French avant-garde journal published by the Éditions du Seuil (1960-82). For two decades Tel Quel succeeded in gathering under its aegis an impressive constellation of names that stand for what is most noteworthy and provocative in French intellectual thought and writing at this time, including Barthes, Georges Bataille, Derrida, Faye, Foucault, Guyotat, Kristeva, Ponge, Ricardou, Denis Roche, Sollers, and Todorov.
Tel Quel was launched in March 1960 by a group of writers in their mid-twenties: Philippe Sollers, Jean-Edern Hallier, Jean-René Huguenin, Renaud Matignon, Jacques Coudol, and Xavier de Boisrouvray. Within a few years no one remained from the original founding team except Sollers. He became the driving force behind the journal, along with Marcelin Pleynet, who became assistant managing editor in 1963. Tel Quel's initial objective was to disengage literature from the reigning ideologies of the post-war years. It consequently supported the Nouveau Roman, viewing it as a viable alternative to Sartrean engagement.
From 1963 to 1966 Tel Quel explored the linguistic and philosophical implications of writing (écriture), and began to elaborate a critical theory which transcended generic and disciplinary boundaries. The literary models were Dante, Sade, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, and Ponge; the theoretical references were the Russian Formalists, Derrida, and subsequently Lacan and Althusser. The importance of psychoanalysis and Marxism for Tel Quel is evident in the collective Théorie d'ensemble (1968), which contains a number of the most significant Tel Quel texts of this period.
In 1967 Tel Quel took on the avant-garde wager of revolutionizing literature and transforming society. It saw itself as the logical successor of Surrealism, whose philosophical and political errors it set out to rectify. A fellow traveller of the French Communist Party from 1967 to 1971, the journal then became Maoist, devoting numerous articles to China until 1974. From the mid-1970s to the 1980s it relinquished Marxism, befriended the Nouveaux Philosophes, turned to theology, and declared the avant-garde dead.
Despite an apparently erratic political trajectory, Tel Quel (subsequently L'Infini at Gallimard) nevertheless succeeded in preserving a certain aesthetic coherence. With its unconditional defence of literature from 1960 to 1982, it represents, in many respects, an attempt to resuscitate La Nouvelle Revue Française in the wake of
[<auth>Danielle Marx-Scouras]
