Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux, and the Zhuangzi: Rationality, Cosmology and Ethics by Xiaofan Amy Li (review)

This intelligent book raises important issues about comparative literature at its most challenging, and its very theories and ways of working compose the subject of the first chapters. The dialogue between twentieth-century French and ancient Chinese thought is perfectly illustrated by the Zhuangzi (romanized into Chuang-Tzu by the translator Angus C. Graham and the commentator Burton Watson, or Tchouang-tseu) as it debunks all theory and systematization, being a series of fragments, and various texts by Artaud and Michaux. So it is not only about the two latter writers’ fascination with the Far East, and in any case, they are both hybrid authors: Artaud, drawn to non-logical thinking, grew up speaking Greek, Turkish, Italian, and French, and so was only notionally French, and Michaux abhorred being Belgian and European. The point of this study, says Xiaofan Amy Li, is a philosophical reading of their triple significance in the way they transformed thought. They are both fluid thinkers and neither should be imprisoned in one category, Artaud in madness and Michaux in self-reflexivity of the narcissistic type, both being inconsistent, drug-influenced, and possessing multiple selves. Of equal importance, Li would like the textual incoherence of the Zhuangzi to remain un-problematic, unsolved, and permit the separate parts of it to remain separate, without being forced into working together. For this reader, the most interesting factor by far in this study is the abundance of exemplary passages from all three creations, illustrating the methods of each; for instance, this from the Zhuangzi: ‘if going from nothing to something you end up with three, then how much more would you get if you go from something to something! Take no step at all, then that by which you move will cease’ (p. 37). Flexibility is clearly the key to reading these three texts. Perspectives overlap, and commonality is inclusivity. An interesting issue is that of ‘trivialism’, which appears to make contradictions not contradictory, and says that ‘all propositions are true’ (p. 52). All three thinkers are concerned with expression and performativity rather than with self-justification. The justification of this three-part comparison is clearly in the fluidity of thinking and its non-limitation.