Jean Berthier

Jean Berthier's novel "Voyage tranquille au pays des horreurs" (Cherche Midi, 2026) reconstructs the historical trip to China undertaken by the Tel Quel group, including Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, and François Wahl, in the spring of 1974. Against the backdrop of the late Cultural Revolution, the author shows how these prominent French intellectuals follow a meticulously planned itinerary, perceiving their own theoretical, political, and aesthetic obsessions more than Maoist China itself. The comical opening episode, featuring Jacques Lacan, who believes he understands China through the categories of his psychoanalysis without ever actually traveling there, introduces the central motif of projection. At the same time, the novel's narrative of the affair surrounding Michelangelo Antonioni's documentary film, which was banned in China, serves as a foil: while the director attempted to see behind the official staging, the travelers readily conformed to it. The essay argues that Berthier develops from this a satire on the blindness of the intelligentsia that is as comical as it is sobering: semiotics, psychoanalysis, avant-garde aesthetics, and revolutionary hope appear not as means of knowledge, but as filters that obscure the view of violence, persecution, and political reality. At its core is the thesis that the travelers turn the foreign land into a projection screen for their own desires and, precisely for this reason, miss reality. Berthier's novel is thus read as a case study in the history of ideas, which, beyond historical Maoism, raises the question of how intellectual certainties can distort perception and transform the foreign into a mirror of the familiar.