REVIEW: The Dynamics of Masters Literature by Wiebke Denecke

The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Fei Zi by Wiebke Denecke (review) Guo Jue Philosophy East and West, Volume 64, Number 1, January 2014, pp. 240-249 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: 10.1353/pew.2014.0002 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pew/summary/v064/64.1.jue.html Access provided by Columbia University (2 Mar 2014 18:19 GMT) out in the introduction, paradoxically it is a problem as omnipresent and contentious as its solution is elusive. For this reason the book is aimed not only at those interested in the philosophy and the arts of Japan but at all those who wish to know more about distinct ways of experimenting with corporeality, with body-language and practice. The arts presented in this book show how an interest in the process of artistic creation does not reside exclusively in understanding the genius of the artist, but that “the most ordinary and quotidian act can be creative. . . . The type of action does not count, but [rather] its quality or even better the quality of space and time lived during it[s course]” (p. 210).4 Marcello Ghilardi manages to bring us closer to the bodily experience that has defined the Japanese arts and which Japanese thought has assumed and has tried to explain at the level of logical argument. And seeing how the body actualizes and molds itself always in relation to events, one can better understand, when the subject is submerged deeply in an experience of reality to the point of forgetting itself, how ethics and aesthetics blend together in the artistic creation — or in the execution of a simple gesture. Notes 1 – The English translation is mine. The original says: “Esso è l’e-venire stesso dei fenomeni, è la figura che il linguaggio impiega per dire questo emergere-e-immergersi, nel quale i corpi, opere, gesti vengono sempre ricompresi, accolti, intrecciati. È la genesi sempre nuova e incipiente di questa dimensione incoativa del fenomeno e del senso.” 2 – “. . . la possibilità della conoscenza reciproca, dell’accoglienza dell’altro e della logica dell’azione come interazione. . . . Si tratta di mostrare come, da un lato, essi [modelli di cultura e di razionalità] non siano mai univoci e perfetti, dall’altro, come non siano mai assoluti, cioè slegati da altri modelli che li definiscono per affinità e sintonia oppure per differenza specifica, anche per negazione.” 3 – “Interculturale, dunque, non potrà mai essere la vocazione di una disciplina, se essa non si apre ad un orizzonte che la disponga secondo la modalità dell’intreccio, della contaminazione, dell’ascolto e dell’attraversamento dei confini delle diverse discipline.” 4 – “. . . l’atto più ordinario e quotidiano può essere creativo. . . . Non conta il tipo di azione, ma la sua qualità, o meglio la qualità dello spazio e del tempo vissuti attraverso di essa.” The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Fei Zi. By Wiebke Denecke. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph 74. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Pp. viii + 370. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-05609-1. Reviewed by Guo Jue Barnard College [email protected] The Dynamics of Masters Literature (hereafter Dynamics) by Wiebke Denecke is an ambitious undertaking, revisiting seven early Chinese texts — the Analects, Mozi, 240 Philosophy East & West Volume 64, Number 1 January 2014 240–249 © 2014 by University of Hawai‘i Press Mencius, Xunzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Han Fei zi — all of which have come down to us known as zhuzishu 諸子書 (writings of the masters), as they were first catalogued in the Han bibliographies. Instead of adding to the many “survey histories of early Chinese philosophy” or providing an “integral treatment of the development of early Chinese thought” (p. 28), Denecke is attempting here to experiment with a hermeneutical reading of this corpus as “Masters Literature,” construed as “discursive space,” in which the texts are considered in a dynamic dialogue with one another through their narrative formats and rhetorical strategies. Denecke begins with a simple but fundamental question that any work aiming at understanding, interpreting, or translating these pre-Qin texts must answer: what are they? Recognizing that the answer ultimately depends on when and to whom the question is addressed, Denecke approaches the question from the perspective of classification, with a sober awareness of anachronism. There are three contenders to be examined: “Chinese Philosophy,” “Chinese belles-lettres,” and “Masters Literature.” All three have been used to characterize pre-Qin Chinese texts, albeit all anachronistically. Nonetheless Denecke’s preference for “Masters Literature” is clear: [D]escribing the corpus of pre-Qin Masters Texts as ‘Masters Literature’ is anachronistic, but the category has many advantages over one like ‘Chinese philosophy’ that is imposed