LETTER FROM BEIJING
In Xi Jinping’s China, a Jesuit who teaches philosophy at a Chinese university has an interest in keeping a low profile. But, on the 58th day of confinement in his Shanghai apartment, Benoît Vermander no longer minces his words. “This is a new stage in an overall strategy of the State-Party: to establish a scientific management which makes it possible to exercise continuous and evolving control over the population, calibrated according to the nature of the emergencies. We must eliminate all that is “impure” : viruses as well as memes supposed to pollute the social atmosphere. It is an extreme form of social hygiene,” he explains, via Skype, in a voice as gentle as it is determined.
Present in the Chinese world for about thirty years, this stocky sexagenarian with a blond beard readily makes one think of the sailors of the Far North, but it is in fact to other endangered species that he belongs. To that of the Jesuits still present in China – there are only a handful left – and above all to that of the great scholars, religious or not, who for centuries have braved headwinds to maintain intellectual dialogue between China and the ‘West.
Encyclopaedic, his erudition evokes a time when the scholar could still hope to embrace all the knowledge of the world. The variety of titles of his latest works testifies to this: Versailles, the Republic and the Nation (The Beautiful Letters, 2018), The Man and the Grain. A Cereal History of Civilizations (Les Belles Lettres, 2021) and, finally, How to read the Chinese classics? (Les Belles Lettres, 336 pages, 27 euros, to be published on June 10, 2022). Not to mention the book that this graduate in political science (Paris and Yale) and theology (Centre Sèvres in Paris and University of Taiwan) has just published in Chinese: On a hermeneutic triangle. Formation and interaction of sinology, comparative classics and intercultural theology (Fudan University Press, not translated). The last four essays of a work that already has thirty. As if that were not enough, Benoît Vermander is also a renowned calligrapher and painter whose works are regularly exhibited both in China and in France.
“Societies never sustain themselves naturally”
The red thread of his reflections? “I am convinced that societies never maintain themselves naturally. What interests me are the resources that allow this maintenance despite all opposing forces. The rituals are part of it, the memory too, and finally the textual. A canon, a text recognized as sacred is the foundation of living together”, explains the professor of hermeneutics. But what do the Chinese classics bring us today? “They belong to the living together of humanity. Without the perspectives opened up by what we learned from China, there would not have been the Enlightenment in the 18th century.e century. Today, debates on gender, on the environmental crisis or on “justice” such as “correctness” in the use of language are very close to Confucius’ reflections on the boundary between the natural and the artificial. »
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