François Jullien, Jody Gladding - The Book of Beginnings-Yale University Press (2015)

The Book of Beginnings
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The Book of
Beginnings
François Jullien
Translated by Jody Gladding
Yale University Press New Haven & London

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from
around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-
speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and
playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to
stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2015 by Yale University. Translated by Jody Gladding.

Originally published as Entrer dans une pensée, ou Des possibles de l’esprit.
Copyright © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2012.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jullien, François, 1951–
[Entrer dans une pensée. English]
The book of beginnings / François Jullien ; translated by Jody Gladding.
pages cm. — (The Margellos world republic of letters)
ISBN 978-0 -300-20422-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Thought and thinking. 2. Philosophy, Chinese. I. Title.
B105.T54J8513 2015 109—dc23 2014031911
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface, vii
1 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 1
2 The Elsewhere of China, 6
3 Thinking Before or Beside? 12
4 The First Sentence, 19
5 A First Chinese Sentence, 24
6 Commentary, 31
7 Hebraic Entry, 39
8 Hellenic Entry, 51
9 Undoing Our Alternatives, 65
v
vi Contents
10 Where Would the Beginning Begin? 74
11 Neither God nor Myth: What Other Possibility? 80
12 When Myth Holds No Interest, When God Holds

No Monopoly, 86
13 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation, 92
14 Translation, 104
15 Is There Still “Tradition”? 113
Finale: A Shift of the Truth, 122
Reference Note, 133

Preface
It is strange—but finally logical—that I am just now coming

to the question with which I should have begun in my work. It is
strange that after traveling for years between Chinese and European
thought, I am only now turning to this question—this preliminary
question—that has always bothered me, it is true, but that I have
never yet approached, at least directly: What is it to enter a way of
thought? Yet, as I say, it is also logical for me to be starting on it so
late, even though it is the initial question, because of course it is only
afterward and in retrospect that the beginning question can be ap-
proached. The same is true of the writing process: Isn’t it when the
book is finished that you write the introduction?
Today in the West, who would not want to enter the thought
of the far “East”? But how can we enter it, since we know that it is
impossible to summarize; no way of thought can be summarized,
but especially not Chinese thought, as vast and varied as it is. And
we also know that its principal notions are not directly translatable;
that viewing it by school, that classifying and cataloguing it, might
lead us to overlook its essential nature; and that following its his-
torical development from beginning to end will not suffice either.
In each case we would remain outside the inner self-referential
logic specific to this way of thought—because where did this way
of thought begin? Now when I pose the question of how to enter
vii
viii Preface
Chinese thought, I also take the risk of addressing nonsinologists as

if they could read Chinese. That is why I will practice a methodical
reading of one Chinese sentence, just one, a first sentence, by gradu-
ally developing the elements that allow it to be read at once from
within (Chinese thought) and from without (Western thought). Be-
cause a way of thought can be “entered” effectively only by begin-
ning to work with it, that is, by passing through it in order to ques-
tion oneself.
The sentence I want to begin reading here is the first one in
Chinese thought to address beginnings. I propose reading it from
both close-up and far away: reading it literally (although what does
“literal” mean when there are no letters or grammar?) and reading it
also from a distance, by widening the gap and bringing the contrasts
into play. But stepping back to read from a distance does not mean
reading in a cursory, vague manner. On the contrary, it means trying
to read even more closely, using this roundabout means to get at the
biases and presuppositions that lie sedimented and buried there. To
show this sentence in relief and to remove it from the comfort of its
“obviousness,” without which entering would be impossible, I will
also read the sentence that begins Genesis, for the biblical side, as
well as the first sentence from the Greek Theogony, for the mytho-
logical perspective. And tracing these perspectives in turn will nec-
essarily lead me to pose the question that takes us directly from the
local nature of such fieldwork to the opposite extreme, because I
cannot imagine a more general question: What are the “possibili-
ties” of thought?
Isn’t it time to get started on this work—to write a “phenome-
nology of mind” that is no longer European?
Preface ix
Is that where Western philosophy finds its limit, or maybe its blind
spot? In any case, that is where philosophy, which claims to reflect
all—“the all”—fails to be self-reflective.
Doubt, we repeat, ever vigilant, is our entryway. But do we know
what we have to doubt? “Doubt,” however methodical and even hy-
perbolic we consider it, always assumes something in place before-
hand, in advance, beginning from which we doubt, but which, in
and of itself, we do not doubt—which we do not think of doubting:
where we remain without hold. In other words, what we doubt al-
ready holds us in its dependency, in the snare of the unthought. So
we can doubt as much as we like, as the heroic Descartes did, but we
are still doubting in our own language and concepts. Doubting lets
us stay at home among ourselves. What I cannot doubt, that is, what
I cannot imagine doubting, I will be able to recognize only when I
encounter another way of thought to disorient me and loosen me
from the—unsuspected—hold of my way of thought. Am I saying
that Descartes, although he roamed Europe, did not travel widely
enough? We can only dislodge the arbitrary from our way of thought
by leaving it and, in order to do so, by entering another. But what is
this strategic elsewhere that might loosen us from the moorings we
cannot envisage? Where will we find it?
What is it “to enter” a way of thought? I am proposing here
that we enter Chinese thought to create a gap that reveals to us how
we think, within what we “doubt”—which may make us reflect not
only on our questions but, more importantly, on what made them
possible and binds us to them to the point that we believe them nec-
x Preface
essary. But Chinese thought, it is true, is so vast: Can we ever finish

exploring it? And then, too, we all know that today’s reader is in a
hurry. Even long-distance travels, for which not so long ago we used
to pack books to fill the empty hours, now pass all too quickly. Do we
still have the leisure for such labor-intensive investments? Maybe
you have only this evening free. . . . Fortunately, our purposes do not
entail “knowing” Chinese thought extensively, an endless enterprise
requiring two lifetimes, but something else entirely: only crossing a
threshold and “entering.”
The Book of Beginnings
o n e ■ W h a t I s It t o E n t e r
(a Way of Thought)?
To enter, if we define it most literally and introductorily, is to

pass from an outside to an inside. Now Chinese thought has effec-
tively remained exterior to our own thought in Europe for a very
long time, and vice versa. We can see that outside both in the Chi-
nese language and in Chinese history. Let us summarize the initial
facts that we all know, although perhaps we have not really weighed
their effects. They justify passing through China to attack obliquely
what lies unthought and beyond doubt for us. First of all, we must
remember that Chinese does not belong to the large family of Indo-
European languages, whereas we are still related to India through
Sanskrit, the sister language of Greek and Latin. Furthermore, let
us remember that Chinese writing is ideographic and not phonetic,
and especially that, among all the languages, it alone remains that
way, which already indicates its singular relationship to orality as
well as its inextricable interdependence on the representative power
of the drawn line. How could—must—that have marked Chinese
thought? Moreover, it was not until our Renaissance that Europe
arrived in China; and relationships between the two ends of that
great continent did not truly develop until the expansion of com-
mercial trade in the nineteenth century, which is very late relative
to the history of these civilizations, one of which then imposed its
1
2 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)?
imperialism upon the other. At present, the relationship of domina-

tion between the two poles is beginning to reverse itself. Neverthe-
less, the question remains: Beneath power relationships and hege-
monic temptations, what intellectual penetration, from either side,
is in the process of taking place—or not, depending upon us? Will
we be content with the mere semblance of intellectual penetration?
As early as Roman times there was the Silk Road, but did the
Romans know that those imported goods came from China, were
“made in China”? What marks did they bear of Chinese thought?
There was also Marco Polo, two centuries before the missionaries,
but Marco Polo traveled overland; the strange spectacle of cus-
toms, ways of life and society, realms and languages, currencies
and armies, endlessly, continuously, repeated itself before him ac-
cording to the country he was passing through and without causing
any rupture suddenly to appear: without any actual event, without
the possibility of arriving. It was an entirely different story in the
sixteenth century, when the missionaries embarked in ships and
docked one fine day at a South China port. To disembark was to
leave one’s ship and set foot on new soil: you knew nothing yet,
appearing suddenly from “elsewhere,” and you were not expected.
With a way of thought as well, to enter implies moving, leaving
in order to be able to penetrate. One enters a way of thought as one
enters an organization, fraternal order, or political party: it cannot
take place without a certain, at least temporary, acceptance on a
trial basis—haven’t I been roundly criticized for my “adherence”
to the “immanence” of Chinese thought? Or one enters as into the
business of others—that is, one begins to take a personal interest
in them, even begins to take charge of them and make them one’s
What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 3
own. Entering into the feelings of others, into their difficulties and
concerns, means putting oneself in another’s place and adopting
that perspective: that does not happen without sharing and conniv-
ance; it requires complicity. Entering Chinese thought, then, is to
begin to question ourselves according to its perspective, according
to its implications and expectations. Now, about Chinese thought
we know at least one thing, which hinders us from the outset: that
it is among the oldest ways of thought and has extended over a very
vast area and length of time. We also know that it has recently been
subjected to increasingly strong foreign influence—our own—but
it nevertheless lays claim to itself as it is, even today, even concealed
or disguised. From this follows a consequence that certainly con-
stitutes a major fact of our generation: we can no longer limit our-
selves, in Europe, to the horizon of European thought. We must
leave home and shake off our philosophic atavism—go “to see”
elsewhere, which was already the first meaning of “theory” for the
Greeks, let us remember, before theory became dully speculative.
But how can one enter this way of thought? It requires so much
time, we know, so much patience, “skill,” memory, to be initiated
into the classical Chinese language and to venture into its immense
forest of texts and commentaries. All the more so because this lan-
guage offers none of the conveniences of our own: it has no mor-
phology—neither conjugation nor declension—and has almost no
syntax (classical Chinese, at least). Thus one can only do what the
Chinese literati themselves did for so many centuries: learn and re-
cite by heart. Above all, let us quickly understand, such thought can-
not be summarized. No synopsis—no abridged, condensed digest—
can give us access to it. You perform that reduction beginning with
4 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)?
terms that are your own, without disrupting them, without moving,
without leaving: you have stayed within your initial categories—you
discover nothing. Alternatively, would you like to display the prin-
cipal Chinese concepts on a chart, one after another, tao (dao),
yin, yang, and so on, draw up a list of them, and compile a lexicon?
But your next two options amount to one: by not translating them
you will leave them aglow in some distant exoticism; by wanting to
translate them you will immediately enclose them within a foreign
language, your own, and deprive them of their coherence, remove
them from their implicitness: you are no longer sharing. This other
way of thought will provide no more than a facsimile, more or less
distorted, of our concepts. You have still not cleared a way, built a
threshold, for “entering.”
Another alternative, the desire to trace the history of Chinese
thought in order to enter it, offers a reassuring feeling of totality:
here we might track it from beginning to end as it unfolds, through
its ins and outs; we would thus follow the ridgeline of its develop-
ment. But can we forget that this would be an imposition—a presen-
tation—that is strictly Western, that is to say, responding to a strong
constituent historicity, made of resounding ruptures and confronta-
tions, belonging to European philosophy? The Chinese themselves
only adopted this approach in Western schools in the early twentieth
century, at the same time as they adopted the term “philosophy,”
which they translated so badly: zhe-xue, “wisdom-study” (in Japa-
nese: “imitation-application,” tetsu-gaku)—what remains there of
desire or philosophic eros? What assures us that such a history, by
establishing positions, presenting theses, constructing debates and
counterarguments in the thinking (of course, there were debates at
What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 5
times in China, too), does not keep us at a distance from the silently
formed complicities, the “obvious facts” endlessly “reheated,”
as Confucius says, that have woven this way of thought’s fund of
understanding—implicitly shared but from then on remaining out
of reach for us? Precisely what we hesitate to call “philosophy.”
Or if we wanted to emphasize the diversity of schools through
careful, methodical classification (“Confucianism” / “Taoism” /
“Buddhism” . . .), under those rubrics we would further exacerbate
the separations that, in China even more than elsewhere, serve only
to indicate membership: (philosophic) schools there are called jia,
“family.” Such tabulations provide order (reassuringly) but do not
give way to thought; they remain exterior to the material beneath
their labels. I mean that they do not help us make use of Chinese
thought to question ourselves; and even though we can thus speak
of “Chinese thought,” we are still thinking in our own language,
according to our own tools. One way or another, you always remain
outside, at home, you still have not moved; you have not “entered.”
T W O ■ T h e E l s e w h e r e o f C h i n a
We must take better measure of this Chinese elsewhere. And

this will be even more necessary the more that which falls under the
name of globalization, by spreading its standard categories every-
where, that is, by saturating the landscape—including the mental
landscape—with its stereotypes, tends to pass off its uniformity as
universality; that is, the more it tends to pass off as legitimate accord-
ing to principle and logic what is only a convenience of production
and its mediatization by portraying it as right and necessary. Or,
alternatively, this will be necessary when the particular is isolated,
closed off, clichéd; when it goes from residual to overrated and finds
itself transformed into artificial folklore, a bait for tourists. Thus,
as a form of resistance, we must now construct a geography of this
Elsewhere and the possibilities of thought. This is not, God forbid,
to close the cultures back down into themselves, huddled in quest
of a pseudo-identity, but very much the opposite: exploring the re-
sources for all intelligence and exploiting them. “Intelligence,” as I
understand it, is not an arrested faculty, belonging to fixed or even
“transcendental” categories, as it was classically understood to be.
Rather, it is activated and deployed, and it progresses in keeping
with the intelligibilities it traverses. And the wider the gap between
those intelligibilities, the greater the opportunities for discovery and
traversal.
6
The Elsewhere of China 7
Let us set out on the better-marked path. With regard to India,

the works of the last generation, of Georges Dumézil and Émile
Benveniste in France, showed us what we, as Europeans, might
share in terms of semantic elements as well as logical relationships,
mental images as well as social functions. Because of proximity, we
can also suspect that thinking was influenced on either side of the
Indus in earlier periods: the influence of the gymnosophists on Plo-
tinus, for example. With regard to Islam, whose language belongs
to another family, we—still the European or, more specifically, the
Christian “we”—share religions of the Book, the biblical filiation,
the idea of a creator God; we share the absolute of a message deliv-
ered in a Revelation. Moreover, the histories of Europe and Islam
have continually mingled. Aristotle returned to us through the
Arabs; Thomas Aquinas was inspired by Averroës; Islamic mono-
theism can be added to the stack of precedents. Furthermore, the
first outlines of the figure of the European intellectual trace back
to Andalusia. But how have we thought beyond that horizon? And
within that “elsewhere”—because it is elsewhere—could we have
thought differently?
Raised in the form of an alternative, this question suddenly
becomes our question. Aren’t the various cultures throughout the
world only so many infinitely varied responses to the same ques-
tions that we ask ourselves—that we cannot help but ask ourselves?
In which case, their inventory is no more than a range of nuances.
Or is it only in those gaps we reveal between cultures that we can
detect, identifying it patiently feature by feature, reflected as what
is thus found in those various encounters, what is—or rather, what
“goes as”—“human”? Let us retain the open, progressive character
8 The Elsewhere of China
of this last formulation and go with the nondefinitive “going.” Let

us set down no preliminary definition, especially of “Man,” which
is always ideological and which thus affects, as we can see, the uni-
versality of the questions themselves.
Is the Kantian summary and breviary—“What can I know?” /
“What must I do?” / “What have I the right to hope?”—so conve-
niently exportable itself? Those questions, which are supposed to be
the most abstract questions, the ones that should best hold all that
is hypothetical within their triangle—are they really so extractable
from their semantic folds? And then, can they be isolated from the
theoretical biases that led to them? Nothing guarantees that “to
know” and “to do,” the two terms of our classical philosophy, are
found a priori in other languages, and the question is even more
relevant, it seems, for the eschatological “to hope.” Don’t these
questions remain fixed in an implicitness they do not probe, being
without (external) support for reflecting upon them? Consequently,
doesn’t this diversity—the diversity of cultures—send us back into
our questions, forcing us to rework them? Indeed, encountering
China, I ask myself: Is it even necessary for us to think by means
of questions? Is it true that to think must always be to respond to a
mystery, to interrogate the Sphinx, to sound the depths, as the West
has passionately wanted it to be since the Greeks?
It is true that a discipline was born when the West, as explorer
of the elsewhere and colonizer of resources, inquired about the di-
versity of cultures throughout the world—that discipline is “anthro-
pology.” But hasn’t anthropology been given that name too hastily,
at too little cost? Does it keep its promises? And furthermore, why
hasn’t philosophy taken more advantage of this Elsewhere that an-
thropology reveals to us, as art has done, for example, by drawing in-
spiration from it? Why has philosophy found so little there to renew
it? Or found renewal only at its margins? After all, there’s Montaigne
(but is Montaigne a “philosopher”?). That is to say, why do we limit
this inquiry on cultural diversity to such a restricted, sectored mode
without letting it renew our universals? Without making it the key
to what “humanity” is—or rather, what it can be?
Because then we could not continue to repeat with Hegel that
philosophy appeared first in the East (the “East,” oriens: where the
morning sun “rises”) but, through a strangely delayed birth, got its
start in Greece, with the discovery of the concept and its operativity
linking the universal and the particular; or, to repeat with Husserl
that if all the cultures are so many anthropological “variations” and
therefore equal, nevertheless only one, the European culture, has
experienced the perilous fate of turning back on itself and becoming
self-reflective; or, to repeat with Maurice Merleau-Ponty that the
East, remaining in the “childhood” of philosophy, can only main-
tain an “oblique” relationship with it (but, as we well know, we have
so much to learn from children!). No, we could no longer conceive
of “geo-philosophy” as Gilles Deleuze did, that is, by consigning
any thinking exterior to Europe to the stage of “pre-philosophic” for
not rising to the “level of immanence,” and so on. Or if we did, we
would still judge that thinking according to our reasons, or rather,
let us say, our pre-reasons, which remain implicit and very much
prior to our prejudgments, our “pre-judices,” since first of all, they
must be detected, which Descartes never considered; and regard-
ing those “others,” we would still only be scratching the surfaces of
clichés and labels without penetrating their coherences, without
10 The Elsewhere of China
calling into question our biases—what biases?—and, consequently,

without probing the depths of our unthought, beginning from these
outside ways of thought, into which we have still not entered.
The usual response I get from my philosopher friends goes as
follows. From the time their schools first appeared, the Greeks de-
ployed the possibilities of thought by systematically developing de-
bates: Heraclitus versus Parmenides, or Epicurus against Plato (or
materialism as opposed to idealism, and so on). How could there
be more radical options, and don’t these oppositions immediately
mark off the entire field of the thinkable? That is, don’t they become
one and the same, let us venture, with the very exercise of Reason
itself? Yes, the Greeks did indeed conceive of all the possibilities, I
would answer, but configured in a certain way, already folded ac-
cording to certain choices that they were not thinking about, that
they did not doubt, that they were neither suspicious of nor sur-
prised by: that they had not thought to think about. It is true that
without fold, one does not think: one only thinks backed up against
the unthought. The axes privileged by the Greeks (“being,” “prin-
ciple,” “causality,” “truth,” and so on), and, primarily, their delib-
erate choice to question, to think of thinking as a confrontation,
favored certain possibilities but left others in the shadows, unex-
plored, lying fallow—unexploited. Their strength, most certainly,
was to take those options to a conceptual (i.e., universal) level so
that, once adopted, once sedimented, they effectively imposed their
“necessity” in return, the necessity of the logos of “logic.” But that
does not mean that those folds—deposits—beginning from which
they worked are the only ones, that other perspectives were not ex-
tricable, that other possibilities were not imaginable. It does not
mean that China’s way of thinking “in course” should be ranked

below that of Heraclitus’s “all in flow,” as one would believe from a
distance, or that not promoting a concept of truth in China should
be confused with—or even compared to—the “phenomenology,”
not to mention the skeptical disenchantment, of Protagoras.
T HRE e ■ T h i n k i n g B e f o r e o r B e s i d e ?
We can now better understand why anthropology, despite its

display of generality, has remained confined to its sector, without
philosophical stakes: because what remains a given is the idea that
the cultures and the thinking of elsewhere, as complex and varied as
they may be, cannot or can only marginally call into question Euro-
pean questioning. Hasn’t European thought, that is, the questioning
of science and truth, adequately proven its effectiveness through the
mastery that it ensures? These ways of thought from elsewhere can
certainly enrich it, and even divert us from it (as exoticism does),
but not make us relinquish it. European thinking does not divest
itself. Upon encountering ways of thought from elsewhere, it ought
to forge new concepts, expand its categories, and, in doing so, better
yield to perceiving its own locality, but instead it retains its perspec-
tive—it has that tool. The Quai Branly Museum of indigenous arts
fascinates us by making us see what we could have not become, but
it does not disturb us. I would even say that the more spectacular
and showy the “elsewhere” is, the less disturbing it is. The problem
with China is that its elsewhere is discreet. There are no myths to
reconstruct there, no arcane oral traditions to probe, no strange cus-
toms to revisit (except foot binding?). Chinese culture developed in
text and history just as our own European culture did. Thus its else-
where subtly escapes the anthropologists’ hold. Anthropology with-
12
Thinking Before or Beside? 13
draws within its (minority) borders; or else its only other option is to
put China and Greece in the same bag, or the same box, as Philippe
Descola did, labeling it “analogism.” But the consequences are still
the same: the “naturalism” that follows after “analogism” arises in
Europe alone.
The thinking of the Enlightenment had already encountered
this problem, let us remember: into which box on our chart to put
what was then called the “Chinese case.” And what if the “Chinese
case” surreptitiously undermined our classifications and our display?
Montesquieu experienced such a moment of vertigo. The problem
posed by this Chinese Elsewhere becomes all the more thorny now
that we are no longer sure we can declare it outstripped (by the
West). China effectively missed the classical scientific revolution,
the one that produced the mechanist-causalist physics of Galileo
and Newton that, within a few centuries, so abruptly changed ma-
terial life on the entire planet; likewise and conjointly, it missed the
ascent of the bourgeois Individual of the Enlightenment and the
thinking of the political contract. But perhaps it can nevertheless
be put in European culture’s—outdated—Before box, as so many
other cultures have been? And here is a still more delicate question:
Is its elsewhere, for that matter, so different? It is true that as soon
as we have defined the difference, separated the “same” from the
“other,” we have returned home. We know this, don’t we—that “to
compare” is another way of not moving, of not leaving, and there-
fore of not entering? One has remained within one’s own initial
overarching categories, beginning from which one orders things;
heterotopia and disorientation have not come into play. Conclu-
sion (the one that has separated me from other sinologists): as long
14 Thinking Before or Beside?
as European reasoning refuses to de- and re-categorize itself, that

