diachronic but synchronic, it buries the heterogeneity internal to each culture as to each given moment by tending to ignore the tensions that have shaped them. Thus it rests upon a convenience of representation that arises in hypostasis, in a unitary fashion, from what arranges that which deranges, giving the impression, through this packaging, of a single entity. Because the “heterotopias” never encounter one another only from without, they also take note of each

Is There Still “Tradition”? 115

other from within. Indeed, wouldn’t these “internal heterotopias” (I am borrowing the expression from Bruno Latour) find one another within a single way of thought, and without that way of thought even trying to make that heterogeneity cohabit within it? At the very moment when European thought invented modern physics based on mathematics and devised experimentation, don’t we see these same thinkers, the heroes of rationalism, recounting once more, like Descartes, the great romance of the world, or, like Galileo, drawing the horoscope of the Medicis? Injured on these two fronts or from two sides, the notion of tradition gives up the ghost. But I am not sure that, once this process has been so briskly dealt with, everything is settled. Because in the contemporary “melting pot,” aren’t there only relics of what has not yet finished being homogenized? Or what might conceal itself, as adherence or even as recalcitrance, under our great global connection, and which even perhaps endogenizes itself under so much homogenization? Moreover, if tradition is most certainly an idle notion, or sets about things the wrong way, only approaching by fleeing and lapsing once again into some substitute for metaphysics, I wonder if the critique it has so justly spawned might nonetheless erase what comes into play there. “Dante and Descartes, Giordano Bruno and Nicolas Malebranche, Meister Eckhart and John Locke: what do they have in common?’’ I hear the retort that attempts to emphasize the exteriority internal to Western culture. Even more than ideological references shared across the centuries (as is the case with Christianism, in face of which everything positions itself, or rather, cannot not position itself), they have “in common” inferences or tacit choices beginning from which they think, I would

116 Is There Still “Tradition”?

answer: a certain unshakeable confidence in the power of the word, including Eckhart (and not to mention Dante! . . .), or something that weaves itself among them like a certain search for the “truth.” And most fundamentally, the (European) language thinks through and for them: they conjugate, construct sentences syntactically, choose within case systems, always assume “subjects,” and so on. That these thinkers ostensibly oppose one another must not conceal how, in fact, it is necessary first of all to agree with one another, closer to the source, in order to able to oppose one another—what I have called a “fund of understanding” for the way of thought. To be in opposition assumes a field where the encounter can be organized, and is only conceivable within a framework of an already outlined possibility. “In every debate (refutation), there is the undebated (unrefuted),” said Zhuangzi; that is to say, there must be a shared undebated—that one does not consider debating—only starting from which can there be debate and refutation. It is just such an undebated (“undisputed”), whether it is European or Chinese, that—by circulating from one to the other, leaving one to enter into the other, letting them reflect one another—my work attempts to clarify. Better than “tradition,” which goes no further than the idea of a diffuse cartage over which one has so little hold, fund of understanding makes appear in an operative fashion the condition of agreement on the basis of which a disagreement in thinking can be brought to light and deployed. Similarly, whereas the notion of tradition is fundamentally reactionary, folding back on itself and rejecting novelty, the notion of a fund of understanding is neither restrictive nor closed. When we trace it back, this fund of understanding can be reshaped, reconfigured, and consequently enlarged and

Is There Still “Tradition”? 117

transformed: thus all my work is aimed, not at isolating the ways of thought (as some might still pretend to believe)—but just the opposite: at opening such a fund of understanding that, through reciprocal de-­categorizations and de-­presuppositions, can be shared with Chinese thought and allow these established ways of thought—­ Chinese, European—to dialogue effectively face-­to-­face. If, furthermore, “tradition” is very often only a curtain drawn over the lack of analysis, it is still necessary not to give in to the mirage of operative discontinuity. Let us ask ourselves what continuity assumes discontinuity, just as we ask what fund of understanding assumes all opposition. A Foucauldian work like that of Gérard Simon has shown, for example, how the perspective of the Renaissance cut ties with the one of Antiquity by providing a system of radically new concepts that rendered the preceding one obsolete. If there is really is an epistemic rupture from one to the other, it does not keep us from asking: How is it that a certain field of research thus detaches itself and imposes itself on history, from one period to another, forming itself into a possible domain of questioning? How is it, in other words, that a problematics made its way, working quietly over a long stretch of time, to being taken up again at a certain moment over all other bases, fresh once again? I would ask even more generally: Isn’t the same thing true of the rupture between the “inquiry on nature” of ancient phusis and of modern “physics”? The latter could come to pass only by distinguishing itself from the former and opposing itself to it as strenuously as possible, but we can also see from the outside—as from China, which, having not known the first, did not develop the second—how, from one physics to another, there was certainly not

