The Vanguard Messiah: Lettrism between Jewish Mysticism and the Avant-Garde 9783110424522, 9783110427790

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prolegomenon: the Messiah
1 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew
1.1 Formative Years in Romania
1.2 Isou’s Parisian Jewish Avant-Garde
2 Judaicities in Lettrism: Theory, Poetics, Praxis
2.1 Anti-Rational Philosophy and Subjective Doubt
2.2 Experientality and Inner Language
2.3 Rien as a Poetical and Mystical Measure
2.4 Hypergraphics: Twentieth-Century Secret Writing
3 Messianism and Temporal Poetics
3.1 Modern Messianism devant la lettre
3.2 The Messiah within and in Becoming
3.3 Messianism and Language
3.4 The Praxis of Messianic Secrecy: Textual Potentiality
3.5 Empty Book, the Skin of God
Conclusions
Epilogue: Towards a Quiescent Judaism
Timeline
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sami Sjöberg The Vanguard Messiah

Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge European-Jewish Studies Contributions

Edited by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam, in cooperation with the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg Editorial Manager: Werner Treß

Volume 21

Sami Sjöberg

The Vanguard Messiah

Lettrism between Jewish Mysticism and the Avant-Garde

ISBN 978-3-11-042779-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-042452-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-042468-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Dr. Rainer Ostermann, München Orinting: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements The topic of this book was first developed in 2008 within the research group “Literature, Transcendence, Avant-Garde” where I benefitted from the collegial expertise of scholars Päivi Mehtonen, Elisa Heinämäki and Antti Salminen. My sincere thanks go to Sascha Bru who introduced me to the concept of academic gift economy and who lives by its standards. Vivian Liska has thoroughly rummaged through the text in its various stages, for which I am immensely grateful. The impact of our discussions over the years cannot be emphasised enough. Several astute people have commented on the manuscript in its different stages. I have benefitted from the insights of readers and listeners Alexander McCabe, Harri Veivo, Andreas Kramer, Shira Wolosky, William Franke, Tom Sandqvist, Hannu Riikonen, Elisabeth Loevlie and The MDRN research group in KU Leuven, especially Jan Baetens, Bart van den Bossche, Pieter Verstraeten and Ben De Bruyn. For their help and confidence in this project I want to thank Pietro Ferrua, David W. Seaman, Cosana Eram, Frederic Acquaviva and the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive. Special thanks go to Catherine Goldstein and Giulio Busi for their permission to include the visual material in the book, as well as the late Alain Satié for his friendship, help and generosity. A draft of chapter 1.1 appeared in Europe – Evropa: Cross-Cultural Dialogues between the West, Russia, and Southeastern Europe (132–149). Portions of chapter 2 were published in Sprachkunst. Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft (41:2, 299–312), Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (17:3, 55–63) and Neohelicon. Acta comparationis litterarum universarum (39:2, 305–319). An early version of chapter 3.5 appeared in Literature & Theology (25:2, 185–198). My work has been financially supported by the Academy of Finland, Kone Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation and the University of Helsinki, for which I am grateful.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements  Table of Contents  Introduction 

 V  VII

 1

Prolegomenon: the Messiah 

 14

1 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew  1.1 Formative Years in Romania   16 1.2 Isou’s Parisian Jewish Avant-Garde   33

 16

 55 2 Judaicities in Lettrism: Theory, Poetics, Praxis  2.1 Anti-Rational Philosophy and Subjective Doubt   55 2.2 Experientality and Inner Language   65 2.3 Rien as a Poetical and Mystical Measure   80 2.4 Hypergraphics: Twentieth-Century Secret Writing   98  114 3 Messianism and Temporal Poetics  3.1 Modern Messianism devant la lettre   114 3.2 The Messiah within and in Becoming   127 3.3 Messianism and Language  136 3.4 The Praxis of Messianic Secrecy: Textual Potentiality  3.5 Empty Book, the Skin of God 152  163

