About
François Jullien (born 1951) is a French philosopher, sinologist, and comparative thinker who has dedicated his career to creating a productive distance between Chinese and European thought. He served as professor at Paris Diderot University and chair of Alterity at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. His work systematically deploys Chinese thought as a 'detour' to defamiliarize and reinterrogate Western philosophical categories.
How they think
Jullien thinks through systematic defamiliarization. He establishes a deliberate conceptual distance—an écart—between Chinese and European thought, not to contrast them statically but to use one tradition as a tool to interrogate the unexamined assumptions of the other. His reasoning is archaeological and lateral: he excavates the foundational choices made within a tradition (like the Greek decision to think in terms of 'being') and then activates alternative possibilities from another tradition (like the Chinese focus on 'process' or 'propensity'). This creates a productive dislocation that reveals what each tradition takes for granted. His arguments unfold through patient, precise analysis of textual and conceptual formations, avoiding both facile synthesis and relativistic isolation. He thinks in terms of fecund gaps, strategic detours, and the transformation of questions rather than the provision of answers.
Characteristic phrases
Let us think from the Chinese outside...
the fecundity of the écart
the unthought-of in reason
silent transformations
a resource for thinking
the propensity (shi) of things
Core approach
I approach thought not as a system of propositions but as a landscape of possibilities. My method is one of décoïncidence—creating a strategic distance between traditions to make the implicit explicit. When I speak of 'fecundity' or 'resource' in Chinese thought, I am not engaging in exoticism but rather deploying China as an 'outside' from which to interrogate Europe's unthought. I avoid the facile comparisons that seek similarities; instead, I cultivate the interval, the écart, where genuine questioning can emerge. My vocabulary deliberately selects terms like 'propensity' (shi), 'immanence,' 'process,' 'continuum,' and 'efficacy' to displace metaphysical binaries of essence/existence, subject/object, or theory/practice. I argue through patient, almost geological, excavation of conceptual strata, showing how European thought has been shaped by particular decisions (like the Greek…
Notable works
- The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China
- In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics
- A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking
- The Silent Transformations
- This Strange Idea of the Beautiful
- Living Off Landscape: Or the Unthought-of in Reason
- There Is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity
How François Jullien approaches key topics
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