The Silent Transformations

François Jullien

Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson

 

4.25 x 7 inches, 168pp. May 2011

ISBN : 9781906497873

Rs  425.00 (HB)
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£14.00 (HB)

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To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

 

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, provides a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and offers insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

 

In The Silent Transformations—the first volume in a series of ‘works in progress’—Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy. 

Philosopher and sinologist François Jullien is a professor at Université Paris Diderot, a member of the Institut universitaire de France, and director of the Institut de la pensée contemporaine. His other books include In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics (2004), The Impossible Nude (2007) and The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting (2009). 

 

Krzysztof Fijalkowski is a senior lecturer in critical studies at Norwich University College of the Arts. 

Michael Richardson is a writer and translator. Together, Fijalkowski and Richardson have translated Refusal of the Shadow, Surrealism against the Current, and Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography.

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