is, to reconsider what is implicit in it, to question it and to probe
its “obviousness,” it cannot effectively access an elsewhere, another
way of thinking; and philosophy, despite its “doubt,” will no longer
be able to be self-reflective.
Let us remember, however: Wasn’t it this Elsewhere, not yet
marked by difference (categorized), that so surprised the first mis-
sionaries who landed in China after having discovered the New
World, the Americas? The New World appeared empty to them,
or they would, in any case, empty it, without resistance, through
extermination or conversion. In Europe one could only wonder—
an ambiguity cultivated with delight over centuries—whether the
specimens discovered beyond the seas represented a humanity that
had not yet progressed, or else had not yet fallen and become cor-
rupt. Does the “good savage” disturb us? It confirms our ethno-
centrism one way or another, and even our critical awareness of it
cannot undo this obvious fact: that that form of humanity belongs
definitively to the past, and henceforth the West alone remains the
single reference point. In China, on the other hand, the missionar-
ies came upon a “full” world; and for a long time the Chinese Lit-
erati would not be taken in by them—not that they refuted those
evangelists who came from their “Far West,” but they could hardly
be bothered: Did they need this imported Message? Was it meant
just for them? Euclid’s Elements could certainly be put to good use,
but the News of salvation hardly seemed to concern them; rather, it
left them indifferent. Now indifference, between ways of thought, is
much more difficult to surmount than difference.
Thus we now find ourselves in an ambiguous historical situa-
tion, but perhaps we have not yet sufficiently analyzed the nature of
this “crisis,” to use the term proposed by Husserl, and this shift, not
to call it, more alarmingly, an upheaval. Because it is precisely at this
moment, at the end of the theoretical globalization it began more
that a century ago, that the West believes it is seeing its conceptions
definitively triumph across the planet, not only its hypothetico-
deductive conception of science with its model-making logic (with
mathematics as universal language in the background), but also,
on the economic and political level, its conceptions of capitalist
productivity and democratic right. It is precisely at this moment
that this culture, the “West,” is suddenly amazed: If a culture, the
Chinese culture for instance, is no longer located only before, but
experienced its own development on many levels beside and paral-
lel to the European culture, isn’t it therefore also true that Europe
occupies only one side (of the possibilities of thought)?
Indeed, this perspective can be reversed: What if European
culture’s choices did not only push it forward, as it has believed
about itself for the past few centuries, considering its success, but
also move it to the side, off its mark, cause it to “go wrong,” as the
expression goes? But to the side of what? In any case, the dual-
isms beginning from which its logic has so continuously operated
now become a burden to it: “mind” / “matter,” “subject” / “object,”
“God” / “the world,” and so on—who in Europe today is not try-
ing by some means or other to shake off their yoke, to slip free of
it? Could this set of tools be outdated? Might it now obstruct the
way forward? Also, the message of salvation that European culture
constructed and passionately proffered in its History, that it made
so many desire, now loses its hold; or perhaps the ideals, like the
“Beautiful,” that it established, to which it sacrificed so much, now

seem to it too costly, if not a wretched sham.
Both perspectives simultaneously intrigue it (“it” being Euro-
pean culture, which believes itself to be universal): Through its
choices, and first of all its choice of “clarity,” didn’t it miss a certain
connected complexity of things, and this at the risk of a complica-
tion leading it ever on, which it would no longer have to pursue?
And thus, wouldn’t it have problematized uselessly, carried along
as it is by this enthusiasm for analytical “reason,” from which it can
no longer step back? To the point that the elemental henceforth
escapes it, that it no longer knows how to access it? Europe is sud-
denly, retrospectively, surprised by the great sacrifice that it has thus
made, committed as one commits a crime, and first of all from the
perspective of what it can only, from now on, dramatically call “exis-
tence” and no longer life: indeed, the desire to penetrate the secret
of the biological never ends, but we no longer know how to live
(how to die)—have we even thought about breathing (which China
has thought about constantly)? We never stop wanting to master
time, planning it ever more conveniently, but we no longer know
how to think about the opportunity of a moment—China began by
thinking about the seasonal “moment,” and so on. By relentlessly
promoting knowledge, the complicities were broken; and the Indi-
vidual condemned to confinement within his individualism. What
is most fundamental escapes us, a disintegration gets under way,
which goes from the social to the metaphysical (the famous “nihil-
ism”), and the mastery acquired will finally leave us destitute.
Thus, but too easily, of course, too lazily, what Western thought
vaguely glimpsed of that Elsewhere of the Far East fascinated it as
that which could henceforth serve to name for it what it repressed.
Might it even offer itself as a remedy? At least, it is no trouble to

concoct this compensatory Elsewhere. To do so, it is enough just
to invert the terms—another way of not disturbing oneself: pro-
jecting one’s fantasy in order not to enter. Beneath the heterotopia
reappears the utopia: the logic of regulation (in China) would thus
prevail over modelization (so praised by the West); or the relaxing
of the principle of noncontradiction (belonging to wisdom) would
prevail over the need for the excluded middle (required by logic);
or again, the global (grasped by intuition) would prevail over the
general (defined by concept); or harmony with the world, over au-
tonomy of the subject, and so on. All the way up to where the most
contemporary science bumps up against it, there is nothing that
would not find a trace of itself at least in harmony with, if not origi-
nating from, the insights of ancient China. This holds as much with
regard to “space-time” revealing itself to be infrangible as with the—
now necessary—renunciation of the very idea of “matter.”
Since that is where we are, historically speaking, it is clear that
from now on, sinology can no longer be considered protected terri-
tory. Or perhaps it is sinology itself that, in so often limiting itself to
erudite monographs, has thus “protected” itself. Hasn’t it too hastily
slipped into, settled into, the habitus and connivances of the within
of its discipline? Hasn’t it passed too naively from the other side, too
hastily straddling the passage, to still be able to allow entry? Like-
wise and conversely, “sino”-logy, a variant of anthropology, can no
longer continue to be considered from without, as a specialty, as phi-
losophy still too often does. It is not only China’s importance today,
and above all its economic importance, that compels us; and all the
hybridizations and superimpositions of globalization will not let us
avoid the great disentangling that has become necessary. We must
indeed enter into Chinese thought, actually enter, in order to exit

that ideological outlet that threatens and allows European reason-
ing to examine itself, both its rich and its exhausted resources—
there is nothing worse, on the other hand, than when it makes itself
feel guilty. Or else we risk lapsing into the inanities of personal de-
velopment and “happiness according to Confucius” that are today’s
big winners.
The fact remains that we cannot enter into Chinese thought
without first approaching it through and in its language. Because
“Chinese thought”—I am responding here to the objections of
those who are afraid of confining cultures within worlds—is, first
of all and essentially, thought that is expressed in Chinese. It is in
the articulation of the sentence, even before ideas and thus prior to
the effects of construction, that the folds are sketched. If language
does not determine thought, to think, nonetheless, is to activate the
resources of a language. Now, as I have cautioned, learning classical
Chinese requires infinite time and patience. Is there a shortcut to
propose? Here I am inviting nonsinologists to read one simple Chi-
nese sentence, but so “simple” that it takes much time to reveal it—
to read it simultaneously from within and without, from close-up
and from a distance—in order, by “entering,” by exiting and reenter-
ing again, by excavating that gap, to open underneath the many
expedients of retreat and reflexivity, which is very different from
believing it is possible to arrange naively side by side, to trace a par-
allel and “compare.” I am offering a reading both in what it says and
what it does not say, both in what it engages and what it turns away
from, in what it does and does not lead us to think. To dispel vague
generalities and whiffs of fantasy, nothing is better than fieldwork.
F OUR ■ T h e F i r s t S e n t e n c e
I do indeed believe in the sentence as the modality belonging

to thought. I do not know if philosophers have a style, according
to the question so often debated; no doubt “style” is too personal
(isn’t it, as Buffon said, “the man himself ”?), too intimately tied to
individuality, and the philosopher might thus have a style despite
himself; his style might in fact work against him. But I find there to
be a sentence belonging to each philosopher insofar as he is a phi-
losopher. A philosopher is recognized by his sentence more than
by his concepts. That is even what makes him a great philosopher:
when he has his sentence—this “great” being understood less as a
word of praise than as a trademark. Plato quite obviously has a sen-
tence, the one that he fully deploys and joyfully affirms his com-
mand over in Gorgias or the Republic. In other words, what makes
Plato Plato is his way of developing his sentence, much more than
his theory of “ideas,” which he calls his great invention, or rather,
the theory finds itself already included there, already understood.
Aristotle has an entirely different sentence. It is through his sen-
tence and its construction, his method of inventory and allocation,
of anonymity and collective opinion, that Aristotle opens a gap be-
tween himself and his master, much more so than through ideas,
arguments, or conceptions-convictions, as much as these find them-
selves involved. Merleau-Ponty has a sentence and does not have a
19
20 The First Sentence
concept (the “flesh” is hardly a concept). I can recognize a sentence,

each different, for Paul Ricoeur as for Alain Badiou.
But what is a sentence? Let us be clear: a sentence has noth-
ing to do with form in the sense of putting a thought “into form,”
because the sentence is its very deployment—in other words, its
condition of existence. From beginning to end, or from one period
to another period, whether or not sentences are marked (ancient
forms of writing, we know, did not mark them), they are the means
by which the thought arises, gets going, expands, builds tension,
perhaps loses its balance and regains it, promotes itself in any case,
and then must end, or at least land, offering some pause or some
breakaway. The Greek sentence, as in Plato, with its an, its ara, and
its optatives, all its combinative play of hypotheses and relatives,
but also its anacoluthons (traditionally identified with the syntacti-
cal freedom of the Greek language), is a sentence that builds, but
in a risky fashion, through perilous balancing acts, by going to the
limit with audacity, just for the sake of it—it is adventuresome. It is
exactly this audacity that gave a shot of energy, insolence, and de-
tachment to what has since been called philosophy in Europe. Kant
has a Latin sentence in German. Hegel, at least in Phenomenology,
develops a sentence that splits apart and turns in circles all the di-
verging, combining elements of German semantics, like a great mill
that can grind everything: that is what gives Hegel his power. As for
Heidegger, he is so taken up with his sentence that he makes him-
self untranslatable.
The same is true, and even more so, for the first sentence. That
sentence operates as a curtain raiser. It does not say where it comes
from, and advances unjustified, a true “throw of the dice” present-
The First Sentence 21
ing us retrospectively with this enigma: Through where—that is,

through what hold or according to what means—can elucidation
begin, can a beginning take place? But at the same time, as dis-
cretely as it presents itself, that first sentence establishes, exudes, an
order that can no longer be undone; henceforth one can only think
within its orbit or in its wake. It happens just like that: a horizon is
already sketched. A first sentence enlists the thinking that follows in
a such way that detachment or disengagement will no longer be pos-
sible, whatever inventiveness is brought to bear; we remain depen-
dent on it or ensnared by it. At the same time as it arises, it folds the
thinkable; that inaugural act, because of its scope, already amounts
to completion. In some sense, we will do nothing afterward but ex-
plain that initial, ventured gesture. Or, put more negatively, hardly
has this first sentence begun to be uttered—to be set in motion—
than it becomes a rut, than it projects its shadow or its fate over all
future developments. We never exit a first sentence.
In Proust’s first sentence, the memorable “For a long time,
I used to go to bed early,” isn’t everything already definitively ad-
vanced? There the die is cast for Remembrance of Things Past; and
Proustians will endlessly discover, with pleasure, all that it sets in
motion. Like a parasol or a canopy that is opened, and under the
shelter of which one remains, that “long time” immediately estab-
lishes, without wait or hurry, the sovereign order of duration. Facing
that expanse, the “I” that points to and responds to it holds the posi-
tion of a singular subject but already overflows with its own exiguity:
it is tenuously anecdotal but is inscribing opposite the empty avail-
able form where everything will come to collect and take shape.
Above all, to begin by going to bed is already to take the opposite
22 The First Sentence
approach, to set in motion a conversion that will not end. It is to

begin to present the interior dimension that lies below the diurnal,
dissolute, soon forgotten daily experience—the nocturnal, in other
words, where, in the silence and refusal of agitation, events and feel-
ings will finally be able to release a clear sound as they settle; where
the impressions then set free will never stop tunneling underground
to reconnect, through “Time,” in order to escape their dispersion
and be rejoined—by way of which the entire work will find its revela-
tion. Thus, after the “long time” gong is struck, the octosyllable that
follows demands a pause that makes it resonate—suspense-silence;
but the framework is already established, the loom is strung.
One may counter that this is a matter of a “literary” sentence
and that it is not the same for a philosophical abstraction. But let
us take the first sentence of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is
more than a threshold; it is already a kind of prescription for what
follows: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly, every action
and every choice, aims at some good, it seems.” In the framework
of this opening sentence alone, we can see that an array of concepts
is organized, a first line is traced for systematically inventorying an
order of things within its grid, and in the most economic, strictly
enumerative fashion, without leaving room for any escape, suppo-
sition, or possible disorganization. A system of impersonal gener-
ality is established that immediately suppresses the mysterious or
strange. Everything is already methodically, serially arranged—all
the more so since it is a matter of marks, shown in equal, steady
light, so that there is no longer anything to fear, anything that stands
out, shadowy, disconcerting. The requirement of an aim is posited
in a perspective from which there is no exit; everything will forever
The First Sentence 23
be returned to it by that same raking motion: an orbit is fixed, that

of telos, toward which everything “aims” (according to that Greek
construction that serves as matrix: ephiesthai + genitive). Conse-
quently, Aristotle will endlessly repeat that if my action has no goal,
it is futile; and whether material is submitting to form, or power
to action, or the world to God, this is very much what he will end-
lessly afterward organize “theoretically.” Similarly, to the generality
so drily opened and allowing no shadow or fissure to remain, the
final “seems” (dokei ) adds, before closing, an empirical flat note
that will be heard endlessly, as a continual echo, the one of general
“opinion,” in other words, the doxa’s support, which is dangerous to
give up. This is Aristotle’s way of issuing warning and immediately
marking his distance from the dangerous—Platonic—flight into
ideality. In this brief inaugural sentence, in its way of analytically
seizing things and organizing, flatly, with no further intrigue, all of
Aristotle is already present.
F I V e ■ A F i r s t C h i n e s e S e n t e n c e
This first Chinese sentence I will take from the beginning of

China’s oldest book, which is also its most fundamental book, the
Yijing (I Ching), or “Classic of Change,” if we translate the title lit-
erally (yi, “change”; jing, “classic”). But is it a “book,” strictly speak-
ing? If there is a book, a text accumulating successive layers from the
beginning to the end of the first millennium BCE, that book takes
form beginning not from a Word but from a line: a complete line
or a broken line (“—”or “– –”) symbolizing the two factors in corre-
lation, yin and yang, simultaneously opposite and complementary
and holding all reality. Those horizontal lines, superimposed, com-
bine into figures of three or six lines (for a total of sixty-four hexa-
grams) such that they derive from one another and form a mecha-
nism that, stemming from ancient divination practices and used for
drawing lots, is both a chance operation and, as such, manipulat-
able. According to their arrangement and the intermingling of the
two types of lines, these figures allow the consultant to identify and
analyze the lines of force at work in each situation encountered,
which must be turned to good advantage in order to succeed.
Given its material, we can see immediately what makes this
“book” original. It does not teach a Message or claim to deliver a
Meaning (about the enigma of the world or the mystery of life—
what do I know?) but presents for examination, going from the bot-
24
A First Chinese Sentence 25
tom to the top of each figure and line after line, how this or that situa-
tion is deployed and inflected in a positive or negative way, “luckily”
or “unluckily,” as a function of the tendencies and interactions de-
tected, which continue to evolve. Each of these successive figures,
considered as a whole and considering each of its lines, through a
macro- and a micro-reading, makes appear in its coherence a mo-
ment of the transformation under way. On the other hand, the first
two figures stand apart because they are each composed of a single
type of line: the initial figure is formed only out of yang lines, evok-
ing the capacity of Heaven (䷀); the second is formed only out of yin
lines, evoking the capacity of Earth (䷁). Yin and yang originated as
the north-facing and south-facing slopes of the mountain, its dark
and its lit sides. Forming a pair, with the six yang lines facing the
six yin lines, these two initial figures comprise the total stock of the
lines composing the series—or the energies invested—and repre-
sent the polarity of the whole. The first embodies what I will translate
as the initiatory capacity, Qian 乾, and the second, as the receiving
capacity, Kun 坤: as counterparts, they form the double door (門)
through which the process of things endlessly passes.
Once this mechanism is in place, what can we imagine to be
the opening formula or the first sentence put forward? But first of
all, once again, is it a sentence, strictly speaking? Just four Chinese
sinograms follow one another side by side, without anything to in-
dicate rection or relationships of coordination or subordination be-
tween them. These four monosyllables are all equal, without any-
thing arranging or hierarchizing them, but in their series they form
a complete whole. In such a formula, is it even a matter of verbs,
nouns, adjectives, or whatever function these words have? Nothing
26 A First Chinese Sentence
can mark it grammatically; there is no more morphological specifi-

cation here than there is syntactical rection. I will choose to trans-
late this parataxis using minimal punctuation:
Initiatory capacity (Qian):
beginning expansion profit rectitude

yuan heng li zhen
元亨利贞
Or just as good: “to begin—to expand rapidly—to profit / to

turn to good account—to remain sound (solid).” Such an opening
sentence, as we can see, does not construct; it is content with simul-
taneously unbinding and binding. Each successive term takes over
from the preceding one and deploys it; it proceeds from it, renews
it, and carries it further: like four points or pieces on an otherwise
empty checkerboard, tracing a curve by themselves. Faced with so
much non-alternative (compared with that series of alternatives that
syntax imposes upon us in our languages), I wonder: Can we imag-
ine an opening formulation that is less inventive, less postulated,
and less adventuresome—less risky? Can we imagine a proposition
less moved by choices, and especially those grammatical choices
required by other languages (choices of person, gender, number,
time, and so on), that is to say, advancing itself less as an option—
hypothesis/hypothetical—taken on what might be called “reality”?
This utterance does not refer to anything in particular, it has no sub-
ject or complement, but it marks the stages and the justification of
all development: it less has a meaning, strictly speaking, than it de-
velops a coherence.
Thus it is less a matter of a sentence, exactly, than of successive

phases of an unfolding: we can read these four terms one by one
and one after the other. A seasonal illustration: the “beginning” is
spring; the “expansion,” summer; the “profit” (harvest), autumn;
the “rectitude” (both solidity and tenacity), winter, which allows
the capacity to endure, through burial, until renewal. But we can
also read the terms two by two, already forming a polarity: to the
release of a “beginning” responds the “expansion” that spreads the
effect; or (then) the “profit” of the harvest calls for the integrity of
the “rectitude” in order not to be exhausted. There, in any case, is
the key formula—drawn from the old funds of divination operations
and repeated many times throughout the book—for that which con-
tinually makes reality, in its incessant process, and which nothing
can call into question, can neither reduce nor contradict.
“Beginning” does indeed mark that which first detaches itself
and comes at the start, as the “initiator” of things (ji), when a con-
figuration is barely suggested but its orientation can already be per-
ceived, which applies equally to everything that comes into the
world and takes on existence, involves nature as well as humanity,
is understood on the physical as well as the moral plane. As the com-
mentators will elaborate, it applies to every formation of “breath,” of
vapor, or of energy (qi 气), beginning by individuating and actualiz-
ing itself, through condensation and concretion: thus the plant ger-
minates or the insect hatches, thus the clouds and rocks are formed,
thus things and events alike come about. But it applies as well to
the slightest incitement of the inner depths rising in reaction to
what we view as unbearable occurrences in the world and trigger-
ing in us a first spark of “humanity”: from that initial feeling of pity
(ren 仁), as non-insensibility with regard to what happens to others,

the possibility of virtue begins. In relationship to which the time
of “expansion” that follows is one of diffusion and maturation or,
more precisely, according to the image, the time of inner, invisible
“cooking,” of completing the development, then resulting in full
manifestation. In this stage, the initial shock deploys itself through-
out and spreads, promotes communication from within and leads
to increase and growth: what has just begun is propagated, united,
becomes a ball of snow or a spot of oil, the effect of which promotes
and deploys itself.
With these two first terms we can already see that what makes
this opening sentence original is that it refrains from—rids itself
of—all originality and confrontation: that it is careful not to intro-
duce any sort of intrigue or offer any opposition; that it puts noth-
ing aside, involves no reference, establishes no preference or proper
order, allows nothing be considered as external or elsewhere. If no
subject is indicated here, as the Chinese language permits, it is be-
cause nothing effectively distinguishes itself as the subject, serving
as substantial medium and destined for predication. Neither does
anything escape this phenomenal perspective, that is, this perspec-
tive on the formation of phenomena: it is equally true for me and
for the world; the subjective and the objective are not separated in
it. Because, in all my manifestations of existence, internal as well as
external, “I” too am a momentary actualization of this dynamism
or this impulse that spreads throughout, invests itself, interacts, and
transmits energy.
This perspective, or angle—although it does everything pre-
cisely in order to do away with anything like an “angle”—is thus
that of every process activated and propagating itself, caught in its
advent and its deployment. Thus to translate the following term (li )
as “profit” is a bit reductive, or, I might say, too invested. In its usual
written form, the ideogram is composed of an ear of grain and a
scythe 利: it signifies what there is to harvest henceforth, as long as
the expansion succeeds, or, in other words, that this expansion, in
deploying itself, is both “pointed” (protruding) and “favorable” (the
double meaning of li), that there is thus capital to be made out of
that shock leading to the sharpening of the effect. But such profit
is only durable precisely because it favors nothing in particular, is
inclined toward no special bias, respects a just balance, neither de-
viates nor overflows. It maintains its immanent capacity through its
“rectitude,” the last term of the sentence (zhen); and this fecundity
at work does not run dry.
If we come back to our original inquiry, we will already begin
to understand it in a less innocent or more trenchant way: How
does one enter into the thinking? By what means or first maneu-
ver does one open a way? What can be a start there, a first step
that is both effective and that one privileges, but after which, I am
afraid, no more can be done but to develop and accept the conse-
quences? In fact, I wonder whether, with this simple opening sen-
tence, “Beginning → expansion → profit → rectitude,” the die is
not already cast, whether everything is not already decided. And
that is precisely because this first sentence does not draw up the ex-
pected originary scene, does not establish the first instant or agent, is
without story and without drama and does not even make anything
emerge; because, furthermore, it offers nothing to suppose or to
construct, leaves room for neither argumentation nor narration—
neither muthos nor logos. Can we even imagine being disturbed by
its truth? What is an utterance that does not even call for justifica-
tion? Which leads to the question: Can our minds grasp what, in
establishing itself, presents so little passion or resistance, fissure or
contraction, through which meaning can be produced or emotion
filtered? Can this sentence, in its equal, steady unwinding, without
suspense or tension, speak to our desire? Does it even let us discern
some doubt or some question? And if so, I repeat, can we think with-
out questioning?
Chinese thought effectively started from there—not from
Being or from God. It did not start from the opposition of Being and
becoming, or of truth and appearance, as did Greek metaphysics
by splitting the world in two; rather, it conceives of the initiatory
capacity (“Heaven”), invested in the formation of every process,
developing in polarity (with “Earth”) and going its way, so that the
process initiates itself—is deployed—makes good—renews itself
without deviating from its course, which is the virtue of Heaven,
being the condition of its renewal (but already I am glossing by
justifying . . .). Neither did it start from a first Subject, author, or
Creator, as represented in the biblical account, but conceives the
operativity involved in every course—discreetly, in silence, tena-
ciously, whether that course is one of the world or of behavior. This
sentence that moves so little, risks or ventures so little, in a certain
way already says everything. It circles back in its progression from
“rectitude,” where it draws to a close, to a new “beginning.” What
could it leave pending? There is no enigma to decipher or worry to
resolve: What could there be to add that is not already commentary?
SI X ■ C o m m e n t a r y
That first sentence is so complete, comprehensive, and defini-

tive, so clear and calm, leaving nothing pending, that there is noth-
ing left to do but explain it; the only way of adding to it would be to
gloss it. So many ancient Chinese texts are constructed beginning
from basic formulas that serve as core or matrix, and all the elabo-
ration that follows does nothing but exploit their richness. Here,
this opening formulation, stating a “judgment” on the first figure of
the Classic of Change, is traditionally attributed to King Wen, the
civilizing king par excellence, founder of the Zhou dynasty in early
Antiquity (turn of the first millennium BCE); and the commentary
that follows it was attributed to Confucius but belongs instead to
“the literati” of the end of Antiquity (in the fourth century BCE).
The commentary begins like this:
Vast is the capacity of Qian [the initiatory capacity]!

The ten thousand beings find their resources there to begin:
so that it commands Heaven.
This exhaustive introductory formula is one of celebration.

