Since first establishing what he refers to as his philosophical construction yard (chantier) to explore the écart between Chinese and European thought François Jullien has been organizing a vis-à-vis between cultures, rather than comparing them, so as to map out a common field for reflection. His work has led him to examine such various disciplines as ethics, aesthetics, strategy, and the systems of thought (pensées) of both History and nature. The aim of this "deconstruction" from without (du dehors) is to detect buried biases, in both cultures, as well as to elucidate the unthought-of (l'impensé) in our thought. It serves also to bring out the resources (ressources) or fecundities (fécondités) of languages and cultures, rather than consider them from the perspective of their "difference" or "identity." Moreover, it launches philosophy anew by extricating it from the bog of its atavisms and purging it of facile notions (évidences). The enterprise has not failed to raise hackles in both philosophical and Orientalist circles. Jullien has argued in response that the way to produce the common (produire du commun) is to put écarts to work. Because they establish distance, écarts bring out "the between" ("l'entre") and put our reflection into tension. "The similar" ("le semblable"), on the other hand, produces only what is uniform, which we then mistake for "universals." Within this construction yard between the languages and systems of thought of China and Europe, Jullien has since developed a philosophy of "living" (philosophie du "vivre"). This marks a departure from Being, the major bias of Greek philosophy. The result is a general philosophy that unfolds (se déploie) as a philosophy of existence. Some of Jullien's recent developments in this area include reflections on intimacy ("l'intime") and "landscape" ("paysage"). For a survey of Jullien's work, see De l'Être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée, Gallimard, 2015. The readership for Jullien's work has been expanding of late beyond the disciplines of Orientalism and philosophy. The world of management has begun to adopt such concepts as situational potential (potentiel de situation), as opposed to "plans of action"; maturation (of conditions), as opposed to projected modelizations; and the initiation of silent transformations ("transformations silencieuses"), to induce change rather than impose it. Cf. A Treatise on Efficacy, 2004; Conférence sur l'efficacité, 2005. The world of psychology and analysis has begun to adopt the concept of "silent transformation" (cf. The Silent Transformations, 2011); the distinction between the word and speech (cf. Si parler va sans dire, 2006); and the concepts of the allusive (l'allusif), availability (la disponibilité), indirectness (le biais), and obliquity (l'obliquité) (cf. Cinq concepts proposés à la psychanalyse, 2012). The art world has begun to adopt the concepts of silent transformation; of the "great image" ("The great image has no form"); of soaring (l'essor) and slackness (l'étale) (slackness is what is determined, what has completely come to pass, and has therefore lost its effect; soaring is the upstream of the effect, when the effect is still occurring, still at work, and has not yet gone slack); of the frontal and the oblique (evocation, being oblique, might be preferable to representation, which is frontal: "paint the clouds so as to evoke the moon"); of coherence, as opposed to sense (if a work does not deliver a "sense," then is it not co-herence that confers the work's con-sistency, that makes it "hold together" as a work?); of the evasive, as opposed to the assignable); of the allusive, as opposed to the symbolic. The art world has also begun to adopt the concepts of the écart and the between (l'entre). Because it is based on distinction, difference specifies an essence and stores it away as knowledge. An écart, however, establishes a distance and thus maintains a tension between the things it separates. Even while producing its disturbance, the écart brings forth a between, precisely because of the distance established. If the "between" is the thing of which ontology cannot conceive—because it has no in-itself: i.e., no essence—it is also the space through which [the thing] passes, or occurs: the space of the operatory and the effective. Cf. In Praise of Blandness, 1997; The Impossible Nude, 2007; The Great Image Has No Form, 2012; This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, 2016.
