China’s Encounter with Contemporary French Theory

Je ne suis pas plus moderne qu’ancien, pas plus Français

que Chinois, et l’idée de la patrie, c’est à dire

l’obligation où l’on est de vivre sur un coin de terre

marqué en rouge ou en bleu sur la carte et détester les

autres coins en vert ou en noir m’a paru toujours étroite,

bornée et d’une stupidité féroce.

Gustave Flaubert – Lettre à Louise Collet, 26 août 1846.

In their configuration as well as in the ways in which they are interrelated, the areas and the colors by which countries were designated in red or blue or in green or black have certainly evolved since Flaubert’s mid nineteenth-century cri de cœur. Indeed, globalization has brought about a radically interdependent and interconnected world, where boundary-crossing encounters involve not only the integration of trade, finance, or resources, but also the flow of ideas from different cultural forms, national traditions, and historical backgrounds. Literary theory represents an important facet of cultural globalization, in which research on Chinese issues in Western theories forges a stimulating field for the circulation of ideas and cultures between China and the West, constituting an important impetus for dialogue (Wu 2020, 134). Within this context, the intellectual and theoretical dialogue between China and France has brought about new insights to both sides, which we explore in this special issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies.

On the one hand, for French theorists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, China is an important source of inspiration, both as exotic resource and, less passively and traditionally, as method of reflection. Generations of French intellectuals have made various efforts to explore China as a mysterious and inspiring oriental “other,” others have attempted to get beyond this paradigm and to (re)map China in the global picture. For instance, by challenging the previous methodology driven by exotic curiosity in Western literary tradition, fin-de-siècle French writer Victor Segalen (1878–1919) developed une esthétique du Divers (between 1904 and 1918) that surpassed the stereotypes imposed by colonialism (See Segalen 2019). Decades later, by projecting revolutionary and cultural purity onto China, the Tel Quel group constructed “a Utopian China” as an imaginary substitute for the ideal society that France could not establish at home; more recently, by practicing une « déconstruction » du dehors, contemporary French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien advocated an approach of “dialogism” that takes China as a method to reexamine European traditions.

On the other hand, for Chinese intelligentsia, Western theory has served as a driving force in the development of contemporary Chinese literary theory. Arguably, the formation of modern Chinese theoretical discourse would not be possible without translation, reception, and appropriation of Western theories, among which French theory is perhaps the most important source of inspiration. Chinese scholars’ fascination with Western theory is noteworthy: not only all important Western theoretical works have their translated Chinese versions, but also an enormous number of research articles dedicated to Western theory have been published in Chinese-language scholarly journals. During the earlier periods after China’s Reform and Opening-up, Chinese scholars focused more on introducing and interpreting Western theory to serve the purpose of “addressing Chinese issues with Western discourses” (Liu 2020). In the past decade or so, they have started making efforts to turn this one-way “translating and borrowing” into a two-way theoretical dialogue, as manifested by the increasing research interest in the interrelationship between China and the West in literary and art theory.

The essays in this special issue also adopt a dialogic perspective, putting Chinese and French theoretical discussions in a reciprocal gaze. Contextualizing Chinese culture, art, and thought in relation to French theory in the context of cultural globalization, this issue approaches the Chinese-French theoretical dialogue both from the perspective of transcultural reflections of China in French theory and from the perspective of incessant exchanges between French and Chinese theoretical thought.

China provides a crucial resource for contemporary French theorists to enrich their understanding of the world’s cultural diversity, from its unique artistic style to its exceptional thinking pattern, from Chinese cultural tradition to its ideology. These Chinese cultural resources open-up another mode of intelligibility and exert considerable influence on contemporary French theory in various ways.

