In this conversation, Anne Anlin Cheng and Shivani Radhakrishnan address questions of writing across genre, the burdens of representation for Asian Americans, and the ties between intimate experiences of loss and larger social histories of racialized gender. This discussion draws from lived experience, psychoanalytic theory, histories of art and architecture, and scholarship on race.

“Intercultural dialogue,” notably between China and the West, seems to have replaced the vogue of comparatism in academic guidelines, and warrants the best of intentions to leave Eurocentrism behind us. This paper, however, critically addresses a certain type of comparatism which still remains part of an Orientalist perspective, since it often continues to treat China as the radical “Other” with which to be compared, so as to make it respond to totally irrelevant questionings. This is a way of stubbornly maintaining (...) the idea of otherness, which freezes oppositions outside of time and space and does not allow one to detect the plurality and diversity of real differences. An unfortunate consequence of this is the constant risk of falling into some type of essentialism, and to end up, albeit non-intentionally, reinforcing diehard preconceived ideas. It is therefore high time that we should try and reach beyond our deeply ingrained Orientalistic frame of mind. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788-1832), the distinguished holder of the first chair of Chinese studies in France – as well as Europe – was a contemporary of the no less distinguished German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). The advent of sinology, i.e. the new academic discipline represented by Abel-Rémusat, is an interesting fact if placed in the context of the professionalization of philosophy so eminently embodied by Hegel. In this perspective, the relations between these two great minds are even more eloquent (...) with respect to the place given to China in the intellectual geography of 19th century Europe. (shrink)

A symposium on “morality and religiousness, Chinese and Western” would most probably need to recount the historical context and the pristine philosophical formulation of the debate on the problematic relationships between these two terms, which are to be found in the very first transcultural experience between China and Europe launched by the “accommodation” strategy of the Jesuits in their approach to seventeenth- to eighteenth-centuries Chinese elite values and culture. This presentation will deal with the original formulation of the “morality and (...) religiousness” question as applied to the Neo-Confucian tradition, as well as with its repercussions on later developments down to contemporary debates. (shrink)

« Apprendre » ( xue 學) se trouve être le tout premier mot des Entretiens associés à Confucius dont la compilation date d’il y a deux mille ans. Avons-nous depuis lors appris, voire commencé à devenir plus humains? L’histoire des temps modernes, jusqu’aux atrocités dont nous sommes témoins aujourd’hui, pointent vers une réponse négative. Serait-ce donc que l’enseignement confucéen avait raison de se concentrer sur le processus d’apprendre à faire de soi un être humain? Et avait-il quelque justification à placer (...) au cœur de ce processus le continuum entre l’homme et le cosmos, ainsi que la transmission entre générations humaines (notamment à travers le culte des ancêtres, les rites funéraires et la piété filiale)? Enfin, une telle conception de l’humain est-elle en droit d’être au fondement d’un humanisme confucéen et d’une universalité chinoise? Telles sont les questions qui sous-tendent l’exploration de sources textuelles de la Chine ancienne proposée ici. (shrink)