What is there at the beginning, am Anfang, as Goethe said, or what
is this first “there is,” this es gibt? What is there to start out from to
say things? From nothing other, it is proposed here as if presenting
the obvious, than the invested—“initiatory” (Qian)—to which all
31
32 Commentary
that exists owes its becoming and its developing: finding in it source
and resource (the notion of zi), and finding simultaneously its point
of departure, its reserve or its “capital,” and its support.
And what term to begin with, what first term to venture? That
“vast” (“great”) comes first; that “vast” is enough to name here that
generous capacity which, opening its arms, can form a wide em-
brace (look at this mark for “vast” with its horizontal line tracing a
man 人 opening his arms 大); that “vast,” in a certain way, already
says it all. Or else that “vast” is the opening word, the first qualifier
projected, chosen from among the possibilities—and is there any
going back? Simply to name this “vastness” in the face of the world,
in the face of life, is to keep from awakening surprised panic in the
face of what might be, beyond all beyond, infinity: the vertigo that
seized Job facing divine Creation’s incommensurability is immedi-
ately disposed of. Similarly and conversely, this sufficient, satisfying
“vast” dispenses with the need to posit some border or edge; it does
not raise questions, as in Greek, with regard to the “limit,” peras:
one is diverted de facto from the worry of having to name the “all”
of the world, to holon, which the first Ionian thinkers raised as an
enigma. Thus this “vast” or “great,” posted first, does not question.
This “ample,” so generously deployed, but without extending to any
boundary and thus to confrontation, already buries any question
of why. It opens widely but does not bump up against anything. It
obliterates any abyss as it dissolves any fixation. Fascination with the
Extreme and its impossible beyond is drowned in it, quieted in it, as,
conversely, any temptation to withdraw or focus—contract—into
the narrowness of the singular is defeated. Through such an open-
Commentary 33
ing, all those ways are already closed. Throwing this “vast” out at the
beginning is enough to create a gap.
What I have translated as “being” (wu 物) is indeed the most
“ample” term for naming both “beings and things” captured in all
their variety (the “ten thousand beings,” wan wu). Etymologically
this term (the graph ) depicts an ox ( ) and plowing ( : a sack
and bit of earth?). But how did we get from there to the “ten thou-
sand” as the number of the innumerable? Could it be because the
clods of plowed earth are multicolored or because the ox is an ani-
mal whose corpulence spreads amply in our eyes (as before the ex-
pert butcher in Zhuangzi )? In ancient inscriptions, in any case, the
word is attested to designate a particular kind of ox with a multi-
colored coat that could be offered in sacrifice. We can gather at
least that reality is approached as living, in its mass and its diversity
of appearance, forming a scene and destined for use, perceived in
activity. Here again, beneath this most ordinary naming, choices
are already indicated which the language does not reflect. To name
what we most commonly call “beings” is just this “plow ox,” that the
Chinese language graphically employs, making it the medium for
a multiplicity: this term blocks the path of speculation; the way of
thought is immediately directed toward function and appearance,
not toward essence or existence. Thus, to translate it as “being(s)”—
as I have just done, but how else to translate it?—ineluctably throws
us off course.
Because once the perspective is projected, once the day has
dawned, we are not allowed to consider “what” (noun) the beings
and things “might be,” nor “from what” they come. Instead, they
34 Commentary
situate us in the fundamental, earlier stage, the one of stock or root

(ben 本). They do not leave room for the question “What is that?”
(the ti esti of the Greeks) nor for an investigation of origin: it will be
enough to note that the incitation is constantly at work, on a wide
scale, and the course is continually getting under way. A capacity is
invested, in every place as at every moment, that never stops “provid-
ing for,” endlessly spreading, promoting, without exhausting itself.
That is why it is called “vast” and why it is celebrated. It commands
from end to end that continuum of becoming—of flow—that is
called “Heaven” (tian 天, “vast,” “great,” 大, with a second horizon-
tal line above indicating that it embraces by covering). Now such a
“Heaven,” at the time of this commentary, is no longer deified nor
separate, strictly speaking, but already serves to name that generous
initiatory energy, never running dry, that is found to be involved in
every process.
The commentary continues:
Clouds pass—rain spreads:

the beings, according to their category, flow [into] their
actualization.
Such is the progress, or rather, such is the in progress, the “ex-

pansion” (heng) after the “beginning” (yuan) that prompts it and
governs it. For the passing of what takes form in turn, deploying
itself in a purely processive way, what is more obvious indeed than
clouds? Not clouds exiled beyond the horizon, prompting nostal-
gia, deepening into infinity, but clouds that condense diffuse energy
into vaporous appearances and begin actualizing it by sketching
contours with their swells. And for that capacity to spread through-
Commentary 35
out and, crossing straight through, to assist in the ripening process,

what better to evoke than rain—the fertile rain that does not target
or spare anything? Now we also understand that the same is true of
everything that is so “fine”—“light”—“subtle”—“compact” that it
becomes imperceptible, but operates all the more easily at the core
of all development, as one commentator on this commentary notes
(Wang Fuzhi, at the end of the seventeenth century). Indeed, what
is life, the world, reality, whatever we call it, if it is not that: the
actualization that deploys itself through interaction into specific
individuations, each according to its rubric, and that thus flows and
follows from itself, without any other pretext? What could be added
to this pure, simple phenomenality, the Chinese ask us, that would
not weigh it down or coat it? What could be assumed to be behind
or beyond it? Why must “something”—being or substance—more
(than this continuous passage) exist? And in particular, what need
is there to conceive of a Cause for this constant promotion, to posit
a Mover, to invoke an Agent?
This commentary, as we can clearly see, asks nothing, it ex-
plains nothing, and it even makes any questioning moot. It neither
claims nor justifies—which is to say that it only presents the obvi-
ous in which we are already engaged, and it does so in a strictly
self-referential fashion, by relying solely on the six lines, or six “posi-
tions” (“dragons”), of the figure that it summarizes:
Vast clarity—end beginning:

the six positions, according to their moment, come to pass;
according to the moment, to mount the six dragons so as to
drive Heaven.
36 Commentary
The way of Qian [the initiatory capacity] modifying-

transforming,
each renders [holds] correct its nature-destiny.
To retain unity; vast harmony.
From which, profit and rectitude.
Each “moment” comes in its time, opportunely, and that is

why, after the “beginning” and the “expansion” come the “profit”
(harvest) and the “rectitude.” What better image of this dynamism
extending from itself and renewing itself than the body of the
dragon? There is successive development indeed, as from the lower
line to the upper line of the figure, at the same time that light, “vast”
as well, accompanies this unfolding throughout, leaving no room for
suspecting any hole or break. What place is there for worry in what
is bound together so well that the possibility of death or interrup-
tion, at this level, is inconceivable? It does not even say “beginning
and end,” but “end-beginning” (which translators often wrongly cor-
rect): this beginning is not inscribed in a single moment in time but
is at work in all activation, and likewise there is no final end, neither
a raising nor a lowering of the curtain. Thus every end is also a be-
ginning; what is completed gives birth again as well. We have only
continuous transitions to deal with.
Or again, there is indeed endless mutation, “modification” and
“transformation” (bian-hua), so that stable or Eternal being can-
not be invoked, but nevertheless this becoming does not deviate.
All that is individuated is called to follow in “correct” fashion what
makes up its “nature” and forms its “destiny.” In other words, what
is invested in it as capacity also commands in it its “rection,” the
Commentary 37
“mandate” according to a fate that sets its destination: whether it

is that of “Heaven” as a whole or that of each singular advent, this
course can develop only insofar as it is regulated. It could not follow
one particular moral code or, conversely, fall outside the framework
of this processivity. “Harmony” (he), the master word of this evo-
cation, in keeping “profit” inseparable from “rectitude,” deals with
them both: it assumes simultaneously that nothing can intervene
from outside the world or secede from within the world. That this
“harmony” is also called “vast” means that it holds in all respects,
as inner value, unique value, without leaving expectations of a be-
yond or fears of rebellion or exception. Facing so much coherence,
which dissolves all metaphysical surprise at this point—that is to say,
makes “Heaven” spill into the natural at this point—we ourselves
are surprised. I cannot help but wonder: Will there never be any
place here for the Rupture? Will nothing ever come to break in, to
rise up in confrontation?
In any case, we must note that the Chinese thinker recognizes
nothing specific here, nothing exclusive, and that he keeps every-
thing connected: according to our own terms, the ethical goes hand
in hand with the cosmological, and it is the same with the political,
which makes it all the clearer what strictly ideological order serves as
foundation, or rather, let us say, as seal. The commentary continues
and comes to an end in this way:
[From the] head to tower over the throng of beings:

the ten thousand realms are at peace.
It is clear, according to all the glossators, that what comes “at

the head” here, what emerges “from the head,” refers back to what
38 Commentary
was said at the start of the beginning-command (yuan): that is, to

the wise Sovereign who embodies that capacity which is both ini-
tiatory and regulatory and whom there is no need even to name as
such, since he is so much one with the good order of things. In fact,
in this processive logic, impossible to disturb, is there still a place for
a political Subject, unique as he might be? Because the sovereign
himself is only the medium or the office through which the social
order comes to plug into the order of the world, aligns itself with
it, and harmony is translated into “peace.” Can our earlier surprise
thus turn finally only to suspicion? Doesn’t such well-regulated
order serve as the engine of obedience? Or, to overcome the latter
and be freed of it, isn’t it necessary to posit an External to the world,
ektos tou kosmou, as the Greeks were already saying, and invent an
ideality detached from situations? In other words, if Freedom has
servitude as its opposite, as we know, isn’t this in conflict with “Har-
mony”? And thus, if such a development works so hard to unfold the
obvious, and does not allow for rupture or dissonance, it is up to us,
readers from Europe, to organize the protest from without, to make
the confrontation arise from elsewhere. With regard to this “obvi-
ous” that the Chinese sentence weaves as if it were only unfolding
it: we must take a step back to put it into perspective, to take it out
of its unthought, to read not only what it says there but also what it
does not say: to disturb it.
SE V EN ■ H e b r a i c E n t r y
Let us deliberately exit this sentence in order to be able to enter

it all the more operationally. To read from without, to arrange an en-
counter between ways of thought that are unaware of one another,
to put the gap to work, and to play with the constrastive effect, is,
as I have said, to make apparent the biases that are implicit, buried,
unlit, by which such thinking has prospered. This approach ap-
plies even more particularly to this first sentence of the Classsic of
Change, whose power stems from its apparent ignorance of all other
possibilities, from its seeming to remain on this side of any option,
to pose no question and thus not to have to propose any solution
either, since it only unfolds the obvious and consequently does not
constitute a point of view, since it is neither original nor unique,
nor hardly even distinctive. Thus, over two millennia, it has been
constantly cited, glossed, explained, endlessly referenced, but never
has it been disturbed. Not only has the extent of its unthought never
been measured, but contesting it has never been imagined. It is so
completely assimilated that it is no longer read: there is no hold on
it. What sinologist today is still interested in it? Thus it will not be a
matter here of comparing but, through the intrusion of an Outside,
of making protrude and react what is so deeply enfolded inside that
it is no longer even suspected of being there. But what exteriority is
there to introduce opposite this sentence, to shake it from its con-
39
40 Hebraic Entry
sensus, to reveal it to itself—that is to say, that can adjust to it and

reflect it? The Bible also begins with a “beginning.”
It is possible to begin otherwise? We also know that the Bible
and the Classic of Change are the same age, extend over as many
centuries, that the two books—these foundational books—carry the
same weight in each civilization, were there at the start of equal tra-
ditions. Thus a parallel emerges. But for all that, what is a “begin-
ning”? Is there only one way of considering it? Or isn’t it rather that
in this “beginning” the gap is already widening, to the point that
henceforth it could no longer be stopped? If it does not create itself
out of nothing (ex nihilo) in Genesis, this “beginning” by which the
Bible begins nonetheless introduces a rupture. Such a beginning,
we calculate, is an irruption without precedent that likewise, in this
block of primordial history, remains unreconcilable with all that fol-
lows, isolating itself from what follows, even if it plays a fundamen-
tal role in it. There it is, suddenly, abruptly, looming up, this begin-
ning become event, and it is toward that fracture that it is aimed. In
face of which we can begin to perceive how the beginning evoked
in the opening of the Classic of Change is of a different nature: it
is not considered from the point of view of the discontinuity that it
could introduce but from that of the release it activates or, a better
way to say it, that it “initiates” and that, from there, can expand and
develop. Thus if we are to enter into Chinese thought, we first of
all have to make this differentiation: to conceive of what I will call
the initiator (the notion of ji in the Classic of Change) as opposed
to the event.
What does “to initiate” mean? To initiate does not signal a
break-in, the break-in of “creation,” bara’, a Hebrew term referring
Hebraic Entry 41
to something new, marvelous, and unprecedented. “To initiate” can

be understood to mean that something “bites,” “takes,” and in pass-
ing is put on its path, is set in motion, makes its way: that a course is
discreetly begun, brought into development—that the infinitesimal
can become infinite. It is not that an action takes place there, gratu-
itously, unjustified, definitively separating the before and the after
and making an otherness suddenly appear; rather, an interaction is
subtly produced, an incitement occurs; an orientation evolves and
begins to make its way. On the Chinese side, the beginning evoked
does not detach itself but engages. Whereas the event of Genesis has
inaugural value, whereas a first day breaks with splendor and maj-
esty, this other beginning sets in motion—and, most important, in
an imperceptible fashion—an operativity. The Genesis beginning
opens a way of thinking of Time (and, first of all, the framework of
the week); the Chinese beginning, a way of thinking of processes
(claiming only unfolding and duration). Moreover, let us notice this
initial fact, as restricting as it is unobtrusive, inscribed as it is in the
language: unlike Indo-European languages and Hebrew, Chinese
is not conjugated; it is expressed, as it were, in the infinitive (which
I have only occasionally been able to retain in my preceding trans-
lation). Thus the indexation or temporal localization, as well as the
assignation to a subject, are not necessarily indicated.
Do I dare say that under those conditions, “God” would exist
only as consequence? Or, in other words, that “God” depends upon
the way one thinks of the beginning? Because the biblical beginning
is conceived as a break-in, it is perceived as intervention; it makes a
Subject (of the creation) suddenly appear, Elohim: “In the begin-
ning God created heaven and earth . . .” God, posited as the Other
42 Hebraic Entry
in this unique beginning, remains external to and uncontaminated

by what he makes, “creating” the world but not dependent on it. A
sign of his presence and an instrument of his power, both wind and
breath, ruah, his spirit, “hovered over the waters”: he must precede
and follow his orientation alone, he cannot be subjected to influ-
ence in return, he does not enter into the play of interactions. On
this initial scene he projects his sovereign will as he verifies the re-
sults of it afterward at each stage: “and God saw that it was good.”
As a result, we can read better, by contrast, what was understood
on the Chinese side: if there really is a celebration of the initiatory
Capacity, from which what makes the world endlessly proceeds, it
is no longer necessary that a Subject emerge, that an Agent be dis-
tinguished. Moreover, let us not forget that the Chinese language
does not distinguish between active and passive voices; also that it
privileges the point of view of functionality, or, more precisely, of
“processivity.” Nothing, consequently, can suddenly rise up sepa-
rated from the course of things; no instance is isolated. If there is
an absolute, it is not dissociated from the world but it is in the “way”
of it, the tao, borne along at full speed: no Will presides there, but
what makes up its viability is continually ensured. China had no
need to posit “God.”
On the biblical side, however, one usually insists upon the ab-
stract, impersonal nature of this “sacerdotal Document,” didactic
and not dramatic, concerned with nomenclatures and classifica-
tions, presenting the first account of the Creation. Whereby it actu-
ally does come closer in its ritual aim to the type of preoccupations
that belong to the Classic of Change. On either side, wouldn’t the
concern be the same: to make a world order appear, a Weltordnung,
Hebraic Entry 43
to be renewed in the community or society? Attention is thus fo-

cused, for both sides, on the specifications: “The beings, according
to their category, flow [into] their actualization,” says the Chinese;
and God created the beings “according to their kind,” the biblical
side repeats. But in the first pages of Genesis, the established order
is progressive, issuing from a repeated separation—“to separate” is
the verb that organizes this opening, and the priority granted to the
otherness of the Creator can only call for a creation represented in
terms of space and time that structure one another by deploying
one another. That is why this “sacerdotal Document” evokes an ini-
tial chaos in the second verse: “there was darkness above the Void.”
This darkness is nothing but a vestige, unexpurgated, drawn from
the old cosmogonic resources; otherwise it would be illogical: since
the order of Creation is affirmed by rupture and something like
break-in, it must necessarily detach itself from an earlier disorder,
a mumbo jumbo of the unformed. It could not otherwise make an
event that could be announced. With all this in mind, we can more
easily take measure of what, in contrast, makes the processive order
so original on the Chinese side: it is not brought from Beyond, not
introduced, but neither is it progressive; rather, it is deployed in an
internal mode, sua sponte, which could be called “natural.” In short,
it is not a matter of introduction but of what we must think of as
“regulation.”
From there arise these gaps that follow from one another. In
the Bible, the light comes to oppose the darkness, even if it then
combines with it to establish an alternation. In its bursting forth,
the light gives rise to the first day of Creation, even before the stars
are created. Whereas, according to the first sentence of the Clas-
44 Hebraic Entry
sic of Change, the light accompanies all unfolding in its continual

transition, from the “end” to the “beginning.” That “vast light” illu-
minates the course of things without allowing shadow; it does not
have to liberate from negative powers, like a weapon brandished
upon encountering them. It does not have to save from the dark-
ness. In the Bible, heaven is reduced to being no more than a solid
surface, the dome of the firmament separating, on either side, the
waters that will form the ocean from those that will fall as rain.
Whereas, in China, “Heaven” becomes the first term establishing
our confidence in this continuum issuing forth reality-viability (tao,
the “way,” both terms say at once). “Heaven,” which prevailed over
the idea of a Lord above, or Shangdi, until it was edged out at the
end of Antiquity, comes to name this bottomless Fund of Process,
which, because it does not deviate, is led by itself to renew itself:
because the capacity for “beginning” “commands” in it, it is not
threatened with drying up, and that is why it is celebrated.
I will turn my attention to this idea of regulation that the Chi-
nese Heaven embodies because that is where, it seems to me, the
gap with the Bible is concentrated. But how to expand this notion,
which in our usage has remained local, technical, or physiological,
into what would make it an ultimate, global concept that, in the
face of Revelation, comes to name the absolute? Just as process is
opposed to progress, regulation is thought of in contrast to orienta-
tion (destination), an idea that prevails in the biblical revelation. In
the account in Genesis, this orientation takes us from dwelling place
to dweller: a world must be laid out, separate from its elements, so
that God can then populate it with living beings who are its orna-
ments and constitute his “army.” We can read there all the more
Hebraic Entry 45
clearly what I have not yet sufficiently explained: why, in contrast,

it says in the Classic of Change commentary that each “position”
the initiatory capacity occupies comes “in its time”; or each of the
six lines that it “mounts” like “dragons” in the figure (of the hexa-
gram) equally comes to pass “according to the moment.” Promotion
and deployment are very much present there, and not a cycle, as we
usually believe as soon as we abandon a linear progression; rather,
the same “harmony” is maintained throughout the unfolding. What
distances this from the Bible is that it is not toward perspective or
End—meaning both time limit and goal and thus naming each
stage as it is passed—that this process can lead.
The biblical account, on the contrary, leads to man: alone cre-
ated in the image of God, he is given dominion over the rest of
Creation, which finds its end in him. That the world is conceived
with a view toward man is even more pronounced in the Yahwist
account, in which God makes the garden of Eden for him. From
there, what has gone unperceived by us until now emerges dis-
tinctly: that “man” is not posited or even named as such in the Chi-
nese sentence or in its commentary, not that he is absent of course,
but that he remains included, does not stand out in this web of
countless knots—“warp and woof ” as the Chinese metaphor says
(jing-wei)—as it weaves the process of the world. Man is immedi-
ately part of the ten thousand beings, wan wu (the original referent,
we will recall, is the plow ox). He is then implicit in the idea of indi-
viduation that renders “nature” correct in forming itself into “fate”;
and finally he is found again in the “ten thousand” of the ten thou-
sand realms or principalities for which, within this regulation of the
whole, “peace” is ensured. But he does not, apart from other beings
46 Hebraic Entry
and in isolation from them, give rise to destiny itself. Even if it may
be said elsewhere that he is inscribed “as a third party with Heaven
and Earth,” he does not emerge as subject bearing within himself
the vocation of the world.
Because the “separation” that Genesis brings into play does not
involve just the physical elements. It also stems from the fact that
man, from the moment he was created, exists separate from God:
whether he is then doomed to exile, or whether it is God himself
who withdraws, the result henceforth is an absence that widens into
enigma. With the loss of proximity (to God) comes the simulta-
neous discovery of access to a responsibility (reverting to man) that
sets History in motion, and thus ensues an essential ambiguity in
which the human condition is played out. More generally, we know
that Creation sees itself only in relation to the quest for Salvation
that it opens. It cannot be understood separately from the question
of the outcome of the History that it starts, the end shedding light on
the beginning, or the eschatological alone effectively accounting for
the origin. In Creation we can perceive messianism already making
its way. Indeed, we could consider how this account of the before
was only composed after; faith in salvation projected itself onto the
beginning in order to better grasp where its potential came from.
This account of the Creation is already, theologically speaking, an
interpretation, as we know: it calls for deciphering a Meaning. Now
I think it is time to wonder in return: In the Chinese sentence that
we set out to read, is it really a matter of “meaning”?
Or rather, couldn’t that be precisely where our difficulty in
reading it arises—difficulty that does not stem from its complica-
tion, from what would constitute its ambiguity, from what would
Hebraic Entry 47
open it into enigma, but from their opposites? This sentence escapes
us because nothing catches, nothing resists in it. There is no “grain,”
Barthes would say, because it unwinds its obviousness without caus-
ing disturbance, brings its correlations into play without wanting
to take risks. We feel no lack there, no appeal to (of) the Other,
not even the rustle of an Exteriority. It unfolds and refolds without
faltering. Let us pause here to notice what, leaving us no fissure
to perceive, thus also leaves us nothing to fill in: how much more
captivating is the origin scene of the Creation—Urszene—cracked
by evil and deepening into parable! This sentence, I admit, reveal-
ing no desire or disquiet, cannot interest us. That is why sinologists
today, as I have said, so willingly set it aside, even though they know
that the basis for understanding Chinese thought is woven there,
that it constitutes the matrix, and that the tradition will never es-
cape it. The same is true in China: how much more captivating for
its play—lively, intriguing, ironic, eccentric—is the anticonform-
ist sentence of Zhuangzi. Yes, exactly, I would answer: the Yijing’s
sentence does not explore a meaning, it elucidates a “coherence.”
Meaning and coherence—which we ordinarily take to be equiva‑
lents (we speak of an “increase in meaning or coherence,” Sinn and
Zusammenhang)—seem to me, in this light coming from China, in
fact to be opposites of one another, even to expel and exclude one
another, like Revelation and Regulation. Meaning appeals, incites;
it takes root in the lack, opens onto a beyond, signals toward the
absent or the unknown. For this reason it provokes tension, responds
to anxiety. Coherence, for its part, is not and does not get excit/ed/
ing; it does not want to discover anything hidden, curtails nothing,
extends nothing, aims at nothing; it neither awaits nor arouses. It is
48 Hebraic Entry
indissociable from what is traditionally so potent in China but so