Conclusions 

Epilogue: Towards a Quiescent Judaism  Timeline 

 174

Bibliography   Index  

 200

 189

 168

 144

Introduction

Introduction

The term avant-garde, in its artistic sense, was first introduced by Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues (1795–1851) in his essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel: dialogue” (1825). Even though Rodrigues’s background as a French banker and Saint-Simonian socialist is often mentioned by cultural historians, his Sephardi Jewish heritage has often been overlooked.1 Despite such an implicit connection, the case of Rodrigues reflects the more general discussion on the relation between the avant-garde and the Jews, which is often mentioned but seldom investigated in-depth. Marc Chagall was Jewish, Tristan Tzara was Jewish, as were Carl Einstein, Max Brod, Salomo Friedlaender, Hans Richter … and so what? The obvious challenge to any such inquiry is the dispute regarding what “Jewish” means – somewhat a Gordian knot itself.2 Even when the artist’s Jewishness and relation to Judaism are obvious, such as in this book, the connection with the avant-garde is problematic. Jewishness and avant-garde are aporetic, because the first is defined historically in cultural and ethnic terms, whereas the second seeks to avert imposed historical definitions; albeit the avant-garde has several of its own conceptions of history. This is to say that there is no straightforward solution to the aporia which would allow one to speak of a “Jewish avantgarde”, and a similar dilemma concerns Jewish art in general.3 Therefore, the individual artist must always negotiate the interrelations between Jewishness, Judaism and avant-gardist art. It seems that, in the words of Marcel Janco, there is no “Jewish artist” but rather “an artist who is a Jew”.4 The occupational and ethnic characterisations do not intermingle. The dilemma related to identity resurfaced each time traditional elements were combined with vanguard art. For instance, El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich 1 Saint-Simonism displayed an elective affinity toward the compassionate social messianism of the Hebraic prophets. The notable presence of Jews and Jewish elements in the movement sparked a reaction by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier as well as Catholic Church spokesmen who denounced Saint-Simonism as a Jewish plot to subvert civilisation. Reissner, Hanns G., “Saint-Simonism”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, Berenbaum, Michael and Fred Skolnik (eds.), 2nd ed. Vol. 17, Detroit 2007, 678. 2 The more recent discussions on the topic tend to distinguish, for clarity’s sake, between the terms Judaism and Jewishness – the former connotes religion and associated customs, whereas the latter is more in line with ethnicity. For a further discussion see e.g. Cohen, Shaye J.D., The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varities, Uncertainties, Berkeley 1999. 3 For a further discussion on Jewish art, cf. Landsberger, Franz, Einführung in die jüdische Kunst, Berlin 1935, 9–10; Roth, Cecil, “Introduction”, in Roth, Cecil (ed.), Jewish Art: An Illustarted History, New York 1961, 18–20. 4 Sandqvist, Tom, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Cambridge and London 2006, 377.

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 Introduction

Lissitzky, 1890–1941) reflected on this predicament in 1923 by asking “Who were we? And where did we belong among the nations of the world? And what was our culture about? And how should our art be?”5 Similar self-reflections were recurring among Jews active in the avant-garde, and occasionally a suitable answer was found between various traditions.6 Illustrating this, numerous expressionist artists were proselytes or secular people of Jewish origin. Many of their theories provided syncretistic models of, for instance, messianism, amalgamating elements derived from both Jewish and Christian traditions with a modern twist that required awareness of the early twentieth-century context.7 Illustrating this, Vivian Liska points out Jewish expressionists who “convey messianic visions in an irreverent and provocative clash of incompatibles and display a tendency to the bizarre and dissonant, to puns and a-grammatical syntax mingling babble and colloquial expressions with suggestions of a mystically inspired power of the poetic word to act on reality”.8 The means for such experimentation with language were readily available in language-oriented mysticisms, which is one reason why numerous avant-garde movements were drawn to mysticism. In the context of the avant-garde that took advantage of Jewish elements, such features could be used as a means of destabilising everyday experiences and identity, and still be interpreted as merely aesthetical. One hereby immediately arrives at a rather unrewarding conclusion: that there were as many ways of relating to one’s Jewish identity, as there were artists. Yet, in the words of Musil, even though there is no general solution, there are particular solutions that one can combine in order to come closer to a general 5 Originally published as “Vegn der molever shul” (Memoirs Concerning the Moghilev Synagogue), Rimon Milgroim 3, Berlin 1923, 9; reprinted in Apter-Gabriel, Ruth (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928, Jerusalem 1987, 233. 6 Isaac Deutscher accounts for persons, such as Heine, Marx, Luxemburg and Freud, who have offered an extension of the Jewish sensibility to the sphere of secular concerns: “The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. […] They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting [while] they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought”. Deutscher, Isaac, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, London 1968, 26. 7 A characterising example is the poem “Weltende” (The End of the World, 1911) by Jakob van Hoddis. Van Hoddis, Jakob, Dichtungen und Briefe, Zürich 1987, 15. 8 Liska, Vivian, “Messianic Endgames in German-Jewish Expressionist Literature”, in Sascha Bru, Jan Baetens, Benedikt Hjartarson, Peter Nicholls, Tania Ørum and Hubert van den Berg (eds.), Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism, and the Fate of a Continent, Berlin 2009, 346. Another instance is the dadaist Hugo Ball, who was drawn to Christian mysticism, evident in his work Byzantinisches Christentum (1923) that addresses the Pseudo-Dionysios. Källström, Staffan, Framtidens katedral. Medeltidsdröm och utopisk modernism, Stockholm 2000, 130–135.