1. Chinese Art

In contemporary French theory, a great number of inspirational sources come from an “artistic China,” as traditional Chinese art has attracted the attention of quite a few French theorists’. Zhirong Zhu focuses on François Jullien’s creative interpretation—and misinterpretation—of Chinese artistic traditions, from his praise of Chinese “blandness” as both an esthetic judgment and moral valuation of the sage, to his analysis of Chinese wisdom of “propensity” and “efficacy,” as well as his interpretation of Chinese literati painting as “non-object.” As Zhu points out, Jullien’s exploration of Chinese art is by and large from a Western perspective, as he wittingly or unwittingly incorporates Chinese artistic thought into an analytical framework derived from Greek philosophy, naturally leading to some misconceptions when viewed from the perspective of Chinese scholars. However controversial it might sound, both Jullien’s creative interpretations and misinterpretations nevertheless remain inspiring for Chinese scholars, as they also provide China with another angle from which to rethink Chinese artistic traditions and bypass traditional preoccupations, just as Jullien takes Chinese art as an ideal outside reference for Europe. In this sense, Jullien’s transcultural reflections on ancient Chinese art encourage a theoretical dialogue in which both China and Europe find inspiration to reexamine their artistic traditions.

Referring to theoretical resources from Jullien and Giorgio Agamben, Jiajun Wang revisits the views of the nude in Chinese and Western artistic traditions. Jullien believes that the development of Western nude art is inextricably intertwined with the philosophical concept of “essence,” whereas Chinese process-oriented thought that emphasizes constant change leads to the absence of nude art in China. By contrast, Agamben denies the existence of “the nude as essence,” and holds that what truly exists is nakedness, featured by an unending process, from “dressed” to “undressed.” As Wang notes, Agamben’s post-structuralist stance, sharing some common ground with Taoist thought, has introduced the dimension of “desire” to the discussion of nude art, and thus helped challenge Jullien’s claim of “the impossible nude” in Chinese artistic expressions.

Weiwei Xiang draws from an even wider range of French sources, as she focuses on the various interpretations of classical Chinese art by French and Francophone theorists and art historians, such as Henri Michaux, Hubert Damisch, Jacques Maritain, Jean-François Billeter, Jullien and François Cheng, over the 20th century. By exploring the correlation between calligraphy and painting, and between words and images, she successfully provides an intercultural and intermedial approach to the analysis of the relationship between classical Chinese art and contemporary French theory.

2. Chinese Language, Literature, and Culture

The image of a “cultural and literary China” in French theory is extensively explored in this issue through the lens of its “mysterious appeal” for many French intellectuals. Chinese language and writing are perhaps one of the most important aspects of this fascination.

From his Chinese studies under the Franco-Swiss sinologist Paul Demiéville in the early 1940s until his close reading sessions with François Cheng in the 1970s, Jacques Lacan sustained a lifelong interest in China and, in particular, its written language. Greenshields focuses on the early 1970s and examines some of the diffuse statements that Lacan made on Chinese writing in Seminar XVIII and XIX, distinguishes Lacan’s preoccupations from the more political interests of the Tel Quel group, shows how Chinese writing and calligraphy provided support for Lacan as he began to separate his psychoanalytic doctrine from (structuralist) linguistics and offers an interpretation of Lacan’s final cryptic homage to the classic texts he studied.

Jun Zeng and Yuxuan Huang’s paper centers on Julia Kristeva’s fascination with the Chinese language. Through a thorough examination of both her scholarly and literary works, they identify three stages in the development of Kristeva’s interest in China, from her early concern with Chinese linguistics and semiotics, to her later analysis of Chinese as a “tonal language,” and eventually to her promotion of dialogue between Chinese and European cultures. As Zeng and Huang point out, Kristeva’s interest in the Chinese language can be taken as a case study within the framework of the “China Question of Western Theory,” which reveals Western scholars’ evolving focus on Chinese culture across different historical periods. In this sense, Kristeva’s intimate contact with China and continued research on Chinese language and culture contribute to the exchanges and dialogue between Chinese and Western theories.