flatly rejected by our culture: ritual, but only ritual that is properly
(truly) functional. By removing itself from what might suddenly
emerge as orientation, by cutting itself off from the wish for a desti-
nation, the regulation embodying this Coherence does not in fact
leave room for the dramatic; it does not trust the pathetic. Because
this “co-herence” literally “holds together,” instead of pursuing the
rupture and adventurously exploring, instead of setting in motion a
History (from Fall to Salvation), it puts in place a mechanism (that
of reality-viability, ti-yong); far from responding to a why, it proposes
to dissolve the strangeness. Can it still speak to us?
In the Bible, this perspective of Meaning finds itself immedi-
ately conveyed by the Word. In the final analysis, what makes this
sacerdotal account so highly original, what constitutes its greatest
invention, what, in any case, produces its principle zone of homo-
geneity is, as we know, that God creates by the word. His word com-
mands, names, and blesses. Its efficacy lies in both sorting out con-
fusion and summoning forth existence. If there is break-in, creating
event, it is very much through the irruption of the Word; and be-
cause God makes the world come into being through his word, all
man’s word can be understood only as response to God: it is in and
through the word that they encounter one another. It is all the more
striking to compare, on the Chinese side, the eternal silence of the
processes (let us recall the “life in the silence of the organs,” as René
Leriche said regarding health . . .). In the Chinese entry, not only
does the word not intervene, but it is not even expected. If the word
has no place in that opening sentence of the Classic of Change, that
is clearly no mere detail. This fundamental book of Chinese civili-
Hebraic Entry 49
zation is not, as I have said, a matter of the word but of the line, the
line formed, even prior to the ideograms, by the elementary lines
of the hexagrams, which themselves find their source in the traces
fissured into the bones of sacrificial animals or tortoise shells sub-
jected to fire, according to the most ancient divinatory procedures.
Already these did not indicate a meaning but let an adequacy ap-
pear: they portended whether the sacrifices were well or badly exe-
cuted, whether the enterprise contemplated could be integrated
into the course of things without disturbing its coherence, whether
it could or could not find its place within the regulation.
Thus I believe that one of the features we most need to consider
in order to “enter” Chinese thought, where we can best perceive
what may be another possible split between Chinese and Western
thought, is that we do not see the theme of the “interior voice”
penetrating ancient China, vox rather than via, the “way,” the tao
of viability. What is God in the last analysis if not the Other who
speaks to me, to whom I can address myself ? We can provide all
the definitions or justifications of God we like, just as we can also
conceive, conversely, of all the possible refutations of God, but I
believe both sides are obliterated in the face of this postulate—or is
it an affidavit?—that God “exists” insofar as I address myself to him
and he addresses himself to me. It is this function that constitutes
“God.” Or “God” merges with this possibility of appeal. Thus to be-
lieve in God is not to trust in some dogma; rather, it is supported by
granting a founding status to the word, by considering, as the theo-
logians remind us, that it is through the word that man most intrin-
sically comes forward as subject—as the Creation account already
says. “God” is—before (behind) any intraworld procedure of ex-
50 Hebraic Entry
change and communication—the One through which the word is

affirmed, fundamentally, as a power that comes from elsewhere and
that thus is not contained by the regulations of processes. This de-
finitively separates “God” from the initiatory capacity and its com-
binatory of lines, in the figure of the hexagram, as markers and vec-
tors of energy. Because Chinese thought clearly knew the demand
for an Unconditioned, otherwise called an absolute, they named it
“Heaven,” but “Heaven,” says Confucius, “does not speak” (Ana-
lects, XVII, 19). The seasons “follow their course,” beings, so nu-
merous, “come to pass”: “what need would Heaven have to speak?”
EI G H T ■ H e l l e n i c E n t r y
The biblical account of the Beginning, which opens the course

of Time, announces itself without justifying itself: it does not pro-
claim where it comes from or what authorizes it; it is uttered without
author and without witness. The Greeks would ask themselves, on
the contrary, how to begin; they were conscious of the beginning as
a question and even as a challenge for thought. Hesiod, who is the
first among them to give a systematic account of the genesis of the
world and the gods, opens his Theogony by evoking the Muses who
inspire it: “Of the Muses of Helicon let us begin to sing.” “To begin,”
as the opening verb (archometha), is spoken by the author to himself
in the first person plural imperative, as this author introduces him-
self and overtly accepts his decision to begin. Because Hesiod does
not want to celebrate the Muses in his poem so much as be autho-
rized by them to express himself, he invokes them as both source
and support for his statement at the same time as he is aware, from
the outset, of the ambiguity belonging to speech: the Muses know
how to speak “lies exactly like realities” just as they are able, when
they desire, “to proclaim truths” (alethea gerusasthai).
The “beginning” becomes the object of an interrogation as
early as these opening Greek verses appear; likewise, as we can see,
the stakes are immediately set for truth and its cleavage: we have
entered into philosophy. A problematic orientation is adopted that
51
52 Hellenic Entry
Greek thought will continually explore and that will become its
mark. The Greek concern will be how to begin to speak of the be-
ginning. Indeed, the process can be twofold, and two options cross:
either one begins with an inaugural event (as the Bible does) be-
ginning from which one enters the course of time and which does
not claim justification, or one works back from the present to the
most distant past, enigmatic as it appears, and the investigation thus
becomes a hypothetical one of the origin and subsequently of the
foundation. That is why Hesiod in his poem presents not one but
two beginnings, considered successively. As a basis for his statement,
he begins first by starting from the present and working backward,
this side of the Muses and the Olympian gods, to the origin of the
world and the first gods. Then he begins by starting from this begin-
ning itself (ex arches, l. 115) and by evoking what happened “at the
very first” (protista) and from which the future of the world and the
gods, up to the present reign of Zeus, ensued.
Such a “beginning,” the two directions competing with one
another, is not, we can well imagine, without ambiguity: the re-
turn journey to the origin seeks an eternal foundation, whereas the
account of the advent of the world follows the temporal develop-
ment or opens with it. How to articulate them both henceforth,
the Being and the becoming, which emerge from divergent planes?
Hesiod, we note, is already facing this difficulty, even if he is not
yet thinking about it. He reports on gods who “are forever” (aei
on) at the same time that he has made the account of their beget-
ting successive. Thus Kronos knows that his fate is to succumb one
day to his own son, that is to say, “by the will of the great Zeus,”
even though this son Zeus is not yet born (l. 465): so the reign of
Hellenic Entry 53
Zeus exists before Zeus’s coming into the world. In making his re—
port, Hesiod discovers the tension—the fertile tension—born of
this difficulty; philosophy will begin with this difficulty and will
be deployed to take it over, which will effectively allow philosophy,
operating between these planes, to construct in thought (ideate),
working to separate the “ontological” from the “genetic,” or what
is principle from what makes its appearance. Arche means both, in
Aristotle’s appraisal, but through the efforts of Greek thought, the
first meaning finally becomes detached from the second. Now we
may ask ourselves: Is this rupture between the temporal and the
eternal, as it structured Greek thought, logically necessary (as the
Greeks believed)? In other words: When we are faced with these
dual levels that the Greeks wanted to clarify, what about the Chi-
nese “beginning”?
Thus we can make another entry here, although still from the
side, from the Hellenic and not the Hebraic side this time, to probe
further into what “beginning” means in the opening of the Classic of
Change. Here we will find a new means, a fresh means, formed this
time by the tool of philosophy, to question what Chinese thought
does not question—not that this difficulty that the Greeks created
is resolved in Chinese thought; rather, it is dissolved there: in this
strange bath, it is no longer recognizable. This processive “begin-
ning” that deploys itself, in Chinese thought, into “expansion,” into
“profit,” and into “rectitude” is not principle, external to becoming,
since the incitement that it activates is very much the first stage—
coming “at the head,” yuan, of an unfolding. But neither is it a fac-
tual beginning, an event, one of a first day or a first time, since this
discreet initiation of a course of things does not create rupture, as
54 Hellenic Entry
in the biblical account, but is an “operation” (yong, the Chinese

would say) that occurs everywhere at every moment: the least pro-
cess gets under way before our eyes, and this “initiation” is inex-
haustible. Even though under the sign of “Heaven,” the sum of all
process, Chinese thought does not conceive of the “eternal” (what
is forever) but rather conceives of the “without end” (what, in the
course of continually renewing itself, never runs dry, wu qiong); nor
does it let itself defer to thought of the “future” and its blind course,
nor to that of a unique History and its destination. The coherence
of regulation that this Classic of Change endeavors to restore, from
figure to figure, makes a “constancy” of change (chang) appear that
is precisely what elevates it to a “classic” (Yijing). Now it is time to
wonder: What is a “classic” of what never ceases to “change”?
At least we can already see, from this initial encounter, what the
outcome could be. This processive “beginning” will not let itself be
grasped according to those categories that are familiar to us, whether
they belong to one side or the other: from the temporal-factual (bib-
lical) side, revealing to us a History, or from the self-essential, onto-
logical (Hellenic) side, as a function of model and archetype. As
wrenching and powerful as this duality of perspectives is, it cannot
speak to us once we have passed into China. It “no longer speaks to
us”—that is, it no longer encounters anything that integrates it and
allows it to take on meaning and truth. Now, this remark applies
more generally. We can see that China does not fit into the oppo-
sition that the great tension between Greece and the Bible raises
in our minds, between Athens and Jerusalem, which has continu-
ally inspired European philosophy, even into the modern period
(Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard: Happiness (Greek) or unhappy
Hellenic Entry 55
Conscience (Jewish), or Abraham facing Socrates, the “Greek” / the

“Jew,” and so on). It does not find its place in this debate.
Let us now consider only Hesiod’s second account of the advent of

the world, inscribed in direct parallel with the one of Genesis. Let
us put aside for now the problematic, preliminary, uniquely Greek
distinction between origin and beginning, according to which the
Theogony is divided, proem and poem; as well as the conflict that
we can see already suggested there between Being and becoming,
which will widen the gap between the Bible and philosophy. It is
here that the opposition between those two prospective accounts
of the beginning, Hebraic/Hellenic put side by side, reappears and
even becomes explicit. In the final count in all of ancient literature,
that is to say, before the affirmation of science and regardless of
which culture we consider, there are only four ways of representing
the advent of the world: through generation, combat, fabrication,
and speech. Someone (some agent) either engenders or fights or
fashions or commands—we can thus arrange them, from one opera-
tion to the next, according to the activity that is the most external.
In this typology by case, the Greek and the biblical accounts per-
fectly contradict each other. In the sacerdotal account, God creates
strictly by speaking and commanding (there is more fashioning in
the Yahwist account and sometimes there is combat in the Psalms);
there is never generation. Whereas in Hesiod’s Theogony, everything
is made through generation; then those engendered powers turn
against one another and come to blows. But there is never fabrica-
tion and especially not creation through speech.
56 Hellenic Entry
How does Hesiod actually begin, and what is inscribed parallel

to the biblical Bereshit (l. 116)?
Assuredly, at the very first, came the Abyss, then followed

Earth with its wide bosom, ever sure foundation for all,
As well as Eros, the most beautiful among the immortal gods,
The one who breaks limbs under desire . . .
Thus, even what comes “at the very first,” the original abyss, Chaos,
is also (already) a matter of “becoming” (genato). Even the first
physical elements then evoked—after Earth: Heaven, sea and
rivers, mountains and stars—come about through engendering.
That is why Love, Eros, the one who mingles bodies and “tames
hearts,” is the first god to be celebrated. Then the same is true for
the gods who succeed one another generation after generation and
who overcome one another in turn to the point of threatening the
world, both through their proliferation and through their rivalry,
until Zeus finally brings good order by definitively establishing his
reign and by blocking this becoming, stabilizing it into eternity.
What do these two operations signify, dominant throughout
but mutually exclusive: creation (Hebraic) and generation (Hel-
lenic)? “Creation” (in the account of Genesis) says that a subject
acts from outside the world and projects his will onto it. “Genera-
tion” (in Hesiod’s Theogony beginning with cosmogony) expresses,
conversely, that everything is done from within the play of powers
that make the world, without intervention from outside being con-
sidered, because from what—strictly inconceivable—“Outside”
could the world be made? Whereas it is only because “God” is com-
pletely exterior to the world, not contaminated by it, that he can be
Hellenic Entry 57
absolutely good; conversely, as long as the divine remains engaged

in the power relationships that make the world, it remains as mixed
as it is, marked by its impurity and inclined toward multiplicity.
Like the gods in Homer, Hesiod’s gods, including Zeus, who reigns
definitively over them, are as greedy, deceitful, perverse, and libidi-
nous as men are; they display the whole gamut of human feelings
and are distinguished only by their immortality and power. Thus let
us note once again that what has, historically, so sharply split the
culture that would become “Western”—the split between “God” or
“the gods,” either singular or plural (monotheism or polytheism)—
effectively exists only as a consequence.
If God is absolutely pure, being exterior to the world and sepa-
rated from it, he can be conceived only in the singular, without the
heterogeneity that shapes him, disperses him, and opposes him to
himself, as is the case with the biblical God. As soon as Plato him-
self conceives of the divine as absolutely good, he can then only en-
vision it in a unitary mode (to theoin). But conversely, if the divine
is as mixed and varied as the world to which it belongs, it is inevi-
tably as diverse and multiple as that world—and then how to stop
this diversification and multiplication in which it is carried along?
Even if Hesiod finally establishes the reign of Zeus to overcome it,
he finishes his Theogony in suspension; or rather, he can only leave
it unfinished, with the gods, through their proliferation, about to
lose themselves in the human and arising in the bed of men, thus
giving birth to the race of “heroes” or demigods, where the bound-
ary between divine and human begins to be erased. On the con-
trary, the sacerdotal account of the Creation is set to close down on
itself, leading immediately to its outcome. From the beginning, it
58 Hellenic Entry
is directed toward its End. The seventh day of the week, God’s day
of rest, the Sabbath day, on which creation is completed, since that
is the full term of its unfolding, even proclaims that this End, in a
certain way, is already there; and that all the history that follows is
messianically fraught henceforth by the quest for access to this sepa-
rate order, pure and no longer dispersed, and free of all tension and
contradiction, starting from which God began his creation.
If Chinese thinking on the beginning, as we find it in the open-
ing of the Classic of Change, does not let itself be ordered according
to this Hebraic/Hellenic opposition between the accounts of Gene-
sis and the Theogony, that means it escapes the alternatives that the
latter have constructed in our mind. Might these alternatives have
been too hastily sealed? We could even go a step further in the read-
ing of the first sentence of the Chinese classic by following how
such alternatives are led to their undoing in the face of it: how their
contradiction must be smoothed out, their opposition unfolded, in
order to “enter” there. That they become null and void and effec-
tively dissolved when we pass into China, forcing us out of our ty-
pology, lets us better perceive where the originality of the Chinese
utterance lies, and this is true as much from one side as the other.
Because first of all, since this “beginning” in the Classic of
Change cannot be conceived on the model of creation, as we have
seen, we will logically be tempted to conceive it according to the
opposite model, as a matter of generation. But if, in the first figures
of the book, yin and yang effectively distinguish themselves from
one another, and couple, as feminine/masculine, all reciprocal in-
citement between them nevertheless abstracts itself into polarity: an
interaction is continually deployed, sua sponte, between these two
Hellenic Entry 59
opposed and complementary factors, without Eros, the beautiful

God of love, having to mingle them, prompting the event of indi-
vidual desire and its disorder. Or consider it the other way around:
if, in Hesiod, the male and female powers and divinities serve as
opposite factors (destabilizing engenderment on the female side,
perpetuating order on the male side), those polarities that Hesiod’s
account brings to light nonetheless fight among themselves as indi-
viduals and in a violent fashion. The Greek poet takes pleasure in
recounting these continual battles at great length: they are what
gives the story tension. Whereas in the Chinese view, harmonious
regulation immediately extinguishes the possibility of this personi-
fying drama and conflict.
Or again, let us proceed from the opposite direction: let us take
as our base the biblical account, freed of all compromise and en-
tanglements. Once more, we can first perceive a comparison, but
the longer we consider it, the more it widens the gap. The initiatory
capacity, Qian, which the first figure of the Classic of Change con-
tains in isolation and which the first sentence of the book presents,
is very much “pure” and “unitary” (chun yang 纯阳); that is, at this
stage it is not mixed with any yin element that would create ten-
sion or corrupt it; it is separate from the series of figures that follow
and that themselves account for the diversity of situations encoun-
tered and of the world as it runs. Moreover, it is only this capacity
for incitation and expansion that will be the source of all “good”
(shan 善); notably, as later thinkers will comment, mixing in the
Book of Mencius, it is this reaction deep within that prompts our
sense that the misfortune of others is unbearable to us, thus estab-
lishing the feeling of pity at the origin of all altruism. Incarnated in
60 Hellenic Entry
“Heaven,” it has absolute moral value; it is elevated to the uncon-

ditioned and bears within it the infinite. Have we suddenly toppled
back over to the Hebraic side? But this goodness engaging every
process is without Will; this positivity is without intention. This ini-
tiatory capacity is completely internal to the great Process of the
world and remains immanent there, developing sua sponte: it calls
for no Other, explores no Beyond, implies no Separation. Whereas,
it is because the biblical God remains exterior and transcendent to
his creation that he preserves his absoluteness and his purity.
This parallel between the Bible and the Theogony can be endlessly
unwound to see how Chinese thought undoes or eludes it. Being the
work of a perfect God, the biblical Creation cannot be faulted; thus
we hear only this one theme repeated throughout: “and God saw
that it was good.” However, as soon as this goodness penetrates the
world, it is no longer tenable. If the initial allusion to original chaos
only appears in passing to better highlight the creative event and the
force of that rupture, from this first perfection on, no other possi-
bility exists for the evolution of the world henceforth but to sink into
ruin: hardly is Creation completed before temptation insinuates
itself, before the assigned limit is transgressed (or else it is assigned
to be transgressed and thus to get History under way), before death
and condemnation arise in response, before harmony is broken and
Eden is lost forever. For what remains of our humanity, the only
way out of this de-creation, culminating in the Flood, is to renew
our alliance with God and his Word, to work toward a re-creation.
Hellenic Entry 61
From the perspective of Hesiod, in comparison, chaos is very

much the initial stage, void, indeterminate, without possible qualifi-
cation and purely negative, starting from which the world will come
about and organize itself, and, in doing so, progressively determine
itself as a function of the Greek postulate that determination alone
makes “being.” Since no plan is projected on the world, and no
power directs it, the powers that engender one another can do noth-
ing but enter into conflict among themselves, in order to win sover-
eignty and try to supplant one another. Eros, the god who couples,
soon finds a rival in Eris, who compels separation, and it requires all
the political acuity of Zeus, incorporating Metis, to impose a last-
ing order, by force or by ruse, neutralizing the oppositions as though
holding them at bay, his children and his parents alike: not only by
overthrowing the earlier gods, like the Titans, and taking them out
of the game but also by blocking the expansion of the divinities born
of him, who encroach upon his power and already threaten him.
Now what strikes us when we enter into Chinese thought is that
we no longer find any place for “chaos” there, however it is viewed,
as residual or principle. The first sentence of the Classic of Change
is ignorant of it, and the rest of the book as well. It ignores it—that is
to say, it does not let itself be disturbed by it in any way. That tension
between order and disorder that we already see looming in the back-
ground of the biblical creation, and starting from which Hesiod,
too, organizes his whole theogony, is not encountered there. If there
is no “Chaos,” can there be “Cosmos”? What is an orderly world that
has not had to triumph over chaos or even needed to differentiate
itself from it? Don’t we run into “evil” in Chinese thought? Let us
62 Hellenic Entry
go one step further and ask: Could it be so unrealistic? In any case,

we do not encounter Evil there as a principle and as a power in and
of itself, whether in the figure of rebellion or of temptation.
Because if the initiatory capacity, purely yang, is totally posi-
tive, the capacity that is coupled with it, the receiving capacity, yin
(Kun, the second figure of the book), is equally so—at least insofar
as it respects its nature, which is “to welcome” and “to conform to”
the initiatory capacity that penetrates and directs it. In a logic of
regulation, yin is bad, or rather, not-good, only through inadequacy.
From there it follows that, if we do indeed encounter “unlucky”
(xiong 凶) figures and positions over the course of the book (“De-
cline,” “Retreat,” “Dissolution,” “Deprivation,” “Elimination” . . .),
there is nevertheless not one that is irresolvable or truly dramatic:
even in the worst situation, it would still be possible to perceive,
even if only in a latent state, an “initiator” of renewal (a yang line)
through which the initiatory capacity discretely reengages the pro-
cess (the viability) by re-inciting and getting (itself) under way
again. Thus all one must do is make oneself “supple” and receptive
enough, which is the yin virtue, to make room for this initiatory fac-
tor of renewal and to allow for its full “expansion” to the point of
being able to “profit” from it.
Now if there is no chaos that threatens and must be vanquished,
if there is no opposing force that must be confronted, neither is
there any possible account. As soon as there is no dramatic, agonis-
tic tension at work, there is no longer anything to relate. In order for
something to happen, something that can be recounted, there must
be evil to deal with or at least resistance to encounter. No negative
means no “story.” This first Chinese sentence, as we can see, opens
Hellenic Entry 63
no account; likewise, in all of the Classic of Change we will not

find the least element of narration. We therefore find neither crime
nor punishment: there is no tragedy to fear or salvation (a way out)
to hope for. There is (are) neither agent(s) nor story(ies). I wonder:
Isn’t that in fact where the gap with the traditional literature of Be-
ginnings most obviously opens? And this time, facing China, the
Bible and Hesiod again find themselves very much on the same side.
Because if in the sacerdotal account we are actually only deal-
ing with a half-story, since the mother cell of the “first day” is sys-
tematically reported in the following days, and only discursiveness
makes sequence necessary (God, at least from man’s perspective,
not being able to pronounce everything at the same time), the real
story opens as soon as evil appears, as soon as the order of the Cre-
ation is cracked. The same is true for Hesiod: since the engendered
powers are in ever-renewed conflict with one another, the story is
fully developed; hand in hand with the genealogical series, this is
what weaves the theogonical web. It is true that the stabilization
brought about by Zeus draws the becoming toward Being and con-
sequently tends to make an exit from the story. But Chinese regu-
lation, as we can see clearly from its side, is not stability at all: it
does not establish a permanent order but maintains in equilibrium
that which must continually transform itself. Thus, instead of exiting
dramatic History, it never makes an entrance there. It is clear that
conceiving of coherence in this way does not let event stand out as
a bearer of meaning around which the story would take shape; in
other words, a logic of regulation in and of itself dissolves all possi-
bility of narration. Now our modernity (or postmodernity) has often
been presented as the exit of the great Narratives. What to think
64 Hellenic Entry
then, or I would ask, in what historicity does one live when, as in

