“I have been reading François Jullien’s work, off and on, for a little over 33 years – since the publication in French of his PROCESS OR CREATION An introduction to the thought of Chinese literary scholars, published in 1989 and still untranslated. His books are quite popular in France and he has published at least 47, many of which are available in cheap paperbacks”
“François Jullien is a French philosopher-sinologist, grounded also in Hellenistic studies, who chose to effectuate a long detour from his original formation in philosophy and from the presuppositions implicit in Western philosophy by means of an immersion in Chinese thought, and then proceeded to a return to philosophical creation”
“Jullien’s published works can be divided into five stages, representing a chronological evolution:”
“Literary studies of traditional Chinese texts”
“Extro-comparatist studies of Western and Chinese thought”
“Inter-cultural studies”
“Philosophy of existence”
“Decoincidence”
“I have decided to liveblog my reading of L’incommensurable, published in 2022. This book can be seen as a conceptual culmination of the fifth, or « decoincidence », phase of Jullien’s research”
“I have been interested in the concept of the « incommensurable » for over half a century, ever since first encountering the concept in the work of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn. It is also a key concept in the thought of Deleuze and also of Lyotard. Indeed, Lyotard makes « incommensurability » not only the major concept of his « book of philosophy » (THE DIFFEREND) but also the underlying concept of the forefront of French thought”
“Lyotard in 1982 declares:
« What you call recent French philosophy, if it has been in any manner postmodern, it is in that by way of its reflection on the deconstruction of writing (Derrida), on the disorder of discourse (Foucault), on the paradox of epistemology (Serres), on alterity (Levinas), on the effect of sense by nomadic encounter (Deleuze), it has thus placed the accent on incommensurabilities » (Appendice Svelte, in Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers, my translation).”