Haitian Zhou focuses on Gilles Deleuze. When 20th-century French philosophers resisted the old metaphysical system proposed by Kant and Hegel and opened up new directions, Deleuze linked his concept of “Becoming” with Chinese Tao, to enrich the connotations of other related concepts, including the BwO, the multiplicity of immanence and nomadic life. The innovational interpretation of Tao is related to Gilles Deleuze’s exploration of the ways in which differences and multiplicity unfold in the process of Becoming. Indeed, Deleuze interprets the nomadic state in the context of Tao with Chinese art theories to state that art reveals the possibility of the world. As Zhou observes, Deleuze’s use of Chinese thought serves his goal to explore the hidden characteristics of ambiguity, confusion, complexity, and interweaving in beings.

Yuhua Xia turns our attention to the Oulipo and examines the paradoxical attitude the famous literary group holds toward Chinese culture. In his article, Xia explores how, despite some superficial affinity, Oulipo maintained an emotionally detached, intellectually distant perspective on Chinese literature. The group’s experimental ethos involves an open yet dispassionate stance, intrigued by artistic potentialities without becoming fascinated by any single tradition. Thus, Xia characterizes Oulipo’s interest in China as “disinterested,” only curiously exploring some possibilities.

3. Chinese Ideology

During the 1960s and 1970s, when the historical strength of the left was particularly widespread in France, the image of a “revolutionary China” was particularly inspiring for French intellectuals, the already mentioned Tel Quel group most notably. As Gombin (1972) observes, “leftism as a revolutionary movement, as a reflection on society and its historical evolution, certainly did exist” in France, and won wide recognition as a cultural phenomenon, especially after May 1968 (27). Chesneaux (1987) traces French left-wing intellectuals’ “love affair” (21) with Maoist China back to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s visit to China in the wake of the Bandung Conference held in 1955, as he claims that “Maoist China was very chic in French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s” (22). China enjoyed popularity among French intellectuals and students because, to a large extent, it met their basic aspiration which can be described as “political exoticism” (Chesneaux 1987, 21). Understandably, Chinese academia attaches special importance to the facet of French theory that amplifies revolution, revolts, and struggles during the period, characterizing it as “French left-wing theory.”

In pursuing this aspect of the Franco-Chinese relation, Fang Yan’s paper re-evaluates the butterfly effect of China and Maoism’s impact on the ebb and flow of Hegelianism in contemporary French theory, arguing that China and Maoism play a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in Althusser’s project of both staging and un-staging Hegelianism. Althusser deliberately constructed Hegelianism as a metaphorical representation of the Oneness in the Western metaphysical tradition, and used Maoism and the Chinese Revolution as powerful weapons to critique Hegelianism, thus indirectly grafting China and Maoism onto the core concerns of contemporary French theory, such as attention to differences, anti-determinism, anti-essentialism, anti-teleology, and anti-historicism. In the process, as Yan notes, Althusser also restrained and weakened Maoism’s theoretical potentials.

Zhenjiang Han briefly explores how Jacques Rancière appropriated, integrated, and reinvented Mao Zedong’s thought, and evaluates Mao’s influence on the French philosopher’s work. Despite the differences, both Mao and Rancière emphasize “the people” as political and revolutionary subjects and stress the pivotal role of literature and art in political movements.

Mao’s influence on French theory from the perspective of literary translation, is the focus of Xin Huang’s article as she explores the impact of translated Chinese “revolutionary” literature on the development of French Maoism. She argues that the translation and (mis)interpretation of Mao’s literature and other Chinese revolutionary literary works by French intellectuals largely served their political or revolutionary demands, considering Maoism as an “idealized” theoretical inspiration from the East.

China thus offers a theoretical distancing for French theorists to reexamine European culture and tradition. In this sense, China studies become a method to reinterrogate European traditions, and China can serve as “a philosophical tool,” to quote Jullien (see 1996). However, as the cultural dimension of global exchanges has gained increasing significance, its seems imperative to examine contemporary cultural within the context of a global dialogism. It is with this in mind that Wu focuses on Jullien’s unique methodology, namely taking China as a method of reflection to unveil the impensés and challenge the hidden assumptions in European philosophy and tradition. She argues that Jullien’s philosophical “detour” through China has pointed the way to a dialogic approach that values cultural diversity and dialogue, which has also taken China studies out of a marginalized field to the foreground of more general philosophical debates. From an “object” to a “method,” this shifted role of China suggests reversing the Eurocentric theoretical and epistemological framework and displays China’s potential to become a method to understand the world.

