On Efficacy in Practical Reason Publication

On Efficacy in Practical Reason:
Comparative Approaches
MARCEL DETIENNE
(Translated by Meredith C. Peters)
on a round-trip: greece-china
In the field of comparative anthropology
questions should be unusual and improbable, that is, if they
are meant to be experimental and constructive. Issues that
have become familiar regain singularity when you discover
their proto-history. So “practical intelligence,” as I once un-
derstood it, was first Greek, marginal, and cunning.1 Some-
time later it met up with a comparative anthropology of
speech, fanned out around the Goddess Word—who had
come from the Vedic world, where she seemed to rule the
registers of voice and song as completely as the entire range
of literary genres.2
This was a time when many anthropologists and historians
were considering the structures of polytheism—while await-
ing experiments and comparisons to be made among the
hundreds of societies fond of imagining genies, inventing
supernatural entities, and every day creating lower-case divine
little nothings.
No research code forbids investigating efficacy and practi-
cal reason through a comparative anthropology of speech.
“Speech” avoids what, for instance, “Logos” or “Word”
would suggest—or, even most annoyingly, impose on
Western ears. So at the outset, it is advisable to distance our-
selves from Logos (the Greeks’ “word-reason”), as carefully
as from the Christian Word, preserved in unique revelation.
The heading “efficacious speech” seems to me adequate as a
way into determining what the notion of “efficacy” could
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mean—in various cultures which have been put into per-
spective and examined experimentally along with contempo-
rary comparative practices, which are responsive to the use-
fulness of “de-centering” and “de-contextualizing” a cate-
gory (both ancient and modern) like efficacy.
On this twofold level—conducting comparisons while
experimenting with comparatives—I think François Jullien’s
venture offers a prime opportunity.3
As a matter of fact, in the 1970s and 1980s two Hellenists
showed “cunning intelligence” [in a book of the same name
—ed.] brought face to face with practical Reason as the key
to efficacy—as “discovered” by a Sinologue philosopher,
François Jullien. Each of his inquiries seems to me now
inseparable from his own individual history. With respect to
“cunning intelligence,” an experiment conducted with Jean-
Pierre Vernant, I believe it is necessary to take apart the
mechanics of the research, performed by two and sometimes
even four hands. For me, it’s a question of performing an
autopsy on the model coming out of the inquiry on mêtis,
and of analyzing certain results that it produced—especially
in François Jullien’s Sinological work.
any reader paying close attention to the Greek mêtis
undoubtedly noted the gap, the gulf, between the last chap-
ter [of Cunning Intelligence], woven around “The Circle and
the Bond” but introducing “reversals” with their minute
mechanisms,4 and the introduction, written, as is usual, at
the close of the investigation. It goes without saying that,
given our deep friendship and the two decades that united
us, it was Jean-Pierre Vernant, the philosopher, who clarified
the broad lines of our experimentation and took responsibil-
ity for posing, as he used to say, “the fundamental ques-
tions.” This was how a clear-cut distinction in “Greek
thought” came to be formulated between geometric philo-
sophical reason, with its conceptual formalism, and practical
on efficacy in practical reason44

intelligence, with its expertise in wiles and quick thinking for
adapting to constantly shifting situations.
At the time, it seemed opportune to make clear the con-
trast between a geometric type of reason, bound to the intel-
ligibility of Being, and the little flashes of practical and tech-
nical intelligence, which are spread among multiple skills
and kinds of knowledge that are often discrete. Gradually,
the clear-cut distinction between these two forms of thought
and two types of rationality became radical: the one would
exclude the other and would prepare, without any real inten-
tion, for the advent of scientific thought—to lead us (as was
soon to be propounded) from Plato to Galileo and Newton.
A comparativist cannot be indifferent to the effects of a
model, both on the Greeks’ public uses of language and of
what is understood by the term Greek thought. From this
assessment, such a constatation, made by someone speaking
from such a position of authority (as was to happen so pro-
foundly), a philosophical audience could conclude that the
Greeks had let an entire portion of thought, which perhaps
others could have exploited, lie fallow. Take the year 1996.
Twenty years after Cunning Intelligence, Jean-Pierre Vernant,
elected, honored, “President of the Association for the
Encouragement of Greek Studies,” expanded his statements
on the Greeks and Greek thought. One of them, so well
minted that it seemed definitive, attributed to Greece and to
Greek thought in its essence, the definitive selection of geo-
metric and formal reason, implying that “philosophical rea-
son” had thus contributed to marginalizing practical reason
and letting everything that cunning intelligence represented
atrophy.5 This, to the point that the word and the idea of
mêtis were effaced from the Greek vocabulary. And profes-
sional Hellenists used this as an argument to denounce the
foolishness of an investigation, produced by two trivial
scholars, focused on obsolete forms of a figure.
In 1996, a Treatise on Efficacy was published, written by
a Hellenist and Sinologist philosopher, and a self-admitted
reader of Cunning Intelligence. In fact, François Jullien
Marcel Detienne 45