from outside the Chinese tradition . . . because it was coined relatively soon after the preQin period in the Han and because it was an indigenous label rather than one developed in comparison to and competition with the vastly different Greco-Roman heritage in its modern European and American inflections. (p. 32) As Denecke convincingly demonstrates in the Introduction, “Chinese Philosophy” and, in the same vein, “Chinese belles-lettres ” rely heavily on later constructions, particularly those of modern disciplinary identities being projected onto the early texts. Denecke starts by deconstructing the most problematic one, “Chinese Philosophy,” charting its relatively recent birth in Europe and its subsequent development in China. Although now a familiar concept and a well-established academic discipline in China, she points out that “Chinese philosophy” was an invention of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century that strategically validated and facilitated their missions in China. The category not only received unquestioned acceptance in Enlightenment Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also gained currency among many Chinese intellectuals, who eagerly embraced and further developed it in an almost desperate effort to modernize China under the dire conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. At both stages, the desire and enthusiasm informing the creation of a “Chinese Philosophy” was not simply anachronistic, but had more severe consequences. One, Denecke argues, was to have enforced the hegemonic notion “philosophy,” which had deep Western roots but was taken as a universal category. The recent “world philosophy” approach that “gives equal access to the accomplishment of philosophy for all peoples and histories” can be seen as the consequence of such a hegemony. As Denecke rightly warns, the “reductive comparability of Eastern and Western philosophies might ironically achieve the opposite effect and bolster Book Reviews 241 Eurocentric claims in the guise of establishing ‘universal parameters’” and create “a fictive pantheon of ‘Universal Philosophy’” (pp. 19–20). Denecke has a more charitable criticism of reading the corpus as a “literary genre” in the discipline of belles-lettres. Acknowledging the strength of studies in this vein that pay attention to “internal progressive dialogue” among the texts, Denecke identifies two shortcomings. First, like philosophy, belles-lettres is also a well-institutionalized academic discipline in China “under Western influence” that renders scholarly efforts a “paradoxical attempt at liberation from Western paradigms” (p. 21). Second, such studies “do not go far enough.” They do not challenge the assumptions underlying both modern disciplines; instead, Denecke humorously comments, they only intend to “take ‘Chinese Philosophy’ out for a rhetorical stroll, for a break from the recent guardians of an old tradition — namely academic departments of ‘Chinese Philosophy’” (p. 22). This second flaw is also framed as a lack of intellectual concerns, which Denecke considers a crucial element to “go beyond identifying and archiving literary strategies” and read these pre-Qin texts as “an embedded inner dialogue with highly sophisticated rhetorical encoding of intellectual concerns” (p. 22). A logical antidote to the severe anachronism and Eurocentric implications in reading the pre-Qin Chinese texts as “Chinese Philosophy” or “Chinese belles-lettres ” would be to employ contemporaneous and indigenous identification of these texts. However, Denecke recognizes that “most of our contextual evidence about the identity and pursuits of the masters comes from Han times, so we are trapped again in anachronistic visions that postdate the genesis of the texts, sometimes by several centuries” (p. 23). Consequently, Denecke contends, we have to rely on “the texts themselves and their mutual references . . . for their historical understanding” due to “a lack of contemporary sources” (p. 24) — a point that will be discussed later in this review. Not pursuing the “strictest immanentist historicist approach,” Denecke nevertheless advocates methodologies of both historicist and literary studies, with some creativity and some compromise. The result is a hybrid framework, “Masters Literature.” In addition to the advantage of being an indigenous category coined in the Han that was temporally closer to the pre-Qin period, “Masters Literature” also forms “a discursive space of shared words and concepts, dissonant interpretations, and disputed implementations” (p. 24). As a pragmatic compromise, Denecke proposes to extract the historical understanding of the context by analyzing “the fundamental shifts in narrative formats and rhetorical strategies” (p. 28). Distinguishing her analysis from previously criticized literary studies that fall short on the historical and intellectual dimensions, Denecke invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s “speech genres” to