Reading François Jullien’s THE INCOMMENSURABLE (1): Contents – towards a non-sinological hermeneutics of the Jullienian text

The book is 233 pages long, and contains an unnumbered introduction (6 pages) and 7 chapters (each from 30 to 40 pages long).

Table of contents from L’incommensurable by François Jullien, Editions de l’Observatoire/Humensis, 2022.

You, what have you done with the incommensurable?

I. Drawdown

II. Of the incommensurable

III. Avoidance

IV. There is the incommensurable (enjoyment, the intimate, death)

V. De-commensurabilise

VI. That which is not of this world, but which is not of another world

VII. Can a concept change your life? (the incommensurable unfolds existence)

Comment: to me this has a Feyerabendian/Deleuzian/Lyotardian resonance as we invoke the birth of the incommensurable in childhood and its omnipresence in the real, its fading and repression, its encounter or re-discovery in key experiences, and ethics and heuristics of de-commensurabilising, and ultimately the potential of this concept, or of any philosophical concept worthy of the name, to change us by unleashing the living that has been enclosed in the folds of the commensurabilised life.

Echoing Socrates’ « the unexamined life is not worth living », Jullien tells us in effect:

The commensurable life is not worth living.

A further resonance is with Badiou’s THE IMMANENCE OF TRUTHS, where he argues against the ideology of the finite and the commensurable, in favour of freeing the incommensurable infinities from their finitist « covering ».

These thinkers provide the context for my non-sinological hermeneutics of Jullien’s text and general project.