Abstract

* The first full-length study in any language of one of the most important elements in post-war French intellectual and cultural life. The journal Tel Quel was the focus of much of the intense theoretical activity of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s and played a vital role in the development of the key thinkers of the time: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers. Patrickffrench traces its history, across the 'time of theory' and the catastrophe of May 1968, to the review's controversial affirmation of literature as akin to theology in the late 1970s. Beyond its documentary and historical significance, the book maps a 'genealogy' of theory, from its structuralausterity and 'terror' to a new time 'after theory'.