François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting: A Review Translated title: 弗兰科瓦·于连 《大象无形，或从绘画论非客体》读后感

Abstract

In The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, François Jullien attempts to find a way to describe the meaning of undifferentiation in traditional Chinese painting. In every chapter, he re-examines the relationship of the painter to the arising-essence of the object and the painter’s desire to go upstream from the arising in order to paint with the object as the object would come to appear in the world. He describes the tradition of Chinese literati painting as an unbroken search for the non-object and the “foundation-font” of existence. In particular, the idea of the non-object is obscured, he says, by the dichotomy of presence and absence. Rather than this dichotomy, he tells us that presence and absence are a continuum in Chinese thought, and that they indicate the arising from and returning to (which is constantly occurring) of the world to an undifferentiated fount. This book may point toward a way out of the subject-object dichotomy, by offering access to a philosophy and creative tradition that does not compartmentalize time in terms of what is gone and what does not exist, but is in a constant state of emergence and transformation, so that time is part of space, and part of matter, and is not imaginary, but is material.

Translated abstract

在《大象无形，或从绘画论非客体》一书中，弗兰科瓦·于连意在描述中国国画中“无分别”的用意。在书本的章节中，作者一次次剖析画家与物体所浮现的本质间的关系以及他想追随这种浮现至其发源处并与浮现一同来到世上的渴望。于连把中国文学界的作画传统比作一次不间断的对非客体和存在的“基础本质”的探寻。他说，有和无之间的对立掩盖了非客体这一观点。于连告诉我们，在中国哲学思想中，有和无并非对立，而是一个连续体。有和无指示这个世界接连不断地从混沌中浮现而又回到混沌中去的现象。本书向我们介绍了这样一个哲学和创作的传统，它也许能解决主体与客体间的对立：它不把时间放在过去和不存在的束缚中，而把它看作不断发生和衍化的，使时间成为空间、物质的一部分：它有实体，而非想象。