The effectiveness of silent transformations

In collaboration with IQSOG

Thinking in Europe has long been governed by the Greek heritage of cutting, defining, aiming and imposing form. This grammar of purpose has shaped our imaginary of action, of plan, of rupture.

To this way of taking hold, the detour via China opens up another intelligibility: discerning the propensity of things, working with the slope of situations, adjusting the right gesture. This shift reverses our idea of efficiency, from the project to the propensity, from mastery to adjustment, from the spectacular to the discreet.

In this way, the Chinese way of doing things opens up another intelligibility.

In this perspective, the event is no longer a shock but the culmination of silent transformations, continuous changes that take place in the open air without us first taking the measure of them. Learning to see these tiny metamorphoses shifts our relationship to time, self-government and collective action.

Hence the need for de-coincidence: creating a loophole in our self-evident ways and customs to reopen initiative. De-coincidence is not about escaping, it's about loosening automatism, freeing up a margin of existence, rekindling a taste for the world through attention to the discrete. This journey leads to the idea of a second life, not to remake one's life but to reclaim it from within, requalifying the ordinary, reorienting one's grasp, until one finally lives.

A whole new apprehension of what practicing strategy, management and governing and more generally exercising power means, in short.

Philosopher and sinologist, François Jullien has been developing a body of work that displaces our obvious for over thirty years. Professor emeritus at the Université Paris Cité, he held the chair on otherness at the Collège d'études mondiales. Using China as a detour to uncover a different intelligence of action, he works on the gap as a method: thinking in the between, de-coinciding with the automatisms of language, welcoming the propensity of situations rather than imposing a plan on them. A work that invites us to a philosophy that is truly operative, because it is attentive to the discreet and to accuracy rather than to the spectacular.