The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic.

• Author: Fuller, Michael A.

Haun Saussy's The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic is a study in comparative rhetoric. Its rules of argumentation, its intellectual commitments, and its overall coherence are within the discursive norms of comparative literature. Like much of contemporary comparative literature, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic is an anxious work, yet its anxieties are real and as important as they are irresolvable. Students of Chinese culture in the end will have to confront the ineluctable problematics of language, subjectivity, knowledge, and power that loom large in Saussy's study and are the themes of theoretical discourse in general. As Saussy seems to suggest, the best one can do, given the distortions created by all reading, is to make interpretive choices and honor the price one pays in choosing. He states, "We began with a translation problem that could not be solved in either of the languages in which it was posed, and we came just now to a solution of a translation problem in which knowledge, or language's power of referring to objects, had to be sacrificed for the work of translation to be carried out" (p. 43). Saussy follows this latter approach. In a world without secure reference, however, the coherence of a study cannot be grounded in the coherence of its object. Instead, a critical text at best has the tentative unity of a work of art; it becomes an act of sensibility and of the will of the critic. As Saussy concludes, "Of all the translations enumerated here,..., the translation of the Chinese aesthetic into an aesthetic China, may be the most forced - but it is also, given the way 'force' comes to inhabit the readings we pursue here, the most necessary. For comparative reading is a force: it cannot leave things as they are" (p. 188).

There is an odd, forgetful hubris in the final phrase, "things as they are." In Saussy's more careful moments - usually when attacking the naivete and poor logic of his opponents - "things as they are" are precisely what we cannot know. This act of forgetting seems, in fact, to be part of Saussy's project, in which China itself dissolves into shadows:

However Longobardi phrases the difference between the Chinese and European mental universes, Leibnitz is able to translate that difference into a difference within European thinking. Far from excluding or silencing the "other," this strategy makes Chinese thinking right at home in Europe, or reminds European thinking of its own unacknowledged strangeness. (pp...