Introduction 

 3

solution.9 Indeed, at times the only common denominator seems to be the fact that the artists were born to a Jewish family. However, such a heritage entails an acquaintance with certain traditions, institutions and upbringing, which provide for potential common experiences amongst the artists. Many of those mentioned above went to the synagogue and received a Jewish education – Chagall, for instance, was schooled in the yeshiva and Tzara attended a Jewish lyceum. Such a background indicates that they were exposed to, among other things, particular linguistic milieus, customs and sociolects which could influence or even, to some extent, inform their later creative work. Naturally, as a diversified people, the Jews of Europe led their lives in highly dissimilar ways under various flags. For instance, the German-Jewish expressionists were in a far better position in the Weimar Republic (especially Berlin) than the Jews of Eastern Europe, such as those in Romania or Russia, where anti-Semitism was more visible, pogroms frequent and civil rights often limited. The situation is illustrated by the fact that Romanian Jews gained citizenship as late as 1919 while a comprehensive emancipation took place as late as 1923. The Jews of Romania were the last in Europe to become legally equal. This is to say that while living in Romania, Tzara had not technically been a Romanian but a Jew living in Romania. The central figure of this book did not emerge from equally dispute-ridden circumstances. Isidore Isou, the pseudonym of Ion-Isidor Goldstein (1925–2007), was a Jew from the Romanian provincial town Botoşani, located in Moldavia. Moldavian and Bukovinian Jewish settlements, known as shtetlekh, surrounded the town, and these communities were rich in terms of tradition.10 More importantly, the ambiguous stances of his predecessors to their Jewishness were not inherited by Isou: he identified explicitly as a Jew, drawing from religious Judaism and especially from Jewish mysticism. In this light, the general account of Isou provided in the Encyclopaedia Judaica seems curious, as he is seen to have developed “an ephemeral literary theory which advocated the dislocation of the word and a return to the original letter: in this, some critics have seen an unconscious echo of the Kabbalah”.11 In reality, there was nothing unconscious about Isou’s adaptation of Judaism and especially kabbalistic theories. He discussed topics related to the Jewish world (such as Haskalah and Zionism), was familiar with the 9 Musil, Robert, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Berlin 1930, 357. 10 The situation was similar in Paul Celan’s hometown Czernowitz that neighboured the Hasidic centre of Sadagora, the birthplace of Celan’s mother. Bekker, Hugo, Paul Celan: Studies in his Early Poetry, Amsterdam 2008, xi. 11 “Isou (Goldstein), Isidore”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, Berenbaum, Michael and Fred Skolnik (eds.), 2nd ed. Vol. 10, Detroit 2007, 98.