explained the role that mêtis played in his reflection on prac-
tical reason and the ethos of efficacy in Greece and China.6
Led by the wish to “think elsewhere”—a philosophical
desire—Jullien explicitly set his initiative on the axis leading
from the Greeks to Chinese thought. His precisely-defined
project aimed to show philosophers “born in Greece,” and
thus European in tradition, that Chinese thought allows,
even invites, “thinking differently,” that is, in a different
framework, with unfamiliar concepts and categories that
seem foreign to “common sense.” In Europe, intellectuals
(like philosophers) speak and think in Greek, that is, with
“being” always in question, in word, in form, or in idea—or
in their democratization of politics. The roundtrip compari-
son between Greece and China therefore ought to lead to a
de-categorization of philosophical thought—even more, to a
de-stabilization of the framework of Western thought.
Why China and China alone? Why not India, or the
Semitic world? Jullien, both Hellenist and Sinologue, says it
and repeats it: because China is alone in offering “thought”
that is explicit, elaborated, and developed in an unbroken
tradition; a thought-system “comparable,” an analogue to
that of the Greeks. Along the way, those curious about effi-
cacy in practical reason who do not feel truly Greek begin to
wonder: Why Greece? Why always the same old story?
For the moment, since it is a matter of “putting in per-
spective” Greek thought and Chinese thought, nothing
appears more attractive than to open our “Greco-European”
intelligence to other ways of thinking, be it in morality,
ethics, time, action, strategy, or universality. According to
Jullien, China offers the occasion of uncovering what
remains outside of traditional thought [impensé], what has
sometimes qualified as infra-philosophical; not pre-philo-
sophical. “Infra” in the sense that our Greco-Western
choices have let opportunities fall by the wayside and be dis-
regarded while the Chinese were able to grasp these oppor-
tunities, develop them, and improve their culture. The
author of the Treatise on Efficacy, while summarizing sev-

eral of his investigations, opposes two conceptions of effi-
cacy. The Greek conception: to build an ideal model and
plan of action with a targeted goal. The Chinese conception:
to take in the situation, learn how to make the situation
profitable, let oneself be carried away and cultivate one’s
productivity by evaluating its potential; it is an ongoing,
unassuming, and indirect process. When comparing these
two systems of thought—simply as a philologist-philoso-
pher—one cannot restrict oneself to simply presenting dis-
tinct parallels and summing up what each system has and
does not have, thereby failing to develop the observed dif-
ferences. When studying the differences between effective-
ness, the Greco-European system, and efficiency, the Chinese
system, what most interests comparativists is discovering
their divergences and the manner in which the analyst han-
dles this, by deconstructing the framework on every level
and de-conceptualizing at every occasion, insofar as an indi-
vidual can rise to the task.
At this point, to discuss the problems posed by efficacy on
the Greek-Chinese axis, two operations seem to me apposite.
The first consists of analyzing still more deeply the compo-
nents of what is called cunning intelligence, by opening it to
the diversity of know-how, of creativity, and of initiation
[des savoir-faire, des faire-créer, des faire-agir], so as to test
the schêma of practical reason as “radically” opposed to
philosophical reason.
The second operation, which is more closely related to the
demand of “thinking differently and elsewhere,” would
demote philosophical understanding on which rests so-called
“philosophical” thought. A demotion, primarily in the field
of the Pre-Socratics, would separate the fine ligatures indige-
nous to what is called “wisdom” and what “philosophy”
means to be. Concurrently, an archaeologist-anatomist could
now, from a contemporary standpoint, reveal the practices
constitutive of philosophic learning [savoir-philosopher]
which took the form of the Agrégation, the examination cre-
ated in 1826 in Restoration France.7 Of these two routes, I
Marcel Detienne 47

