Tel Quel 1967: Theory as Excess

Abstract

Tel Quel 1967Theory as Excess Patrick Ffrench One of the nodal moments of the “time of theory” as it has been problematically baptized came with the publication of the suitably titled “Programme” by Philippe Sollers in his book L’Écriture et l’expérience des limites and in the quarterly review Tel Quel, issue thirty-one, in Autumn 1967. The text began with a capitalized demand which articulated the agenda announced by its title: “UNE THÉORIE D’ENSEMBLE DEMANDE À ÊTRE ÉLABORÉE, PENSÉE À PARTIR DE LA PRATIQUE DE L’ÉCRITURE” (“Programme” 8) [“A COMPREHENSIVE THEORY DERIVED FROM THE PRACTICE OF WRITING DEMANDS TO BE ELABORATED” (“Program” 5)]. I take this statement to be symptomatic of a certain dimension of what is meant by “theory.” Evidently, the term has a wider semantic range and pertains to a deeper historical periodization than can be comprised within the scope of this article, but I would contend that this statement and this moment are crucial in the delineation and the fortunes of what we now think of and practice or fail to practice as theory. What I mean is that Tel Quel defined a certain notion of theory, that this definition had its part to play in what has become of theory, and that revisiting it can suggest what we might now do and make of theory. In the genealogy of theory in France in the 1960s in and around the review Tel Quel one sees a consistent configuration of the theory and practice of writing as an element of excess in relation to established bodies of knowledge. This excess is variously figured as “literature,” practice, supplement or truth. Here I will excavate a number of the contexts which form this genealogy, focused around Tel Quel at the critical moment of 1967/1968. At stake here is the sense of the excess of a community over and above individual authorship, as voiced in the notion of a “théorie d’ensemble”; the excess of the practice of writing which critically supersedes the “ideology” of “literature,” Tel Quel drawing here on the Althusserian account of ideology and the “theory of theoretical practice”; an epistemological shift away from the psychological and metaphysical attributes of “author” and “work” and towards the concepts of scriptural practice and of the text, but also a consistent emphasis on the excessive character of the “truth” that the practice of writing articulates over and above the knowledge of science of criticism. Through attention to the ways in which Tel Quel’s theoretical practice is articulated with Lacanian psychoanalytic [End Page 97] theory I will situate its affirmation of excess in relation to what Lacan calls “truth” in a key essay of 1966, “La Science et la vérité,” and in relation to what will emerge slightly later as the theory of the four discourses. I thus hope to argue that “theory,” as it is constituted and named at this critical juncture is both a theory of excess, and that it functions as excess. Tel Quel had previously apposed its name to Tzvetan Todorov’s collection of articles by the Russian Formalists published under the title Théorie de la littérature, which was published in the series named as the “Collection Tel Quel” in 1965. Philippe Forest, in his Histoire de Tel Quel notes that on being consulted about the collection by the then relatively eminent and avuncular Roland Barthes, the latter had advised Philippe Sollers, principal animator of the review, that Todorov’s collection and summary of the work of the Russian Formalists was disappointingly behind the more exciting theoretical advances of the moment. We can note that 1965 was the year of the publication of elements of Derrida’s “De la grammatologie” in the review Critique, which would appear in book form in 1967; 1965 was also the year of the arrival in France of Todorov’s fellow Bulgarian Julia Kristeva and the year in which Lacan’s seminar started to attract a wide non-psychoanalytic public. Sollers’s “Programme,” published in 1967, and the collective publication also titled Théorie d’ensemble of 1968 (the title signifying at once a “general theory” a “theory of the...