4 

 Introduction

teachings of Jewish philosophers, invoked kabbalists and figures of Jewish messianism, adopted doctrinal elements from messianism and the Kabbalah, utilised kabbalistic theory of language and appropriated all of this Jewish input into his twentieth-century avant-garde aesthetics. Parting ways with his predecessors, Isou’s stance on identity differed radically from the views upheld during the interwar period when assimilation and clandestine Jewish identity were common. Avant-garde and anti-Semitism were not necessarily always that far apart, which is exemplified by Hugo Ball’s belittling reflection on “eine orientalisch aussehende Delegation von vier Männlein” [an oriental-looking delegation of four small men] in the Cabaret Voltaire.12 The quartet of Romanian Jews originated from Moineşti, Iaşi and Bucharest, and they were known by the names of Tzara, Arthur Segal, Marcel and Georges Janco. In the milieu of the First World War, they had little interest in promoting their Jewishness the way Isou later did. For Isou, the link with Jewishness was immediate. Already his name was a sign of this link: “sa mère […] lui expliqué qu’Isidore, en hébreu, signifie Israël. Et Israël, c’est le nom de mon peuple [his mother explained to him that in Hebrew Isidore signifies Israel. And Israel, that is the name of my people].13 Isou hereby emphasises a sense of belonging and the importance of a community, whether it was an abstract or a concrete one. By and large, especially during the early years of his artistic activity, his aims were related to the idea of a Jewish community. Such an inward definition of Jewishness was accompanied by a negatively delineated Christian history. During those years Isou was particularly intolerant towards Christianity, which he regarded as an external “threat” to Judaism. In his view, Jewish mysticism had contained and preserved the “essence” of Judaism.14 Hence, the Kabbalah had served an important purpose in the history of Judaism: Depuis longtemps déjà, les Juifs, afin de se défendre, se sont aiguisés, entêtés, enfoncés plus durement dans leurs vérités. Le premier résultat a été la Kabbale. La Cabbale (Kabbalah) est le premier effet de cet échec de l’israélite dans sa conquête. […] La Cabbale est une carcasse réalisée dans un instant de rétraction. Elle a servi comme nourriture, comme provision idéologique dans les plus durs instants du judaïsme lorsque les loups et les hyènes affamés du christianisme […] mordaient et tuaient, partout, l’Homme.15 12 Ball, Hugo, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, München 1964, 70. 13 Isou, Isidore, L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un Messie, Paris 1947, 293. All translations by the author unless otherwise mentioned. 14 Between El Lissitzky’s statement and Isou’s early works, the notion of a “Jewish essence” had been resurfacing in relation to the avant-garde, especially in texts by expressionists such as Alfred Wolfenstein and Julius Bab. Cf. Wolfenstein, Alfred, Jüdisches Wesen und neue Dichtung, Berlin 1922. 15 Ibid., 282–283.



Introduction 

 5

Since long ago the Jews, in order to defend themselves, have made themselves sharp and stubborn, pressed harder into their truths. The first result was the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah is the first effect of the Israelite’s failure in his conquest. The Kabbalah is a carcass created​​ in an instant of retraction. It served as nourishment, as ideological provision in the toughest moments of Judaism when the hungry wolves and hyenas of Christianity were everywhere biting and killing Man.

Isou regarded the Kabbalah as a clandestine and almost invisible non-public undertaking which was not private in character but rather communal in closed groups. For him, the Kabbalah had preserved the tradition of Judaism – a heritage that was elsewhere destroyed by often simultaneous assimilation and modernisation. Another undercurrent in the excerpt above is that by mentioning the “Man”, Isou refers to a utopian avant-gardist idea of the new man, which he envisions in a stark contrast to the Christian population. This is as conspicuous as it is peculiar, because the avant-garde often included only such religious elements that were distanced from the original context, the religious doctrine: for instance the employment of a rhetorical level of theology. Hence, Isou’s ideas depart from the syncretist pursuits of the preceding, the so-called historical avant-garde.16 He depicted the Jews as future men, and more importantly, as the future of all humanity. According to him, everyone would eventually become a part of the universal Jewish Gemeinschaft. Most likely he adopted the idea of an eventual “Judaisation” from nineteenth-century reformist messianism, which had an impact on the early twentieth-century avant-garde as well. In expressionism, the desire for an ideal community was a recurring theme, and the idea continued in dada circles as these included former expressionists. Isou thereby revisioned the dream of the utopian expressionists and dadaists in Jewish terms. Another noteworthy feature in Isou’s relation to Judaism is that he launched his artistic career in the immediate wake of the Shoah. In his œuvre the Holocaust resulted in a stark antagonism against Christians, which included not only the Nazis and the Romanian fascist Iron Guard but every baptised person regardless of their part in the genocide. It also brought about an aspiration to utilise the kabbalistic and messianic traditions. Besides this initial impulse, Isou did not assign any special role to the Shoah, but rather regarded it as an instance in the European history of anti-Semitism, to which he wanted to put an end with his avant-gardist projects. Isou’s early theories suggest that his initial aspiration was to position the avant-garde to serve a “Jewish purpose”, even though no further account is 16 Historical avant-garde denotes movements that preceded the Second World War, such as expressionism, futurism, dada and surrealism. Peter Bürger applies the term to distinguish these movements from neo-avant-garde of the 1960s. Cf. Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt am Main 1974.

