The Zhuangzi: Efficacy, Vulnerability, Negative Politics, and Anarchy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel examines the political philosophy of the Zhuangzi (5th-3rd century, BCE). A canonic work of Daoism, the Zhuangzi has been studied widely for its views of moral relativism, epistemic skepticism, and mysticism. While often regarded as apolitical or anti-politics, the Zhuangzi is deeply political. Despite the puzzling and elusive text, its fierce and yet playful attack on claims to knowledge and values approved by authority, blurring of the boundary between human and nonhuman against anthropocentrism, and insistence on natural spontaneity over organized, hierarchical social-political world make the Zhuangzi still relevant today. The panel comprises papers motivated by diverse political readings of the Zhuangzi. Questions of interest are: How is the political understood in the Zhuangzi? How does it respond to the relations between the individual and the collective, the personal and the public? In what ways can the Zhuangzi illuminate our understanding of efficacy? How does it matter to politics and difference? Does the Zhuangzi have a theory for anarchist politics? In engaging these questions, the panel offers different approaches to the Zhuangzi’s political philosophy. Bennett’s comparison of the Zhuangzi and Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (Rome, 1st century, BCE) foregrounds what she calls “the efficacy of the slight”—even the tiniest difference can matter the most. In examining the term, Bennett investigates how both texts shed light on alternative ecological politics. Kwek’s reading of the Zhuangzi presents an alternative way to understand human vulnerability situated within nonhuman worlds via questions of political subjectivation and recognition. Jiang examines politics in the negative sense of the term in the Zhuangzi and argues that the Zhuangzist negative politics is based on personalist domain within a moral/political world and is vital to individual freedom. Yu offers an anarchist reading of the Zhuangzi by underscoring what he terms “the ethics of failure” at the heart of the Zhuangzi’s celebration of the useless in defiance of authority. The panel furthers work in comparative political theory and philosophy, and explores ways to connect across intellectual traditions, past and present.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Efficacy of the Slight - Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University

• Reimagining Vulnerability: Within More-than-Human World - Dorothy H. B. Kwek, Cardiff University

• Negative Politics in the Zhuangzi: Reframing the Personal in Zhuangzi’s Thought - Tao Jiang, Rutgers University

• The Zhuangzi, Anarchism, and the Political Ethics of Failure - Peng Yu, Earlham College

Chair

• Kennan Ferguson University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Discussant

• Nicholas Tampio Fordham University