highlight the capacity of “Masters Literature” to include historical depth. Bakhtin’s “speech genres,” according to Denecke, are “those parts of an utterance that have already been spoken before,” and they “function as frames and triggers of the audience’s expectations” (p. 24). Following this theorization Denecke constructs not only intertextual echoes among different texts in the corpus, but also textual interactions among “scene and function of enunciation,” which she specifically 242 Philosophy East & West identifies as evidence of the existence of “readerly expectations” manifested among the authors of Masters Texts, who are “are creative and brilliant readers of earlier instances of the genre” (pp. 24–25). Having laid out her objective and methodology, Denecke devotes eight carefully structured and lucidly composed chapters to unfolding and uncovering the proposed “dialogues” that are embedded in the specifically devised narrative formats and rhetorical strategies. Before addressing each text individually, chapter 1 offers four snapshots of the different “faces” — polemical, taxonomical/bibliographical, biographical, and literary — of Masters Literature (or more accurately, in my view, Master writings) from the pre-Qin period to the Eastern Han. In the next seven chapters, Denecke dives into an admirable amount of materials, and in an implicit chronological order analyzes each text with respect to its distinctive narrative and rhetorical format. These narrative and rhetorical formats are the result, as Denecke tries to show, of consciously responding to the preceding ones in pre-Qin times. Chapter 2 centers on the Analects and introduces what Denecke aptly summarizes as the “scenes of instruction.” It highlights the community that formed around the physical presence of Confucius as an actor-teacher, and argues that the “scenes of instruction,” with its emphasis on the oral transmission of knowledge, is the most seminal rhetorical format in the genre of “Masters Literature” and germinates the other rhetorical formats later developed either as alternatives or continuations of it in the other texts. Chapter 3 takes up the traditionally perceived strongest opponent to the followers of Confucius, represented by the Mozi. Denecke portrays the rhetorical “scenes of construction” in the Mozi as the opposite of the “scenes of instruction” in the Analects. She argues that in the Mozi, “learning is transmitted not through personal experience of instruction represented in written texts, but instead is codified in writing, systematically constructed on the textual site that becomes the major site of transmission” (p. 131). She also suggests that the impersonal and rigid rhetorical format of the Mozi contributed to its loss of favor in the Han and its eventual demise in the tradition of Masters Literature. Chapter 4 turns to the Mencius and returns to the “dialogue form.” Mencius “models itself rhetorically on Confucius lore as we see it in the Analects,” and “casts the figure of Mencius as a second Confucius” (p. 154). Along this line, Denecke argues that the most celebrated theme in the Mencius, “human nature” or a concern over “interiority,” paradoxically derived from and served the end of creating a “Confucian lineage,” which she somewhat ambiguously also calls “depth” in the “temporal, textual, and physical senses” (p. 156). Chapter 5 explores the Xunzi with respect to “new discursive strategies.” Denecke argues that the innovative usage of the first-person expository essay format, which shows the indebtedness of the Xunzi to the Mozi, not only highlights human agency as is normally perceived in the concept of wei 偽, “deliberated acts,” but also leads the way to staging an “authoring voice” in later rhetorical forms (p. 180). Furthermore, Denecke points out, the emphasis on the authorial voice and utilization of poetry in the Xunzi compensates for the “loss of aura” owing to the lack of the Book Reviews 243 physical presence of the master figure in the expository essay format. The end result is a combination of “scenes of instruction” and “scenes of persuasion” in the Xunzi. Chapter 6 paints the Laozi as an intentionally crafted textual “counter-universe” to the rhetorical traditions, especially to those of the “Confucian schools.” The distinct formal features of the Laozi text — most prominently the rhymed verses and the lack of embodied voice — are “predominantly intentional rather than primordially innocent, polemical rather than mystical” (p. 208). Denecke also contends that such a craftily created rhetorical format, which is “too believable to be explicitly recognized as wrong, but too polemical to be true,” and the “pervasive polemics specifically against Confucian values and ideas” are strong evidence of a late date of the Laozi after “Confucius’s legacy had become well established” (p. 208). I note here that Denecke only speaks of the received Laozi, whose current form largely came into being in the second century B.C.E., a