China Perspective Issues
BOOK REVIEWS
HEURTEBISE, Jean-Yves. 2020. Orientalisme, occidentalisme et universalisme : histoire et méthode des représentations croisées entre mondes européens et chinois (Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Universalism: History and Method of Cross-representations between European and Chinese Worlds). Paris: Editions Eska.
Jean-Yves Heurtebise’s essay explores various aspects of the crossed history of intellectual and cultural relations between European and Chinese worlds since the Renaissance. It is a decisive contribution not only to the epistemological questions debated within the field of Sinology – the delimitation of its object, its role in the construction of an essentialised China, its Eurocentrism – but above all, to a critical history of representations of China in Europe.
This stimulating work is the fruit of a compilation of articles published by the author in English, French, and Mandarin since 2014. Although a real effort has been made to strengthen the coherence of the whole, it does not escape the pitfalls of such an exercise in that it creates several redundancies, and thematic developments that sometimes distance the reader from the subject. It also suffers from a disorganised structure, and language that lapses into jargon on occasion. This demanding and ambitious essay, whose plentiful citations are always in their original language, nonetheless proves highly fertile in terms of ideas and methodological perspectives.
The subject is tackled from three distinct angles: a critical approach to the conceptual and philosophical dimensions of these representations and their histories; a theoretical reflection that aims at reconsidering the debate between universalism and relativism in terms that go beyond a sterile duality, and finally, a discussion of the interlinked issues of Orientalism and Occidentalism applied to the Chinese sociohistorical context.
A substantial introduction allows the author to draw up a particularly welcome critical state of the art concerning these ideas and the way they are used. He reflects on the two poles, negative and positive, of these discursive depictions, questioning both their symmetry and their singularity and, in particular, the absence of a historical colonial infrastructure in the case of Occidentalism. He is therefore convincing when he demonstrates that what he terms “Sinological Orientalism” has its philosophical presuppositions in a definition of “culture” inherited from European intellectual history and seen as indissociable from homogeneous language and people (p. 45).
After this theoretical introduction, the author offers a long section on the history of intellectual representations of China. From Matteo Ricci to Gilles Deleuze, and taking in Kant and Hegel, this historical overview is undertaken using a selection of authors from different periods, philosophical traditions, and ideological orientation. For the author, the Jesuit interpretation of China and the Chinese rites controversy constitutes the origin of the epistemological foundations of a European discourse on China (p. 70). Heurtebise sees the ontological gap between the “European subject” and the “Chinese object,” the inability to imagine the processes of hybridisation and the recurrence of philosophical clichés applied to China (the missing of transcendence, absence of idealism, lack of rationality, inability to think in abstract terms) as the distinctive traits of an Orientalising European representation of China. The culturalist anthropology of the nineteenth century and the romantic illusion of autonomous knowledge outside its subject of study has reinforced this representation (p. 89). Countering this, the author tries to show that European Sinological knowledge was the product of a co-construction with texts, debates, and issues from within China (p. 91).
Heurtebise puts forward an edifying reinterpretation of the references to China to be found in the writings of German idealist philosophy. He traces Sinophobia back to a period before the nineteenth century, revealing in a convincing manner the gap – in particular where Kant and Hegel are concerned – between the progressive universalism of their philosophical systems and the culturalist and racialist foundations of their anthropological discourse, in particular when applied to Asia/the East/China (p. 91-113).
Citing the writings of Gilles Deleuze and François Jullien, Heurtebise extends his discussion on the philosophical representations of China and “Chinese thought.” He reveals the limits of Deleuze’s representation of China, seen as purely imaginary, metaphorical, and with an intellectual production that had come to a halt in a “pre-philosophical” state (p. 119, 124). He nonetheless draws on Deleuze for a method by which to go beyond an “external difference” between China and the West, and see the possibility of thinking of the internal differences and multiplicities of these spaces (p. 138). The author’s constant methodological ambition lies in thinking of what is common and universalisable in these texts and geocultural spaces without falling into an essentialising dualism.
The second main section of the work seems more dispersed as far as the subject is concerned. Enlightening pages on the pictorial perspective and the ideal of “Western medicine” allow the author to develop a stimulating and critical reflection on the methodological difficulties of comparative studies, and to deconstruct biases that are culturalist, essentialising, and lack historical context, which continue to beset the dominant discourse on Chinese/Western medicine in China and in Europe (p. 144-85).
In the three other “case studies,” Heurtebise tackles some texts and discourse enshrined within the Chinese-speaking space. A too-brief analysis of the amnesic nationalist imagination in science-fiction literature (p. 185-201) precedes a historical and philological development on the polysemy and the political uses of the concept of tianxia (天下), literally “under the sky” or “empire-world” in the politico-cultural imagination of the pre-modern period (p. 201-36). His ambition and the richness of his textual and theoretical references would seem to call for greater development to tackle in context such a complex concept in all its historical variations. It does, however, provide the author with the opportunity to apply his transcultural approach whilst taking care not to isolate the texts and to juxtapose their different interpretations of this polysemic idea.
The last chapter gives us a critique, sometimes stimulating but often rather confused, of what the author calls a “quadruple ideological projection” of China (developmental, liberal, pacifist, and ecological), its putative identity, its historical trajectory, and its future (p. 236-59).
The conclusion represents an attempt at a synthesis and formalisation of the author’s methodological suggestions for cultural studies. In a language that is sometimes a little abstruse, he suggests that henceforth we think of the relationship between “European and Chinese worlds” in terms of circulation, hybridisation, and heterogeneity within these geocultural spaces. Despite the formal and structural weaknesses inherent in its constitution, this study, supported by an impressive quantity of secondary literature, would seem to be indispensable reading for researchers working with or on China, as well as those interested in intellectual history (Chinese, European, global) and in subjects relating to postcolonial criticism, transcultural studies, and comparative literature.