China in the looking glass of the west: Transcultural imagination and east-west dialogue in françois jullien’s chinese study

In the age of global mélange, the trans-lingual, trans-cultural, and trans-textual reflection and imagination of China in the eyes of Western scholars becomes a unique looking glass to reflect the Chinese image in a detouring manner. The theoretical construction of China by François Jullien, controversial as it might seem, has in fact provided an ideal research paradigm for Chinese studies to overcome the stereotyped approaches of exoticism or orientalism by conceiving the possibility of transcending the East-West dichotomy and establishing a mechanism for cross-cultural dialogue. As Jullien utilizes the strategy of detour to interrogate the European experience out of a passage through China, his approach of dialogism provides another angle for both sides to open up new modes of intelligibility in pursuit of the unthought-of (impensés) in their own cultures. In this sense, the strategy of “detour and access” proposed by Jullien could also be applied to reexamine Chinese culture and issues from the outside in today’s globalized and contextualized world, involving both the preservation of traditional Chinese cultural elements and the embrace of universalist values of mankind. Thus, Jullien’s transcultural reflection of China is not only a philosophical prescription for Europe to shake up the spiritual binding, but also a lens through which China can revisit the unthoughtof and change the scenery of thought.