fact we know from the archaeological discovery of the Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the Laozi text, dated to about 168 B.C.E., to which Dynamics does not refer. I will discuss the excavated texts and their role in Dynamics later. Chapter 7 locates the Zhuangzi rhetorically between the radically disembodied Laozi verses and the most fully personified “scenes of instructions” in the Analects and Mencius. Denecke sees the Zhuangzi sharing the agenda of the Laozi to “displace surrounding master discourses,” at the same time being caught up in a dilemma between “negating language and affirming the ineffability and uselessness of language” and utilizing “the power of language as the brilliant instrument of the persuader, entertainer, and imaginative polemicist” (p. 238). Denecke argues that the Zhuangzi finds “fictional solutions” — the well-known storytelling style of the Zhuangzi — to this dilemma, solutions that not only deal with the “logical problem of paradox” but also break “the Confucian monopoly on ‘scenes of instruction’” by “radically transforming that ‘scene’ for its own purpose” (p. 261). Chapter 8 focuses on the Han Fei zi, dubbed “the neglected stepchild in the family of Masters Texts (note that Denecke uses Masters Text here instead of Masters Literature, a distinction which Denecke regrettably overlooks and which consequently weaken her rhetorical construction of “Masters Literature.”)” (p. 280), and draws attention to the novel visions of a self-regulating state, a purposively nonacting ruler, and an absolute textuality embodied by fa 法, timeless “laws” and universal “methods.” Denecke observes “paranoia” style tensions between the ruler and the state, and between the ruler and the subject in the Han Fei zi, and above all between the Han Fei zi and other Masters texts. She therefore argues that in coping with this “paranoid disposition,” the Han Fei zi develops two rhetorical strategies — introducing the commentary form and persuasively using anecdotes — that make the Han Fei zi “a panorama of the thematic and rhetorical repertoire” (p. 323). In this sense, the Han Fei zi “both embodies and surpasses [the] Masters Literature” that had developed up to that time, which also makes it a proper coda to the examination of Masters Literature in pre-Qin times. The Epilogue, in addition to a convenient summary of the characteristics of Masters Literature that have emerged from the previous chapters, takes an unexpected, if not surprising, turn as it brings back the concept of “Chinese Philosophy,” which 244 Philosophy East & West was thoroughly torn apart at the beginning. Denecke’s gripping proposal is not only to stick “heuristically” to “Chinese Philosophy” for the sake of entertaining multiple “disciplinary translations,” but also to use “Chinese Philosophy” strategically as a membership badge so as to enable “constructive engagement” between modern academic disciplines, because it is “the strongest claim in the Western hierarchy of traditional academic disciplines: only a claim of ‘philosophic’ proportions might help in the questioning of cherished misconceptions about the Western philosophical tradition” (p. 338). Nevertheless, this clever and eclectic strategy, despite its noble intention, is somehow reminiscent of the proverb “if you can’t beat them, join them,” and inevitably makes one wonder whether there is a “deeper structure” in Dynamics. It is time to offer some observations I have gathered during this enjoyable and stimulating, yet at times ambivalent if not puzzling, journey in reading Dynamics. I will focus on the use of sources and methodology. To begin, it is worth noting that, although it is largely accurate that there are lamentably few extant contemporaneous references in the received tradition that can help to contextualize pre-Qin societies and the historical conditions of the time, recent archaeological discoveries and excavated materials in China are gradually changing this frustrating situation. The changes may not be as drastic and fast as we would like them to be; nonetheless, it is undeniable that new materials coming out of the ground, particularly textual materials including bronze inscriptions and bamboo and silk manuscripts of many sorts, are of great importance to reconstructing a more thorough and complete understanding of the historical and intellectual milieu in pre-Qin times, especially the Warring States period, when most of the master figures and their followers were supposed to be active. Therefore it is surprising to notice that excavated materials are largely excluded from Dynamics. However, one would be mistaken to take this omission as a casual neglect of the potential relevance of the excavated materials to the task that Denecke undertakes. On the contrary, it is a consciously made choice. Since this particular line of reasoning is key to a clearer understanding of the “deeper structure,” particularly in terms of the methodology, of Dynamics, it is worth