## EXPLORATIONS OF THE LANDSCAPE

FRANÇOIS JULLIEN: LIVING OFF LANDSCAPE OR THE UNTHOUGHT-OF IN REASON TRANSLATED BY PEDRO RODRIGUEZ

LONDON AND NEW YORK: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD INTERNATIONAL, 2018. 135 PAGES ISBN 978-1-78660-338-8

A landscape -or the landscape -in its full potential still seems to be at least partially hidden to the viewer. This might be a surprising claim, as it may first look as one of the most straightforward phenomena: it is 'there,' we can 'see' it, perceive and experience it through various modes and forms, it is 'in front of us,' ready to be appreciated, analysed, recorded, or even transformed. The fact that there is nevertheless a myriad of undiscovered potentials of  the  landscape  is  also  curious  if  we  consider  how  often landscapes are visited, researched, described, painted, or even planned, created and re-created over the centuries. Nevertheless, and despite the several hundreds of years of its representation in various forms of visual and fine arts, descriptions in the literary arts and also of its theoretical analyses dedicated to the subject, it still feels -especially after having read François Jullien's latest book on the topic -that it has much more to offer than what we have thought so far. Part of the lack of understanding comes from the comfort of relying on previous results and on being perhaps less motivated in going beyond that -hence it is not surprising that in the beginning of his book, Jullien often uses the term 'all too well known' (e.g. pp. 3, 5, 9), describing the possible difficulties of  knowing  more:  i.e.  that  exactly  the  established  knowledge itself may pose some obstacles on the further discovering and understanding.

'We have ground to believe (or at least a hint of evidence, as I see it) that a transcultural, transhistorical, philosophically useful concept of landscape is possible, and that we needn't settle for the idea that landscape, like a moment in art, is the product of a culturally and historically limited artialization.' (p. 101). This statement  comes  perhaps  surprisingly  towards  the  end  of  the book, even if it sounds more like a key initial statement in the considerations of the author. At the same time, however, instead of placing it in the beginning of the book, and thus risk making it  look  like  a  rhetorical  trick  of  grasping  the  attention  of  the reader, it summarises the methodical aims of the volume. The particularities of method become crucial in the entire text, and for those less familiar with Jullien's work, the translator Pedro Rodriguez's careful footnotes definitely help as commentaries explaining  not  only  the  special  terms  Jullien  uses  in  his investigation but also in demonstrating how they make up the structure of his thought.

This  'transcultural,  transhistorical,  philosophically  useful concept  of  landscape'  is  searched  and  developed  with  the analyses  of  the  Western  and  Chinese  landscape  tradition  in painting,  poetry,  and  theoretical  texts.  Nevertheless,  Jullien's method  is  not  comparison  in  the  sense  of  translating  and describing the particularities of common phenomena, or looking for  equivalent  or  relatively  similar  concepts  in  the  different cultural traditions and showing their possible interconnection. He is much more driven by an active and creative juxtaposition of the different approaches along a divide ( écart )  in  order that they have a mutual reflection on each other. In other words, as Pedro Rodriguez summarised in his commentary note, by placing them 'on either side of an exploratory divide' cultures 'reveal each other's biases -or, to use another of Jullien's images, they discover each other's cultural headwaters -and thus bring forth new possibilities.' (p. ix). Throughout the discussion, this will then turn into an invitation -or even a critical and crucial advise -to pursue an examination in two directions: to go backwards and (re)discover the origins of the phenomena, but also to go forward and to bring forth what is found, i.e. setting this knowledge and understanding  gained  from  the  revelatory  reflections  of  the different cultural phenomena to see what can be developed from them, especially from what we may have missed or lost along the way: 'Through this mutual face-off we can venture back into their [the conceptions -Z. S.] unthought-of.' (p. 21). Therefore, this double direction of the investigation characterises Jullien's method of cleaning and recovering long-forgotten potentials that lay hidden in the phenomena, and that, again, will help not only in the reconstruction of the meaning and changes of meanings of the concepts, but also in the more precise understanding of the current state of the phenomena too.

If following Jullien's considerations, then I need to admit that even my first sentence in this very review ('A landscape ... hidden to the viewer .') contains an issue or bias, since his departure point is  exactly the critical investigation of the Western tradition of 'viewing' the landscape, i.e. considering it as an object of vision and what can be primarily perceived through the faculty of sight. When focusing on retracing the origins of the emphasis of the visual aspect of landscape-perception typical in Western thought, he identifies it as a key problem that automatically leads to the subject's dominating the landscape, unlike in Chinese thought, where a more comprehensive and more complete experience of landscape is set forth. Revisiting not only the origins of the term in its etymology but also presenting the earliest descriptions and theories of landscape -that in China dates back several centuries earlier  than  the  first  European  analyses -he unfolds the most characteristic  features  of  the  Chinese  approach  to  landscape through profound analyses of the term itself. Two characters 'mountain(s)-water(s)' is how 'landscape' is expressed in Chinese, and this allows Jullien to develop a convincing interpretation of how in Chinese culture the landscape is not an object of vision, a cut-off of the horizon, but rather a confrontation and correlation of various oppositions (dry and wet, high and low, vertical and horizontal, immobile and flowing etc.) that nevertheless respond to each other. In this way, by breaking with the Western tradition of the domination of and by the dominating power of sight -that naturally  also  detaches  the  observer  from  the  landscape -the subject may remain amidst and in between, i.e. instead of being an external viewer, the subject will be immersed in the landscape through the aforementioned interactions of the opposite factors.

Naturally, this will have several philosophical consequences related to the interpretation of the nature of the experience too. Regarding this above immersion, Jullien points out that it is not necessarily an aesthetic category: 'Is this an 'aesthetic' pleasure, as the West has categorized it? No. It is, rather, a gratification of living , through the activation it provokes.' (p. 39, italics and quotation marks in the original -Z. S.) This will then result not only in the possibility of a novel encountering of the landscape but in the subject's (re)establishment in the world.

Another  inspiring  part  of  the  volume  is  when  the  above considerations  are  applied  to  the  understanding  of  other phenomena connected to the perception of natural forms, namely the  garden  and  the  kiosk.  While  the  tradition  of  the  French garden -due  to  the  Western  dominance  of  sight  and  vision -focuses on how the cured and planned section of Nature should look like, thus arbitrarily imposing geometry on it, the Chinese garden  is  more  'recreational,'  in  both  senses  of  the  word, restoring one's energy by recreating the tensions experienced in an actual landscape. In a similar way, kiosks ( ting in  Chinese), small constructions placed in the landscape without the function of for example dwelling or commercial hospitality services, also serve to promote a submersion in the landscape, instead of simply providing an observation point.

Jullien's main merit with this book, therefore, lies not (only) in the explanation of the differences of the cultural tradition and their landscape-interpretation, and not even merely in the fact of presenting his method of investigating the concepts through the  divide,  but  that  through  his  observation  of  the  tradition he manages to propose novel ways of being engaged with the landscape that have multiple further consequences not only in interpreting past art products and cultural phenomena but also in  offering  new  answers  to  contemporary  environmental  and ecological issues.

Zoltán Somhegyi