Comparison of Cixous and Jullien on Nude

Comparison of Cixous and Jullien on Nude

François Jullien, born in 1951, is a French Sinologist and is currently Professor at Paris Diderot University and director of the Institute of Contemporary Thought and the Marcel Granet Center. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has made great contribution in literature, of which some of famous works are:

The Propensity of Things, a history of efficacy in China (New York : Zone Books, 1995)

A treatise on efficacy : between Western and Chinese thinking (Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, 2004)

Praise of blandness: proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics (New York : Zone Books, 2004)

The Great Image has no shape, or, On the nonobject through painting (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009)

The impossible nude : Chinese art and western aesthetics (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Detour and access : strategies of meaning in China and Greece (New York : Zone Books, 2000)

Vital nourishment : departing from happiness (Brooklyn : Zone Books 2007).

Cixous is an important figure in postmodern philosophy, arguing for the connection between sexuality and language. She develops and argues for feminine writing, écriture féminine. She first uses the term in 'The Laugh of Medusa' (1983) to indicate not only writing that is antithetical to masculinist, linear, representationalist writing, but to indicate the non-linear flow between writing and speech that is inherently bodily.

Cixous argues that masculine writing is static, disembodied and free of desire. Feminine writing is where change can take place. 'Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently from their own bodies . . .' (Cixous, 1986: 279).

In her essay 'Sorties' [1968] (1999) Cixous argues 'phallocentricism is. History has never produced, recorded anything but that . . . . Phallocentricism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men stand to lose by it, differently but as seriously as women. And it is time to transform. The phallocentric order functions through binaries.

In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship between sexuality and language. Like other poststructuralist feminist theorists, Cixous believes that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society.

In 1975, Cixous published her most influential article Le rire de la méduse (The Laugh of the Medusa), translated and released in English in 1976. She has published over 70 works; her fiction, dramatic writing and poetry, however, are not often read in English. Her reading of Derrida finds additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level.

The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics, is misleading. Readers who seek to understand the reasons for the lack of pictorial nudes in Chinese art find more of a sinologist's philosophical inquiry into the nude in European traditions. Jullien has an intriguing premise for the book: one sees neither painted nor sculpted nudes in the long history of Chinese art, and Jullien approaches this topic from the vantage point of the Western ...