believe the first, in shortened form, is best suited for our
reflections on efficacy. Revisiting the mêtis of yesteryear—
and Jullien’s Chinese prism certainly contributed here—I con-
sidered it necessary to come back to the complexity of a mêtis
that we fixed too early, too fast, as “cunning intelligence.”
Examination of the field of polytheism (or polytheisms)
already provided a glimpse of the wealth of these skills, ana-
lyzed with the help of reagents among the divine powers who
never allowed themselves to be placed in two categories,
those who have mêtis and those who do not. A single exam-
ination cannot discover the multiple facets of powers which
are as subtly intertwined as, for example, Dionysus and
Apollo are in their multiple configurations, and in the
diverse practices of their powers. The experimenter and
micro-analyst is entirely free to manipulate practices and
configurations as he would in a laboratory where the exper-
iment can be repeated. I believe that experiment-by-manipu-
lation is essentially the art of constructing comparisons, be it
in the complexity of one culture or the meshing of more than
one. Picking up again with greater depth and scope in order
to analyze the components of what we know as mêtis is a
way to open up to the diversity of know-how, creativity, and
initiative. There are many practices articulated around the
semantically rich verb poiein—to do or to know how to
do—after which the subject Poiêtes is named. On this topic,
an enquiry by David Bouvier has been of great help to me.8
The Poiêtes of an archaic age, between the eighth and fifth
centuries bc, represents the craftsman in his manifold prac-
tices; he embodies the intelligence to craft his own tools.
Men of such skills, so present in the epic tradition, may help
loosen the meaning of “being” in regard to Greek thought.
By restoring demiurgic intelligence to the place it deserves,
one can identify which spirits and, accordingly, which ele-
ments men and gods share, as would happen in a world
where the gods move about among men without fear of
revealing their identity. I shall examine only two or three fea-
tures of this “demiurgy” in poetics. In the sphere of skills,

the most frequently praised powers are those of Athena and
Hephaestus, sister and brother. At their side, hurries Apollo.
The modalities and practices of skills are told through
Homer’s words and those of his creatures. One skill, tecton-
ics, is the knowledge, the technê of the carpenter-architect,
the man who is expert in keeping the line straight, his tool
for hewing the beam and building the hull. With this comes
praise of his handiwork and the extensions he gives himself
with his “manual” intelligence—sometimes called sophia,
sometimes intelligence—by name mêtis, the very one Athena
adorns herself with, the mêtis of Athena, born of Mêtis the
swallowed bride of Zeus whose sovereignty aims to be all-
encompassing. Learning need not fear inspiration; they nat-
urally complement each other. The acquisition of knowledge,
eidenai, and of its effectuation, poiein, expresses itself in
multiple forms, such as through creation and production.
The skill of Hephaestus is seen and heard “poetically”: a
blacksmith constructs an indestructible dwelling of bronze
similar to the starry sky, just as he creates and shapes
(poiein) Achilles’ shield with two human cities, one at peace,
the other at war. Forging (teuchein) is seen as similar to
weaving (daidallein) and to constructing (tektainesthai):
these skills all stem from creation; this is exemplified by
Athena when she gives herself the tunic and the robe “with
a thousand embroideries,” born of her creative hand which
embodies her own mêtis, her sophia; just as for the black-
smith, the carpenter, and the potter.
Making, creating, and representing are inseparable: the
same inventive technology that begets and grows sails, tex-
tiles, hulls, arms, armor, tall columns, and vast houses for
men also produces these goods for gods. Mortals and immor-
tals intertwine their skills in arts and techniques so that they
have the same creative power. The demiurges of those times
harmoniously share technical intelligence as well as artistic
skills. The most active—not to say the ones presented as the
best “performers”—conceived creations endowed with the
intelligence which spawned them and which even bestowed
Marcel Detienne 49

