Tel Quel (in English "as is") was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris (Éditions du Seuil) by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.
Tel Quel was influenced by a number of revolutionary writers who intended to drastically criticize the conditions of their time, such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Comte de Lautréamont, Georges Bataille, James Joyce, Jacques Lacan. The foci of its writings varied, but, as one might read in its name, most writings meant to inscribe what is as it is, emphasizing the metaphor of all language and the deconstruction of control systems set to normalize the masses.
The editors committee included Philippe Sollers, Jean-Edern Hallier, Jean-René Huguenin, Jean Ricardou, Jean Thibaudeau, Michel Deguy, Marcelin Pleynet, Denis Roche, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jacqueline Risset, François Wahl, and Julia Kristeva. It aimed to reflect the avant-garde revaluation of classical literary history. Authors and collaborators include Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Cayrol, Jean-Pierre Faye, Julia Kristeva, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Marcelin Pleynet, Maurice Roche, Philippe Sollers, Tzvetan Todorov, Francis Ponge, Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, Pierre Boulez, Pierre Guyotat, Severo Sarduy, and Shoshana Felman. Publication ceased in 1982, and the journal was followed by L'Infini.