Philosophy East and West

In order to highlight the significance of the book I'm reviewing here, let me recount a recent academic experience: A conference on the Zhuangzi is hosted by a leading scholar in the field with the sponsorship of a major university in mainland China. Several prominent scholars present papers focusing on various different passages of the text. The addresses cover the mystical, the performative, the epistemological, the ethical and several other facets of Zhuangzian thought. Yet one topic is conspicuous by its absence: the political. Not a single paper addresses this matter. Romain Graziani's book effectively rectifies this situation by perceptively showing how Zhuangzian thought ran counter to many of the political assumptions of its time, particularly as they related to notions of food preparation and consumption, animals, mourning, teaching and others.

Besides the emphasis on the political, another distinctive feature of the book is its methodology, which I would describe as a form of intellectual history, if by that we understand the hermeneutic principle according to which the reading of a text should "begin by trying to delineate the full range of communications that could have been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the issuing of the given utterance. After this, the next step must be to trace the relations between the given utterance and this wider linguistic context as a means of the decoding the intentions of the given writer" (Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume I, p. 87). Graziani's book showcases various ways of putting such a principle into practice. The result is a series of highly suggestive and thought-provoking readings of the Zhuangzi. Many of these were originally presented in French in a volume titled Fictions philosophiques du «Tchouang-tseu» (Gallimard 2006), later translated into Spanish as Ficciones filosóficas del Zhuangzi (Trotta 2018). But as the author mentions, the English edition is "a revised, updated, and partly rewritten version" of the original, wherein only "half of the original work remains unaltered" (p. viii). In other words, this is not just a translation but a new book altogether. [End Page 1]

The book has three parts of two chapters each, titled "Humans versus Animals", "Humans versus Death" and "Humans versus Heaven", plus a conclusion. I shall proceed to describe their contents.

Part I starts with "Carving up a Myth in the Kitchens of Power." The chapter is an expanded and revised version of a piece originally published in 2005's Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China, edited by Roel Sterckx. It argues that the story of Cook Ding's slaughtering of an ox should be read vis-à-vis the sacrificial-cosmological uses of culinary expertise as explained in texts such as the Mengzi and the Liji . While in the latter the spirits feast on the ox (prepared by the cook), in the former the cook feasts on the spirits. Thereby, Graziani concludes that "the notion that the butcher cutting the meat enjoys the efficient power of the spirits is in itself a subversive re-appropriation of the monopoly of favors granted by the invisible world to the nobility, their legitimacy being founded on the performance of sacrifices in ancestor worship" (p. 28). Chapter two reads three Zhuangzi stories about animals as responses to the widely held notion in early China that the ruler's moral authority expressed and legitimized itself through the capacity to control not only people but also animals (pp. 39-40, 41-43, 49-50). Contra the naturalization of absolute monarchy in the Liji, Lushichunqiu , Hanfeizi and other texts, the Zhuangzi "replaces the theme of the moral influence of royal virtue on the wild world with the notion of the destructive contamination by technical and moral artifices at every level of nature" (p. 68).

Chapter three, which commences Part II, focuses on stories about death and dying in the Dazongshi chapter...