an imaginary topos of “untranslatable” difference. . . . The imagination of Japan is an occasion to wish, as in a dream, the toppling of the West: the undoing of its systems of language and discourse, its institutions of meanings, its symbolic paternal order. (Lowe 1991, 159)
As such an “antitext to the West, however,” Lowe writes, “Japan is ultimately not an ‘atopia’ but a ‘utopia,’” precisely in the sense that Barthes gives to this term: it’s the product of an “oppositional desire, still caught within the binary logic he seeks to avoid” (ibid., 159). In short, “Barthes’ Japan is a reactive formation,” and for that reason, Lowe argues that it fails as an atopia—and succumbs to orientalism.5
A similar problem affects Barthes’ writings on China: China is, in Barthes’ own terms, “hallucinated” in his work—but entirely within Western terms, as the West’s opposite. It is “considered exclusively in terms of occidental cultural systems,” as Lowe puts it (Lowe 1991, 162). Barthes “does not offer an explanation of how China is subversive within its own autonomous cultural system” (ibid., 162). Rather, it’s “invoked according to a logic of opposition” (163). In its blandness, which (as I have discussed in my introduction) Barthes identifies as China’s aesthetic trait, it offers “a commentary whose tone would be no comment” (Barthes quoted in ibid., 167; emphasis original).6 “Again,” Lowe writes, “as in traditional orientalism, the Western writer’s desire for the oriental Other structures the Other as forever separated, unpossessed, and estranged” (ibid., 167). “From this discussion of Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel Quel,” Lowe concludes, “we understand that even on the Left the orientalist gaze may reemerge, even when the purpose of its project is to criticize state power and social domination” (189). “The continuing utopian tendency of projecting revolutionary, cultural, or ethnic purity onto other sites, such as the Third World, must be scrutinized and challenged” (ibid.).
Hayot too seeks to understand—in the wake of scholars like Patrick French, Philippe Forest, and Danielle Marx-Scouras—the melding of “the imaginary and the real” (Hayot 2004, 128–29) that we find in Tel Quel’s accounts of China. He considers such melding to have been enabled by
the theoretical ground laid by Foucault (associated with Tel Quel early on but no longer involved by the time of the journal’s Maoist turn) and Barthes, among others, in which traditional notions of representation and reality gave way to more complicated projections of linguistic systems and dream worlds, blurring the line between actual and imaginary China. (Ibid., 129)
This is very much in line with Edward Said’s Foucault-inspired book Orientalism, which is interested in the “interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism” (Said 1978, 3)—between research on the Orient and then also what Said refers to as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” which is the starting point for “elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its peoples, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on” (ibid., 2). What Said refers to as the “traffic” between the two produces what is, in his view, “the third meaning of Orientalism,” “which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two”: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). It’s at that point that Said brings up “Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse” (ibid.), noting that he found it useful even if he will also criticize Foucault for not believing enough in “the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (ibid., 23). Overall, one can see here how much Said’s own book—which dates from 1978, just four years after Tel Quel travels to China—is in line with the work by Foucault to which Hayot alludes.
What Hayot takes issue with, rather, is that for Tel Quel “the very theory that supported such a sense of China seemed to be coming from China itself, as if China were justifying, once again in advance, 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