François Jullien wants us to see what thought and life could look like without ontology, promising intellectual riches unavailable in the heavy ontological apparatus we are deeply invested in. The strength of Jullien’s argument comes from a deep and unique alliance between philosophy and Chinese thought, a risky one – incurring predictable disgruntlement from both philosophy and sinology – but nevertheless enduring and productive. This is far from advocating one in place of another, as we are accustomed to do in critical theory in relation to divinity, grand narratives, scientism, modernity, and even stable truths. It is an endeavour to think the ‘unthought of’ of ontology through what Jullien calls a vis-à-vis suspended in productive tension, a dialogue. In philosophy, the other is subsumed in a singular dialectical relationship through oppositions. What Jullien insists on is a doubleness of co-existence in Chinese thought rather than a singularity of dialectics in ontology. If ontology grounds a philosophy that makes a world in its image, and if that image is increasingly untenable as an ecology of the planet, Jullien’s call for a deeper reflexivity in ontology is of enormous significance. This special issue brings both Jullien’s argument and Chinese thought to a forum to explicate what this could mean in multiple fields from art and architecture to anthropology and critical theory.
Jessica Dubow’s In Exile – working through Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig – reads Judaic thought from the Exodus as exile. With Rosenzweig, she understands this as pitting the (Judaic) singular of faith against the (Greek) universal of reason. This ‘bad universal’ was Hegel’s state, which Dubow also sees as Carl Schmitt’s state. Dubow sees this as it were universal of dominance in today’s Israeli state, against which she pits the singular of exilic thought.
François Jullien intervenes into the ontology debates to understand Chinese thought as an anti-ontology, but instead in terms of ‘life’, that is as a sort of vitalism. Chinese anti-ontology features the juxtaposition of the wu (there-is-not) with the you (there-is). This, I argue, maps onto theology’s counterposition of otherworldly and this-worldly. Here Daoism features an ascetic and unstratified wu in contraposition to Confucianism’s you of moderation and stratification. We contrast ontology’s causation with ‘efficacy’ in Jullien’s Chinese thought. We read Zhuangzi’s ‘Equalization of Things’, where the inequalities of the you are equalized in the wu, as a sort of vitalist object energetics. We turn to Chinese ethics, and its driving virtue of yi. We understand the yi not as ‘righteousness’, which is a theological attribute of Christ, but instead as closer to political ‘right’, in China embedded in immanentist forms of life. Western Cartesian ontology is often contrasted with Chinese thought that works through a certain ‘analogism’. We read this, with Walter Benjamin’s Chinese ‘mimetic’ faculty, in terms of a vitalist energetics, a forcefield of the Ten Thousand Things.
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