Thinking between China and Greece: Breaking New Ground: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet

This interview first appeared in French as "Penser entre la Chine et la Grèce: Nouveau chantier," Le Débat 143 (January–February 2007): 86–104.

MARCEL GAUCHET:

You've reached a turning point in your career: you've thrown yourself into a new cycle of studies, the first volume of which has just been released: If Speaking Goes without Saying: On Logos or Other Last Resorts [Si parler va sans dire, Du logos ou d'autres ressources] (Seuil, 2006). What led you to relaunch your project? And what does the whole of this new undertaking consist of?

FRANÇOIS JULLIEN:

Let's recapitulate: my work might give the impression of a succession of books with quite diverse titles, with an internal articulation that's not always clear. But basically I've been writing one book, whose different titles constitute so many chapters intended to back up and prolong each other. One book that finds itself commanded by a fundamental question, or more precisely an inquiry, which has led me to pass through China—but without leaving Greece behind. The entire project is effectively borne by this uneasiness—in my view, a properly philosophical one—about coming to attain, in its spirit, some degree of distance. For wouldn't there be two ways of conceiving of the practice of philosophy? The first consists of ostensibly taking a position and developing theses—thesis against thesis; the second consists of swimming upstream so as to bring to light the implicit choices in (one's) thought—those from which one thinks and that, precisely due to that fact, are never thought—those that one puts forth as evident without thinking to interrogate them. I choose this latter path: China provides me with the means for an oblique glance at the unthought of our thought.

Because the unthought is not the false, and doubtless there's nothing more difficult for thought than turning back on itself and considering itself from without. What is put back into question, then, is what I've called, in various reprises, the pre-notioned, or the pre-categorized, or the pre-questioned, that is to say, that which constitutes our theoretical pre-suppositions. Hence I take off from the exteriority of China in regard to Europe: China is elsewhere, as much in terms of language as of history. This exteriority is established. It is not to be confused with the "other," the different, or the opposite. If there is "alterity" between China and Europe, this alterity is to be constructed, and not to be assumed.

MG:

So you distinguish the elsewhere and the other [l'ailleurs et l'autre]?

FJ:

From the outset these distinctions must be more or less clear, otherwise there is a risk of an infinite confusion that would generate vain discussions. Elsewhere is indeed a given: the Chinese and European worlds didn't communicate with each other until relatively recently. The other, as it has been known since Plato's Sophist, is the tool of a philosophical grammar, the necessary instrument of every dialectical elaboration. As I was just saying, the elsewhere establishes itself, while alterity or otherness, if there is any, is to be constructed, and here this entails an operation of reflection—reflection in the proper sense—between the two fields concerned. Thus I've given myself over precisely to this progressive construction of alterity between China and Europe and from essay to essay, to extract these two thoughts from what I shall call their mutual in-difference—at the start they neither speak to nor even regard each other—and to constitute bit by bit the new framings and theoretical retrofittings allowing us to pinpoint the "differences" between them.

So what about "Chinese alterity"? Far from "postulating" it, I'm only able to catch hold of it and define it little by little, thread by thread, essay after essay, in essays that branch off from each other. From one essay to the next, my construction of alterity becomes more dense in its stitching and more...