the geo-theoretical conception that made itself possible” (Hayot 2003, 129). “Tel Quel’s ‘China’ was therefore its own cause and its own effect” (ibid.). This is Hayot’s way of drawing out the orientalism of Tel Quel’s accounts of China: in Tel Quel’s perspective, China ultimately becomes no more than a justification for an already-developed theoretical point of view. What Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel Quel ultimately find in China is nothing but themselves, to continue Spivak’s criticism of Kristeva, and illustrates “the Western intellectual’s self-centeredness in the face of the other” (155). They are psychotically hallucinating a version of China to confirm what they already knew—basically, the critical take on the West that they had already developed (129). Hayot partly relies on Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity to emphasize that China is “not the magical utopia Kristeva imagines it to be” (142). Instead, “China is just another place” (ibid.).
If Tel Quel may have been one likely referent of those “Chinese utopias” in French thought from which Jullien seeks to distance himself, it’s worth pointing out that Kristeva, Barthes, and their colleagues were certainly not the first to fall in love with China.7 When Chesneaux, in what has become a key text in the field, writes about this love affair, he is writing not only about the 1970s but also the ’60s and ’50s and traces this contemporary sinophily back to the nineteenth and especially eighteenth centuries. The love affair is complex, as Chesneaux points out, and its contemporary realizations need to be understood within the French context specifically as a “rejection on the part of the French intellectuals of Soviet-styled communism,” for example, but also out of an interest in China as “a valuable experiment in Marxist economic theory” (Chesneaux 1987, 21). He goes on to note that
China also met a basic aspiration among French left-wing intellectuals, which I would describe as political exoticism—that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries. At times in Cuba, at one time in Algeria, in Vietnam, then in China; each provided a substitute for the ideal society France was unable to develop at home, especially after the failure of the May ’68 movement—which had been so popular with most intellectuals, and not only with students. (Ibid.)
Certainly Tel Quel fits the latter bill. However, Chesneaux’s overall point is that France’s love affair with China extends beyond the journal to what Alex Hughes (commenting on Chesneaux) refers to as “the mid-century moment . . . [that] witnessed a plethora of voyages en Chine undertaken by French luminaries in the wake of the Bandung conference of May 1955” (Hughes 2003, 85; emphasis original). Hughes writes,
That conference spawned the invitation famously proffered to the West by Zhou Enlai [first premier of the People’s Republic of China], ventriloquized by the French journalist Robert Guillain, who acted on it in the following terms: “La Chine est ouverte au visiteurs. Venez voir!” (China is open to visitors. Come see for yourself!). (Ibid.)
Hughes adds that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were two of those early visitors. In his article on Tel Quel, Ieme van der Poel suggests that it is because Sartre and de Beauvoir had already discovered China in the 1950s that, around the time when Tel Quel falls in love with Mao, Les Temps Modernes (the journal edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir) “s’intéresse peu à la Chine” (wasn’t interested much in China): “Il paraît que pour Les Temps Modernes, le culte de la Chine représente une étape du tier-mondisme qui était déjà passée” (it appears that, for Les Temps Modernes, the China cult represented a stage of third worldism that had already passed”; van der Poel 1993, 433).
Still, “by and large, Maoist China was very chic in French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s,” Chesneaux writes (Chesneaux 1987, 22). Chesneaux’s use of the term “chic” in connection with Mao enables one, with a wink to US novelist and critic Tom Wolfe, to use the phrase “radical chic” to capture Tel Quel’s love affair with Mao. Published in New York Magazine in 1970, Wolfe’s text “Radical Chic” satirizes a party at Leonard Bernstein’s where the Black Panthers were the guests of honor (Wolfe 1970). Wolfe’s account includes toward the end a rendering of how the Bernsteins, in the aftermath of the party, quickly become the object of criticism: the New York Times, which published two noncritical accounts of the party, followed up with an editorial that attacks the Bernsteins’ “romanticization” of the Panthers and deems it “an affront to the majority of Black Americans” (ibid.). The party creates, according to the editorial, “one more distortion of the Negro [sic] image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People [i.e., New York’s Park Avenue elite] create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful” (ibid.). Things got even worse for the Bernsteins when Black Power groups turned out to be voicing “support for the Arabs against Israel” (ibid.), ultimately forcing Bernstein to distance himself from Black Panther politics while he insisted nevertheless that it has a place in democratic culture.
Much in Wolfe’s piece, it’s worth noting, revolves around the representation of the Black Panthers, who are hailed in Wolfe’s satirical account of “Lenny’s Party” as “real”: “they’re real, these Black Panthers . . . who actually put their lives on the line . . . [with] real Afros . . . these are real men” (Wolfe 1970). Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” thus stages a problem of representation that’s not entirely separate from the orientalist issues that haunt Tel Quel’s love affair with Mao: there, too, the issue is, if not so much with the reality of China, with its hallucinatory and dreamlike construction, its psychotic projection, as “real”—more real than the West. As Robeson Taj Frazier in his book The East Is Black has shown, China furthermore plays an important role in “the black radical imagination” itself, precisely during the same three decades that I’ve discussed (Frazier’s book ranges from the 1950s to the 1970s). This means that the historically and philosophically parallel cases that I’ve just laid out (“the black panther” and “the dragon of China,” to draw from William Worthy’s 1967 Esquire magazine article; Worthy quoted in Frazier 2015, 109) need to be considered as imbricated into each other as well. Frazier notes early on in his book that orientalism is a real issue in this context (ibid., 64) and in fact uses the phrase “radical orientalism” as part of his discussion (16). He does not consider, however, how, for example, the Black Panthers themselves were exoticized and orientalized in the United States.
Chesneaux’s final judgment on Tel Quel does not pull any punches:
The whole affair was certainly a strange combination of affectation and naivety, of misinformation and self-complacency, which deserves blame and regret and nothing else. We [French intellectuals] were definitely lacking intellectual rigor, caution, and integrity. Not only did we satisfy ourselves with a rosy picture of China . . . We failed completely to assess properly our responsibility towards French public opinion. (Chesneaux 1987, 23)
When Lisa Lowe quotes Tel Quel’s statement from 1971 that in regard to the Chinese Cultural Proletarian Revolution they will do everything “to illuminate it, to analyze it, and to support it” (Lowe 1991, 136), she surely does so to draw out the extent to which they failed (and perhaps also to shed light on her own project, which, while exposing the orientalism of Tel Quel, would never purport to speak the truth about China; Said had of course already taught us as much in Orientalism). Chesneaux uses the occasion of his text, which is based on the “Morrison Lecture” that he delivered in 1987 in Canberra (it’s worth noting Chesneaux himself refers to it as “a kind of unofficial ‘Victor Segalen Lecture’”; I will return to the importance of Segalen for the broader context and especially reception of Jullien’s work in chapter 4), to express—quite modestly—his regret about this. Noting that “We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society,” he also adds, however, that “we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China—namely, France itself” (ibid., 24). In other words, Tel Quel’s project—however flawed—may still have some value beyond its erroneous engagement with China as a critical approach to France.
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