Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness [Hardcover]

Francois Jullien (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2007

A philosophical inquiry into how to "feed life," or nourish it, draws from early Chinese thinker Zhuanghi to explore notions of breath, energy, and immanence.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Francois Jullien is Professor at the Universite Paris VII-Denis Diderot and director at the Institut de la Pensee Contemporaine. He is the author of Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, and In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics all published by Zone Books.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 170 pages
• Publisher: Zone (August 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890951803
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951801
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #369,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars feeding life, May 26, 2008

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barredsubject "barredsubject" (Oakland, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (Hardcover)

Another great zone publication. Everyone's on-board on this one. Bruce Mau design, Arthur Goldhammer translation. Francois Jullien? where did i get the idea that he was one of Henry Corbin's students? Anyway, this book is outstanding and entirely necessary. As the title implies this book is "vital nourishment" and i attest to its restorative and life-affirming properties. I mean Who doesn't love a book with the subtitle "Departing from happiness?" I mean that really says it all. With everyone else commanding you to enjoy yourself all the time the book is a glorious reminder of the banality of pleasure and its ready alliance with death through the repetition compulsion. Much like Badiou, Jullien endorses a Platonic return to process and form over Aristotelian ends and goal. Jullien correctly diagnoses the commodification of our very lives in this view of life as finished-product. take away the expropriated product(i.e. a life lived towards a goal) and there is no longer alienated labor (Sartre, Luckacs); furthermore, if there is no longer any subject, but only process, then the task of philosophy is to articulate a proper response to this question of what is to be done? with a formula for action that voids any notion of a transcendent overcoming of this bifurcation via a hopeful hereafter. immanently affirming the present, Jullien's daring book provides a template for the overman's new life; a life, moreover, that is much more active and vital than the one s/he left behind. Surely a manifesto for the new philosophy, and especially in its brevity, a must-read.