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continuation but, rather, substitution and consequently relay. Of course, the fruitfulness of one theoretical resource is exhausted, and another replaces it by forging in opposition to it a tool and a new system; but the preceding one had configured a certain possibility, among others, had already located and marked out a field of questioning in such a way that research could thus persevere. Can we remember the passage from the dirigible to the airplane? I offer this as an image. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was imagined that the sky henceforth would be filled with dirigibles. Then, over all other bases, by resorting to different means, by taking advantage of other resources, the airplane was built. The dirigible was dead, or survived only as décor. Nevertheless, the whole history of aviation incorporates within it that of the dirigible: the dirigible, a short-­lived attempt, nevertheless deployed a certain possibility that paved the way for today’s aviation. That is why, before concluding that the preceding analyses now belong to the past and consequently could stand in the way of understanding as well as of present opportunities, or that posing cultures opposite one another is an obsolete business, since they are no longer individual enough, I believe it is suitable to show a little more patience and, if I dare say so, circumspection. What about that art of the formula that I mentioned earlier, for example, with regard to the commentary on the first sentence of the Classic of Change? And first of all, when did I myself first become aware of that form for constituting the utterance? When I landed in China and began to read the People’s Daily to follow the staggering current events of the moment: in order to read, it was necessary for me to learn to see how, over the course of days, the formulary utterances emerged,

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were detached, condensed, isolated within themselves, becoming invariable and of a single piece (I am referring to Encre de Chine, my first essay). Was that only an effect of the propaganda? The Chinese language has shifted profoundly since the beginning of the twentieth century, with the vernacular language replacing the classical one. It has also felt the influence of Western syntax, but as long as it remains tied to its ideographical writing, this resource of formula and parataxis does not appear to be exhausted. Today, writing in China still very much means resorting to that art of formulation that brings polarity into play (what is called, too crudely, “parallelism”). Let us consider the symmetrical formulas that we can read even today, on the two sides of so many doorways. Even the formulas from the Confucian commentary that we have read may be found as is, without modification, in a current Chinese text, which might even be a magazine article. . . . What about the notions linked together in this introductory formula of the Classic of Change—are they themselves forgotten? “Beginning—expansion—profit—rectitude”: in other words, has this fund of coherence now run dry? I am so much less certain of it since the latter, not inviting construction, also does not invite contention, as I have said: it offers no hold for criticism. Not being constituted as a truth, neither is it refutable. So where would the outside begin? I walk down the Paris streets and enjoy looking at the names of the Chinese restaurants in my neighborhood (the “Latin” quarter, it is called). What appears on the signs and also, in its own way, constitutes text? “New—flourishing” (“in full bloom”) Xin cheng. Or, on the following street, “Expansion—deployment—profit” Xing fa li. Or again, “Full flight (of the wild goose)—deployment” Qi

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hong. And I can even find, as in the name of this jiaozi restaurant, the first two words of the Classic of Change: “Initiatory capacity—­ expansion” Qian heng. And so on. How to translate these restaurant signs? Or are they translated, and what do we find written on the other side, juxtaposed, in European languages? Going back to those Chinese names, in the order they appear above, I quote: “Delicious Monge” (on Monge Street), “Délices asiatiques,” and “Délices express.” And for the first two words of the Classic of Change: “Chez Tonny.” There is no attempt here to translate, the two rubrics in the Chinese and European languages remaining parallel and never penetrating one another. The two perspectives opened in the two languages do not communicate with each other. There we have, superimposed, an appellation from within and an appellation from without, and the two remain ignorant of one another. Is this merely incidental? As trivial as it seems, couldn’t it be an indication of a fracture and even of impending danger? That, beneath the appearance of borrowing the other’s language, of adopting from without and adapting from within, we fold the coherence back on itself, instead of extroverting it, we enclose it within the within? Thus we seal it up again into ineffable depths instead of opening it as a fund of understanding. We still have not begun to make an “entry.” The danger is that we may act globally in this fashion: that we do not translate between languages by illuminating the implied biases, which are also so many riches, but instead we superimpose and consequently bury. In other words, under the Westernizing (globalizing) stratum is reconstituted an identitary, autochthonous stratum, which becomes all the more firmly embedded insofar as it does

