Review: Francois Jullien’s Living off Landscape, or the Unthought of in Reason

François Jullien’s Living off Landscape, or the Unthought of in Reason, (Vivre de paysage ou L’impensé de la Raison [2014] 2018. trans. Pedro Rodriguez), is another outstanding work in a series of original and challenging studies of Chinese history and culture. A review in a special edition on Landscape East and West is easily justifiable, despite the work not engaging directly with Chinese mountain-and-water-paintings, nor with European landscape painting and its commonly associated concepts such as the beautiful or the sublime, which otherwise stand at the center of Western discourse in art history and aesthetics. The main connection Jullien elaborates regarding landscape is his observation that the general Western concept of “landscape” emerges hand-in-hand with the emergence of landscape painting: “’Landscape’ was first named (thought through) with respect to painting.”(2) Hence, Jullien’s approach is to draw on a similar relation regarding China. Given his overall critical enterprise, he thus explores the resources of Chinese landscape art for a better understanding of what landscape really is all about in that tradition, yet still missing in its Western conception. In short, this book does not directly thematize topics relating to Asian arts and aesthetics instead, the topic of landscape East and West serves as an opportunity for Jullien to evolve his own philosophical project of developing an ecological meditation on the habitable world (in the Greek sense of οἰκουμένη γῆ) in a global perspective. Thus, Chinese landscape painting serves as a prism to deflect and reflect philosophical conceptions.