Subversive intent: gender, politics, and the avant-garde

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONIn December 1982, after more than twenty years of continuous presence on the international intellectual scene, the French avant-garde journal (as it had long characterized itself and been characterized by others) Tel Quel published its last issue. Without tears, without grandiose farewells -- without the slightest indication that number 94 would not be followed by 95.In truth, for a while already, Tel Quel had been preparing its demise. Or, if one prefers, its transfiguration -- for the first issue of a new journal, L'Infini, with the same directeur (Philippe Sollers), the same kind of layout and cover (down to the typeface in which the titles were set), many of the same authors, but a different publisher (the venerable house of Gallimard, rather than the postwar upstart, Editions du Seuil) appeared in spring 1983, without missing a beat. This time, there was an opening editorial to explain the shift; it was in the form of a dialogue between two unidentified voices, those of a typical Parisian questioner and Sollers. Te/ Quel has stopped and begun. What do you mean by that? the questioner asks. Sollers replies it was not we who stopped Tel The old publisher would not release the title, insisted on keeping it. Now it was dead. But there is nothing to regret, he says two pages later: L'Infini is a much better title than Tel Quel. Which was only a threshold [seuil -- a belittling pun on the abandoned publisher], which in any case had had its day.1Tel Quel had had more than a day. For well over a decade, starting with the heady days and months that preceded May 1968, its name not only had been synonymous with the radically new -- new conceptions of writing, of language, of subjectivity, of history, promising to revolutionize the human sciences, including philosophy and the study of literature, in France and elsewhere -- but also had represented, for many people, the latest incarnation of the European avant-garde. Like its historical precursor, Surrealism, Tel Quel considered itself a collective movement with a doubly revolutionary program. One cannot make an economic and social revolution without making at the same time, and on a different level, a symbolic revolution. This declaration by Sollers, speaking for Tel Quel in 1970, appeared like a distant echo of Andre Breton's often-quoted statement, made in a speech in 1935: Transform the world,' said Marx; 'change life,' said Rimbaud: for us, these two watchwords are one.