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not let itself be penetrated by the other but isolates itself from it: under the guise of this external display that makes us believe in what is shared through integration, the inside that no longer allows “entry” will suddenly reemerge as “Asian values” that, as we can see in China today, henceforth claim to be absolutely specific, almost ahistorical, and inaccessible to foreigners. Thus, in order to unfold the various possibilities of thought, we cannot make only a work of memory or even of resistance; and we cannot even be content with promoting a reciprocal fertilization between cultures, as the discourse of goodwill has so often advocated. But rather, those gaps that we put to work between ways of thought, instead of concealing them, deploy the space of a new reflexivity; and to do this work, today, is to be militant. But militant how? We no longer begin from an a priori definition of “Man” but instead explore, through this reciprocal penetrating gaze, what goes for—or clears the way for—the human. We explore the resources of thought as they can reconfigure, from one side as from another, the field of the thinkable. It is true that we will no longer lapse into the commonplaces of humanism, so easy to keep repeating, which have as ardent a hold on us as our prejudices do. Rather, we will provide humanism with the tool for constructing and developing itself.

F i n a l e : A S h i ft o f t h e T r u t h

To describe the possibilities of thought, then, is not to want to label the cultural traits that we might assume to be specific and characteristic as identifying and therefore isolating functions: such cultural traits are inevitably selective, of course, and could not help but be arbitrary; furthermore, they are called upon—such is the nature of culture, even before we entered the regime of globalization—to transform: “culture-­transformation” (wen-­hua 文化), as the Chinese language so aptly says. Still less is it a matter of wanting to “essentialize” the cultures and enclose them within worlds—I bore myself repeating this. But the question remains: What comfort, or ideological security, am I on the way to, or in the process of, disturbing here? Because I always find myself facing, growing back again and again like the heads of the hydra, that stubborn determination to block any thinking begun in this direction: indeed, any of us who are no longer certain that all our notions are at once universal and conspicuously innate somehow find ourselves immediately denounced as “culturalist.” Isn’t it a matter here of something else entirely? If we consider culture in terms not of identity but rather of fecundity, it becomes a matter of calling for the development of cultures as resources that their gaps tend to reflect. That is why they are precious and why it is necessary to investigate them patiently by measuring their effect

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and their range. And without betraying their coherence. Because in encountering one another, cultures are not led to relativize but to probe one another: they are discovered by one another to be like so many enterprises or conquests that, through their least attempted options, are simultaneously exploring the human and deploying the human. That is what I mean, finally, by the “possibility” of thought or, let us say more generally, of mind (in the sense of the Phenomenology of Mind, but which would no longer be only European): this possibility’s reason for being (its condition of possibility) becomes clear, and it is pregnant with the possible, the future, or the riches to be exploited. To treat the possibilities of the mind deploys a diversity and, at the same time, produces a parity. That is what, first of all, puts the cultures on an equal footing on principle and stops ethnocentrically hierarchizing them. Furthermore, this plural itself multiplies our intelligence and, of primary importance, gets it unmired; it de-­ excludes as well. I will admit that I am no longer so sure that the subject and citizen of the world to come must be urged to be “tolerant,” as is repeated over and over today in a reprimanding tone that assigns guilt. I do not see why it would be necessary for him to give up his adherence to his values (for example, in Europe, Freedom) and trade his ideals. This plural of possibilities of the mind thus has a critical function, but it is not disenchanted or skeptical. On the contrary, by discovering such diverse possibilities of thought, we ourselves are led here, without being forced, to become comprehensive— “comprehension,” which is better than any compromise (the two terms, of course, are opposites): we are called upon to develop a

