Dao - 2021 Dao Annual Best Essay Award

Benoit Vermander, “Edit by Number: Looking at the Composition of the Huainanzi, and Beyond.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 20 (2021): 459-498 

 Via a hermeneutics focused on numerology and concentric arrangements, the essay, which demonstrates familiarity with the germane historiography, literature, and theoretical apparatuses, offers an original construal of a textual universe in early China writings. Instead of taking for granted the organization and configuration, or the absence thereof, of these texts, it argues that there is a structural rhetoric. With particular reference to the Huainanzi, it lays bare the discernible and distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating them to corresponding patterns of thinking. In so doing, it suggests the possibility and importance of looking beyond the writings’ intertextuality and toward their inter-structure.