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p.14-15 The nature of a resource... is to be explored and exploited, and to be explored further in its exploitation... A resource is... nobody's property; it does not belong... A resource goes to whoever discovers it... and draws benefit from it. Because it retains a measure of potential, because it counts on a future in which to deploy, a resource is not something to delimit or define from the start. We do not instantly know its nature or limits. A resource exists only insofar as we have developed it. It therefore entails responsibility. We activate a resource or do not. We might just as easily overlook it, or else see it and pass it by.
p.18-19 resources lead us to consider them valuable only insofar as each of us... makes an effort to activate them, from scratch, so as both to explore and to exploit them. Resources exist only insofar as we make them bear fruit. At the same time, the potential that lies within keeps them soaring [en essor] and frees them from the limits to which the present moment is subject in its slackness [etalement].1 Potential extracts them from the miring positivity of the finished and the accepted. We do not know the limits of the resources we explore
1 p.103 [footnote] Soaring [l'essor] is a special term in Jullien's lexicon and stands in opposition to slackness or spread [l'etale]. What soars is alive, or activated; what is slack, because complete and finished, is dead.
p.20 Resource is productive, because it prospects.
p.21 A resource... is... available to all, open to all... We explore a resource insofar as we see a "resource" in it.
p.25 The divide sets tension while at the same time bringing out interspace, because it opens up a distance... a divide maintains the face-off, and thus the tension, between what it has separated. It keeps the separated things staring at each other [maintient le devisagement].
p.28-29 Our two terms, becoming and being, are linked: the one is established on the basis of the other
p.35 Chinese, being processual, does not allow us to think of an event's advent, of an arising that is not already prefigured or under way (its e-venit), because in China an event is always the manifest, "sonorous" surfacing of a silent transformation whose gestation we can already make out further upstream.
p.38 Life, in other words, is the deployed and continual effect of advent, unheard-of as it is.
[JLJ - In my philosophy, it is the predicament that we continuously find ourselves in, the emergent effects of the colliding forces, the resources that we have or can borrow, the immediate dangers, the opportunities, the demands, the execution of schemes and their aftermath, the inherent becoming, the fleeting joys, and the vision of an ultimate expiration of all of this, that makes life.]
p.102 [footnote] An advent here is an occurrence that comes from outside of the world.
p.42 Being alive means two things. It might just mean being alive, as in the condition of not being dead; and it might mean having life within oneself superabundantly, or life insofar as it is alive, and thus cannot die: life as vocation.
p.44 The Greeks sought to understand the good life... how one could live better, but never raised the more radical question of what it is to be effectively alive.
p.50 The Greeks taught us to conceptualize: that is, to go from the concrete plurality of things to a unitary idea that gathers ("subsumes") diversity into intelligibility. They taught us to raise our thinking from "beautiful things" to the beautiful itself: in other words, to the idea of the beautiful. This is the teaching of Socrates, in Plato and according to Aristotle, and opens the way to theoretical knowledge.
p.55 As I have said, a resource exists only to the extent that we explore and exploit it.
p.57-58 More generally, to de-coincide is to extract oneself from one's adequation-adaptation both to oneself and to one's world - "hate" one's life "in this world" - in order to redeploy the possibilities coiled within and reopen a future - i.e., an adventive becoming [devenir d'avenement] - to life. Such is the logic of living in John's conception. If we do not de-coincide with our being-alive and with our world, if we are content and satisfied with them, then life in itself withers and goes sterile. Our positive adequation-adaptation with our being-alive and the world we live in, by virtue of its very positivity, amounts to a loss of our capacity for life, which becomes slack and fixed. We must therefore de-coincide with it, tear ourselves forcibly away from both its connivance and its coherence ("hate" it), so as to accede to the livingness of life.
There is No Such Thing as Cultural Identity, Jullien, 2021
Translated by Pedro Rodriguez
JLJ - Francois Jullien at work again with his deconstructive tools he has developed over a lifetime, producting at the end valuable insight into yet another difficult or controversial subject. Pedro Rodriguez guides us as usual through the careful distinctions of translated terms to make Jullien - difficult to understand at best - almost intelligible. Jullien wades into the debate with wise opinions, delivering a difficult-to-understand French philosophy, now pay attention and be quiet, please, class has started. Jullien's method of obtaining insight is usable for any subject. You are taking notes, aren't you? Mine are below...
p.24-25 Difference, then is classificatory - its analysis proceeding by resemblance and difference - and at the same time identificatory. It is proceeding "from difference to difference," as Aristotle says, that we arrive at a final difference. This final difference delivers the essence of the thing, expressed in a definition. The divide, by contract, is not identificatory but exploratory, giving rise to some other possibility. Thus a divide has no classifying function - does not set up typologies.