quoting in its entirety here (and note that the emphasis is mine): I engage a central, core body of Masters Texts. Recently, archaeology has enhanced our understanding of early Chinese Thought, thanks to the excavation of ancient versions of texts and the discovery of completely unknown ancient texts that had apparently fallen out of favor and were lost to the historical record. As the study of these materials rapidly progresses, it crucially enriches and revises our understanding of Early China. Yet I have decided not to make these materials a central piece of my book and only mention them to illustrate particular points. The reason is simple: This book proposes a new disciplinary ‘translation’ for the texts that have come to be called ‘Early Chinese Philosophy.’ It coins the term ‘Masters Literature’ for this corpus, uncovers the distinctive features of this genre, and traces how arguments are shaped by narrative formats and rhetorical strategies developed in the early stages of its unfolding, from Confucius to Han Feizi [sic!]. While excavated texts like the Guodian materials add new insights into intellectual positions that had disappeared and uncover lineages of influence in the interpretation of Confucius’s legacy, their existence and content does not alter my argument. They, too, are part of the Book Reviews 245 discursive space of Masters Literature and add historical and intellectual nuances to its development, as I showcase by example in Chapter 6. Yet, all the fundamental shifts in narrative formats and rhetorical strategies that are relevant to my argument about the nature and development of Masters Literature are evident in received texts. (pp. 28–29) Two things should be made clear at the outset. First, Denecke does acknowledge the importance of the excavated texts to her project and makes “showcase” use of a single text from the Guodian materials, albeit with a somewhat intuitive assertion about their loss in history — a highly complicated and continuously debated issue — as these texts “apparently had fallen out of favor,” without clearly identifying whose “favor” it might be. Second, in some areas of study, due to the almost complete lack of contemporaneous or otherwise reliable evidence in the received tradition, excavated materials are becoming indispensable sources. Examples include what excavations of the Ruins of Yin and the so-called oracle bone inscriptions add to our knowledge about late Shang history, or what the legal and administrative documents found at Shuihudi 睡虎地, Zhangjiashan 張家山, and Liye 里耶 add to the studies of Qin and early Han legal and administrative systems. In other cases, a balanced integration of received sources and excavated materials benefits research and should be encouraged. Thus, it is certainly at the researcher’s discretion to decide whether and how to use source materials. This being said, the decision does usually reflect the work’s theoretical and methodological positions. Thus, it makes one all the more curious about the somewhat ambivalent, if not preconceived, attitude toward excavated materials in Dynamics. Three points are noteworthy in the passage quoted above. First, although it is clearly suggested here that “Masters Literature” is a term that Denecke specifically “coined” for the text corpus under analysis, this is puzzling because we are also told elsewhere that “it was coined relatively soon after the pre-Qin period in the Han” by the Han bibliographers (p. 32); it also becomes clear that what Denecke really argues for is the actual existence and conscious usage of “Masters Literature” as a textual genre already in pre-Qin times. Denecke makes this argument most explicitly in the following statement after reiterating the intertextuality present among the texts’ “technical vocabulary”: “It is precisely this last point that should count as the strongest proof for the existence of a distinct textual genre of Masters Literature in pre-Qin times” (p. 89). This statement is significant for an understanding of Denecke’s methodology. Because only when “Masters Literature” is conceived of not only as a “distinct” textual genre but also a priori as a self-contained, closed, demarcated, and thus static “space” in which the texts under analysis consciously participated does it become possible to “uncover” and “unfold” the fixed “distinctive features” manifested in their “narrative formats and rhetorical strategies.” Or, to put it another way, the “discursive space” constructed in Dynamics is rhetorically “discursive” rather than historically “discursive.” On one hand, this brilliantly bypasses the difficulty of identifying the historical authors or compilers of these texts, which admittedly is not always possible for these early composite texts; on the other hand, it weakens the historicist position that Denecke insists on taking, albeit in moderation, and falls 246 Philosophy East & West back on a rhetorically paraphrased but still by-and-large literary approach that she