on them the “capacity” to act upon themselves on their own.
In this way, the fittest vessel knows how to sail by itself and
without a helm, totally safe amid the movements of the sea
and the winds. Experts in hermeneutics did not overlook the
fact that, among the different demiurges sung about in hexa-
meters, the one most qualified in the nous, the intelligence of
his know-how, was a poet, more precisely the bard-and-
maker Ulysses, the polutropos with a thousand ploys and
skilled in every field. Through the creations of the Poet, the
craftsman of poiein, a whole new level of practices and
thoughts is revealed, beautifully Greek and utterly indifferent
to the tiny “being,” the word of a sole sage (Parmenides).
More significant in both social and political categories, demi-
urgic skills are conceptually enriched in the commerce of the
political experiences of limited partners, those promoted to
the rank of lawgivers, legislators, judges, tyrants. In several
parts of the Greek world, high-ranking magistrates are called
“Demiurges.” A less hasty analysis of “demiurge” would call
into question the rigid opposition between poiêsis and praxis,
and the radical contrast between a producer in subjection to
“usefulness,” and the action—the praxis of a free and noble
agent—one who possesses in himself his “own purpose.” The
skills of craftsmen and the intelligence of poet-demiurges per-
petually pass through and question the thought of the
philosopher (Plato) who in Greece should personify geomet-
ric and purely model-forming reason. This has already been
shown, and for the major issues.9
I would add that the Chinese world, the one called the
Kingdoms of Combatants, with its master-craftsmen, experts
in metallurgy, and multi-skilled creators, seems to call for a
confrontation with archaic Greece, which is less schematic
than is sometimes perceived. How can we translate ancient
Chinese craftsmanship or know-how? This first stage already
shows that a comparative approach cannot be performed by
relating “practical reason” and “philosophical reason.”
The second operation I propose more directly concerns
efficacy, especially in regard to comparing the efficacy of

Greece and China. There are many comparative approaches
simply because we never stop comparing, every day, some-
times unconsciously and sometimes quite knowingly—on
reflection, perhaps just to the degree that one is, say, an
anthropologist or a philologist-historian. Generally speak-
ing, philosophy hardly cares about comparisons. In his own
way, François Jullien is proof of this. The thought of China
seems to him “comparable” to that of European Greece, in
the sense that they are good to contrast, for two reasons:
first, because they are both of the same breadth, the same
duration, and they offer the interpreter mountains of more
or less homologous texts; second, because Chinese thought
insures a profitable return for the philosopher-philologist,
persuaded, as he claims, that he can “read Greek better,” the
Greek of his birth place. Each to his own practices: Jullien
insists he is not comparing, he does not want his project to
be mistaken for an anthropological approach, aware of how
comparative they always are. He knows all about its “mis-
deeds,” the first being to put China and the Hopis, or the
Bororo people, on the same level; China, according to him,
is allergic to any “equal footing” with other cultures.
Besides, some say China, throughout its long history, never
cared to practice anthropology. As I said from the outset, this
is not a detour; by the means of efficacy and practical rea-
soning, I intend to put comparative processes face to face.
Comparing methods of comparison is part of the program I
set out for myself.
To begin experimenting and constructing, one needs to
find an “entryway” that will outline the best comparatives
for this study. Clearly, “practical reason” is not a narrow
category; it appears so broad, not to say loose, that the gap
between Chinese and Greek regarding this term tends to
become a contrast between two absolutes. As for “efficacy,”
another option for an “entryway,” I have yet to find a cul-
ture that would consider this concept to be “incomparable,”
or dramatically absent from anything that could be called
“efficacious, effective, active, endowed with an active
Marcel Detienne 51

virtue.” Regarding plain efficacy, it is perhaps appropriate to
explore its semantic values, beginning with the observation
that there is no Greek root for the word “efficacy,” any more
than a “Chinese” term (the native word for “propensity”
being used to define “efficacy”).
So what falls into the category of efficacy?
When I recently applied this procedure to the category “to
found,” “foundation,” I suggested that we implicitly refer to
any act, gesture, ritual, or ceremony as inseparable from an
individual who was present at its place of origin, whose life
was rooted there and who likely experienced the event as
unique. By this point, the investigation had delivered a small
“theoretical” gold mine, rich enough to lead to the idea of
“digging into” the concept of “territory,” and then putting
in perspective how the practice of autochthony is linked to
representations of the national, the foreigner and the immi-
grant, representations constantly honed since the nineteenth
century, particularly in Europe. 10
Borrowed from imperial Latin, efficacia, derived from effi-
cax, means “the active virtue” of something, not of someone.
Active, effective, energetic: these are the qualities most closely
linked to efficacy. Efficacy, in its capacity as force, action,
power, and might, is a rare concept in French up to the late
seventeenth century. To see the beginning of its meaning as
“capacity to produce the maximum amount of results with
the minimum amount of expenditure or effort,” soon fol-
lowed by the ideas of output and productivity, one need only
wait until the early twentieth century and the arrival of
America on the world stage; America was viewed as the land
of initiative and efficacy, and announced by Europe, in the
words of Andre Siegfried, as “the soul of the people.” Since
then, the countless by-products of capital efficiency have
invaded shops and supermarkets, with commodities such as
washing powders, hair removers, and shampoos, all made
even more efficacious with each generation.
In the highly Catholic Western world, efficacy, as word and
deed, marched steadily ahead, thanks to theologians and