6 

 Introduction

offered by the poet himself. As was commonplace in a time of crisis (even though the Shoah is unique), messianism gained popularity amongst the Jews.17 Simultaneously, figures such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem had placed messianism centre stage during the interwar period.18 In light of these developments, it was not unexpected that Isou entertained automessianic speculations and that his aesthetic theories are saturated with messianism. The “identity confusion” between the automessianic deliberation and the awaited Messiah in Isou’s thought is a feature of Jewish messianism. Isou was in the habit of generating neologisms to emphasise the vanguard character of his inventions and, accordingly, termed the messianic element in his theory “paradilogy” (paradilogie). The paradological structure constitutes three temporal spheres: the antecedent, the current and the coming. Firstly, the sphere of the past represents the preceding states of both knowledge (savoir) and existence. Secondly, that of the acquired represents knowing (connaissance) and the actual state of life. One should note the subtle distinction Isou makes between knowledge that is always past, and experiential knowing, which is unmediated and hence present. The latter sphere is that of exploration, representing “le but imaginaire ou possible de la condition souhaitée, embrassant […] l’existence dans la joie perpétuelle d’un individu ou d’un groupe d’individus vivant éternellement [the imaginary or possible aim of the desired condition, embracing the existence of an eternally living individual or a group of individuals in perpetual joy]. Furthermore, even though the third sphere is still occupied by lacking and emptiness, it will eventually be complete.19 This is the temporal dimension and the messianic promise, which are fundamental in Isou’s theory. In Jewish messianism, messianic hope is seldom accounted for content-wise, but Isou outlines his aspirations related to the third sphere of becoming as follows: Je n’ai pas voulu seulement mener mes semblables jusqu’au Paradis, comme Moïse conduit son people jusqu’à la “terre promise” avant de disparaître, mais j’ai souhaité les installer dans 17 As Scholem informs, “Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theory of catastrophe. [Messianism] stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the messianic future”. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971, 7. Regardless of its ominous tone, Scholem’s interpretation of messianism is exaggerated (see chapter 3). 18 In the case of Bloch and Benjamin, the infusion of messianism was purpoted to rescue the socialist idea from the crisis of Marxism. The focus on economy had left a void that was to be supplanted by the Messiah. Bloch, Ernst, Geist der Utopie, Frankfurt am Main 1971, 305, 346. 19 Devaux, Frédérique, De la création à la société paradisiaque. Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque, tome 2, Paris 1998, 26–27,



Introduction 

 7

l’Éden et organiser celui-ci, […] en nous permettant de vivre éternellement, dans une joie croissante, infinite.20 I did not want to just take my fellow beings to Paradise, as Moses led his people to the “promised land” before disappearing, but I wanted to install them in Eden and organise it, allowing us to live forever in an infinite, growing joy.