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polyglot and translating intelligence, knowing how to “enter” and to “leave” and reflecting itself in its biases, which are also, let us not forget, so many supports. That is to say, we are called upon to arrange passage for one into the other or, again, to let one access the other, the “other” that then rightly—reciprocally—discovers itself, the “oneself ” or the “one’s own.” Because to translate, as I have said, is itself operative: to reopen from the inside and make one see from the outside simultaneously inventories resources on both sides, activates them, and offers them—which is why to translate is, in and of itself, ethical. I even see in it the single ethic of the world to come, which would not be forced, if we want to resist identitary confinement as much as its apparent opposite, the ambient uniformization that, as soon as it no longer allows for working the gaps, sees itself condemned through repetition to sterility. From there, exploiting the possibilities of thought makes our very concept of “truth” shift. Because we are led to reconfigure it by relating it to our capacity for intelligence, which I will understand in its double meaning as the human faculty producing the intelligible (and as such, never fixed) and as the real and singular power of grasping or apprehension (as we say: to have intelligence of). I will call “true” henceforth that which is the source of intelligibility and yields to discovery and implementation. Its negative is no longer the “false” but the unapproached, undiscovered, or unthought. Because the true can henceforth no longer be sufficiently understood according to its traditional (scholastic) conception of “adequacy” (“of the thing and the mind,” rei et intellectus), since this “real” to which the mind refers could always be suspected of having been constituted by some option or implicit choice of that

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mind. Nor can it be understood any longer, from the other side, by its capacity for intrinsic (Spinozist) “relevance” alone, since we are always already judging it from within a singular logic, the logic of a certain possibility of thought that, as soon as we exit it, no longer imposes itself. The same is true in an already exemplary fashion for what our classical reason was most attached to: the principle of noncontradiction, posited by it as the first axiom and relevant only within the perspective that it itself elaborated. If I thus limit myself again to this notion that has borne philosophy and merged with it, but that I want to open to the same diversity, the one of the possibilities of thinking, then the “true,” understood henceforth as internal to each of them, can no longer be conceived as exclusive. But for all that, it will not let itself be dialectized on a Hegelian model, because these possibilities maintain an exteriority among themselves and are even rivals; in any case, they are not completely integrable into a whole—not that this “true” is relative or sector-­based, but it reveals itself to be competitive. It will conceive of itself thus, not in a referential way—since there is always the fear that it is, in fact, self-­referential without knowing it—but in an operative way: the true is what configures the thinkable and offers a hold over it; in other words, the “true” is what deploys—produces—promotes the intelligible and puts it into service and to work. In the image of what I call a possibility for thought, it simultaneously clarifies its condition (of possibility) and gives it productivity. It also measures itself by its fecundity—in other words, by its simultaneously heuristic and pragmatic power: the true is the fissure to explore, the lode to exploit; this source of intelligibility is a resource to be opened for prospecting.

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This plural of the possibilities of the mind is thus not a plural of orders, objects, or dimensions but a plural of explorations or adventures. According to its operative concept, which allows it to discover the true, it can offer for consideration the totality of human thought only by each time inscribing it locally and singularly, within a history and an environment; that is why it is cultural. In that web of human thought, how many of those possibilities can we locate? I began here by making an inventory with regard to the thinking about the beginning. There is a biblical intelligence or “truth” that we can see simultaneously detaching itself and exploring itself in the rewritten account of the Creation. By positing introductorily an absolute Other, external to the world, this opening creates in the human—deploys there and sets into motion—the conditions of a subjectivization that, through the means of guilt and Expectation, will henceforth endlessly construct and reveal itself. Or rather, let us say that the biblical human, upon encountering what it posits at the outset, in this inaugural scene, as incommensurable Outside, and under the theme of the Alliance that is formed there, henceforth must endlessly look toward it and make its “inside” from it: it discovers (promotes) that intimate External at the same time as it perceives (deploys) that intimacy as an infinity, thus appropriating an unprecedented becoming (through the motifs of vanquished death and salvation). An eminently singular and productive coherence, which has its own fecundity, puts to work indefinitely—and according to which the religious in Europe took form—what is not adequately characterized by the terribly banal reference to what is called “God.” Under “God,” Pascal has already warned us, so many things are listed that really have hardly anything in common.

