Living Off Landscape
Is it only through vision that we can perceive a landscape? Is the space opened by the landscape truly an expanse cut off by the horizon? Do we observe a landscape in the way that we watch a 'show'? What, ultimately, does it mean to 'look'?
In this important new book, one of France's most influential living theorists argues that the first civilization to truly consider landscape was China. In giving landscape the name 'mountain(s)-water(s)', the Chinese language provides a powerful alternative to Western biases. The Chinese conception speaks of a correlation between high and low, between the still and the motile, between what has form and what is formless, between what we see and what we hear. No longer a matter of 'vision', landscape becomes a matter of living. Francois Jullien invites the reader to explore reason's unthought choices, and to take a fresh look at our more basic involvement in the world.
Francois Jullien, Professor, Universite de Paris-Diderot and Chair of Alterity, Fondation Maison
des Sciences de l'Homme
Francois Jullien is Professor and Chair of the Department of Oriental Studies at Universite de Paris-
Diderot and Chair of Alterity at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. He is also
President of the College International de Philosophie in Paris. His previous books on aesthetics
have all been translated into English, including The Strange Idea of Beauty (2015), The Great Image
has No Form, or On the Nonobject Through Painting (2009) and The Impossible Nude (2007).
Pedro Rodriguez, translator