China, one has passed alongside those great Accounts?
By posing this question, we will at least verify something that
began for me as a consignment and that is now nothing more than
a truism (or is considered only a banality as long as it has not been
experienced): “to enter,” it is necessary to exit; to penetrate into
Chinese thought, it is necessary to leave a “home” way of thought
and let oneself be disturbed. Because when we pass into China, not
only do our traditional representations lose their relevance—that is,
our representations that oppose Being and becoming, or creation
and generation, or monotheism and polytheism—but the contra-
diction around which Western thought takes shape and which
underlies those oppositions is undone as well, the contradiction of
muthos and theos: of the theological (promoted by the Bible) and
the mythological (deployed by Hesiod). What other possibility can
we enter, then, that is neither one nor the other—in other words,
that escapes their alternative: a possibility of thought that, all told,
is perhaps no stranger than the others but that the others have not
conceived, according to their enlisted choices, or even just simply
imagined.
NIN e ■ U n d o i n g O u r A l t e r n a t i v e s
At this point the question of beginning is turned around—let us

point it back at ourselves: Circulating among so many beginnings,
have we ourselves properly begun? Did we begin with the begin-
ning when we chose to “enter” into Chinese thought starting from
the first account of Genesis and Hesiod’s narrative, passing alter-
nately from one to the other—that is to say, both by positing the two
of them as the first and by opposing them to one another? Wasn’t
I too quick to resume this convenient match established by tradi-
tion? Because for more than a century we have discerned—and this
knowledge is confirmed with each new discovery by paleographers
and archaeologists—that neither the sacerdotal account of Gene-
sis nor the Greek poem of the Theogony burst forth all at once like
single blossoms at the dawn of humanity. They reflect a much vaster
cultural whole, both external and anterior, that sets us journeying
throughout the Near and Middle East, from Sumer to the Hittites
to Mesopotamia; we must thus move from history to geography. We
have opposed them as two different sides, in their construction and
their intention—theological on the one hand, mythological on the
other; but don’t they draw from a common fund, as does the Baby-
lonian poem Enuma Elish? Coming later as they do, aren’t they
akin to or influenced by each other? It is through contamination by
Greek speculation on origin, we should note, that the biblical cre-
65
66 Undoing Our Alternatives
ation story was finally conceived—and logically, that is to say, ac-

cording to the requirements of logos—as creating itself out of noth-
ing, ex nihilo, in the second book of the Maccabees.
Let us remember, moreover, that the sacerdotal Document
with which the Bible opens is not the first; that the Yahwist account
of Creation, which appears after it, preceded it. Commentators
have delighted in emphasizing how material and anthropomorphic
the creative act of God seems in the Yahwist account, how unre-
fined: the creator is only dealing with a garden plot, a stream water-
ing his land, a man who takes his place as farmer or tenant farmer.
He makes water well up from that land like a well digger, he puts
in plants like a gardener, he shapes the human body like a potter.
. . . We are still far from a God conceived as external to the world
and transcending it. Now, even if the sacerdotal Document sub-
sequently takes care to erase those anecdotal and excessively imag-
ined representations, it cannot make us forget that they preceded it,
that it is nevertheless their heir, and that the Bible, in the end, was
not averse to retaining them.
Because from this common fund shared with Babylonia, there
remains not only the image of a God producing men as one molds
clay, the “tree of life,” the garden of “Eden.” Jean Bottero makes
clear to us as well, when we follow him among those cultures, how
the protoscientific knowledge of the Babylonians served as support
for the sacerdotal account itself of Genesis, placed at the beginning
but already decanted. Whether the transmission was diffuse, via
Syria and Phoenicia, or occurred directly at the time of the Babylo-
nian exile of the Jews, the contamination, as we have been shown, is
obvious. This raises the question that has been advancing insidiously
Undoing Our Alternatives 67
for more than a century and that the exegetes have not been able to
escape: Wouldn’t such an influence dissolve the originality of the
biblical account of the “Creation,” undermining both its status as
exception and the authority it assumes as “Revelation”? So deeply
do these analogies and intersections affect the very act of the Cre-
ator: for example, that the biblical God proceeds by “separation,”
the master word of this account, and first of all within the aque-
ous mass itself, may recall the separation of Tiamat’s body into two
parts—one becoming the sky, the other the earth—in the Babylo-
nian epic. And most important, the biblical God does not begin his
work starting from nothing but has to organize an original chaos,
which goes back to the Babylonian cosmogonic conception, accord-
ing to which everything is perceived in becoming: to the point of
blurring any first opening from which Creation, as an event, could
have absolutely begun.
The carefully elaborated reflections of theologians faced with
this difficulty seem to me revealing in terms of our inquiry into
the possibilities of thought. Once stripped of all apologetics, these
reflections pose the question of how to view cultural singularities:
it is precisely because Israel shares many representations with the
Near and Middle East that its own choices might be all the better
perceived. These cultural singularities stand out, as we are shown,
as material to revisit; and the successive accounts that rewrite the
Creation make them more and more apparent in the Bible, from
the Yahwist narrative to the book of Job. The monotheistic require-
ment that comes to assert itself may be thus all the more striking as it
breaks with the ambient polytheism and isolates itself from it: a theo-
logical conception of Genesis is revealed there that distances itself
from the original burgeoning of the cosmogonies and, at the same

time, condemns them. Instead of the divinities’ evolution remain-
ing included within the world’s, God establishes himself outside the
cosmos more and more strongly through the course of the rewrit-
ings, even as he presides over its continuation through his wisdom
alone. Or again, as sexuality and generation find themselves trans-
ferred solely to the side of creatures, the conflict inherent in the de-
velopment of life no longer affects God. “It is not within the universe
that you created the universe,” Augustine would conclude in a deci-
sive remark. That God no longer has to struggle to impose his power,
his word being sufficient to make everything come about, lets a gra-
tuitousness then appear within the world, free from the constraints
of phenomena and from the relationships of forces. Similarly, the
act of creation is pure of the various violent, self-interested feelings
that marked the Babylonian accounts; and in return, it is no longer
up to man to sustain the life of the gods, as one appointed to sac-
rificial service, but instead to recognize that generosity that made
his being: his very vocation becomes responding to this invitation.
Thus resources are there, as clear choices and options, increas-
ingly in concert, extracting themselves at once from the cosmogo-
nical and from the mythological (from the cosmogonical as concep-
tion and from the mythological as representation): they constitute
what I would call a possibility for thought. Barely glimpsed, the idea
that supports “Moses” works and makes its way; such a way of think-
ing about God can deepen only according to a unitary and monopo-
lizing mode and, consequently, by absolutizing itself. Discerned in
the tangle of primitive imaginings, this thread lets itself be separated
out; indeed, by affirming itself, this option turns itself around into
a requirement. In short, once discovered, this lode (theological be-

coming) lends itself to being indefinitely exploited: Would it let its
richness be exhausted? Because as we can already see through the
biblical rewritings of the Beginning, the need to de-cosmogonize
God and demythologize his Creation will never end: the need to
block what any representation can only ever describe in terms of
“world”; what our categories, even the most abstract ones of space
and time, can only ever apprehend in an internal mode and as an in-
ternal order, thus letting their incomprehensible Beyond escape, as
Job discovers as he gives his support to transcendence—support that
the “Creation,” from the outset, already solemnly wanted to grant.
We may thus proclaim the “death of God” as much as we like,
but it only prevents an approach to the thinkable from a simulta-
neously monopolizing and absolutizing perspective. Just as Genesis
begins to produce “God” starting from the One—from the Other—
from the External—from the Infinite, so this production will no
longer let God be resorbed, or reduced by any counterargument,
or disposed of. The affirmation, even the demonstration, that God
“is not” does not supplant God. Have we turned our attention fully
enough to this resistance? Has our rationalism sufficiently contem-
plated it? Such a possibility, or fecundity, is indeed supported by an
internal coherence, of both self-justification and self-deployment,
that never renders it completely accessible to some inquisition from
outside. The discussion is stopped at this border; and philosophy is
wrong to believe that such a gulf can be completely spanned by
reason (but Plato already knew this). The seemingly preliminary
question—whether God “exists” or not—seems of another order
and, finally, out of place beside this; it has no hold over and never
encounters this: “God” is effectively rendered present as soon as I

introduce in myself that tension that can take in “everything” and
to which the Bible, as early as its account of the Creation, serves as
vector and invitation.
That Nietzsche himself endlessly circled around this difficulty
is very much what gives his philosophy its power. Although we can
denounce in the tradition originating in the Bible a destructive ap-
peal for vengeance against life, the cultivation of resentment and
decadence, an inspiration appears there, nevertheless, that has not
only “refined,” but again, in its fashion, deployed humanity; and
once this theological resource is discovered, can it let itself run dry?
Not that a place must be saved for mystery (condemned on principle
to the residual, in face of the progress of knowledge), but does the
possibility remain open that no reason is any longer in a position
to reclose: that “God” serves to name the Other, becoming “You,”
to whom an “I” can always immediately address itself—and isn’t
it even what renders useless, null, and void any mediation, at the
same time that it removes any constraint or condition? “God” will
name the Infinite that, through its irruption, mentally uncloses all
finitude, liberates from all fear or frustration, or else will name that
Exterior that at the same time discovers itself in the depths of a “me”
as that which is most intimate, or rather, as that which continually
deepens that “me” into an intimacy-infinity (from which European
romanticism drew such great effect). Would such a dimension of
what will deploy itself in the history of the culture as consciousness
have been able to develop if God had not been posited as the great
Guarantor? Because we know that what is called “consciousness”
is a fruit, poisonous perhaps, but slowly ripened; and it is owing to
“God,” more than the object, that something like “subjectivity” was
brought to light, even if it later meant calling him the “Great ob-
ject,” as in the Classical period, when science triumphs. Because
once engaged, this possibility can make use of experience (or ex-
perience can make use of it) and is sufficient for reconfiguring it.
Now as soon as we take this truant path and begin to circulate ever
so slightly, here and there, among the cultures, the Greek Theogony
poses the same problem to us as Genesis does: Treating the begin-
ning of the world itself, could it serve to mark a beginning? Am I
even permitted to treat the “Greek” beginning in this way, isolating
it, excessively perhaps? Did the “Greeks” indeed ever exist? Haven’t
they been constructed by our Humanities? Because as recent docu-
mentation reveals ever more clearly, Hesiod’s poem also possesses
an Eastern background. In the Kumarbi myth, for example, the god
of lightning was considered, like Zeus, to be the supreme figure
in the Hittite pantheon; as in the Theogony, it is reported there
not only his entry into the world after generations of gods but also
his elevation to the kingship of the heavens. We can go even fur-
ther into the details here: we find a god who, like Kronos, swal-
lows a stone in place of his son, and we find that just as Ouranos,
Hesiod’s Sky, is castrated by Kronos, so is Anu castrated by Kumarbi.
In both myths, scenes of plotting, vengeance, and Titanesque fight-
ing among the gods follow one after another. If we turn once again
to Mesopotamia, we likewise learn that the Enuma Elish epic cele-
brates in young Marduk a counterpart of Hesiod’s Zeus; he elimi-
nated his rivals and triumphed over the monsters like Tiamat, who
corresponds to Typhon. Like Zeus, Marduk eventually imposes his

justice and peace upon the world. Could this be the very archetype
from which the Hittite myth, as well as Hesiod’s Theogony, is de-
rived? Setting out in search of sources and parallels, we could in any
case make an endless list of them: but beyond transmissions and in-
fluences, could the human imagination prove to be so limited when
it comes to evoking the beginning of the world?
What other large-scale possibility might thus emerge that the
biblical “Creation,” for its part, might have worked to separate itself
from and that, because it does not disengage itself from a cosmo-
gonical becoming, would thus constitute the web of its episodes
and events? Hesiod’s poem, through its poetic development, might
thus mark one point in it, not a starting point but already a point of
completion. To consider this possibility mythological, as opposed
to theological, in fact brings to light another resource, forming an
alternative; and we must again wonder whether its richness, though
condemned by the other alternative, is indeed exhausted. To what
extent would the “myth” thus let itself expire? Because in the case of
myth, presenting a beginning of the world is no longer a matter of ex-
tracting an Outside that can support transcendence, as in the Bible,
but of testing, in the figures of the gods and begetting, the lines of
tension and agency; it is no longer a matter of yielding to the ver-
tigo of the infinite but of providing narrative schemas, muthoi, that
may also be explicative. This resource, so magnificently exploited
by Hesiod, is not mystical but already symbolic: it is grounded on
what will come to be, not “faith,” but fiction (for the purpose of ex-
ploration)—rival categories, henceforth, to the point of mutual ex-
clusion; and creating a following, in this case, will depend on the

pleasure produced by the imaginary.
Because instead of distrusting the narrative, as we can see that
the sacerdotal document already does, myth invites it. Instead of re-
fraining from offering representations in worldly terms, it delights
in the representation of a world deploying the play of its internal
powers, of which the “gods” are the convenient incarnation, and
of which the finite, this time, allows the beauty of a formal evoca-
tion to be leisurely traced. The tension produced henceforth no
longer stems from absolutization but from variation (of passions
and situations alike, but enlarged and theatricalized to the cosmic
scale); it no longer stems from exaltation (sublimation) but from
dramatization: throughout the poem, Hesiod exploits the convinc-
ing charm of the Muses as well as the monsters, of the amiable as
well as the terrifying. Also, since his poem is denounced fairly early
on as not being truth but fabrication, Hesiod immediately protect-
ing himself from that ambiguity, the possibility of the mythological
is only apparently subject to harm. These “calculated imaginings,”
evocatory-exploratory attempts to clarify the ever enigmatic begin-
ning of things, will find their future, as well as their revenge, in what
the sacerdotal account of Genesis, already running counter to its
Yahwist precedent and in reaction to it, tried precisely to dispose of.
They already play into what will be affirmed in and will authorize
literature. Running parallel to the dogmatic, to which the theologi-
cal is led, and compensating for it, the vein of this possibility could
not, any more than that one, be exhausted.
T EN ■ W h e r e W o u l d
the Beginning Begin?
“To enter” is operative. Entering proceeds in a single time,

makes clear its ins and outs, comprises the two ends of its jour-
ney. On the other hand, “to compare” is endless: comparing is in-
exhaustible. We can go on forever counting off the intersections,
searching farther and elsewhere for the parallels. Doesn’t compar-
ing already admit to growing tiresome—because, setting out as we
have in search of a beginning of the beginning, where could we
come to a stop? Considering one civilization behind another and
each time pushing the horizon further back, wouldn’t we finally
have to go all the way back to Egypt? And even to the edge of the
Nile rather than to Babylon? Isn’t that where we would have to seek
that beginning of the thinking on beginnings? In Egypt, we notice,
the accounts of the “beginning” multiply, as cyclical time does: they
vary from place to place, stretch over a lengthy course, and are ex-
pressed in a variety of documents that range from hymn to funeral
phrase, from dedication to ritual, without any one text assembling
them in a unitary, didactic fashion, even if afterward we could look
to find something compatible there. So many times and in so many
various ways, the “First time” is evoked. . . . What city hasn’t estab-
lished its local god, its ancient tribal god, as universal creator? There-
74
Where Would the Beginning Begin? 75
fore, to establish a parallel, what more orderly conception could we

make emerge from this juxtaposition and this pileup?
Nonetheless, once the two possibilities of the theological and
the mythological are established opposite one another, as two colon-
nades, can’t we hope to get our bearings by filing this welter of rep-
resentations between them? As soon as this polarity is posited, it
would be only a matter, from one case to the next, of shifting the
cursor to pinpoint each instance of originality. Egypt’s mythologi-
cal treasures strike us immediately, but could the theological pos-
sibility also come to light there? Because all things did not emerge
from darkness there, still less out of nothing, through the action of
a god external to the world and supposedly “atemporal,” properly
creative. They emerge, the Egyptologists report, from a latent state
that, unmarked by any determination, is chaotic, as in all mythologi-
cal resources, and that is first represented by an expanse of water.
This expanse contains the seeds of becoming, and every potential
demiurge is found submerged there—such is the Nun: a motif com-
mon to so many ancient cultures but that finds its landscape natu-
rally in the Nile, which periodically floods and fertilizes the land
with its waters.
With the exception of water, everything might have a beginning
on the shore of the Nile. But how can we hope to set some limit to
the possible variations as soon as we imagine this advent in terms
of the “world”? Is it the sun that sets the genesis of the universe in
motion (Re, but Atum before him, according to the syncretism of
Heliopolis), its heat making vegetation germinate, its light making
all the distinctions emerge? Or is it the first emerged land, the ini-
76 Where Would the Beginning Begin?
tial hillock, the island that finally appeared, that “earth that rises up”
and provides life with its matter (Ptah, at Memphis)? Or again, is it
the luminous atmosphere (Shu) that separates earth and sky, that
puts the world’s props in place and raises the vault of the heavens?
Or is it Thoth, who is also the god of writing, or is it . . . ? Indeed, must
that originary scene be imagined, even before the birth of the sun,
as the emergence of a cow from the Nun to give birth to divinity, or
as a hatched egg, or as a lotus that opens one morning on the sur-
face of the waters, or as a snake winding through the marshes, or
as . . . ? Once opened, the array of mythological representations can
be closed again only arbitrarily. Nevertheless: let this god be born
of no one, let him be called the Solitary or the Unique One, and he
already moves closer to the other shore, in all its inexpressible mys-
tery, the shore of the theological lode and inspiration.
Thus in Egypt, on the one hand, we have physical representa-
tions fertilizing the mythological, whose richness and diversity we
could endlessly inventory: those gods and all the beings are born of
the demiurge’s first masturbation, from its spittle, or from the tears
of the sun. And as we find so commonly elsewhere, this demiurge
shapes or works with clay on the wheel, he is modeler and potter
(Khnum at Esna). But on the other hand, this divine creation is
perfect, a unique god, as in the Bible, “ordering absolutely nothing
defective”; it is only starting with man’s revolt and the first mytho-
logical battles that death—physical or moral evil—is introduced
into the cosmic order. Because as this god implements the plan for
creation conceived in his heart, he has only to pronounce the word
for the thing to exist. His creation is realized through the word and
the mind; and as Bottero notes, this advent through speech might
thus even be what is remembered in the Bible, the sacerdotal ac-
count of creation finding support in Egypt to promote its theologi-
cal inspiration.
Where could we, as we head off elsewhere, learn something else of

“beginning”? How do we not succumb to that temptation, which
drives all travel, that makes us believe that by going farther we will
discover something new—as if, because something is distant, it is
different . . . ? Bridging the cultural resources of the ancient West
and East, the immense work of Georges Dumézil allows us to reach
India and to get our bearings ever so slightly in its burgeoning forest
of myths and speculations. In India, we are warned, as in Egypt or
even more so, we are dealing with an expanse of time, a multiplicity
of conceptions, and a proliferation of divergent interpretations that
even willingly contradict one another. Doesn’t the thought of begin-
ning itself finally dissolve, or at least become relative, by being re-
peated in various ways over the course of genealogical undertakings:
“In the beginning . . .”? In any case, in India we find again, as the
Indian experts confirm, that whole stock of images, motifs, and ex-
planatory schemas that henceforth seem to constitute the required
paraphernalia for all thinking about a beginning of the world: the
egg (golden), the lotus (rising from Vishnu’s belly), the seed, and
especially the primordial waters, that first vagueness made up of
darkness and escaping all characterization; but also the universal
artisan or the Demiurge, whether he is Prajapati or Brahma; and
78 Where Would the Beginning Begin?
also the etymological promptings as well as the power to utter just

the name to call the thing into existence: “Bhur, he pronounced;
and this earth appeared.”
In India even more than elsewhere, the mythological lode is
abundant, its flowering lush; the cosmogonical web is endlessly re-
woven according to school and genre. All the same, does this output
that gives carte blanche to the imagination know how to open other
ways, to depart from certain schemas? Not that the so-called fertile
imagination finally admits to being sterile, or that it is internally
ruled by archetypes, but it is nevertheless true that the very idea of
beginning, as soon as it is represented physically, is subjected to that
limit. As early as in the Vedic hymns, creation is often the work of
a god embodying a natural principle: always either fire or the sun
or water. . . . “In the beginning, in truth, there was only water . . .”;
or is it creative ardor . . . ? Or if not that, the universe might be con-
sidered the work of all the gods together, each one producing some
part of it. Or else it is from the dismemberment of the cosmic man,
at once victim and sacrificer, of whom “all beings are a segment,”
that the world is born. . . . Or else it is the elements gradually pulling
away from one another through progressive heating, so that Praja-
pati finally appears, who, in turn, creates the universe. Or else . . .
Once again, originality will come from elsewhere through the
shaping of this mythological material. An eternal impersonal prin-
ciple emerged early in Indian speculation, from behind the throng
of divinities; existing before creation, it rendered it phantasma-
gorical: Is the idea of creation still relevant, or rather, isn’t it on
the point of disintegrating? Brahman, of whom the created world
is only appearance, is anterior both to Being and to Nonbeing, to
the point that either could be equally and successively affirmed as

having been “at the beginning.” In the end I would ask the Indian
experts if India won’t lead the idea of beginning—through prolif-
eration—to exhaustion? The result in any case is that, if an originary
scene of creation really exists, here as elsewhere, we learn that in
India it is led to repeat itself, the unique principle from which the
world is derived thus periodically tending to resorb it. And so the
curtain falls on the great drama of creation and returns it to silence:
Vishnu sleeps on his serpent, then once again awakens after millions
of years, again setting in motion the creative process.
e LE V EN ■ N e i t h e r G o d n o r M y t h :
W h a t Ot h e r P o s s i b i l i t y ?
After making turns and detours and cutting short inexhaust-

ible comparisons, there is this, at least, that ought to suffice once
again to make us enter. Having parted from those different shores,
from all those Easts pouring out their treasures of images and specu-
lations, couldn’t we finally, in returning to Chinese thought, see
more clearly what threshold we are thus crossing? A door gradually
emerges from the row where, between those side posts, thought
lets itself be framed. Will we perceive another possibility there, or,
first, wouldn’t the perspectives previously established have to be en-
gulfed? Because after shifting the lines of the foreign and the famil-
iar as far as possible in order to see the cleavages align, after starting
from the West to cross through this gallery of the Near, Middle,
and then Far East, and all in search of a typology that is at once re-
fined and enlarged, the fact is that, coming “to China,” we might
suddenly be more inclined to undo than to add, to subtract than
to supplement. Finally we can penetrate the first sentence of the
Classic of Change as though entering an astonishingly cleared site.
We can take measure of what, without realizing it, that sentence has
avoided; we can read it (from outside) in what (it does not know) it
does not say. “Beginning—expansion—profit—rectitude,” and that
is all: could we dream of anything more pure? This sentence does
80
Neither God nor Myth 81
not allow for imagining or speculation, for mythologizing or theolo-

gizing, and steers as clear of cosmogonical becoming as of eternal
Being; of the inventory of elements, components, and materials as
of the ineffable One. It neither dramatizes nor creates the hope of
salvation. It neither recounts nor constructs; it summons no Agent,
artisan, or even bestiary; it draws up no originary scene—wherein
lies, first of all, its originality.
The whole Classic of Change will say no more of this. It is not
one book among others within Chinese civilization, a book that
the others could challenge or criticize or simply vary or complete.
This sentence is the start of a reflection that more than two mil-
lennia have not altered. Can it even elicit debate, something other
than gloss and explanation? Wang Fuzhi, a thinker from the seven-
teenth century, who is undoubtedly one of the most powerful in
the whole history of Chinese thought, offers this commentary on it
at the beginning of his last work devoted to the Classic of Change,
upon which he meditated continually throughout his life. A life so
perilous and dramatic! In a China fallen prey to great peasant re-
volts and then coming under the yoke of the Manchus, he yielded
neither to the court intrigue of rival factions nor to the temptation
of a monastic retreat and remained a resister, a resister confident
in the coherence of History, whom nothing weakened or drove to
despair: confident because the Classic of Change was what he read
and practiced. We can, I believe, now read the beginning of his com-
mentary from start to finish:
The initiatory capacity (Qian) is the deployment of the

breath-energy (qi ).
82 Neither God nor Myth
The concentration of the yin energy constitutes the tangible

and the opaque:
coagulating as it does over time, the result is materiality.
The yang energy, circulating within and without the tangible
and the opaque,
constitutes the animating energy and the spirit:
over time, it deploys (itself ) and communicates throughout,
promotes and sets in motion, in relationship with the yin,
and renders positive its modification-transformation:
there is no magnitude that it does not attain,
no smallness that it does not penetrate,
its functioning is harmonious and gentle,
but it leaves nothing unfinished—
that is why it is called persevering (jian).
For this first figure all the lines are yang:
their own nature and the effect that results are all deployment
and effusion
and pure in this perseverance . . .
The Classic of Change establishes the initiatory Capacity