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Opening Hesiod’s Theogony, we find in it an intelligence (truth) of another kind, “mythological,” which, if it occasionally draws from the same source as the preceding one, distinguishes itself or “chooses” in another fashion, gives itself another usage and experiences another productivity: representing, varying, dramatizing, as both exploratory and probationary function, it tries a whole set of coherences to explain the world beginning from implied forces and factors. The forces and factors unite or oppose one another, engender and merge with one another, balance and compensate for one another, from which ensue the many series of filiations and renewals that form “fate.” Its fecundity has been exploited ever since in accordance with that inexhaustible lode and promoted by the pleasure of narration, fiction, and romance, to which is attached—but also wants to distinguish itself from, depends upon but struggles all the more violently against—the “logical” intelligence or truth of the beginning that we see proposed in the muthos reelaborated by Timaeus: intelligence that no longer only symbolizes but also abstracts, no longer thinking in terms of representation but of entities; that is no longer only causalist but is also finalist, weighing all the ins and outs. It is not content to answer questions but is deliberately problematic, explaining itself starting from a case system; and therefore, it is constructive and modelizing, explicative and deductive. It expels earlier ambiguity by arming itself with the principle of noncontradiction, the source of clarity through exclusion; it transforms the sequence of the account into internal necessity resting upon argumentation alone. It is what paved the way for science, or rather, let us say, for a certain kind of (classical) science that based its hold and its efficacy upon it.

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Now we discover in China another form of intelligence, of “hold” or “truth,” by opening the Classic of Change and again with regard to the beginning. I think that it can be conceived overall as an intelligence at once of processivity and operativity (tao meaning simultaneously the course of things and the way of operating: “tao of the world” and “my tao”). Thus it does not necessarily present a subject; it dispenses with narrative, and it dissolves all dramatization; it does not think in terms of cause and end, model and aim, but in terms of condition and consequence, or, more precisely, to take up again its four opening notions, of “initiation”—“maturation”— “harvesting”—“regulation.” Even in its religious and ethical dimension, this intelligence is strategic: drawing on the very procedures of ritual, it teaches the art of putting oneself in phase with the moment, of conforming to the lines of force of its unfolding—the latter becoming clear through the play of polarities—and finds its productivity in the capacity to induce evolution, without confronting the situation or exhausting itself. We understand that what serves it—not as model or ideal, because it does not detach itself from the order of things, but as norm—is “harmony”: harmony, tai he 太和, is at once the condition of the renewal of the world, through its constant balancing, and the—absolute—foundation of the morality that avoids deviation and deregulation through partiality. Might these modes of intelligence be incompatible? In any case, they each deploy their own zone of exploration and fecundity and are not necessarily led to intersect one another. Of course, as I have noted, the Bible has its moments that become novelistic, and philosophy periodically affiliates itself with the biblical religious. Nevertheless, even if they cross, their respective coherences are not

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undone. Thus, when we want to manage the course of things, we can both modelize, by drawing up a plan and determining ideal ends (as Timaeus’s Demiurge does), and strategically ripen the situation, by taking advantage of favorable conditions (as the Classic of Change teaches us, line by line); but these two logics, which thus support each other and can intersect, remain contradictory to one another with regard to their resources and fecundity (as I have demonstrated elsewhere with regard to efficacy). Above all, I do not believe that these various possibilities of thought are constituted in successive ages, those of a “necessary development” of the human mind so dear to the Enlightenment, and accordingly, that one possibility would, through its progress, ineluctably tend to supplant the other. That is to say, I do not see that philosophical rationalism triumphs finally over biblical faith, according to the old positivist schema; nor even that literature has to outstrip philosophy, according to a schema in vogue at present (Richard Rorty). They each experience their moment of stardom but not, for all that, their moment of running dry, because they also relaunch and reciprocally reactivate one another through confrontation and by putting the gaps between them to work. Thus it would be philosophically fallacious, that is to say, sterile, to claim to encage, that is, to chart, these possibilities of thought, as some anthropologists have attempted to do, or even just to want to make a tour of them, in an attempt to be exhaustive. Our point of view in this business must not be retrospective (classifying and cataloguing), but prospective and extending beyond any given horizon, which traveling effectively serves. Such a (finished) inventory would come to harm the resources that these “possibilities” are, as

