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Decentering Sinas: Poststructuralism and Sinology

Decentering Sinas: Poststructuralism and Sinology In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Western philosophy following “the becoming-legible of non-Western scripts,” when the European intellectual tradition was forced to confront its civilizational others. Derrida positions himself as contributing to this decentering, displacing the value-laden binary opposition central to structuralism. But as Derrida explained, the “first decentering limits itself” by “recenter[ing] itself upon” what he calls “the ‘Chinese’ prejudice: all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language [which] encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history.” How has the approach to Chinese language and literature of that decentering known as poststructuralism limited itself or recentered itself, and how has sinology responded to the influence of poststructuralism? Insofar as the Chinese term for the Sinae (China) at the root of sinology is itself “middle” or “central” (中), how susceptible to decentering can sinology be? This article begins with a survey of poststructuralist writings about China by renowned post-structuralists, alongside responses to their work by sinologists and comparatists, arguing that poststructuralist writings tend to recenter themselves on a binary opposition between China and the West. The author then addresses the influence of poststructuralism on Chinese literary studies, to argue that the most successful poststructural decentering occurs in sinology when sinologists disseminate their decentering through a dissipated poststructuralism. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture Duke University Press

Decentering Sinas: Poststructuralism and Sinology

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Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by Duke University Press
ISSN
2329-0048
eISSN
2329-0056
DOI
10.1215/23290048-9681163
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Abstract

In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Western philosophy following “the becoming-legible of non-Western scripts,” when the European intellectual tradition was forced to confront its civilizational others. Derrida positions himself as contributing to this decentering, displacing the value-laden binary opposition central to structuralism. But as Derrida explained, the “first decentering limits itself” by “recenter[ing] itself upon” what he calls “the ‘Chinese’ prejudice: all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language [which] encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history.” How has the approach to Chinese language and literature of that decentering known as poststructuralism limited itself or recentered itself, and how has sinology responded to the influence of poststructuralism? Insofar as the Chinese term for the Sinae (China) at the root of sinology is itself “middle” or “central” (中), how susceptible to decentering can sinology be? This article begins with a survey of poststructuralist writings about China by renowned post-structuralists, alongside responses to their work by sinologists and comparatists, arguing that poststructuralist writings tend to recenter themselves on a binary opposition between China and the West. The author then addresses the influence of poststructuralism on Chinese literary studies, to argue that the most successful poststructural decentering occurs in sinology when sinologists disseminate their decentering through a dissipated poststructuralism.

Journal

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2022

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    Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten
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    De Man, Paul
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    Hung, Ho-Fung
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    Kao, Yu-kung Tsu-Lin Mei
  • Syntax, Diction, and Imagery in T'ang Poetry
    Kao, Yu-kung
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    Klein, Lucas
  • On the Study of Tang Literature
    Kroll, Paul W.
  • Tu Fu's ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism
    Mei, Tsu-Lin Yu-kung Kao
  • Outside the Parenthesis (Those People Were a Kind of Solution)
    Saussy, Haun
  • French Feminism in an International Frame
    Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
  • What about the Billeter-Jullien Debate? And What Was It About? A Response to Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
    Weber, Ralph
  • Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the ‘Li Sao.’
    Williams, Nicholas Morrow Maghiel van Crevel Lucas Klein
  • Hidden in Plain Sight? The Art of Hiding in Chinese Poetry
    Yu, Pauline
  • The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West
    Zhang, Longxi
  • The ‘Tao’ and the ‘Logos’: Notes on Derrida's Critique of Logocentrism
    Zhang, Longxi
  • Contesting Confucius
    Zhao, Henry Y. H.
  • From Work to Text
    Barthes, Roland Stephen Heath
  • So, How Was China?
    Barthes, Roland Chris Turner
  • Well, and China?
    Barthes, Roland Lee Hildreth
  • John Wilkins' Analytical Language
    Borges, Jorge Luis Eliot Weinberger
  • The Heated French Debate on Comparative Philosophy Continues: Philosophy versus Philology
    Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten
  • Editor's Introduction
    Bowman, Paul Paul Bowman
  • Hallucination and Coherence
    Cayley, John Yang Lian 楊煉
  • Forum: From the 1990 AAS Roundtable
    Chaves, Jonathan
  • How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory
    Chow, Rey
  • Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem
    Chow, Rey
  • Kristevan (Mis)Understandings: Writing in the Feminine
    Chung, Hilary Michel Hockx Ivo Smits
  • Editors' Introduction
    Defoort, Carine Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光
  • The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism
    De Man, Paul
  • The Resistance to Theory
    De Man
  • Does the Metaphor Translate
    Ekström, Martin Svensson Ming Dong Gu Rainer Schulte
  • Illusion, Lie, and Metaphor: The Paradox of Divergence in Early Chinese Poetics
    Ekström, Martin Svensson
  • One Lucky Bastard: On the Hybrid Origins of Chinese ‘Literature.’
    Ekström, Martin Svensson Anders Pettersson Gunilla Lindberg-Wada Margareta Petersson Stefan Helgesson
  • Sino-Methodologies, a Draft
    Ekström, Martin Svensson
  • Is Mimetic Theory in Literature and Art Universal?
    Gu, Ming Dong
  • Mimetic Theory in Chinese Literary Thought
    Gu, Ming Dong
  • Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West
    Hayot, Eric Ali Behdad Dominic Richard David Thomas
  • Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900
    Hung, Ho-Fung
  • Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T'ang Poetry
    Kao, Yu-kung Tsu-Lin Mei
  • Syntax, Diction, and Imagery in T'ang Poetry
    Kao, Yu-kung
  • A Dissonance of Discourses: Literary Theory, Ideology, and Translation in Mo Yan and Chinese Literary Studies
    Klein, Lucas
  • On the Study of Tang Literature
    Kroll, Paul W.
  • Tu Fu's ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism
    Mei, Tsu-Lin Yu-kung Kao
  • Outside the Parenthesis (Those People Were a Kind of Solution)
    Saussy, Haun
  • French Feminism in an International Frame
    Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
  • What about the Billeter-Jullien Debate? And What Was It About? A Response to Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
    Weber, Ralph
  • Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the ‘Li Sao.’
    Williams, Nicholas Morrow Maghiel van Crevel Lucas Klein
  • Hidden in Plain Sight? The Art of Hiding in Chinese Poetry
    Yu, Pauline
  • The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West
    Zhang, Longxi
  • The ‘Tao’ and the ‘Logos’: Notes on Derrida's Critique of Logocentrism
    Zhang, Longxi
  • Contesting Confucius
    Zhao, Henry Y. H.