Nothingness and the aspiration to universality in the poetic 'making' of sense: an essay in comparative east–west poetics. Issue 3 (2nd July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Franke, William
• Is Part Of: Asian philosophy. Volume 26:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 241
• Page End: 264
• Publication Date: 2016-07-02
• Subjects: Comparative poetics -- Jullien -- apophasis -- negative theology -- analogy -- classical Chinese thought; Philosophy, Asian -- Periodicals; 181
• DOI: 10.1080/09552367.2016.1206687
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0955-2367

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As a contribution to comparative East-West poetics, this essay descries a common resource of Western and classical Chinese literatures in certain "apophatic" modes of thought and discourse that are oriented to what cannot be said, to what is manifest only in and through a certain evasion and defiance of all efforts to verbalize and conceptualize it. This argument is developed in critical counterpoint with the work of interpreting Chinese classical poetry and thought by the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien. Jullien acutely apprehends and elegantly expounds the deeply apophatic bent of Chinese poetics. However, he sets Chinese thought and poetry categorically apart from Western approaches, whereas my analysis brings them together under the aegis of their common inspiration from the experience of the limits of language vis-à-vis an unspeakable origin of thinking and its source in reality.