(Qian) and the receiving Capacity (Kun) both at once as
the great beginning:
with that complete sufficiency of yin and of yang,
it has control over the modification-continuation of the sixty-
two other figures.
In the immensity of the past to the present,
in the vastness of the between Heaven and Earth,
whether it is a matter of the constituent nature of the least
thing,
the efficacy-capacity of the least course of action,

there is never yin without yang,
never yang without yin,
just as there is not Earth without Heaven
nor Heaven without Earth,
so that it is not suitable to establish a single figure purely yang
and without yin.
But here, since pure yang is considered to be the initiatory

capacity,
it is to highlight, within the evolution where yin and yang are
combined,
the vast, burgeoning course of yang.
The sixty-two other figures each have their proper moment,
but the initiatory and receiving capacities are without specific
moments.
The initiatory Capacity, touching vast creation, constitutes
the evolutionary course of Heaven;
touching men and all beings, it constitutes the spirit
animating their nature;
touching the multitude of affairs, it constitutes the
penetration of knowledge;
touching study and apprenticeship, it constitutes the inner
capacity to master (oneself ) and to make order reign;
touching the alternation of good and bad luck, of order and
disorder,
it constitutes the burgeoning of administration and
management:
84 Neither God nor Myth
that is why it is established hand in hand with the receiving

capacity
and why this initiatory capacity possesses its own structure
and operation.
Thus some twenty-five centuries later, with regard to this first

sentence of the Classic of Change, it is still a matter in China of
elucidating the single phenomenon that is at once beneficial incite-
ment and polarity. Because it is only from the internal play of this
energy correlated to the other, opposed and complementary—yang
and yin, “initiatory” and “receiving” capacities—that all reality de-
rives, that reality may be considered from the perspective of ani-
mated beings, encountered situations, or activities. Could we thus
be content with calling this other possibility that we discover in
China “cosmological,” as is customary? In any case, we can see that
it forms a triangle equally with the mythological as with the theo-
logical and that its purpose is to capture the coherence belonging
to every process, whatever the scale or mode. The question here is
very much that of “great beginning” (tai shi), of the Book as of phe-
nomena, but that beginning has nothing of fact or event about it. It
is very much a matter of “vast creation” (da zao), but that is noth-
ing other than the course of things in continuous actualization—
“modification and transformation” (bian-hua 变化). Such an ini-
tiatory capacity is very much conceived as separate in its purity and
its specific nature, hence its absolute capacity to “positivize” the
process of things (shan qi bianhua), but nonetheless it never ceases
to inhabit the least situation and does not refer to any Outside of
the world; nor does it conceive of a cosmos drawn out of chaos any
more than it does a creator God.
Because the spiritual and the material are bound together here,
indissociably linked, continuously dependent; or rather let us trans-
late these terms as the “spiritualizing” and the “materializing.” They
are the dual, joint dimension of all process and do not let them-
selves be formed into separate levels or domains. Or, to be closer to
the Chinese formulations, let us designate them as the animating
breath and the reifying opacity, acknowledging that the latter is un-
mired as soon as it lets itself be traversed and incited by the former.
Because if there were no receiving capacity opposite it, what could
the initiatory capacity touch and set in motion? So this Chinese
conception has no need either to represent, in terms of the world,
or to resist representation to make way for transcendence. Never-
theless, even while exposing the faults of our inherited categories,
perhaps it is no more surprising to us than any other conception, as
I have said, or even not surprising at all. Because such a conception,
in the end, invents nothing or as little as possible, whether figura-
tively or theoretically. But as soon as it thus quiets all anxiety, can it
still excite us, or even simply “speak” to us?
T W EL V e ■ W h e n M y t h H o l d s N o I n t e r e s t ,
When God Holds No Monopoly
Could China thus have totally ignored the question of a begin-

ning of the world? Could it have completely missed what everyone
so eagerly reminds us of, including the theologians: “that it is always
through myth that man names his origins and thus locates himself
in the world, facing death or the enigma of evil, and facing his gods”?
This is how Pierre Grisel presents it in his book on the Creation. Ar-
riving in China, can we still maintain such a generality, whatever
the comfort it offers and however it nourishes an easy humanism?
The sinologist Max Kaltenmark, at the end of his collective work on
“the birth of the world,” gives us immediate warning. After follow‑
ing the required itinerary—beginning his survey with Egypt, Sumer,
the Hittites, and Canaan, continuing his inventory through Israel
and Iran, through India and the Mongols, and finally completing
his tour in China—he opens this last chapter by anticipating dis-
appointment: “The documents that inform us about ancient Chi-
nese mythology are distinguished by their paucity”; “there are only
scattered fragments, usually corrupt” because “the oldest texts pre-
served no legendary tradition regarding the origin of the universe.”
What gets reported to us, on the other hand, in a historicized and
moralizing fashion, are the beginnings of Chinese civilization (as
is the case in the “Great Commentary” of the Classic of Change,
86
When Myth Holds No Interest 87
B, 2). Now this is very much what China presents us with, even if we
look beyond the Classic of Change: China retains just vague traces
of the mythological, but neither does it deepen theological reflec-
tion, as if recognizing that neither orientation was interesting, that
is, neither seemed to be a path worth venturing down.
It goes without saying that these eroded mythological remnants,
when they are found in China, where they have only occasionally
been preserved, inexorably bring us back to the familiar: the egg,
the separating of elements, clay molded to fashion humans, waters
covering the land. . . . One isolated passage from a lost work, dating
from after Antiquity and retained only in encyclopedias, reports to
us that Pangu grew inside the undifferentiated source as in an egg,
broke his way out of it with an ax, and separated Heaven from Earth.
Beginning from which, Heaven, each day, grew a zhang (ten feet),
and Earth, each day, thickened by a zhang, which strangely enough
might recall, or rather, foretell, what the physicists are now saying
about an expanding universe, the modern (scientific) version of the
Creation. . . . Let us remember, however, that the Chinese literati
never paid much attention to this account; and that, moreover, it
is much less narrative than it might seem at first glance, since it is
based, as ever, on the conception of yin and yang forming a polarity
and underlying the world, as well as on the uninterrupted chain of
transformations.
Likewise, we find here that “after Heaven and Earth became
separate beings,” Nüwa “modeled the yellow mud and made men
from it.” “But,” the passage continues, “despite all the energy she put
into it, she could not see her work through, so she soaked a rope in
the mud and, raising it into the air, created other men.” Here we see
88 When Myth Holds No Interest
that, hardly has this figure of the artisan appeared than the egali-
tarian theme of the creation of men, which leads so easily to uni-
versalism, is lost, and we slip back into a hierarchical vision, which
is common in China. “That is how,” the explanation reads, “the
nobility and the rich came from the earth and the common people
were produced with rope.” Furthermore, if such a narrative schema,
lending itself easily to representation, was able to serve as figurative
element, a memory of which the iconography retains, did it, in fact,
fertilize thinking? What intellectual trace did it leave, beginning
from which Chinese thought would be developed? This motif is only
mentioned in a few lines in a dictionary and is found reported only
in one General Anthology of Customs (Ying Shao’s Fensu tongyi ),
which is itself cited in a later compilation. . . . This is scant vestige,
in truth, in a culture where the Text dominated.
The remains, therefore: the mythological resources that China
might have known encountered hardly any use or possible deploy-
ment there, starting very early on, with thinkers of Antiquity. Also,
those remains themselves only rarely emerge and are immediately
diverted, altered in their perspective. So what was it that resisted
and blocked the mythological vein here, that we are so quickly—
imprudently—informed should be the bedrock for all cultures
worldwide? We see it, for example, in Mencius (III, B, 9). If in one
sentence he recalls that “in the time of the sovereign Yao” (thus
already within dynastic history), water flooded all the principalities
of the Center, it is not to ponder this de-creation but rather to better
justify the logic of regulation, according to which, in his eyes, his-
torical time is periodically renewed: from the great Yu, who, by dig-
ging out the riverbeds, releases the earth from its waters and drains
them toward the sea, to Mencius himself, who—another time, an-

other task—finds himself forced to participate in the debate of the
schools to correct their ideological excesses. . . . This Flood scene,
hardly touched upon, far from lending itself to dramatization or
opening the question of Evil and punishment, emerges from the
side of a necessary alternation of “order” and “disorder,” thus less
from the side of Meaning than Coherence, and does not lead to
more anxiety.
Might it be different on the so-called taoist side? Emphasizing
the One, the Isolated, the Unnamed, might the taoist side open the
way to transcendence by detaching it from the mythological? Might
it join up with the other (theological) side? The Laozi may evoke “a
reality confusedly formed,” “born before Heaven and Earth, silent
and empty, rising up solitary without being altered,” that “could
be considered the mother of the whole world” (chapter 25). After
which, “not knowing its name,” the speaker “calls it tao,” the “way”;
“being forced,” he names it “vast,” “great” (da 大). We might think
we have fallen back into the idea of an ineffable Divine, isolating
and deepening it in its mysterious unity. But it immediately follows
that “vast” means “going away,” that “going away” means “far away,”
and that “far away” means “coming back.” . . . “Coming back”: it
is not from Elsewhere or from Outside where this way, tao must
lead; and if the tao is called “vast,” “great,” Heaven, Earth, and the
Sovereign, are immediately called “great” as well: all these “greats”
find themselves “within the world” (yu zhong). More clearly still, it
concludes, as if it were a matter of blocking the way of the theologi-
cal as well as the metaphysical, that if “man imitates Earth, Earth
Heaven and Heaven the tao,” the tao, for its part, at the height of
90 When Myth Holds No Interest
this progression, “imitates the spontaneously so”—in other words,

it follows immanence (dao fa ziran). Thus, far from being consti-
tuted as a separate entity, apart from the world, the tao refers back
to the natural: that undifferentiated Fund, from which everything
proceeds and to which everything returns, never leaves a logic of
processivity.
We can at least glimpse a vestige of cosmogony when the Laozi
(chapter 42) says that “the tao engenders the One, the One the
Two, the Two the Three” and that “the Three engenders the ten
thousand beings.” But it immediately adds that “all the beings bear
yin on their backs and hold yang in their arms” and that, from this
“blend of energies,” “harmony results” (chong qi yi wei he). Chi-
nese thought will not free itself from the framework of generative
polarity and regulation, even when, as in the Laozi, every effort is
made to cast off ritual demands. Indeed, the commended “way” is
in the resorption of differences and the return of the undifferen-
tiated, and not in the separation and individuation to which Cre-
ation tends, which lead to contradiction and exclusion. When the
Zhuangzi (chapter 7) reports—not at the beginning but in the last
lines of what is considered to be the authentic work—that the sov-
ereign of the South Sea and the sovereign of the North Sea, having
been well received by their host of the Center, the Undifferentiated,
started amiably to pierce openings in him to thank him for his hos-
pitality, to enable him to see, hear, eat, and breathe like men, it hap-
pened inadvertently that, with the last pierced hole, he died. . . . Far
from taking from the required exit from the undifferentiated state,
breaking the originary egg, Zhuangzi lightheartedly adopts the op‑
posite position—in fine, signaling, ironically, not a threatening de-

creation but what might be a regressive, beneficial un-creation.
That these vestiges survive but are not deployed, that they are
hidden, buried, or disguised in China by a coherence that prevails
over and shatters them, only makes clearer, in fact, what holds for
every culture: that it is shaped by the relationships of forces and
makes certain possibilities triumph by fully deploying them, to the
detriment of others that are left lying fallow or pushed back into
unthought. Let us take into account here the territorial diversity
of “China” so as not to be fooled by this too unitary appellation,
which makes us believe in too much homogeneity. Because it is in
the cultures of China’s South that the cosmogonical schemas were
most diffuse, as is evident still today in traditions like those of the
Lao, whereas the cultures of the North, less attached to the oral
than to the drawn line, and especially to hexagrams even before
ideograms, have favored in their conceptions the ritualist bias of
harmonic adequacy that eventually imposed itself. This bias is not
explicative or “etiological” but tends to discern the evolutionary line
of things in order to read in it a proclivity to which to conform. By
making this perspective the key principle of all administration as
well as all understanding, Chinese thought held the mythological
motifs in check and buried them within so-called popular culture,
under the heading of folklore, to the point that they would only be
mentioned in isolated fragments. Unlike the resource of the Greek
tool, they were not retained in what would make up, beginning
with the Classic of Change, the formulary repertoire of the literati.
T HIR T E e N ■ G r e e k T o o l /
Chinese Formulation
Tool is what I call all that serves to construct in a way of thought.

Which does not apply only to a notion becoming a concept, thus
rendering operative the generality that it manages, but, equally and
in an even more basic way, to language itself, the whole array of mor-
phological and syntactical means, of declension and conjugation,
as well as prefix and suffix, preposition and conjunction, starting
from which the option chosen in each case system makes a mean-
ing arise and articulates it through the singular coordination of all
these structuring elements. Let us pause at this banality about our
languages before we must move on: such a tool allows for composing
a “sentence,” that is, for organizing in a conjoined fashion a certain
number of functions according to the rules of rection and subordi-
nation—for establishing the desired relationships of determination
or explication, finality or consecutiveness, temporalization or spa-
tialization, hypothesis or deduction, and so on. This tool makes the
sentence into an assemblage erected on the base of distinct cases
among which one chooses. This panoply is grammar. Opening wide
the gamut of its modalities, the Greek language in particular devel-
oped this system of choices, starting from which one thinks. Didn’t
the Greek legein (from which comes logos) originally mean both
“to gather” and “to choose”?
92
Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation 93
Now, is the same thing true for Chinese, a language almost

without grammar, a language that neither declines nor conjugates,
that marks morphologically neither passive nor active, neither plu-
ral nor singular, neither time nor mood, that thus barely conceives
of itself as a case system? Since its array of prepositions and co-
ordinating conjunctions is so limited, it recognizes, classically, only
“full” words and “empty” words, the latter coming into play between
the former and orienting them in their usage while simultaneously
allowing for breath in these interstices. It is not enough just to men-
tion this fact, which I have already noted. We must still take mea-
sure of its effect to illuminate from the reverse direction the gaps
we have just explored regarding the advent of the world and the
question of the beginning, since the way of thought, as I have said,
exploits the language. Because we must not fear the question that
is so plainly basic it always gets forgotten: What does the (classical)
Chinese language offer for “constructing” a sentence? I would say
that instead of bringing this function of tool into play, it aims at
“formula,” or what I will call, thus repurposing the term, formula-
tion. I will call formula that reduced “form,” as concise as possible,
which, having once reached this point of purity and functionality,
is definitive and no longer has to vary. Whether the formula is alge-
braic, poetic, or, first of all, ritual, it establishes relationships among
its terms in a global fashion that may be adapted most efficiently.
The formula condenses a solution in a typical way, as a process, and
once adopted, it only has to be memorized and reused—the for-
mula serves and is antispeculative. It does not venture. A formula
is viable or valid rather than true; its criterion is functionality. Now
let us consider the first sentence of the Classic of Change: it is very
94 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation
much a formula (even the formula of all process). Let us recall the
commentary (from the Confucian tradition) that it was given: it is
a formulary progression that constructs no further.
We may wonder: What possible relationship is there between
this gap we perceive, starting from language, between tool and for-
mula, between construction (of a meaning), on the one hand, and
what I would call condensation (of a coherence), on the other, be-
tween all that and the way of thinking about “beginning,” primarily,
the beginning of the world? We will notice a perfect example of
the relationship in considering the way Plato reports such a gene-
sis in the Timaeus (27–30): truly, there is no more beautiful “con-
struction,” nor a better implementation of what I have called the
Greek tool. Approaching the genesis from the prepositionally speci-
fied angle of the “through” which (hupo + genitive), Plato conse-
quently considers it starting from a way of thinking about cause
(aitia) and in an explicative mode. Causality is the first tool with
which he works and builds his account of the creation, argument
after argument, from one stage to another: “All that arises arises nec-
essarily through a cause, because it is impossible that whatever there
is can arise without a cause” (see Phaedo, 98C). From there it fol-
lows—unlike in the biblical Creation story, conceived instead as the
reverse side of cause, or according to what would be called “grace”
(creatio est gratia, the church fathers would say)—that it is accord-
ing to the category of causality that Plato is to led to think about
God—first cause and intelligent cause: “Let us thus say through
what cause (dia entina aitian) the one that formed the future and
the world formed them. . . .” Now “cause” is a concept that, pre-
sented thus, definitively secures the continuation of the thought. It
is precisely because Plato needs to establish this first Cause as the

point of departure for his explanation that he is led to posit—to sup-
pose—God (see Republic, 379c): this world being “the most beau-
tiful of things,” wouldn’t its artisan, as a result, be “the most beau-
tiful of causes”? His “God” (demiurge) is an effect of construction.
To which responds consequently, in Plato, the conception of
the creation as a plan contemplated in advance and conducted
through finality (causality and finality being connected, or rather,
finality being to conceive prospectively starting from causality, as
Kant would establish: “the object is the end of a concept, insofar
as that concept is considered the cause of that object”). Because
God is good, “God wanted all things to be good,” Plato logically
continues: the Platonic artisan no longer has his hands in clay; in-
stead, his gaze is steadily fixed on the ideal model whose “idea”
and “power” he transposes into this world. Thus, “by virtue of these
reflections,” it is after putting the intellect into the soul and the
soul into the body that he fashions the world “in order to make of
it a work that was by nature the most beautiful and the best” (ac-
cording to the Greek construction hopos + optative). Indeed, what
could “explaining” consist of, if not this capacity to deploy the intel-
ligible according to this dual dimension, regressive/prospective, of
the same terms, of causes and ends? This is where the classical West,
starting from the Greeks, drew its intelligence, which was promoted
exemplarily in its physics.
Now, of what does the Classic of Change speak to us? Or rather,
with what? (This with what in fact determines the of what). Neither
in the initial formula nor in its Confucian commentary (contempo-
rary with Plato), nor even in the seventeenth-century commentary
(by Wang Fuzhi, before the intrusion of Western thought), does cau-
sality appear (causality only enters Chinese thought in the Mohist
movement, which would fail to develop, which in itself is already
significant). If these utterances do not “explain,” what do they do?
Nor, consequently, is some finality contemplated. “Profit” (or “har-
vest,” li: the scythe next to the ear of grain 利) is not the “end,” much
less the “aim.” This is so because “profit” is the internal result of the
unfolding, just as it follows from it, whereas the end is projected by
the mind beyond the contemplated action and justifies it, starting
from its conclusion telos. From which it follows that the positivity
(shan) developed by the course under way cannot be confused with
the Good as it is viewed in Plato, especially in relation to the divine
plan. That is also why, instead of “explaining” the advent of the world
through causality, Chinese thought clarifies what I earlier called its
processivity, that is to say, its capacity to be in process, which renews
itself by itself, from phase to phase, and does not deviate (and wis-
dom, we are told repeatedly throughout the Classic of Change, is to
put oneself in phase). That is also why, instead of conceiving of the
world’s processivity as an “action” that assumes a subject (ergon, this
Agent being the “demiurge”), it considers it an impersonal opera-
tivity, manifesting itself in “modification-transformation” (bian-
hua). And that is why, finally, instead of positing God at the begin-
ning of the world’s creation, it conceives of the tao, the “way” of
viability, according to which this process, by regulating itself, can
once again—indefinitely—initiate itself.
Because Plato has that tool “logic” (generating from logos) at
his disposal, not only prepositions and conjunctions but also, start-
ing from them, explicative means like cause and finality, as well as
a whole, very diverse set of verbal modalities ranging from the fac-
tual to the conditional, from the indicative to the subjunctive to
the optative, he can build the thinking about the beginning of the
world into a question. And first of all, as with Hesiod, this question
is one of the good beginning of the beginning. “Now the most im-
portant thing, in all matters,” he warns, “is to begin with the natural
beginning”—that is to say, according to the logical place to begin
for the good development of the question. On the other hand, if
it is no longer up to Hesiod’s Muses, it falls to Timaeus in particu-
lar in the Platonic prologue to have the first word—because he is
“most the astronomer” among the participants and because he has
accomplished the most work toward knowing the “nature of every-
thing.” Having the most authority and “starting from the genesis of
the world,” a logical debut, it falls to Timaeus to conclude “by ap-
proaching the nature of men.” Having forged a useful tool for itself
thus allows this Greek initiative of thought, most fully assumed by
Plato, through which the philosopher personally asserts himself; “in
order that I myself declare as clearly as possible what I conceive
throughout (dianooumai) on this subject.” Thus this beginning is
a deliberately “posited” one, that is, like a “thesis,” starting from
which the interrogation can be reconfigured and wresting itself im-
mediately from the conventions of language as well as from the
rut of usages and traditions—which makes it philosophical; it thus
considers the question in its full right or purity, that is to say, in its
greatest generality and according to its own order: “Whether it is
all the heaven or the world, or, if it could receive some other more
appropriate name, let us give it that name. Let us first pose, in this
regard, the question that, we would say, must be posed in the be-
ginning for all things. . . .”
Plato knows at the same time that this question of the begin-
ning (of the world) promises to be quite risky, detached as it is from
any adherence or horizon, that it will be perilous to venture there,
and that it retains the status of enigma: the author and the father of
this universe will have to be “found,” “discovered” (heurein). This
thesis, as well justified as it may be afterward, could not rid itself of
its original underlying nature, of hypo-thesis. If Plato problematizes
the thinking on the beginning from the outset, it is because, just as
the (Greek) language presents itself as a case system, the thinking
on the beginning of the world organizes itself by alternative. An ini-
tial or even preliminary question, the most radical one, concerning
the beginning and questioning the question itself, is knowing first
of all whether there is a beginning. By whatever name we call it,
“has it always been,” without a beginning (principle) of genesis, “or
did it come into being, having begun starting from a certain begin-
ning”? This disjunctive instrument of Greek thought was necessary,
pushing the interrogative branching back as far as possible (pre-
cisely that disjunction that Chinese thought abhors) to consider the
question of the beginning in its properly “theoretical” condition of
possibility, which, as we know, came to influence the Bible when it
began to conceive of the Creation starting from nothing, ex nihilo.
Henceforth, according to the Greeks, to think will be to make
successive cuts into an organized series of alternatives, each implied
by and following from the others, opting for one solution and re-
jecting the other (these are the procedures of definition by divi-

sion, we may recall, from the Sophist), so that Greek thought is
constituted by “throwing out ahead” or “projecting” the difficulties
to resolve—in other words, it is constituted “problematically” (this
problematic that China so willingly ignores in favor of the “mystery”
in which one is allowed to flow as into bottomless depths, xuan 玄,
to reemerge at ease in greater simplicity, like the divers-swimmers
in Zhuangzi). Not only does one have to choose in Plato between
the domain of that which always “is” and is never “born” and the
domain of that which is always “becoming” and never “is,” but one
also has to choose between what is model and what is copy or, again,
between those two regimes of utterance and relevance: choosing
what the “truth” is that one “knows” (fixed, irrefutable) and what is
only “plausibility,” in which one “believes” or “trusts” (pistis).
Once again Plato conceived of any account of the advent of
the world as only being able to belong to the second category: it
could only be muthos, marked by uncertainty and controlled by
probability, since it involves the domain of becoming and not of
immutable Being, which nevertheless does not impede the story
or account. Plato would like to string the account together (hepo-
menos) in a necessary and demonstrative mode—this muthos thus
becoming logos: not only by starting with methodological distinc-
tions allowing preliminarily “analysis” of the question (“one can,
to my mind, first make the distinctions that here . . .”) but also by
developing a hypothetical-deductive reasoning that will pave the
way for Western knowledge. Let us say, “posits” Timaeus, that in
effect there are two models (the one of eternal Being, the other of
becoming) according to which the world could have been made;

since this world is beautiful, it could only have been conceived in
relationship to the eternal model, because in the opposite case, the
artisan would have looked to the model that is born, which is not
possible, since he would not have then been able to produce “the
most beautiful of things,” that is to say, created starting from “the
most beautiful of causes,” and so on.
Now, in contrast, can we see what is done in the initial for-
mula of the Classic of Change? We will notice a pure parataxis that
absolutely nothing coordinates: “Beginning—expansion—profit—
rectitude.” And then what is done as well in the Confucian com-
mentary—contemporary with Plato—that develops it? We find for-
mulas of four words that nothing links together (with two formulas
out of seven constituting a variation: four + one empty word + two,
the only two coordinates [nai, yi] thus expressing consecutiveness:
“to the point that,” “in such a way that”). What internal order, if not
logic, does the linkage thus obey? On the one hand, by responding
to one another, the formulas bring polarity into play—for example:
cloud(s) pass // rain(s) spread
On the other hand, rather than deduction (reasons), there is