has previously perceptively criticized. Second, a consequence of Denecke’s view of the text corpus as a self-contained rhetorically discursive space is that it takes what can be observed in the received texts, namely what she calls the “shifts in narrative formats and rhetorical strategies,” specifically in this corpus of the chosen seven texts, as “fundamental.” Thus, although acknowledging that some excavated texts represent long-lost “intellectual positions” and “lineages of influence” that would seem to be logically crucial to her historically and intellectually oriented task, Denecke still considers that they can only add “historical and intellectual nuances” to the somewhat already set course of the genre of Masters Literature, construed and conceived as mentioned above. In other words, excavated texts, relegated to a supplementary role, if any, without being actually scrutinized in their own right, are so characterized because the “fundamental shifts,” which are solely derived from the received texts in the first place, are all “evident in the received texts.” This is a circular argument and does not do justice to the excavated materials. Third, it is also worth noting that the only excavated text corpus that is mentioned and utilized in Dynamics is the so-called Guodian manuscripts unearthed in 1993 from Guodian tomb 1 in Hubei, China, dated to around 300 B.C.E. This burial deposit consists of a great number of bamboo manuscripts on various topics, for instance three groups of cross sections that can be found in the received Laozi and a manuscript that largely resembles the “Ziyi” 緇衣 chapter in the Liji 禮記, just to name a couple of well-known and thoroughly studied ones. The Guodian manuscripts have most frequently been categorized as early Chinese philosophical and intellectual compositions, which have consequently, but not unproblematically, been studied along the “Confucian” and “Daoist” lines, in other words under the Han retrospectively devised school-based labels. Denecke’s assessment of the Guodian corpus as “intellectual positions that had disappeared,” “lineages of influence in the interpretation of Confucius’ legacy,” and “part of the discursive space of Masters literature” certainly resonates with this general outlook mainly derived from and most fruitfully in service to the received tradition. Thus the inclusion of the Guodian corpus fits well and also implicitly speaks of the theoretical and methodological position in Dynamics as discussed above. On the other hand, there are other excavated materials that are not primarily conceived, or at least not usually introduced, along these philosophical or intellectual lines that nonetheless can shed light on the discourse that Denecke would likely categorize as “Masters Literature.” Take as an example the long bronze inscription on a ding cauldron found in the tomb of King Cuo of the Warring States Zhongshan Kingdom, most likely cast in 316 B.C.E.1 This 469-character inscription offers King Cuo’s unreserved praise of his longtime advisor, a man named Zhou, for assistance and service in his reign over the kingdom since the king was young. What make this inscription potentially relevant to Dynamics are the historically contextualized descriptions of many terms central to many of the masters writings that Denecke discusses, such as ren 仁, li 禮, zhong 忠, zhi 志, ci 慈, ai 愛, and dao 道.2 This is not Book Reviews 247 just a piece of writing from the fourth century B.C.E. from a state traditionally considered far removed from the Central Plain cultures, if not “barbarian”; the easy and seamless usage of these terms that later bear the labels of being “Confucian,” “Moist,” or “Daoist” offers a historical glimpse outside the retrospectively constructed textual and rhetorical boundaries of the “Masters Literature.” Another example is related to the single excavated text that Denecke showcases in chapter 6, on the Laozi, a text called “Xingzimingchu” 性自命出 from the Guodian corpus. Largely based on Michael Puett’s reading and suggestion, Denecke juxtaposes it with the first line of the received Laozi and argues that the Dao in this line is not “making a point about the mystic ineffability of the Way,” but “criticizes the channeling of the ‘Way’ through human intentionality and education,” which later became the hallmark of Xunzi (p. 226). This in turn is used to support the overall reading of the Laozi as an intentionally created “radical rhetorical counter-universe” to the “Confucian, Moist, and even Chuci traditions” in the “discursive battlefield of Late Warring States China” (pp. 229–230). Denecke is certainly cautious to stress that her seemingly stereotypical contrast between the “Confucian” and the “Daoist” in this chapter is only on the rhetorical level (p. 229). However, two out of the three so-called “Laozi” cross sections in the same Guodian corpus have some significant textual variants from chapters 18 and 19 in the received Laozi, a fact that might challenge the neat “rhetorical contrast” presented in Dynamics. The issue centers on whether the conventionally identified polemics against the “Confucian” ren 仁, yi 義, and sheng 聖 in the received Laozi as well as in the Mawangdui “Laozi” silk manuscripts (dated to ca. 168 B.C.E.) were present in the 300 B.C.E. Guodian bamboo manuscript versions. Based on a convincing paleographic and contextual study of the variants, Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭 argues that they were not in the Guodian manuscripts. He proposes that their appearances in the silk manuscripts and received versions were later, presumably Han, changes when the polemics between the Confucian and Daoist school proper can be more confidently attested.3 In conclusion, working almost exclusively with the received corpus of pre-Qin Masters writings as they were conceived in the Han, Denecke offers some brilliant and creative heuristic constructions for each text in terms of their salient narrative and rhetorical formats, which will no doubt help to penetrate the textual surface of these early Chinese texts. On the other hand, framing them as Bakhtinian “speech genres,” although on a theoretical level and in a blanket manner, acknowledges historical factors, without actually unfolding the depth of the contextual and historical details of their formation, invoking “speech genres” alone cannot change a formal analysis into a truly historical one. In this regard, Dynamics also has not gone far enough. Notes 1 – For the original inscription and transcription, see Hebeisheng Wenwu Yanjiusuo ed., Cuo mu: Zhanguo Zhongshanguo guowang zhimu (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1995), pp. 341–369. For English translations, see Constance A. Cook, “Chung-shan Bronze In- 248 Philosophy East & West scriptions: Introduction and Translation” (M.A. Thesis, University of Washington, 1980), pp. 43–53, 75–87; also Gilbert L. Mattos, “Eastern Zhou Bronze Inscriptions,” in Edward L. Shaughnessy ed., New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 104–109. 2 – Mattos, “Eastern Zhou Bronze Inscriptions,” pp. 109–110. 3 – See Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭, “Guanyu Laozi de ‘jueren qiyi’ he ‘juesheng’” 關於《老子》的“絕仁 棄義”和“絕聖,” in Chutu wenxian yu guwenzi yanjiu 出土文獻與古文字研究 1 (2006): 1–15. Anfractuosité et unification: La philosophie de Nishida Kitarō (Anfractuosity and unification: Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy). By Michel Dalissier. Genève: Librairie Droz, 2009. Pp. 640. Paper CHF 143.50, ISBN 978-2-600-01188-4. Reviewed by Ralf Müller Kyoto University [email protected] Anfractuosité et unification: La philosophie de Nishida Kitarō is the latest work by the French scholar Michel Dalissier, whose 2005 doctoral dissertation won him the 2007 Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, given each year to a French work on Japan.1 This new publication is the culmination of his rich, multi-lingual research on Japanese philosophy, both in Japan and abroad. Instead of providing an all-encompassing account of Nishida’s thought, Dalissier focuses on major concepts in key passages in a limited selection of essays, elucidating important ramifications implicit in Nishida’s at times opaque argumentation. Moreover, Dalissier clarifies Nishida’s concepts by explaining them in relation to almost every philosopher Nishida had read. He does this based on details that are at times miniscule but nonetheless important, such as Nishida’s underlining or marginalia in the copies he owned of Leibniz, Emil Lask, and others. The first of three parts, titled “Psychology and the Dialectic of Unification,” deals with Zen no kenkyū (1911)2 and lays out Dalissier’s central thesis of interpretation. The second part, “Phenomenology, Epistemology, and Metaphysics of Unification,” shows the broadening of Nishida’s writing and its movement away from psychologism. This part focuses primarily on Nishida’s Jikaku ni okeru hansei to chokkan (1917)3 and explores his struggle with Fichte and others, and this paves the way to a proper conceptualization of his idealistic intuition of unification. Based on essays published in 1930 or earlier,4 the third and largest part, “Topology and Unification,” is devoted to Nishida’s main conceptual tool, basho 場所 (topos or place; Fr. lieu). While Dalissier acknowledges Nishida’s “Eastern” intellectual heritage he emphasizes his intrinsically philosophical legacy, which is culturally unbiased and universal. According to Dalissier, Nishida’s basic intuition of unity is somewhat “oriental,”5 but the driving force in Nishida’s work is not a kind of religious experience or mystical insight based on Zen meditation; rather, it is the will to contribute to philosophical discourse, and with intellectual rigor: “In fact, it is no longer about postulating this identity between man and world, between the self and the exterior Philosophy East & West Volume 64, Number 1 January 2014 249–253 © 2014 by University of Hawai‘i Press 249