Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece

In Detour and Access, François Jullien investigates the subtlety, strategy, and production of meaning in ancient and modern Chinese aesthetic texts and political events. Moving between the rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and China, Jullien attempts no simple comparison between these two civilizations. Rather, he uses the perspective provided by each to gain access to one culture considered all too strange — “It’s all Chinese to me” — and to another whose strangeness has been eclipse...