French-Chinese Dialogues on Poetry, Art, and the Limits of Subjectivity at Wolfson College; How Taoist thought meaningfully contributes to questions in modern French philosophy, literary studies, ecological thought, and related fields.
What happens when two intellectual traditions that seem not to have much in common – Classical Chinese Taoist thought and modern French poetics/philosophy – enter into sustained conversation? An interrogation of language, art, and the boundaries where the self bends, twists, or dissolves under the pressure of cross-cultural encounter. The voices in this conference illustrate the ways in which each contribution surrounds, refracts, and sometimes rewrites the question of subjectivity at the edge of poetics.
Xiaofan Amy Li: Negative Poetics and the Unusable Idea
The opening keynote, delivered by Xiaofan Amy Li (UCL), set the tone with a provocation: poetry doesn’t want to be useful. Li’s essayistic talk: I’ll speak in reckless words, so please listen recklessly: Thinking Negative Poetics via Zhuangzi and Bataille, takes a central Taoist motif (the uselessness/utility paradox) and places it beside Georges Bataille’s ideas about excess, rupture, and the refusal of conventional meaning.
The key here is not to translate Taoist thought into Western categories, but to notice a shared discomfort with purpose. For both the Zhuangzi and Bataille, the moment language is defined as being for something – a message, a truth, a subject – it has already lost whatever depth it had. Poetry becomes an effect, not an instrument. Li’s framing asks: what if the point isn’t to say something useful, but to unsettle the very idea of use?
Xie Bo: Painting, Poetry, and Non-Intentional Expression
In a panel on Poetry and Painting, Xie Bo (Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts) examined how image and verse dialogue beyond the assertion of a speaking self. Traditional Chinese painting and classical poetics often foreground the empty space as much as the visible form, an aesthetic cousin to Taoist ideas of wu-wei (non-forcing).
Xie’s argument suggests that the boundaries between forms, including the painted, the spoken, and the silent become productive when intention recedes. It’s not that artists don’t intend anything, but that intention is not the centre of gravity. Rather, meaning circulates in relations, silences, and the spaces between the strokes or lines. In this sense, Chinese poetics here isn’t the “mystical East” but a mode of enunciation where the subject recedes into pattern and cadence.
Ruoshui Zhang: Lingual Thresholds and the Pre-Subjective
Cambridge’s Ruoshui Zhang takes on the slippery terrain where language approaches, but never quite arrives at meaning. What emerges in Zhang’s framing is less a theory of language than a phenomenology of linguistic threshold: sentences that begin, gestures that spatialise themselves, and words that evaporate before they fix elucidation.
Here the “limits of subjectivity” become a field of tension, not a crisis to be solved. Subjectivity isn’t something to discard or affirm, but something that emerges in the border zones between utterances, traditions, and the felt world. It’s a subtle shift from “what is the subject?” to “where does it not hold?”
Heejung Seo-Reich: Relational Poiesis Across Borders
Heejung Seo-Reich (Sungkyunkwan University) contributed to the conversation by foregrounding dialogue rather than conquest. Her work resists the familiar rhetoric of East/West synthesis and instead attends to contact zones – places where poetic form, philosophical categories, and cultural logics enter into relation without vanishing into one another.
Like Xie Bo, Seo-Reich sees art as functionally plural, not unified by a single subject whose intention steers it, but as a network of positionalities, echoes, and retentions. This approach starts to look like a poetics of emergence rather than a poetics of assertion.
Claude Romano: French Philosophical Echoes
From Paris-Sorbonne University, Claude Romano brought the Continental philosophical lineage into play, especially where French thought has long questioned the autonomy of the subject (think post-structuralism’s resistance to the unified ego).
Romano’s contribution situates the dialogue in a broader intellectual lineage: French philosophy isn’t meeting Taoism as “exotic other”, but finding convergent questions about language as world-making, not world-reporting. Here the limit of subjectivity isn’t an absence of subject; it’s an edge condition – a region where language, gesture, and perception bleed into one another without an originating locus.
Cécile Simondonian: Play, Flux, and the Zhuangzi Swimmer
To close the day, Cécile Simondonian (Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) offered a poetic philosophic rumination titled “Margins of play: between the Heraclitean logos of flux and the poetics of Dao.”
Simondonian’s choice of metaphor – a swimmer who succeeds by not having a method – is not cute imagery; it’s a philosophical gesture inviting us to see subjectivity as embodiment in flux. The subject is not absent but not sovereign either. It is porous, situational, and in continual negotiation with its environment. This is Taoist thought not as analogy but as method: meaning doesn’t sit inside the mind, it emerges in relation with the world.
Instead of delivering a manifesto; these voices collectively unfold a field of thinking in which the subject is never supreme, but a participant in a wider dance of language and perception; Poesis (poetic creation) is an act of exposure, not mastery; And limits aren’t barriers to be overcome, but generative thresholds that invite new forms of relation.
In a cultural moment focused on voice and authorship, this conference gestures toward something more nimble: poetics as world-making without ownership, where art is not a proclamation of identity but an attunement with flux. Instead of a conclusion, an orientation: the richest dialogues don’t lie in importing one tradition into another, but in witnessing their transformation through the act of listening.