mediaeval linguists. Certainly in the early twentieth century,
philosophers could still take advantage of Lalande’s
(1902–1960) teachings that one of the major figures of
“active virtue” dwells in the efficient cause, the one which
successfully produces its desired effect, whereas the effica-
cious cause is the one which produces its desired effect with-
out losing any of its own resources—a distinction fortunately
clarified by the same dictionary: God’s efficacy is the extreme
opposite of human effort. Thus a tribute is paid in the
Sorbonne to the efforts and the intelligence of the philoso-
pher-theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
One of the heights of efficacious speech arose, I believe, in
the Middle Ages, during the debates on the “religious sign”
and the “virtue” of what was to be christened a “sacra-
ment”—therefore, prior to the “efficacious Grace” and the
“divine Word in action” of Luther and Calvin’s era, when dis-
putes on the same subject led to prolific ideas. It was between
Oxford and Paris that the thoughts around “efficacious
Speech” flourished with such active exchanges that only Irène
Rosier-Catach’s expert analysis allows the uninitiated to ben-
efit from their knowledge, especially if one is keen to conduct
comparisons and is therefore partial to conceptual anatomy.11
In Christian society, to say “sacrament” evokes the “Mass”
and the “Eucharist,” and with it the mystery of the sacramen-
tal speech which declares, “This (deictic) is my body, this
(another deictic) is my blood.” In order to better grasp the sig-
nificance of this ritual, it is advisable to inform non-Christians
that the “Eucharist” (there’s Greek where there’s grace, charis)
is a vital component of Christian theology and a symbol of
Jesus Christ’s incarnation. How disorientating is it to contem-
plate and reflect on these rituals—sacraments so powerful that
they bring about what they say and effectively portray what
they represent? Four terms, four notions subtly tested and
which certainly are impatient to be confronted with what the
obligatory force of speech signifies, in Roman law, in Anglo-
Saxon law—and in the very near future, in the “non-law” of
the Chinese world, busy in commercial practices of all kinds.
Marcel Detienne 53

Let us for now shelve the debt, the obligation, the bond, and
the law which are not indifferent to something like efficacy,
but which would put us dangerously at risk of deviating from
our course, the long sacramental journey of “efficacy.”
In many meanings of the word, both embodied and
assumed, the Eucharist allows one to observe how a purely
linguistic act performs a conversion, called by some “tran-
substantiation.” This single formula of words has the ability
to perform such a mysterious act. It is up to the theologians
to explain it, justify it with the words which, according to
the Gospels, were uttered by Jesus, before he was given the
name Christ, during the Last Supper. This conversion leads
to many crucial issues: the formula is at once “meaningful”
and “operational”; it is enunciated in a space of time; it is at
the end of the utterance that the conversion is realized, for
real: the conversion, the transformation of bread to body
and wine to blood. It is therefore essential to determine pre-
cisely what happens in the last instant of saying the formula.
This leads us to a series of problems: does an “operative”
wording have to be “true” in order to be “conversive” (i.e.,
to initiate the transformation)? What divine presence is
involved? What is the exact importance of the speech for the
transformation? What is the speaker’s role in the conversion
and in the “real presence”? What is the fundamental rela-
tionship between the integrity of the formula and the inten-
tion of the speaker? Does the utterance of the words have to
be a “voluntary act,” comparable to a choice of means that
commit the speaker—the officiant of the Eucharistic ritual?
Must there be an evident intention to accomplish the trans-
formation or is merely stating the formula effective? It is of
capital importance to determine, with the utmost precision,
an explanation for the “power,” the virtus, behind the effi-
cacy of the sacramental words. For decades, philosophers,
linguists, and theologians have persevered to define the rela-
tive value of the parameters of the ritual and its mystery, such
as: the original institution, the established norm, the defini-
tion agreed upon by the church and its magisterium, the

