The Dissident Politics of Tel Quel

The Dissident Politics of Tel Quel Danielle Marx-Scouras D OES LITERATURE STILL have something to do with politics? To associate the two, today, is to conjure up—not without a certain malaise—the specters of Marxism and engagement, which French intellectuals hoped to have finally put to rest in the 1970’s. As for the formidable events of May 1968, and the irreversible rupture that they represent (“ Rien ne sera plus comme avant,” affirmed Pompidou), they have been transferred from the terrain of historical turmoil to the one of leisurely thought, where they can be contemplated and neutralized at will. The primacy of culture (“ [la] culture avant tour” 1 ) and the dis­ engagement of literature have once again earned their legitimate place in a socio-political context characterized by restoration and conservatism. If the notion of disengagement was viewed with extreme suspicion from the 1940’s until the 1970’s, today it represents somewhat of a liberation from the mania of political ideologies that terrorized literature and philosophy during the postwar years. Disengagement is even perceived as a manner of affirming individual rights over ideological totalitarianism. The mid-70’s mark the spectacular disappearance of Marxism as an obligatory reference in French intellectual thought, cultural practice and political life. In the 30 years following World War II, Marxism so dominated the French intellectual scene that it succeeded in subsuming modes of thought as ideologically alien from it as Existentialism and Structuralism. With no hegemonic doctrine to follow suit, French intel­ lectuals would find themselves without familiar landmarks in the vast militant space that had opened up. Many, such as the Tel Quel group, would relinquish their Marxist vulgate in favor of an anti-totalitarian discourse in the name of human rights. The crisis of Marxism has also brought an end to the traditional status of the French intellectual, both as a universal conscience speaking out for others in the name of justice and truth, and as the representative of the cultural and political concerns of subordinate groups. In an inter­ view with Gilles Deleuze of March 1972, Michel Foucault stated: The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “ somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms Vol. XXVII, No. 2 101 L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r o f power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere o f “ knowledge,” “ truth,” “ consciousness,” and “ discourse,”2 The totalizing notions of “ universal,” “ engagé,” and “ organic” that have qualified the modern intellectual have, to a large degree, been aban­ doned in favor of such counter-hegemonic ones as “ specific” and “ dissident.” In an article which appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of Tel Quel, Julia Kristeva states that our representation of the intellectual, both as “ engagé” and “ organic,” is bound up with an insurmountable opposi­ tion between the masses and the individual, which, governed by the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, generates pity and guilt. Insofar as there has not been, according to Kristeva, any real questioning of the relationship of the individual to the masses, and of the intellectual to society, the intellectual has all too often seen his role limited to one of patching up social groups. As a result: The intellectuals [. . .] have used their superior historical perspective inherited from the nineteenth century to devote themselves to a cause whose ideal o f social and economic equality is evident but which serves both to swallow up the particular characteristics o f intellectual work and to perpetuate the myth o f a successful society whose messianism, when not Utopian, has turned out to border on totalitarianism.3 In their preoccupation with social causes, intellectuals have, in too many instances, maintained a division between their political militancy and their own work, say, as writers, linguists, philosophers, or teachers. They have thus failed to recognize that “ each individual’s specific activity [can] serve as the basis for [his] politicisation.”4 Political mili­ tancy, all too often, becomes a diversion from the urgent need to reflect on the specificity of one’s own work and on...