Also contextualized in cultural globalization, Kang Liu and Dingwen Wei’s paper connects China and French theory with an important intermediary agent, the United States. They trace the trajectory of “Postism,” a Chinese coinage for poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, from the continental Europe (primarily France) to China via the translation and reinvention by the American “marketplace of ideas.” They argue that French theories, institutionalized and politicized in the US, were otherwise invoked in the Chinese context to reaffirm anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, and anti-Western nationalist justifications in the 21st century. The “weaponization” of Western theories in both U.S. and China nowadays, though in different manners, ought to be carefully scrutinized and reevaluated.

Although much has been explored concerning Derrida and China, Yifeng Sun adopts a rather unique approach, from the perspective of translation studies. Sun traverses the intertwined terrain of deconstruction and translation theory, revealing the compelling interplay between multiple contexts, the irreducibility of meaning, and the transformative potential of linguistic exchange from a Chinese perspective. Sun also shows how Derrida’s insights serve as a guide to unraveling the intricacies of multiple contexts that are paramount to translation while confronting the daunting challenge of untranslatability. Translators are thus presented with the task of navigating the irreducible nature of meaning and making strategic decisions to effectively convey the essence of the source text, if indeed such a thing as an “essence” can be said to exist in the Derridean approach.

Biwu Shang connects the boom of Chinese narrative studies with French narratology. In his view, narratology is now an indispensable enterprise in Chinese academia, which undergoes three salient phases of development in reference to French influence. Specifically, he takes pains examining how French narratology, as a travelling theory, undergoes metamorphosis in China with reference to translation, introduction and application. Shang pays particular attention to the efforts of Chinese narratologists to develop their own version of narrative theory and to go beyond French narratology by making a fruitful use of Chinese narrative tradition on the one hand, and by embracing the postclassical turn on the other.

The contributors to this issue come from different fields of study, including literary and art theory, comparative literature and culture, translation studies, narrative studies, and philosophy. The papers authored or co-authored by Ph.D. candidates also play a part in this issue, and we are grateful for the contributions of these promising young scholars.

François Jullien, one of the most popular contemporary French intellectuals in today’s China whose works have been extensively explored from various perspectives in this issue criticizes both the orientalist use of China as well as its construction as utopia in French intellectual tradition, as he (1996) adopts Foucault’s term “heterotopia” and proposes that China “has never been a site of utopia for me, but its ‘heterotopia’ continually serves me (164). Jullien’s “heterotopia” is not in the sense of “disturbing heterotopias” (Foucault 1973, xviii); rather, he endows the term with a new function to challenge the approaches of exoticism or orientalism, thus, faire travailler l’écart (Jullien 2012, 7). By putting China and Europe into perspective, he (2013) has coined the term l’atopie, and identifies it as a “nulle part de l’entre,” where there are abundant cultural resources to exploit (75–77). Thus, by exploring the fertile theoretical resources “in-between” China and French intellectual traditions, this issue of CF&FS on “China in Contemporary French Theory” constitutes a modest attempt to make their écart work and promote an intellectual dialogue, in the pursuit of each other’s unthought-of.

Guest Co-Editor    Editors
You Wu Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is Professor emeritus of French & Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin

Eliane DalMolin is Professor emerita of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Cultures in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

You Wu

You Wu is Professor at East China Normal University. She is the author of Un siècle de révolution: Le rôle des intellectuels comme initiateurs et soutien du processus des mouvements des femmes en Chine, en Grande Bretagne et en France de 1850 à 1950 (2013) and Dialogue and Diversity: François Jullien and China (多元与对话: 弗朗索瓦·于连与中国, 2023). Her articles appeared in journals such as Babel, Interventions, Critical Arts and Archiv orientální. Her research interest lies in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies.