Tel Quel in Beijing

There they are in the photo, standing in Tiananmen Square: four Westerners in flared trousers, and their two Chinese guides, dressed somberly in black. Only one man, standing confidently in the center, is smiling directly at the camera: Philippe Sollers, novelist, editor, and, for the time being, ardent Maoist. Next to him is Marcelin Pleynet, art critic and poet, holding what appears to be a camera. At one edge of the group, looking offstage, is François Wahl, philosopher and editor at the publishing house Éditions du Seuil. Barthes, the only one in a tie, stands a little behind the others, wearing a slight frown. Behind the lens, we can infer from her absence, is the feminist semiotician Julia Kristeva. (A scheduled sixth member of the delegation, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, pulled out at the last minute. Alas, we are left to wonder what the good doctor would have made of the conversation in a Shanghai hospital where the group was informed, as Barthes tells it, that mental illnesses are “cured by materialist Dialectic.”)

Though less than a household name in the US, Tel Quel (1960–1982), founded by Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier, was at the center of postwar intellectual life in France. Its contributors included most of the luminaries in the French intellectual firmament, many of whom would also go on to shape the humanities in the American academy: Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and, of course, Barthes. The journal brought continental recognition to foreign writers like Ezra Pound and Jorge Luis Borges, fostered the work of contemporary French avant-garde authors (not least among them Sollers himself), and revived the critical reputations of a host of ignored or neglected ones, including Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. While primarily a literary journal, for a time Tel Quel also dabbled in radical politics; the Chinese trip in 1974 was undertaken at the height of the group’s enthusiasm for Mao Zedong and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution he had launched, which they hailed as “the greatest event of our time.” They went to China in order to witness (and participate in) a true revolution, whose message they would return to France to disseminate. For the Tel Quel group, it was a way to authenticate their status as militant radicals; and for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it was a chance to bolster the image of the country abroad.

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