speaker’s intention, the listener’s disposition, the association
of the words with the actions performed, and other elements
of the rite, the Mass, and more generally, the context of the
declaration, the altar, the officiant an ordained priest, etc.
In short, as Rosier-Catach concludes, the words are effica-
cious not because they are said but because they are believed.
If this is so, the next question to be asked is what equilibrium
is possible between the believer’s intention and commitment,
and respect for the established norms regulating the pronun-
ciation of the formula?
In all likelihood, few cultures offer the anthropologist of
speech and its efficacity as profound and wide-ranging a
conceptual experimentation as this study. It is enough to
evoke the world of magic, so present in the Middle Ages with
their magical formulas and practices. Theologians past and
present, as well as historians of religions and countless eth-
nologists will continue to be ensnared by the relationship
between magic and religion, in particular the connection
between primitive magic and the so-called “symbolic effica-
cies” used by modern healers, without ever approaching the
wealth of experimentation achieved by theologians in their
“modern” laboratory of the Middle Ages.
for an investigative Hellenist, it seems to me that the
sophia of skills and the field of “poietics” contain an impor-
tant deposit, a mass of theoretical and semantic materials for
experimenting with “efficacy” by approaching it indirectly,
with intuitive pruning—and by providing two outlines from
the Greek world. The first, straight out of the practices of
art, of the poietics of Hermes: eager for oracular knowledge,
obsessed challenger of his elder, Apollo, Hermes quickly
arises as a nocturnal demiurge, fiddling with a toy cithara.
Confident that he can use to his advantage the superiority of
a god in whom are thought the supreme thoughts of Zeus,
Hermes improvises a recital where he intends to stun the
Marcel Detienne 55

Lord of Delphi: Hermes alone is able to draw inspiration
directly from Mnemosyne, the Mother of Muses, and realize-
create the immortal gods and the dark earth. The verb “to
realize-create,” this time, is not poiein but krainein, “to
make into reality.” The cithara was born from Hermes’
poetic skill, his dexterous hands, and ever-active mêtis “in
words and deeds.” This process of “realization” proceeds in
the same manner during Apollo’s performance as Master of
the oracle and the only true virtuoso of the cithara, which
confounded and completely silenced Hermes. The god of the
oracle, established on the umbilicus of the world, develops
from Delphi a high theology of speech: a speech so “effica-
cious,” so “realizing” that it establishes knowledge and
foundations, whether for altars or cities; a speech infused
with absolute musicality so that it creates the entirety of cul-
ture, at once paideia (cultural upbringing) and paidia (chil-
dren’s games), in the order of celebrations and competitions.
In tracing the ways of Apollonian speech, forms of efficacy
of the verb krainein–“to realize” appear and disorient the
“Logos” of tradition. Oracular words arise, winged amid the
signs and enigmas proposed by those who had come to ques-
tion Delphi and depart in winding ways in order to “found-
create” something “like politics.” So what is the reality
involved, for example, in the founding of Thebes with its
murders and maledictions and with its frightening “efficacy”
over so many generations? 12
It is up to comparativists to work out, for each distinct
society, the speech that is efficacious “by itself,” the words
that spurt out spontaneously like wine from a vessel or one of
Dionysus’ vine shoots, speech more or less belonging to the
order of the “automaton,” the variety of words which speak,
which “make the law” or are recognized as “imperious,” in
Rome or elsewhere. From the sacramental of Roman
Catholicism to the automaton of Dionysus which passes
through the efficacious signs of divination, there are so many
constellations which deserve something better than the
poverty of a “speech act” on the US tenure track.

