This year's lecture follows on from my 2008-2009 lecture, when I inaugurated my teaching at the Collège de France with a revisit of Confucius, and more specifically of the Entretiens (in Chinese Lunyu 論語). As I mentioned at the outset, it was with a translation of this book (which had - and still has - in China and throughout East Asia a significance comparable to that of the Gospels in Christian Europe) that I made my first armes en sinologie thirty years ago. But it also happens that we are currently witnessing a spectacular " return of Confucius " in mainland China. It's what has now become a veritable social phenomenon that I've chosen as the starting point for a backwards approach.
Last year, we saw how the figure of Confucius became closely entwined with the vicissitudes of China's long march towards Western modernity, the crucial question being : to what extent does China need to rely on its past (identified as Confucian) to provide a stable foundation for a society in the throes of change ? Or, on the contrary, to what extent does it need to wipe the slate clean in order to have a free hand in the race to modernity ? For Chinese intellectuals of the 20th century, the big question mark was, and still is to some extent : how can we explain that everything that was the foundation of their " civilisation millénaire " is so contrary to the foundations of Western modernity, which clearly took over from the middle of the 19th century onwards?