(formulary) unwinding, or “stringing together” (the image is one of
string threading through the interior and throughout, guan); that is
to say, one formula follows from the preceding one, marking a new
stage or phase of the elucidation: the sentence is processive as well.
Also, instead of the thinking about the advent of the world being
problematized, it is unfolded according to an obviousness that—
because no tool or support is available—nothing threatens to dis-

turb. We encounter no operative distinction here, no case system,
no play of hypothesis and conclusion; that is to say, from one end
of the sentence to the other, no other possibility is ever left to be
imagined: critical consciousness does not appear (accounting for
the lesser development, in China, of the philosophical). Also, to take
up our earlier tools again, instead of producing a meaning, which
is risky, this thinking about the advent, which is not of the “world”
but of all process, maintains its coherence or cohesion throughout:
it does not let itself be taken or split apart: thus, neither does it let
itself be “analyzed.”
Because it does not problematize, does not raise itself to the
level of reasoning, resorbs the interrogation instead of deploying it,
this Chinese thinking about the beginning escapes the question of
its truth. I have already asked this: Can it still interest us (speak to the
desire for intrigue in thought)? The tool offers a hold, brings out a
perspective, or provides a means (to implement and to ponder). But
the formula, by validating itself, folds back on itself, so that what pro-
ceeded it is cut off and forgotten. Isolating itself in establishing its
internal relationship, it dispenses with external justification. In the
image of the ritual form, it normalizes (channels: thought or behav-
ior) without having to invent or argue. Its perfecting stabilizes it and
makes it available for use; all that counts is its functionality: more
than two millennia of literate thinking has continuously turned to
that stock of basic formulas, provided by that first sentence, that are
endlessly reiterated. Conversely, what the Greek tool discovers (I say
tool and not “mind,” the famous “Greek mind” so often invoked)
is a power of reflexivity of thought, making it turn back on itself, by

which the Greeks were able to follow the question back to its source
as well as to question its conditions.
From there we can understand that if (Greek) philosophy
chose to think of “Being,” it is because “Being” could be extracted
(abstracted) onto the operative plane, either of work or of thought,
where thought can radically separate concepts one from another as
well as make them stand out in a unitary fashion (kata mian idean,
says Plato), without their being hampered anymore by ambiguity;
without one always being mixed up with and dependent upon an-
other (as in Chinese thought, which, in contrast, has drawn coher-
ence from this through correlation). It is on this plane that it may
have to, through its own intervention or on its own authority, con-
struct and coordinate (but that is also exactly what Heidegger would
regret: that “Being” may have become, with Plato, that operative
plane of thinking . . .). Or if Greek thinking thought of God (either
“God” or “nature”: either it “theologizes” or it “physiologizes,” Aris-
totle summarizes), it is to posit a starting point for its deduction,
allowing itself a marked beginning (such as the principle, arche),
the key to the vault of the speculative, although its hypothetical
nature is rarely concealed (and consequently unrelated to the per-
sonal God of the Appeal and of prayer).
“God” and “Being” are products of this tool, or at least, this tool
establishes them as alternatives which impose (not unarbitrarily,
or, in any case, not without a share of construction) their necessity
upon us: “To be, or not to be?” (whereas, China tells us, there is only
“transformation,” including in death). Or, “Does God exist or not
exist?”; whereas, we read in Chinese, that there is only the—joint—
dimension of spiritualization (yang) or of opacification (yin). Let us

not fail to notice this, no matter how it vexes us: that in one case as
in the other, whether it is a question of the promotion of Being or
of God, it is a matter of demands or effects coming from our (Euro-
pean) syntax, at once linguistic and logical. But the question then
resurges: How to translate into our languages a way of thought, like
the Chinese, without syntax and without construction?
f o u r T E e N ■ T r a n s l a t i o n
Let us come back to the virtue of fieldwork. Let us consider, as a

countercheck, the most common translation, which is also the most
recent one, of the Confucian commentary that we have read. It is by
Richard Wilhelm, whose 1924 German translation was translated
into English, then (re)retranslated by Étienne Perrot into French.
It may be surprising that so short and so major a text, traditionally
attributed to Confucius and making up part of the canonical book,
as well as being universally recognized as basic to Chinese thought
because it provides a set of formulas and coherences that have been
readopted and exploited ever since, would have drawn so little atten-
tion from translators. But I have already discussed this: in sum (in
the land called the Middle [Country] or the “centrality”), the utter-
ance is too elementary, not outstanding or troubling enough, not
partial enough; in short, it offers too little hold or angle to stimulate
desire or capture interest. Would that be the only reason, however?
Isn’t it also that, since it lends itself so conveniently to stereotypical
usage, since it invents or forges nothing, is at stage zero of theoreti-
cal function and fiction, it is most difficult for a European reader to
apprehend: because it does not allow for divergence or give way to
speculation. Wilhelm introduces it with these words:
104
Translation 105
In the Chinese, the sentences of this commentary are for the

most part rhymed, probably in order to make it easier to re-
member them. These rhymes have not been reproduced in
the translation because they are of no material significance.
However, it is well to remember the circumstance, because
it explains much of the abruptness in the style, which is often
somewhat forced.
Strange: these expressions are rhythmic, inviting scansion,

and are easy to memorize, but they are scarcely rhymed. (Is it true,
moreover, that a rhyme would not be significant?) Stranger still: the
“abruptness” of the style and its “forced” nature, although it is obvi-
ously a matter here of an unwinding that offers precisely no texture,
where nothing conflicts or deviates or abrades; and it is exactly be-
cause nothing resists here, nothing strains, that this utterance is so
difficult to grasp. The distinctive feature of the formula is to dissolve
all roughness and to smooth: What is there to grab hold of? None-
theless, as the translator does not leave the horizon of our syntactical
and logical tool, as he does not perceive that the operation here is
not one of construction (of meaning and of conceptions) but one
of formulation and elucidation, he can only share his discomfort in
approaching this text.
The translation inevitably suffers the consequences. In place of
what I translated as “Vast is the initiatory capacity! / The ten thou-
sand beings find their resources there to begin: / so that it com-
mands Heaven,” Wilhelm-Perrot translates:
Great, verily, is the success of the creative, to which all things

owe their beginning and which penetrates all heaven.
106 Translation
Let us pass over the overly evangelical “verily,” which is purely

the invention of the translator (let us not forget that Wilhelm was a
Protestant minister). But here the “initiatory” factor (of all process:
Qian) is understood as “the creative,” and since the dimension of
that capacity at work (de 德) is not understood, the strange idea of
“success” is introduced—as if to compensate? The notion of “re-
sources” (“funds,” “capital,” zi 资), on the other hand, is omitted;
furthermore, it is not a matter of “penetrating heaven” (meaning
what?) but of “commanding” the course of heaven by conducting
throughout its processive unfolding. Finally, the sentence is ren-
dered syntactically, relying heavily on determiners and relatives,
which wreaks havoc with its formulary unwinding without con-
structing anything.
Is this only a matter of translation (even if, let us acknowledge,
the distance between the two proposed versions is so great that we
might wonder if the same text is at issue)? In any case, the com-
mentary that follows leaves no doubt about the work the translator
engaged in:
In the explanation, the two pairs of properties are divided into

four distinct attributes of the creative power, whose visible form
is heaven. The first is success, which, as first and original cause
of all that is, constitutes the most important attribute and the
most ample principle of the creative.
In light of what is said here, understanding Chinese thought

would thus mean immediately reinterpreting and rectifying it in
Aristotelian terms, which, via scholasticism, formed the intellec-
tual equipment of our classical Western reason. Beginning from
Translation 107
which, everything is indeed projected: the notion of “properties” or

“attributes” referring to an inferred substance they serve to qualify;
“cause” (“first,” “original”) paired with “principle” (according to the
Platonic-Aristotelian conjunction arche-aitia); the plane of Being
(“all that is”), finally, forming the base for this conception. Here,
then, are the makings of a system—Being—cause—property—and
what in effect “explains” the sentence to us. But once it has fallen
under Aristotle’s categories, once they have been allowed to colo-
nize it, what remains to us of Chinese thought? Traduttore, traditore
(“translator, traitor”), but here it is not so much treason as travesty.
Now could we discern what, more fundamentally, is at the
core of this travesty, rendering it at once so logical and so com-
plete (but which this translator of course fails to analyze)? Without
warning, an interpretation has been added that is at once ontologi-
cal and predicative, that is to say, at once a matter of the construc-
tion of Being and of Meaning, which is the dual characteristic of
classical European thought, which paired the two but which our
modernity wanted to break apart (thus the rupture and violence
done to rationalism—witness the art and poetry of this past cen-
tury). To construct a “meaning,” the translator really does need a
“subject” here, in the precise sense that Aristotle uses the term, that
is, grounding itself in “Being” and “supporting” the stated qualifi-
cation. Because from the ontological perspective, the one of Being,
the “sub-ject” is that which is “extended under” (hupokeimenon)
the various qualities that are supposed to be related to one another
there in a unitary fashion as “properties,” and for which it is the sup-
port or substratum—in other words, what holds together “below”:
the “sub-stance.” The subject is thus what is sup-posed “to remain”
108 Translation
one and the same “under” the change (hupomenon) and “in what”
the change can take place (Physics I, 190a). From the perspective
of meaning, or the predicative, on the other hand, the subject is
the subject of the proposition, for which the rest is attribute, or,
as Aristotle defines it, “that of which everything else is predicated,
while it itself is not predicated of anything else” (Metaphysics, Zeta,
3, 1028b). These two versions of the subject, coming from Being
and the language that utters it, fit together in the logos, to which
the latter owes the relevance of its utterance—to the point that, in
order to construct a meaning, the Chinese translator himself has so
great a need for such a substantial and grammatical, ontological-
predicative subject, which would immediately reestablish Euro-
pean intelligibility, that he invents one here. . . .
Thus, what next would translate literally as
Vast clear end beginning

six positions moment to happen
moment to mount six dragons so-as-to conduct heaven
is rendered by this translator as:
Because the holy man possesses great clarity on the end and
the beginning, as well as on the way in which the six degrees
complete themselves each in its own time, he rides them like
six dragons to mount to heaven.
Nothing in the Chinese text points to this “holy man” posited

here as the subject of the utterance. This is a matter of an introduction-
intrusion that nothing justifies, or rather, by which everything is di-
verted, but which we can clearly see is necessary as soon as we want
Translation 109
to construct the sentence syntactically. Because why establish, or,

worse, personify, a “what” that would be vast and clear, from the
end to the beginning, or that would mount the six dragons so as to
conduct heaven? (Likewise, Wilhelm translates what follows: “This
is what furthers and what perseveres . . .”) This is indeed a criti‑
cal question: Is it always necessary, as in good Aristotelian logic, to
have a “what” support-substratum of the utterance? Instead, let us
acknowledge that in the Chinese sentence, the predicative relation-
ship remains loose, not rigorous or not constraining: not assigned (to
some assumed subject); the question of the “what” comes undone
there. Because in this figure of the initiatory capacity, it is a question
of an operativity, developing from phase to phase, or from one “mo-
ment” to the next (like the six dragons symbolizing the six succes-
sive lines of the figure considered here together as a single team): as
such, this operativity is precisely without subject (which, we know,
is the distinctive feature of a process) but beneficially conducts the
course under way. That is why, since Chinese verbs are not conju-
gated, I prefer to translate into the infinitive. To import or impose a
subject, on the other hand, to invent it, is not so much superfluous
(or reductive) as it is an immediate barrier to understanding.
This translator was nonetheless very wary of wanting to act as an
importer, and he would never have considered treason. Indeed, mis-
sionary though he was, he supposedly admitted his “satisfaction,”
not without humor, as Jung, who was his friend, reports to us, at
“having never baptized a Chinese. . . .” This evangelist, Perrot adds,
“made himself a disciple”; he was supposedly the first European to
“have received the living science of the Yi King [Yijing],” whereas
the others before him were supposedly “too sure of their knowledge,
110 Translation
of the universal value of their mental categories.” Let us thus do him

justice by appreciating his good intention to be free from ethnocen-
trism. But it is nonetheless true that without knowing it, this trans-
lator converted Chinese thought into Western thought, although
the conversion was no longer religious but syntactical and logical,
and not done in an incidental but in a systematic way, as we can
already note in these few lines. Let us consider how difficult it is to
call into question one’s own “categories,” suspecting them of con-
taining a bias beneath their “obviousness”; how difficult it is not to
project one’s preconditions and inferences, lurking just this side of
all questioning: so much more difficult to discern—because they are
what thought is backed up against—than the famous “prejudices”
that, through one’s doubt, philosophy is supposedly intended to dis-
pose of. Or rather, the former would not be uprooted or neutralized,
as the latter are, so much as scrutinized: to interrogate not what one
thinks (which, all told, is terminal and resultative) but rather with
what one thinks: not, any longer, the object of the thinking but
rather its tool. Which is conceivable, as I warned at the beginning,
only through the encounter with other possibilities of thought—at
least, if one does not come back home from such encounters too
early.
If this translator ontologizes the sentence here without even
noticing it, projecting onto it “being” and the “what,” substan-
tial and substantive, at the same time as he projects the triangle
of “cause,” “principle,” and “property”; if he also theologizes it by
projecting a “creator” there in place of the continual initiation of
all process, as well as a “holy man” who rides dragons “to mount to
heaven” (finality, once again, and behind it, eschatology); if, finally,
Translation 111
he makes a European sentence out of it by introducing into it syn-

tactical articulations: “The Way of the creative,” he translates next,
“works by means of change and transformation . . .” (but where
does this “by means of ” come from, which the Chinese would not
dream of saying?)—it is because, in order to translate, he wanted to
adapt. To translate, for him, is to integrate and to return as soon as
possible to the familiar. He does not consider that a translation, at
the same time as it accommodates, can make available what resists
such accommodation. He does not consider that, in order to trans-
late, he must thus rework his own language there, recast it and put
it back under construction: with a view to making it more receptive
and opening it to what it would not dream of saying, by making
new possibilities arise there. He does not consider that to translate,
in short, can involve de-assimilating at the same time as assimilat-
ing, de-categorizing and re-categorizing. At the risk, otherwise, of
not having moved, of not having confronted from without, of never
having entered.
At which point, of course, the question turns around, and I
myself become its target. Beginning by “explaining” in this way, in
my language and subjected to its constraints, am I not also in the
process of betraying, ineluctably, and of diverting? No, that is not
inevitable, I would answer, if I consider that to translate is to clarify,
along the way, what possibilities had to be closed in passing from
one framework to the other, and also what others had to be opened
in the language of arrival; if at the same time as I clear (and force) a
passage from one language to the other, I am already beginning to
retrace my steps to clarify what I did (I cannot imagine translating
without commenting); in short, if at the same time as one “trans-
112 Translation
lates,” one returns to the conditions of possibility for what one pro-
duces. Translating then no longer constitutes a loss (I say this to
counter so many long-winded lamentations on that inevitability:
“translation is treason,” and so on). Rather, it is the means and the
opportunity for a new reflexivity: Babel is definitely a stroke of luck
for thought—the chance to be able to leave one’s language and one’s
idioms (atavisms), a chance, in any case, to be able to probe them.
Again, in order to translate, it is necessary to help another pos-
sibility get through, and not to hurry this transition; not to step over
the difficulty, not to mask it, but, on the contrary, to unfold it. Be-
cause to translate is not to land flatly from one side or the other any
more than it is to dream of a meta-language, beyond the two, that
would integrate and reconcile them; it is, rather, to develop and de-
ploy a threshold between the outside and the inside that effectively
allows entry. There are no insurmountable walls between languages
any more than there are premade bridges. Which is to say that trans-
lating is not deceptive but effective, and thus is not falsifying but
fascinating: it is a matter of maintaining oneself at the breach as
long as possible, perilously but patiently, being open equally to both
sides and maintaining the encounter between them until the pos-
sibility of one is equally recognized by the other and progressively
finds there what, as a reflected condition, can also make its way in it.
F I F T E e N ■ I s T h e r e St i l l “ T r a d i t i o n ” ?
But what remains of these gaps today? This is the retort I hear.
Isn’t it obvious that cultures no longer exist apart from one another?
(What is more, did they ever?) They mix together, hybridize, and
interbreed—what elsewhere still remains? We can even see how this
phenomenon is accelerating: What you have just described of the
possibilities of thought, is it still relevant? Or are there only traces
and vestiges of it in the ancient texts, which are in the process of
fading away and becoming uniform? Starting from the theoreti-
cal globalization coming from the West a century ago, our ways of
thought have been becoming both unified and standardized. China
adopted the European categories of science, as of philosophy, and
translated them into its language, often via Japanese: Haven’t they
been assimilated there? And we ourselves, when we learn Chinese,
don’t we integrate it progressively into the horizon of our thinking?
What gap could still survive? In short, at the very most you have
made a work of memory, because the scene has changed. The world
of communication that is ours today, where everything interferes
with and spreads—responds—to everything else across the planet,
no longer knows an outside. How could there still be an “entry”?
“Tradition” is the term usually advanced to counter these ques-
tions and to name the residue of these changes (chuan-tong, the
Chinese call it, who themselves make such great use of it). Now,
113
114 Is There Still “Tradition”?
convenient as this notion is, does it really hold? Because it is pre-

cisely that transmission or filiation operating more or less in isola-
tion, away from others, that in today’s connected world is doomed
to disappear—that is the gift of History. As for the past, such a notion
has already found itself denounced for decades, even within the
human sciences, as a catch-all or soft underbelly that only serves to
idly collect as remnant what has escaped more precise definition:
thus supporting the idea of a vague causality that could be called
endemic and that, in its wide embrace, dispenses with having to
provide for analysis. Because by definition “tradition” does not be-
long to one precise moment, does not let itself be delimited by chro-
nology: it serves only to name the evasive; it cannot be formed into
a subject, much less a tool of knowledge. Might it only serve as alibi
in the end, or as coverall to hide our inability to go further and to
discern more clearly, thus as a way to adorn—or to conceal—a re-
nouncement?
“Tradition” might be guilty, in fact, of a double dissimulation.
First, the notion may obscure the ruptures and discontinuities that
it is the archaeologist’s task to spot and make stand out, in contrast
to the smoothing by which History is transmitted (the critique that
we inherit from Foucault). And in another fashion, no longer dia-
chronic but synchronic, it buries the heterogeneity internal to each
culture as to each given moment by tending to ignore the tensions
that have shaped them. Thus it rests upon a convenience of repre-
sentation that arises in hypostasis, in a unitary fashion, from what
arranges that which deranges, giving the impression, through this
packaging, of a single entity. Because the “heterotopias” never en-
counter one another only from without, they also take note of each
Is There Still “Tradition”? 115
other from within. Indeed, wouldn’t these “internal heterotopias” (I

am borrowing the expression from Bruno Latour) find one another
within a single way of thought, and without that way of thought even
trying to make that heterogeneity cohabit within it? At the very mo-
ment when European thought invented modern physics based on
mathematics and devised experimentation, don’t we see these same
thinkers, the heroes of rationalism, recounting once more, like Des-
cartes, the great romance of the world, or, like Galileo, drawing the
horoscope of the Medicis?
Injured on these two fronts or from two sides, the notion of
tradition gives up the ghost. But I am not sure that, once this pro-
cess has been so briskly dealt with, everything is settled. Because
in the contemporary “melting pot,” aren’t there only relics of what
has not yet finished being homogenized? Or what might conceal
itself, as adherence or even as recalcitrance, under our great global
connection, and which even perhaps endogenizes itself under so
much homogenization? Moreover, if tradition is most certainly an
idle notion, or sets about things the wrong way, only approaching by
fleeing and lapsing once again into some substitute for metaphysics,
I wonder if the critique it has so justly spawned might nonetheless
erase what comes into play there. “Dante and Descartes, Giordano
Bruno and Nicolas Malebranche, Meister Eckhart and John Locke:
what do they have in common?’’ I hear the retort that attempts to
emphasize the exteriority internal to Western culture. Even more
than ideological references shared across the centuries (as is the
case with Christianism, in face of which everything positions itself,
or rather, cannot not position itself), they have “in common” infer-
ences or tacit choices beginning from which they think, I would
answer: a certain unshakeable confidence in the power of the word,

including Eckhart (and not to mention Dante! . . .), or something
that weaves itself among them like a certain search for the “truth.”
And most fundamentally, the (European) language thinks through
and for them: they conjugate, construct sentences syntactically,
choose within case systems, always assume “subjects,” and so on.
That these thinkers ostensibly oppose one another must not
conceal how, in fact, it is necessary first of all to agree with one
another, closer to the source, in order to able to oppose one an-
other—what I have called a “fund of understanding” for the way of
thought. To be in opposition assumes a field where the encounter
can be organized, and is only conceivable within a framework of an
already outlined possibility. “In every debate (refutation), there is
the undebated (unrefuted),” said Zhuangzi; that is to say, there must
be a shared undebated—that one does not consider debating—only
starting from which can there be debate and refutation. It is just
such an undebated (“undisputed”), whether it is European or Chi-
nese, that—by circulating from one to the other, leaving one to enter
into the other, letting them reflect one another—my work attempts
to clarify. Better than “tradition,” which goes no further than the
idea of a diffuse cartage over which one has so little hold, fund of
understanding makes appear in an operative fashion the condition
of agreement on the basis of which a disagreement in thinking can
be brought to light and deployed. Similarly, whereas the notion of
tradition is fundamentally reactionary, folding back on itself and re-
jecting novelty, the notion of a fund of understanding is neither re-
strictive nor closed. When we trace it back, this fund of understand-
ing can be reshaped, reconfigured, and consequently enlarged and
transformed: thus all my work is aimed, not at isolating the ways of

thought (as some might still pretend to believe)—but just the oppo-
site: at opening such a fund of understanding that, through recipro-
cal de-categorizations and de-presuppositions, can be shared with
Chinese thought and allow these established ways of thought—
Chinese, European—to dialogue effectively face-to-face.
If, furthermore, “tradition” is very often only a curtain drawn
over the lack of analysis, it is still necessary not to give in to the
mirage of operative discontinuity. Let us ask ourselves what conti-
nuity assumes discontinuity, just as we ask what fund of understand-
ing assumes all opposition. A Foucauldian work like that of Gérard
Simon has shown, for example, how the perspective of the Renais-
sance cut ties with the one of Antiquity by providing a system of
radically new concepts that rendered the preceding one obsolete. If
there is really is an epistemic rupture from one to the other, it does
not keep us from asking: How is it that a certain field of research
thus detaches itself and imposes itself on history, from one period
to another, forming itself into a possible domain of questioning?
How is it, in other words, that a problematics made its way, working
quietly over a long stretch of time, to being taken up again at a cer-
tain moment over all other bases, fresh once again?
I would ask even more generally: Isn’t the same thing true of
the rupture between the “inquiry on nature” of ancient phusis and
of modern “physics”? The latter could come to pass only by distin-
guishing itself from the former and opposing itself to it as strenu-
ously as possible, but we can also see from the outside—as from
China, which, having not known the first, did not develop the sec-
ond—how, from one physics to another, there was certainly not
continuation but, rather, substitution and consequently relay. Of

course, the fruitfulness of one theoretical resource is exhausted, and
another replaces it by forging in opposition to it a tool and a new
system; but the preceding one had configured a certain possibility,
among others, had already located and marked out a field of ques-
tioning in such a way that research could thus persevere. Can we
remember the passage from the dirigible to the airplane? I offer this
as an image. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was imagined
that the sky henceforth would be filled with dirigibles. Then, over
all other bases, by resorting to different means, by taking advantage
of other resources, the airplane was built. The dirigible was dead, or
survived only as décor. Nevertheless, the whole history of aviation
incorporates within it that of the dirigible: the dirigible, a short-lived
attempt, nevertheless deployed a certain possibility that paved the
way for today’s aviation.
That is why, before concluding that the preceding analyses
now belong to the past and consequently could stand in the way
of understanding as well as of present opportunities, or that posing
cultures opposite one another is an obsolete business, since they are
no longer individual enough, I believe it is suitable to show a little
more patience and, if I dare say so, circumspection. What about that
art of the formula that I mentioned earlier, for example, with regard
to the commentary on the first sentence of the Classic of Change?
And first of all, when did I myself first become aware of that form
for constituting the utterance? When I landed in China and began
to read the People’s Daily to follow the staggering current events of
the moment: in order to read, it was necessary for me to learn to
see how, over the course of days, the formulary utterances emerged,
were detached, condensed, isolated within themselves, becoming