By promoting a mythical Eden Isou seems to distance himself from the idea of a promised land, which in Zionism would denote modern-day Israel. Conversely, he imagines an abstract, divine place that is the fulfilment of messianic hope. Despite these obvious Jewish influences, Isou’s theories are not unambiguously religious. He led his artistic career in Paris, never in the peripheral areas of Romania where religious traditions prevailed in the everyday life of people. Isou had to appropriate the Jewish tradition and transmute it into a form that was applicable and acceptable in the modern era Western Europe. Hence, on the one hand, France appears in his works as an intellectual “fatherland” but, on the other, he preserves the connections to his heritage by adopting influences from the Jewish tradition. This double entendre is obvious in his first two books published by Gallimard (both in 1947).21 In Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (“Introduction to a New Poetry and to a New Music”, henceforth Introduction) Isou’s appeal to the French historical avant-garde is evident. Yet in the semi-autobiographical L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un Messie (“Aggregation of a Name and a Messiah”, henceforth Agrégation) Isou explores his connection to Jewish philosophy and medieval Kabbalah in particular.22 Surprisingly, so far the two volumes have not been examined in conjunction. The simultaneity of novel aesthetics and traditional elements is evident in the avant-garde movement Isou launched in 1946, known as lettrism (lettrisme). The movement is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, but a new interest towards it has awoken in France in recent years.23 Lettrism was not limited 20 Quoted in ibid., 15. 21 Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique was published in April 1947 and L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un Messie  in October 17, 1947. Laurent Graff’s (Archives Gallimard) email to Sami Sjöberg at March 3, 2014. 22 Frédérique Devaux explains that the word “aggregation” derives from the French agrégé in its lettrist sense, meaning perfect, successful and vibrant (vivant). Devaux, Frédérique, De la création à la société paradisiaque. Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque, tome 1, Paris 1996, 75. 23 Most of these studies are introductory, such as Mirella Bandini’s fairly recent general introduction Per una storia del lettrismo (2005), Kaira M. Cabañas’ Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (2015) and Bernard Girard’s Lettrisme, l’ultime avant-garde (2010). Roland Sabatier’s Le lettrisme (1989) is a general non-academic introduction by an artist involved in the movement and it does not address Judaism. A comprehensive and pioneering

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 Introduction

to aesthetics, but was truly a movement of the avant-garde in the sense that it aspired for a social change. Numerous lettrist publications focused on the social and financial standing – or the lack thereof – of the youth, whom Isou regarded as a neglected cohort. Besides, young artists were generally far better positioned to join the avant-garde, because as “outsiders” they were yet to be socialised into the more conventional aesthetics. In addition to the arts and social theory, Isou theorised about various other disciplines, such as economics, theology and psychology, providing radically “outside-the-box” thinking that, however, seldom had any practical applicability. Eventually, in the 1950s, the movement divided into fractions, one of them evolving to situationism.24 The one led by Isou, however, retained its Jewish influences and the aspect of religion was most prominent in the poetics of his movement. As the poet and art critic Armand Robin expressed, lettrist poetry is religious rather than secular.25 In practice, literary lettrism is based on elements that developed into a combination of all known writing systems, including “signs” invented by the author.26 Isou dubbed this kind of writing, known as hypergraphics (hypergraphie), as secret and sacred. Lettrism indeed exemplifies a continuous amalgamation of religious and secular spheres in its aesthetical inventions. Lettrist works do not explicitly reveal their Jewish influences, but these appropriations become relevant through lettrist theory of aesthetics. This is to say that one may analyse lettrist works without taking the Jewish dimension into account, but that such an approach unveils only half of the equation.27 Isou’s French contemporaries, who tended to acquaint themselves only with Introducaccount of Isou’s works, together with visual material, is provided in Acquaviva, Frédéric and Simona Buzatu (eds.), Isidore Isou: Hypergraphic Novels 1950–1984, Stockholm 2012. 24 Between 1952 and 1957 several artists broke from Isou’s le mouvement lettriste and formed ultra-lettrism (which focused on body sound poetry) and l’internationale lettriste (led by Guy Debord), which eventually developed into situationism. Debord felt that lettrism was too Paris-centred instead of aspiring to international acclaim. The latter squabbling is somewhat ironic, as Isou had proclaimed in 1947 “la poésie lettriste, la première vraie internationale  : L’INTERNATIONALE LETTRISTE” [lettrist poetry, the first true international: LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL]. Isou Introduction, 179. For a further discussion on the issue from Isou’s perspective, cf. Isou, Isidore, Contre le cinéma situationniste, néo-nazi, Paris 1979; Isou, Isidore, Contre l’internationale situationniste, Paris 2001. 25 Robin, Armand, Essai d’histoire comparée du lettrisme, de l’informel-asignes et de quelques peintres-a-signes indépendants, Paris 1963, 19. 26 Isou, Isidore, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, Paris 1947, 21–59. 27 There are numerous comprehensive introductions (which acknowledge lettrism) to how typography in avant-garde poetry has evolved, cf. Richard Grasshoff’s dissertation on letter poetry Der Befreite Buchstabe. Über Lettrismus (2000), Willard Bohn’s Modern Visual Poetry (2001), and Johanna Drucker’s The Visible Word. Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (1994).



