Abstract:          

In this talk, I propose that Liu An (c. 179-122 BCE), the king of Huainan, and his erudite courtiers fashioned the Huainanzi in an extraordinarily intertextual manner in order to create an efficacious, textual artifact that could help the imperial Liu clan in its ritualistic endeavors to actualize cosmic order. I suggest that the producers of the Huainanzi apparently perceived its intertextual writing practice, a widespread phenomenon in premodern Chinese texts, as a literary performance of non-action (wuwei) that could create ordering effects in the phenomenal world via resonances (ganying). Hence, Liu An’s text seems to display a vision of intertextuality and textual performativity that clearly exceeds the logocentric and discursive understandings of writings prevalent today.

Biography:      

Tobias Benedikt ZÜRN is a visiting assistant professor of religion and humanities at Reed College. He earned his Ph.D. in premodern Chinese studies (specialization: Chinese religions and literature) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MA in sinology from the University of Munich. His first monograph Text/Bodies: The Huainanzi’s Construction as a Powerful Scripture of the Way reconstructs the earliest conceptualization of efficacious writings in East Asia. He is also the co-founder of the international research project “Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi” that investigates the Daoist classic’s far-reaching influence over the last two millennia. As part of this project, he develops his second monograph, tentatively titled Transformations of a Butterfly: A Multimedia Reading of Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream, which examines this vignette’s receptions in commentaries, poetic and aesthetic discourses, and artistic reworkings.