Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece (review)

Everyone interested in language and meaning should welcome François Jullien's Detour and Access. Students of ancient Greece, China, philosophy, linguistics, epistemology, and philosophy of language will be provoked by reviewing Jullien's theories and interpretations. I have not seen the French original (Le Détour et l'accès: Stratégies du sens en Chine, en Gréce [Editions Grasset, 1995]), but Sophie Hawkes' translation reads well, and she appears to have captured the original style. Jullien presents his interpretation and arguments in a fashion befitting the subject. Inspired by the Chinese approach, Jullien uses an oblique rather than a frontal presentation in which he incites meaning and makes indications, following a meandering path. The text begins with a short Preface and a Reader's Guide. It contains fifteen chapters and a conclusion, with copious notes and a Glossary of Chinese expressions. Regrettably there is no index.

Provoked by ancient Chinese military tactics, which employ the oblique attack, Jullien opens the Preface with these pressing questions:

In what way do we benefit from speaking of things indirectly? How does such a distancing allow us better to discover-and describe-people and objects? How does distancing produce an effect? Westerners find it natural and normal to meet the world head-on, but what can we gain from approaching it obliquely? In other words how does detour grant access?

(p. 7)

Jullien wants to employ the Chinese love for indirection and subtlety of language "to investigate the relation of cultural originality and the production of meaning" (p. 8). He encounters a host of secondary questions along the circuitous path:

What if the world were not an object of representation, and figurative meaning did not tend to represent something-symbolically? What if generalizations were not the goal of thought, or speech tended not to define (to build a universality of essences) but to modify itself-to reflect circumstances? In short, what if consciousness did not strive to reproduce the real in order to ground it in transcendence (of being or of God)? And what if the purpose of speaking about the world, to make it intelligible, were not to arrive at Truth? … Why did the Chinese not constitute the level of essences and spirituality which helped the Greek tradition to structure the Western horizon of meaning? Or … what are the theoretical biases-which remain beneath the surface-that have conditioned Western modes of interpretation, which, because they seem so obvious, have become confused with Reason?

(pp. 8-9)

For Jullien, strategies of meaning must be apprehended by following their own internal logic such that his text makes a "circuitous journey," being indirect and meandering, turning and returning.

Because of the meandering path, in the Reader's Guide the contents of the chapters are previewed in general and the reader is informed that she can take up the text at almost any point. The reader could begin with the last two chapters, or take the philosophical circuit and begin with chapter 9, or she could begin decoding China with the first six chapters. "In any case the purpose of the journey is the same: to travel as far as possible away from logos, to explore how far difference can take us" (p. 14).

Chapter 1, "'He's Chinese,' 'It's All Chinese to Me,'" begins with a lengthy quote from Chinese Characteristics, by the nineteenth-century missionary Arthur Smith. Smith's analysis, though clearly dated, ethnocentric, and judgmental, contains ideas that inspired Jullien to identify the Chinese knack for indirection and the oblique method. Smith is inclined to accuse the Chinese of being "devious" and intentionally suppressing information because he is a prisoner of the "Anglo Saxons pride … of going directly to the marrow of a subject" (p. 15). Smith does not recognize that there are alternative strategies of meaning. Smith does understand...