Tel Quel School

Tel Quel was a review published in Paris from 1960 to 1982. Under the direction of Philippe Sollers, it became a key source of avant-garde work in literature and critical theory. Concerned with the relations between art and politics, the Tel Quel group drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism as the bases for an overall theory that would establish writing – écriture – as having its own specific and necessary revolutionary force. Influential in its emphasis on literary practices seen as breaking with the given social ordering of ‘reality’ and ‘subject’ (the ‘limit-texts’ of writers such as Sade or Artaud), the review emphasized textuality, the condition of all fields of knowledge as textual productions. Less a coherent school of thought than a site of shifting theoretical-political interventions and new explorations in writing, Tel Quel was at its most powerful in the late 1960s and early 1970s.