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human experience that, gathered each time in its cultural coherence, and thus singular, is at the same time valuable, or at least intelligible, henceforth for every subject—which is very much what their philosophic elaboration claims. Indeed, what do we know of other possibilities not yet discernible, in gestation? The human intelligence, conceived of as a capacity forever in the course of development, cannot be neatly set into a system or laid out flat in any way. The relief (in thinking) produces by itself a diversity of sides that are not approachable in a single perceptive field; or rather, to embrace this diversity of perspective, it would thus be necessary to adopt a dominant point of view, but at the same time that relief is lost. That is why I distrust the comparison that assumes such a dominating vista, arranging according to itself and the other, charting but no longer entering. On the other hand, and today even more than yesterday— which may be the positive side of globalization, as opposed to the risk of uniformization that it threatens us with—we can circulate among languages and cultures, and do so horizontally, transversely, by extricating certain possibilities and reflecting them through others and holding these perspectives concurrently. Thus we can more deliberately enter and exit: because it is necessary to have gone out, it is necessary to have gone elsewhere, to have moved, to be able to “enter” and to penetrate. I went into China first of all to be able to finally enter into the Greek thought that I probably felt, if confusedly, I had inherited: this connivance through familiarity (atavism) is not knowledge. To make these possibilities of mind emerge, on the contrary, simultaneously emancipates and impassions: emancipates us by desolidarizing us from the adherences we have been

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subject to; impassions us (the philosophical eros) because these possibilities rekindle one another respectively by clarifying each other in their choices and by discovering each other engaged. We are held there less by a conviction—attached as we might be at first to a certain determined content of truth—than by a desire for both exploration and exploitation. At the same time as we step back in our minds, we make junctions appear that offer us choices and that are there for the trying.

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Reference Note

I have not attached notes to this essay because if I did, it would be necessary to add one to almost every line. Instead I rely on my previous work to lay the foundation for this one and to render it valid, because it is the decantation of them. Questions that I raise here go back to my first essay, Procès ou création (Seuil, 1989); but I have ruminated since. Concerning the Classic of Change and the most technical aspect of reading it, I refer in particular to Figures de l’immanence (Grasset, 1993), in which, following the commentary of a seventeenth-­century thinker, Wang Fuzhi, I try to develop a philosophical usage for this foundational book of Chinese thought, and in order to extract it from the hands of the gurus. This essay, it will be clear by now, is a sinology Manifesto, at once philological and philosophical. Given such an explanation, I wonder whether we can return to the brief essay in philosophy, even when it touches on knowledge. It would be brief and not cursory. Can we revive the genre of the Letter and the Discourse that happily follows the thread of an idea, carried along by a desire to think and no longer seeking shelter behind a screen of erudition? Although this essay does not take that form, it is also a dialogue engaging contemporary French thinkers who seem the most important to me: a dialogue, notably with Marcel Gauchet, that this ques-

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tion of the possibilities of thought, among others, has prompted; with Philippe Descola, who has attempted a powerful anthropological charting of the modes of thought; with Bruno Latour, who raised the suggestion of an “internal heterotopia”; with Marcel Detienne, finally, who no longer believes in the “Greeks.” Would there then be the “Chinese”? From the inside, this dialogue engages the sinologists as well: In addressing ourselves to Western readers, are we not all compelled by this obligation to “enter”?

François Jullien (b. 1951) is a French sinologist and philosopher. Jullien was president of the French Association for Chinese Studies (1988–1990), director of the East Asian Department of the University of Paris VII (1990–2000), and president of the Collège International de Philosophie (1995–1998). He is currently a professor at Paris Diderot University and director of both the Institute of Contemporary Thought and the Marcel Granet Center. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Jullien is well known in France and throughout the world for his writings that explore the distances between European and Chinese thought. He has published more than thirty volumes of philosophy, and his works have been translated into numerous languages.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. The author of three collections of poetry, she has translated almost thirty books from the French. She teaches in the MFA Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.