Another pattern of efficacy in the Greek way of “making
real”–krainein: political decisions; Argos, the city; the
Danaids as supplicants in Aeschylus’ highly detailed ver-
sion.13 The procedure of proxenia and asylum; an assembly
of citizens from Argos; an orator possessing persuasive
speech that becomes efficacious and brings about (krainein)
the vote in a show of hands; election on a majority basis
(plêthos), the dêmos exercises its authority (kurios), its
power (kratos), “kratocracy” [kratodémie] or democracy.
Accomplishment of the procedure in telos—not the intended
goal of a project or an agent, but the effect of a process that
is in no way automatic. The exemplary report, given by
Danaos, the Stranger, to the Choragos ends with the for-
mula: with its raised right hands, all the people (pandemos)
“made that these things be” (ekran’ hôs einai tade).
In the agora, that “these things be” does not have the same
makeup as in the krainein of Hermes, or the Bee-Women of
Delphi, or others which should be analyzed as precisely as
possible. Maybe there we can achieve a little bit of this com-
parability that we are attempting to construct by going to the
very bottom of a thought, then of another thought, and then
of the “thought of others.”
To construct by dismounting, decomposing, and re-con-
ceptualizing. Jullien says to translate propensity as opposed
to efficacy or efficiency; he introduces the idea of a thought-
system, where there are hundreds of little thought mecha-
nisms with their arrangements, with their knots of quasi-
causal sequences, and also “a sort of coherence” with a
direction. These micro-coherences and the fields of these sin-
gular orientations, I would say are comparable; they are not
themes or big words like debt, bond, and identity, which
should always be converted into smaller and smaller denom-
inations, under the conceptual microscope; if these words
can stimulate in the mind a series of manipulations and
experiments, the possibilities to be explored are endless.
Daring to compare is a first step. Constructing compara-
tives from a chosen point of view, which is “comparative
Marcel Detienne 57

anthropology,” is (I think) intellectually more interesting
than opposing two great thought-systems. To think other-
wise and think elsewhere—especially if we claim to adhere to
“philosophy”—we should go beyond the point of view of
“we have efficacy; they (the Chinese) have efficiency.”
A global confrontation risks going astray by making China
the absolute opposite of Greece. It also seems to me para-
doxically to confirm all over again the election of Greece in
the most academic sense of the West: letting it be said and
repeated that “the Greeks are not like the others,” which my
entire enterprise continues to resolutely criticize.
notes
1. Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs (Paris 1974; latest new
edition: Champs, Essay series, 2009). An inquiry begun in 1964–65 in a
series of seminars conducted with Jean-Pierre Vernant in constant collabo-
ration, at the sixth section of Advanced Studies. Originally published by
Flammarion.
2. La déesse Parole: Quatrefigures de la langue des dieux. M. Detienne
and G. Harnonic, eds. (Paris 1995).
3. François Jullien, Traité de l’efficacité (Paris 1996; Livre de poche,
Biblio series, 2002). An abridged version in the form of a lecture was pub-
lished by the Presses Universitaires de France (Paris 2005: Conférence sur
l’efficacité, Centre Marcel Granet). Regarding his undertaking, see François
Jullien, Thierry Marchaisse, Penser d’un dehors (la Chine): Entretien
d’Extrême-Occident (Paris 2000).
4. Following the conclusion of Les Ruses de l’intelligence, a note (307)
indicates the author or authors of each chapter.
5. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Entre mythe et politique (Paris 1996), 262–63
(“L’avènement de la pensée rationnelle,” 253–64).
6. F. Jullien, Traité de l’efficacité (note 3), 17–20. [Livre de poche, 2002:
21–24].
7. Invited to a discussion on Jullien’s work in December 2010, I presented
two reflections: 1. “For a comparative anthropology of Speech among us,
our Greeks, and others”; and 2. “Disruptions in comparables: for Hellenists,
national historians, anthropologists, even philosophers” (forthcoming).
8. In this regard, the following was of great help to me: David Bouvier,
“Quand le poète était encore un charpentier: Aux origines du concept de
poésie,” in Poétiques de mythes: Etudes de Lettres (Lausanne 2003),
85–105. I shall come back to the whole issue when re-writing the chapters
on mêtis (Flammarion having returned the rights to each of yesterday’s

accomplices). For the following, in this instance, I omit the references, since
often known.
9. For example, Anne Balansard, ed. Le travail et sa pensée technique
dans antiquité classique.
10. I came back to this in Les Grecs et nous, chap. V: “Faire son trou
entre l’Œdipe de Thèbes et nos identités nationales” (Paris [“Tempus”]
2009), 112–41.
11. Irène Rosier-Catach, La parole efficace: Signe, rituel, sacré (Paris
2004).
12. For more on this, without the wait [note 8]: Marcel Detienne,
Apollon le couteau à la main: Une approche expérimentale du Polythéisme
grec (Paris 1998). [New edition, Paris: Gallimard, Tel series, 2009.]
13. For now, an even more succinct evocation of this is Aeschylus, The
Suppliants, 600–24.
Marcel Detienne 59

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