In this second chapter, we turn to the reading of Mallarmé produced by the chief theoretician of the avant-garde journal Tel Quel, Julia Kristeva. As is well known, Kristeva's reading of Mallarmé was produced at a time of great intellectual effervescence in France, which marked the end of Sartre's dominance and the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism. It is during this period that a former collaborator of Tel Quel, Jean-Pierre Faye – who in 1968 had gone on to found the journal Change – sparked a violent polemic between the two rival journals by penning his article ‘Comrade Mallarmé’. In this piece, Faye enlists the poet in the political and theoretical struggle for universal emancipation:

For the intellectual period we are about to study, Faye's passage is strikingly representative – so representative, in fact, that it can be surprising to discover it was part of a polemic meant to articulate the differences between two avant-garde journals. By linking linguistic creativity to political emancipation, and then by suggesting that, up to this point, Mallarmé had been misunderstood and that only the ‘the most recent research in the linguistic sciences’ could restore him to his proper place in the language-centred struggle for a ‘new society’, Faye reproduces some of the key tropes of the political appropriations of Mallarmé in this period.

Numerous readings of Mallarmé were offered within the ranks of the Telquellians and their collaborators, from essays by Philippe Sollers to lengthy studies by Jacques Derrida, to Kristeva's own engagement with the poet throughout her 1969 work Sèméiôtiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse and her 1971 essay ‘Sémanalyse et production de sens, quelques problèmes de sémiotique littéraire à propos d’un texte de Mallarmé: Un coup de dés’.