invariable and of a single piece (I am referring to Encre de Chine,
my first essay). Was that only an effect of the propaganda? The Chi-
nese language has shifted profoundly since the beginning of the
twentieth century, with the vernacular language replacing the clas-
sical one. It has also felt the influence of Western syntax, but as long
as it remains tied to its ideographical writing, this resource of for-
mula and parataxis does not appear to be exhausted. Today, writing
in China still very much means resorting to that art of formulation
that brings polarity into play (what is called, too crudely, “parallel-
ism”). Let us consider the symmetrical formulas that we can read
even today, on the two sides of so many doorways. Even the formulas
from the Confucian commentary that we have read may be found
as is, without modification, in a current Chinese text, which might
even be a magazine article. . . .
What about the notions linked together in this introductory for-
mula of the Classic of Change—are they themselves forgotten? “Be-
ginning—expansion—profit—rectitude”: in other words, has this
fund of coherence now run dry? I am so much less certain of it since
the latter, not inviting construction, also does not invite contention,
as I have said: it offers no hold for criticism. Not being constituted
as a truth, neither is it refutable. So where would the outside begin?
I walk down the Paris streets and enjoy looking at the names of the
Chinese restaurants in my neighborhood (the “Latin” quarter, it is
called). What appears on the signs and also, in its own way, con-
stitutes text? “New—flourishing” (“in full bloom”) Xin cheng. Or,
on the following street, “Expansion—deployment—profit” Xing
fa li. Or again, “Full flight (of the wild goose)—deployment” Qi
hong. And I can even find, as in the name of this jiaozi restaurant,
the first two words of the Classic of Change: “Initiatory capacity—
expansion” Qian heng. And so on.
How to translate these restaurant signs? Or are they translated,
and what do we find written on the other side, juxtaposed, in Euro-
pean languages? Going back to those Chinese names, in the order
they appear above, I quote: “Delicious Monge” (on Monge Street),
“Délices asiatiques,” and “Délices express.” And for the first two
words of the Classic of Change: “Chez Tonny.” There is no attempt
here to translate, the two rubrics in the Chinese and European lan-
guages remaining parallel and never penetrating one another. The
two perspectives opened in the two languages do not communicate
with each other. There we have, superimposed, an appellation from
within and an appellation from without, and the two remain igno-
rant of one another. Is this merely incidental? As trivial as it seems,
couldn’t it be an indication of a fracture and even of impending
danger? That, beneath the appearance of borrowing the other’s lan-
guage, of adopting from without and adapting from within, we fold
the coherence back on itself, instead of extroverting it, we enclose
it within the within? Thus we seal it up again into ineffable depths
instead of opening it as a fund of understanding. We still have not
begun to make an “entry.”
The danger is that we may act globally in this fashion: that we do
not translate between languages by illuminating the implied biases,
which are also so many riches, but instead we superimpose and con-
sequently bury. In other words, under the Westernizing (globaliz-
ing) stratum is reconstituted an identitary, autochthonous stratum,
which becomes all the more firmly embedded insofar as it does
not let itself be penetrated by the other but isolates itself from it:
under the guise of this external display that makes us believe in
what is shared through integration, the inside that no longer allows
“entry” will suddenly reemerge as “Asian values” that, as we can see
in China today, henceforth claim to be absolutely specific, almost
ahistorical, and inaccessible to foreigners. Thus, in order to unfold
the various possibilities of thought, we cannot make only a work
of memory or even of resistance; and we cannot even be content
with promoting a reciprocal fertilization between cultures, as the
discourse of goodwill has so often advocated. But rather, those gaps
that we put to work between ways of thought, instead of conceal-
ing them, deploy the space of a new reflexivity; and to do this work,
today, is to be militant. But militant how? We no longer begin from
an a priori definition of “Man” but instead explore, through this re-
ciprocal penetrating gaze, what goes for—or clears the way for—the
human. We explore the resources of thought as they can reconfig-
ure, from one side as from another, the field of the thinkable. It is
true that we will no longer lapse into the commonplaces of human-
ism, so easy to keep repeating, which have as ardent a hold on us as
our prejudices do. Rather, we will provide humanism with the tool
for constructing and developing itself.
F i n a l e : A S h i ft o f t h e T r u t h
To describe the possibilities of thought, then, is not to want

to label the cultural traits that we might assume to be specific and
characteristic as identifying and therefore isolating functions: such
cultural traits are inevitably selective, of course, and could not help
but be arbitrary; furthermore, they are called upon—such is the
nature of culture, even before we entered the regime of globaliza-
tion—to transform: “culture-transformation” (wen-hua 文化), as
the Chinese language so aptly says. Still less is it a matter of want-
ing to “essentialize” the cultures and enclose them within worlds—I
bore myself repeating this. But the question remains: What com-
fort, or ideological security, am I on the way to, or in the process of,
disturbing here? Because I always find myself facing, growing back
again and again like the heads of the hydra, that stubborn determi-
nation to block any thinking begun in this direction: indeed, any of
us who are no longer certain that all our notions are at once univer-
sal and conspicuously innate somehow find ourselves immediately
denounced as “culturalist.”
Isn’t it a matter here of something else entirely? If we consider
culture in terms not of identity but rather of fecundity, it becomes
a matter of calling for the development of cultures as resources that
their gaps tend to reflect. That is why they are precious and why it
is necessary to investigate them patiently by measuring their effect
122
Finale 123
and their range. And without betraying their coherence. Because in

encountering one another, cultures are not led to relativize but to
probe one another: they are discovered by one another to be like so
many enterprises or conquests that, through their least attempted
options, are simultaneously exploring the human and deploying the
human. That is what I mean, finally, by the “possibility” of thought
or, let us say more generally, of mind (in the sense of the Phenome-
nology of Mind, but which would no longer be only European): this
possibility’s reason for being (its condition of possibility) becomes
clear, and it is pregnant with the possible, the future, or the riches
to be exploited.
To treat the possibilities of the mind deploys a diversity and, at
the same time, produces a parity. That is what, first of all, puts the
cultures on an equal footing on principle and stops ethnocentri-
cally hierarchizing them. Furthermore, this plural itself multiplies
our intelligence and, of primary importance, gets it unmired; it de-
excludes as well. I will admit that I am no longer so sure that the
subject and citizen of the world to come must be urged to be “toler-
ant,” as is repeated over and over today in a reprimanding tone that
assigns guilt. I do not see why it would be necessary for him to give
up his adherence to his values (for example, in Europe, Freedom)
and trade his ideals.
This plural of possibilities of the mind thus has a critical func-
tion, but it is not disenchanted or skeptical. On the contrary, by
discovering such diverse possibilities of thought, we ourselves
are led here, without being forced, to become comprehensive—
“comprehension,” which is better than any compromise (the two
terms, of course, are opposites): we are called upon to develop a
124 Finale
polyglot and translating intelligence, knowing how to “enter” and

to “leave” and reflecting itself in its biases, which are also, let us not
forget, so many supports. That is to say, we are called upon to ar-
range passage for one into the other or, again, to let one access the
other, the “other” that then rightly—reciprocally—discovers itself,
the “oneself ” or the “one’s own.” Because to translate, as I have said,
is itself operative: to reopen from the inside and make one see from
the outside simultaneously inventories resources on both sides, acti-
vates them, and offers them—which is why to translate is, in and of
itself, ethical. I even see in it the single ethic of the world to come,
which would not be forced, if we want to resist identitary confine-
ment as much as its apparent opposite, the ambient uniformization
that, as soon as it no longer allows for working the gaps, sees itself
condemned through repetition to sterility.
From there, exploiting the possibilities of thought makes our
very concept of “truth” shift. Because we are led to reconfigure it
by relating it to our capacity for intelligence, which I will under-
stand in its double meaning as the human faculty producing the
intelligible (and as such, never fixed) and as the real and singular
power of grasping or apprehension (as we say: to have intelligence
of). I will call “true” henceforth that which is the source of intelli-
gibility and yields to discovery and implementation. Its negative is
no longer the “false” but the unapproached, undiscovered, or un-
thought. Because the true can henceforth no longer be sufficiently
understood according to its traditional (scholastic) conception of
“adequacy” (“of the thing and the mind,” rei et intellectus), since
this “real” to which the mind refers could always be suspected of
having been constituted by some option or implicit choice of that
Finale 125
mind. Nor can it be understood any longer, from the other side, by
its capacity for intrinsic (Spinozist) “relevance” alone, since we are
always already judging it from within a singular logic, the logic of
a certain possibility of thought that, as soon as we exit it, no longer
imposes itself. The same is true in an already exemplary fashion
for what our classical reason was most attached to: the principle of
noncontradiction, posited by it as the first axiom and relevant only
within the perspective that it itself elaborated.
If I thus limit myself again to this notion that has borne phi-
losophy and merged with it, but that I want to open to the same
diversity, the one of the possibilities of thinking, then the “true,”
understood henceforth as internal to each of them, can no longer
be conceived as exclusive. But for all that, it will not let itself be dia-
lectized on a Hegelian model, because these possibilities maintain
an exteriority among themselves and are even rivals; in any case,
they are not completely integrable into a whole—not that this “true”
is relative or sector-based, but it reveals itself to be competitive. It
will conceive of itself thus, not in a referential way—since there is
always the fear that it is, in fact, self-referential without knowing
it—but in an operative way: the true is what configures the think-
able and offers a hold over it; in other words, the “true” is what de-
ploys—produces—promotes the intelligible and puts it into service
and to work. In the image of what I call a possibility for thought,
it simultaneously clarifies its condition (of possibility) and gives it
productivity. It also measures itself by its fecundity—in other words,
by its simultaneously heuristic and pragmatic power: the true is the
fissure to explore, the lode to exploit; this source of intelligibility is
a resource to be opened for prospecting.
126 Finale
This plural of the possibilities of the mind is thus not a plural

of orders, objects, or dimensions but a plural of explorations or ad-
ventures. According to its operative concept, which allows it to dis-
cover the true, it can offer for consideration the totality of human
thought only by each time inscribing it locally and singularly, within
a history and an environment; that is why it is cultural. In that web
of human thought, how many of those possibilities can we locate?
I began here by making an inventory with regard to the thinking
about the beginning. There is a biblical intelligence or “truth” that
we can see simultaneously detaching itself and exploring itself in
the rewritten account of the Creation. By positing introductorily
an absolute Other, external to the world, this opening creates in the
human—deploys there and sets into motion—the conditions of a
subjectivization that, through the means of guilt and Expectation,
will henceforth endlessly construct and reveal itself. Or rather, let
us say that the biblical human, upon encountering what it posits at
the outset, in this inaugural scene, as incommensurable Outside,
and under the theme of the Alliance that is formed there, hence-
forth must endlessly look toward it and make its “inside” from it:
it discovers (promotes) that intimate External at the same time as
it perceives (deploys) that intimacy as an infinity, thus appropriat-
ing an unprecedented becoming (through the motifs of vanquished
death and salvation). An eminently singular and productive coher-
ence, which has its own fecundity, puts to work indefinitely—and
according to which the religious in Europe took form—what is not
adequately characterized by the terribly banal reference to what is
called “God.” Under “God,” Pascal has already warned us, so many
things are listed that really have hardly anything in common.
Finale 127
Opening Hesiod’s Theogony, we find in it an intelligence (truth)

of another kind, “mythological,” which, if it occasionally draws
from the same source as the preceding one, distinguishes itself or
“chooses” in another fashion, gives itself another usage and experi-
ences another productivity: representing, varying, dramatizing, as
both exploratory and probationary function, it tries a whole set of
coherences to explain the world beginning from implied forces and
factors. The forces and factors unite or oppose one another, engen-
der and merge with one another, balance and compensate for one
another, from which ensue the many series of filiations and renewals
that form “fate.” Its fecundity has been exploited ever since in ac-
cordance with that inexhaustible lode and promoted by the plea-
sure of narration, fiction, and romance, to which is attached—but
also wants to distinguish itself from, depends upon but struggles all
the more violently against—the “logical” intelligence or truth of
the beginning that we see proposed in the muthos reelaborated by
Timaeus: intelligence that no longer only symbolizes but also ab-
stracts, no longer thinking in terms of representation but of entities;
that is no longer only causalist but is also finalist, weighing all the
ins and outs. It is not content to answer questions but is deliberately
problematic, explaining itself starting from a case system; and there-
fore, it is constructive and modelizing, explicative and deductive. It
expels earlier ambiguity by arming itself with the principle of non-
contradiction, the source of clarity through exclusion; it transforms
the sequence of the account into internal necessity resting upon
argumentation alone. It is what paved the way for science, or rather,
let us say, for a certain kind of (classical) science that based its hold
and its efficacy upon it.
128 Finale
Now we discover in China another form of intelligence, of

“hold” or “truth,” by opening the Classic of Change and again with
regard to the beginning. I think that it can be conceived overall as
an intelligence at once of processivity and operativity (tao meaning
simultaneously the course of things and the way of operating: “tao
of the world” and “my tao”). Thus it does not necessarily present a
subject; it dispenses with narrative, and it dissolves all dramatiza-
tion; it does not think in terms of cause and end, model and aim, but
in terms of condition and consequence, or, more precisely, to take
up again its four opening notions, of “initiation”—“maturation”—
“harvesting”—“regulation.” Even in its religious and ethical dimen-
sion, this intelligence is strategic: drawing on the very procedures
of ritual, it teaches the art of putting oneself in phase with the mo-
ment, of conforming to the lines of force of its unfolding—the latter
becoming clear through the play of polarities—and finds its pro-
ductivity in the capacity to induce evolution, without confronting
the situation or exhausting itself. We understand that what serves
it—not as model or ideal, because it does not detach itself from the
order of things, but as norm—is “harmony”: harmony, tai he 太和,
is at once the condition of the renewal of the world, through its con-
stant balancing, and the—absolute—foundation of the morality
that avoids deviation and deregulation through partiality.
Might these modes of intelligence be incompatible? In any
case, they each deploy their own zone of exploration and fecundity
and are not necessarily led to intersect one another. Of course, as I
have noted, the Bible has its moments that become novelistic, and
philosophy periodically affiliates itself with the biblical religious.
Nevertheless, even if they cross, their respective coherences are not
Finale 129
undone. Thus, when we want to manage the course of things, we

can both modelize, by drawing up a plan and determining ideal
ends (as Timaeus’s Demiurge does), and strategically ripen the situa-
tion, by taking advantage of favorable conditions (as the Classic of
Change teaches us, line by line); but these two logics, which thus
support each other and can intersect, remain contradictory to one
another with regard to their resources and fecundity (as I have dem-
onstrated elsewhere with regard to efficacy). Above all, I do not be-
lieve that these various possibilities of thought are constituted in
successive ages, those of a “necessary development” of the human
mind so dear to the Enlightenment, and accordingly, that one pos-
sibility would, through its progress, ineluctably tend to supplant
the other. That is to say, I do not see that philosophical rationalism
triumphs finally over biblical faith, according to the old positivist
schema; nor even that literature has to outstrip philosophy, accord-
ing to a schema in vogue at present (Richard Rorty). They each
experience their moment of stardom but not, for all that, their mo-
ment of running dry, because they also relaunch and reciprocally
reactivate one another through confrontation and by putting the
gaps between them to work.
Thus it would be philosophically fallacious, that is to say, sterile,
to claim to encage, that is, to chart, these possibilities of thought,
as some anthropologists have attempted to do, or even just to want
to make a tour of them, in an attempt to be exhaustive. Our point
of view in this business must not be retrospective (classifying and
cataloguing), but prospective and extending beyond any given hori-
zon, which traveling effectively serves. Such a (finished) inventory
would come to harm the resources that these “possibilities” are, as
130 Finale
human experience that, gathered each time in its cultural coher-

ence, and thus singular, is at the same time valuable, or at least intel-
ligible, henceforth for every subject—which is very much what their
philosophic elaboration claims. Indeed, what do we know of other
possibilities not yet discernible, in gestation? The human intelli-
gence, conceived of as a capacity forever in the course of develop-
ment, cannot be neatly set into a system or laid out flat in any way.
The relief (in thinking) produces by itself a diversity of sides that are
not approachable in a single perceptive field; or rather, to embrace
this diversity of perspective, it would thus be necessary to adopt a
dominant point of view, but at the same time that relief is lost. That
is why I distrust the comparison that assumes such a dominating
vista, arranging according to itself and the other, charting but no
longer entering.
On the other hand, and today even more than yesterday—
which may be the positive side of globalization, as opposed to the
risk of uniformization that it threatens us with—we can circulate
among languages and cultures, and do so horizontally, transversely,
by extricating certain possibilities and reflecting them through
others and holding these perspectives concurrently. Thus we can
more deliberately enter and exit: because it is necessary to have gone
out, it is necessary to have gone elsewhere, to have moved, to be able
to “enter” and to penetrate. I went into China first of all to be able
to finally enter into the Greek thought that I probably felt, if confus-
edly, I had inherited: this connivance through familiarity (atavism)
is not knowledge. To make these possibilities of mind emerge, on
the contrary, simultaneously emancipates and impassions: eman-
cipates us by desolidarizing us from the adherences we have been
Finale 131
subject to; impassions us (the philosophical eros) because these pos-

sibilities rekindle one another respectively by clarifying each other
in their choices and by discovering each other engaged. We are held
there less by a conviction—attached as we might be at first to a cer-
tain determined content of truth—than by a desire for both explo-
ration and exploitation. At the same time as we step back in our
minds, we make junctions appear that offer us choices and that are
there for the trying.
Reference Note
I have not attached notes to this essay because if I did, it would

be necessary to add one to almost every line.
Instead I rely on my previous work to lay the foundation for this
one and to render it valid, because it is the decantation of them.
Questions that I raise here go back to my first essay, Procès ou cré-
ation (Seuil, 1989); but I have ruminated since.
Concerning the Classic of Change and the most techni-
cal aspect of reading it, I refer in particular to Figures de l’imma-
nence (Grasset, 1993), in which, following the commentary of a
seventeenth-century thinker, Wang Fuzhi, I try to develop a philo-
sophical usage for this foundational book of Chinese thought, and
in order to extract it from the hands of the gurus.
This essay, it will be clear by now, is a sinology Manifesto, at
once philological and philosophical. Given such an explanation, I
wonder whether we can return to the brief essay in philosophy, even
when it touches on knowledge. It would be brief and not cursory.
Can we revive the genre of the Letter and the Discourse that hap-
pily follows the thread of an idea, carried along by a desire to think
and no longer seeking shelter behind a screen of erudition?
Although this essay does not take that form, it is also a dialogue
engaging contemporary French thinkers who seem the most impor-
tant to me: a dialogue, notably with Marcel Gauchet, that this ques-
133
134 Reference Note
tion of the possibilities of thought, among others, has prompted;

with Philippe Descola, who has attempted a powerful anthropo-
logical charting of the modes of thought; with Bruno Latour, who
raised the suggestion of an “internal heterotopia”; with Marcel De-
tienne, finally, who no longer believes in the “Greeks.” Would there
then be the “Chinese”?
From the inside, this dialogue engages the sinologists as well:
In addressing ourselves to Western readers, are we not all compelled
by this obligation to “enter”?
François Jullien (b. 1951) is a French sinologist and philosopher.
Jullien was president of the French Association for Chinese Studies
(1988–1990), director of the East Asian Department of the University
of Paris VII (1990–2000), and president of the Collège International
de Philosophie (1995–1998). He is currently a professor at Paris Dide-
rot University and director of both the Institute of Contemporary
Thought and the Marcel Granet Center. He is also a senior member
of the Institut Universitaire de France. Jullien is well known in France
and throughout the world for his writings that explore the distances
between European and Chinese thought. He has published more
than thirty volumes of philosophy, and his works have been translated
into numerous languages.
Jody Gladding is a poet and translator. The author of three col-

lections of poetry, she has translated almost thirty books from the
French. She teaches in the MFA Program at Vermont College of
Fine Arts.

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The Book of Beginnings

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Translated by Jody Gladding

Yale University Press New Haven & London

English translation copyright © 2015 by Yale University. Translated by Jody Gladding.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

1 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)? 1

2 The Elsewhere of China, 6

3 Thinking Before or Beside? 12

4 The First Sentence, 19

5 A First Chinese Sentence, 24

9 Undoing Our Alternatives, 65

10 Where Would the Beginning Begin? 74

11 Neither God nor Myth: What Other Possibility? 80

12 When Myth Holds No Interest, When God Holds

13 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation, 92

15 Is There Still “Tradition”? 113

Finale: A Shift of the Truth, 122

Reference Note, 133

It is strange—but finally logical—that I am just now coming

Chinese thought, I also take the risk of addressing nonsinologists as

essary. But Chinese thought, it is true, is so vast: Can we ever finish

To enter, if we define it most literally and introductorily, is to

imperialism upon the other. At present, the relationship of domina-

We must take better measure of this Chinese elsewhere. And

Let us set out on the better-­marked path. With regard to India,

of this last formulation and go with the nondefinitive “going.” Let

calling into question our biases—what biases?—and, consequently,

mean that China’s way of thinking “in course” should be ranked

We can now better understand why anthropology, despite its

as European reasoning refuses to de- and re-­categorize itself, that

“Beautiful,” that it established, to which it sacrificed so much, now

Might it even offer itself as a remedy? At least, it is no trouble to

indeed enter into Chinese thought, actually enter, in order to exit

I do indeed believe in the sentence as the modality belonging

concept (the “flesh” is hardly a concept). I can recognize a sentence,

ing us retrospectively with this enigma: Through where—that is,

approach, to set in motion a conversion that will not end. It is to

be returned to it by that same raking motion: an orbit is fixed, that

This first Chinese sentence I will take from the beginning of

can mark it grammatically; there is no more morphological specifi-

Initiatory capacity (Qian):

beginning expansion profit rectitude

Or just as good: “to begin—to expand rapidly—to profit / to

Thus it is less a matter of a sentence, exactly, than of successive

(ren 仁), as non-­insensibility with regard to what happens to others,

That first sentence is so complete, comprehensive, and defini-

Vast is the capacity of Qian [the initiatory capacity]!

This exhaustive introductory formula is one of celebration.

situate us in the fundamental, earlier stage, the one of stock or root

Clouds pass—rain spreads:

Such is the progress, or rather, such is the in progress, the “ex-

out and, crossing straight through, to assist in the ripening process,

Vast clarity—end beginning:

The way of Qian [the initiatory capacity] modifying-­

Each “moment” comes in its time, opportunely, and that is

“mandate” according to a fate that sets its destination: whether it

[From the] head to tower over the throng of beings:

It is clear, according to all the glossators, that what comes “at

was said at the start of the beginning-­command (yuan): that is, to

Let us deliberately exit this sentence in order to be able to enter

sensus, to reveal it to itself—that is to say, that can adjust to it and

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

12 When Myth Holds No Interest, When God Holds

Let us set out on the better-marked path. With regard to India,

as European reasoning refuses to de- and re-categorize itself, that

(ren 仁), as non-insensibility with regard to what happens to others,

The way of Qian [the initiatory capacity] modifying-

was said at the start of the beginning-command (yuan): that is, to

the efficacy-capacity of the least course of action,

Thus some twenty-five centuries later, with regard to this first

posite position—in fine, signaling, ironically, not a threatening de-