François Jullien: This, Wondrous Strange Idea of the Beautiful

François Jullien, born in 1951, philosopher and sinologist, teaches at Paris University VII. He is Director of the Centre Marcel Granet and of the Institutes de la Pensée Contemporaine, and former President of the Collège International de Philosophie. François Jullien is most likely the first Western philosopher to have ever undertaken thoroughgoing study and research in Chinese thought. Among others, his work also attempts to deconstruct European traditions of thought from the vantage points of Chinese thinking. Several of Jullien’s books are in German translation.

On the subject of the lecture François Jullien remarks:
“The course of the centuries have borne witness to an unceasing questioning of the criteria and conceptions of the beautiful, along with attendant variations in its definitions. And yet has one ever enquired into those preconditions inherent in language itself that have enabled one to refer to “the beautiful”? Has one ever really considered on what pedestal “the beautiful” has been placed? In contrast to its European counterpart, Chinese thought has refrained from abstractly isolating “the beautiful”. By focusing my work on this difference, I intend to excavate all other terrains that have not yet subordinated themselves to the monopoly of the beautiful and, further, to discover various other fruitful things on which contemporary art – in open warfare with the beautiful – may discourse. Reason enough to at least want to extract the beautiful from those customary places that exhaust it, and so to deliver it to its strangeness.”

The lecture will be held in the French language and simultaneously translated.