Text/Textuality

While it might be argued that the appearance of Michel Foucault's "Language to Infinity" (an essay openly in dialogue with Blanchot) in an early issue of Tel Quel is what destined the encounter between the journal and the concept of the text, this presupposes rather than establishes the relevance of Blanchot. What clearly makes Tel Quel so pertinent to the emergence of the text is the fact that its longtime senior editor, Philippe Sollers, sought explicitly to devote the resources of the journal to the dissemination of the concept. Indeed, it is largely through the intellectual debates stirred by the journal that the text and textuality came to belong together. Although it ceased publication in the 1980s (morphing into L'infini in 1982), the journal not only brought together all of the major theorists of the text—Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, and Sollers—but, by virtue of its role in the French institutions of intellectual power, it allowed the text both to materialize and to do so in a manner that left it marked by the conditions of its emergence. Despite its heady and deeply theoretical character, the text was always in some ways a "pop" phenomenon. With the creation of the Tel Quel series at Editions du Seuil in 1962 (which eventually included major works by Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva), not only was the text being widely disseminated (many titles in the series were translated), it became the topic of discussion at seminars, colloquia, and, thanks to Bernard Pivot's Apostrophes, nationally televised debates. Those eager to dismiss the importance of the text typically point to this as evidence of its degraded character, but in thereby hiding the commodity character of virtually all academic concepts they overlook the distinctly textual character of the text. The heterogeneous threads woven into the concept always included unruly, indeed compromising, material elements; indeed, this was part of its purchase on the concept of materialism, a purchase that might be said to culminate in the displacement of context (whether social or historical) by contextuality.