p.25 The divide stands in opposition also to the expected, the foreseeable, the settled. Whereas difference aims to describe and, to this end, proceeds by determination... the divide prospects: it imagines - fathoms - how far we might clear other paths. It is adventurous.
p.27 With a divide... the two separated terms remain face to face. This is why divides are precious to thought. The distance that appears between separated terms maintains tension between them.
p.30 difference is identificatory... From it stem properties established as characteristics, and thus the very possibility of knowledge. The divide, however, shifts us away from the identificatory perspective. It brings forth not an identify but what I will call a "fecundity," or, to put it another way, a resource. In opening up, the divide gives way to another possibility. It leads us to discover other resources, ones not considered or even suspected... the divide... brings to light "something" that has hitherto escaped out thinking. In this it is fecund.
p.44 resources are inventoried. Resources are explored and exploited (activated, in my parlance).
p.48 resources exist only insofar as we activate them.
p.49 Resources by their nature rise to the surface in a local and unforced way... Resources are not brandished.
p.50 Resources... are reckoned by their effects alone, by the gains to be had from them... Resources... are not exclusive. I can gain indifferently from these or those. They are additive and non-limiting... They do not belong... but are available to all. They go to whoever takes the trouble to exploit them.
p.54 To philosophize... is to make a departure. It is to veer from the beaten paths of opinion, step back from the accepted and the agreed-upon, clear a new way - bore - into thought.
[JLJ - To philosophize in my opinion is in simplest form to offer a thought that is deemed worthy of consideration, in light of the others that have gone before, and those that are yet to come. To write philosophy is to propose a system of thought that offers an explanation of what is, or possibly of what is not, or to compose a way of living, or to offer an explanation of why. Philosophy however is not always necessary for living a good life. One can sit and simply come up with practical schemes, and then execute them. This allows an effective way to go on, to go about living. One does not need philosophy if one has a substitute for it, or if the demands of the current predicament do not call for it. Philosophy is a system that permits practical and possibly effective thought about any subject, with an end goal of impacting the way choose to 'go on' in our daily predicament, even if this is simply 'more thought.' Without the predicament of living, there can be no philosophy, or no philosophical thought.]
p.68-69 A dia-logue is not instantaneous; it takes time. Only gradually, patiently, can the respective positions - separate and distant as they are - discover each other, reflect each other, and slowly develop the conditions of possibility for an effective encounter. Things must unfold.
p.70-71 Once dialogue is engaged... and for as long as it lasts... an interspace comes to light - each position opening slightly to the other... in which thought once more gets down to work. Through this interspace thought passes once more and can be activated.
p.75 to ex-ist is to resist
The Strange Idea of the Beautiful (Jullien, 2010, 2016, 2022)
Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski
p.88 this definition from the Shitao that has to be read literally: painting is 'below the heavens', or in the world, 'the great rule of modification-continuation' (Li Wancai 1966: Chapter 3)... The two form a couple, 'modification' and 'transformation' (Chapters 6 and 7).
p.106 The Chinese painter therefore paints not 'forms of being' but 'trans-formations'
p.108 The 'mountain' is not an object but a resource... the painter releases... the capacity.
p.118 Emergence through 'energy-resonance'... has been made the first principle of painting in China... All later theoreticians only repeat this canonical formula and vary it, none of them dreaming of bringing it into question
p.119 the art of the painter is certainly an art of representation, but it should not get bogged down in representation; it certainly produces visible forms, but these are of value only as conformations of invisible energy.
p.199 Beauty provokes the gaze, holds it captive, it is reveted to it and petrified.
p.205 There is 'life' precisely in the sense in which an unfolding to come is implicated.
p.206 'Living', in short, amounts to being pregnant, in other words, to be teeming with possibilities for development.
[JLJ - Living consistently returns to managing a predicament - at times full of possibility, yet at times with few or no choices.]
p.208 'The painter's products stand before us,' said Plato, 'as though they were alive'
[JLJ - Well, the same is true for a film, except we permit ourselves to escape into the illusion, which we find pleasurable.]
p.214 Such is the problem with which the beautiful is finally confronted - it is resultative and terminal at the heart of the visible; it does not go deeper from the visible to the invisible. It integrates, totalizes, harmonizes, but does not permit a surpassing. It stops and hence eternalizes, instead of calling upon a development to come - the very one that Chinese painting has promoted as being 'life'.
[JLJ - Jullien forgets that sound - music - can be beautiful, so beauty is not confined to the visual.]
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