Introduction 

 9

tion, relied on an impression of lettrism that was devoid of religion and emerged from an exclusively French background. Even later on, for instance, Barbara Gitenstein argued that Isou’s and the kabbalists’ only correspondence concerns the assertion of the letter instead of the word as the fundamental unit of meaning. Otherwise the comparison falls short because the kabbalists “aimed meditation on the letters at the true understanding of God [while] Isou, and his predecessor Tzara, aimed only at the articulation of the primitive sources of human communication”.28 Even though somewhat correct in the case of Tzara, concerning Isou her argument is inaccurate, because it overlooks the influence of the Jewish tradition on lettrism. Tzara’s dada exploits were not straightforwardly repeated by lettrism although there were similarities in their poetics.29 Other existing studies on lettrism are scarce and tend to connect lettrism with concrete poetry owing to the visual properties of lettrist works, even though Isou stated that lettrism is anti-typographic in character due to the favouring of handwriting over typefaces.30 The influence of the Kabbalah in lettrism has figured only marginally in discussions since the 1960s.31 The tradition-orientedness of the Kabbalah is a pivotal aspect that has divided academics addressing the aforementioned relation. Individual scholars can be categorised according to their anti-traditionalist or traditionalist emphasis. On the one hand, the anti-traditionalist school approached lettrism from the background of twentieth-century French poetry and tended to emphasise lettrism as a movement of the avantgarde, meaning that it was seen as anti-traditionalist by nature.32 On the other 28 Gitenstein, Barbara R., Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry, Albany 1986, 100. 29 According to Isou, Tzara had focused on the destruction of preceding aesthetic expressions, on figurative plasticism and word poetry (poésie-à-mots), while his own art was based on novel elements that amounted to a fundamentally different kind of structure. Isou Erreurs, 177. 30 Isou, Isidore, Histoire du roman. Des origines au roman hypergraphique et infinitésimal (1944–1989), tome I, Paris 1990, 185. For instance, Willard Bohn and David W. Seaman regard that lettrism belongs to the tradition of concrete poetry. Bohn: Modern Visual Poetry; Seaman, David. W., Concrete Poetry in France, Ann Arbor 1981. Richard Kostelanetz, for one, claims that lettrism can be regarded as a pre-stage of concrete poetry. Kostelanetz, Richard, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Chicago 1993, 132. 31 So far the only exception is the subject-specific small circulation book De la création à la société paradisiaque: Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque (1996–1998) by the lettrist Frédérique Devaux, which is impressionistic and provides allusions between lettrism and Judaism rather than a minute analysis through close reading. Nevertheless, it is pioneering in its attempt to account for the Jewish aspects in lettrism. 32 Cf. Robin Essai; Gitenstein, Apocalyptic Messianism; Seaman, David W., “French Lettrisme: Discontinuity and the Nature of the Avant-garde”, in Henry G. Freeman (ed.), Discontinuity and Fragmentation, Amsterdam 1994, 159–169.

10 

 Introduction

hand, it has been acknowledged that numerous avant-gardes have acquired textual techniques – such as permutations – from marginal movements and religious and ethnic traditions which were chronologically or geographically beyond the immediately preceding Occidental tradition. In particular, scholars who study the development of invented languages tend to draw correlations between the Kabbalah and lettrism.33 Notwithstanding these preliminary stances, no full-length study has been devoted to the subject. This is likely due to the fact that Isou managed to construct a theory of the evolution of poetry where the focus on the letter as the basic unit of meaning was made to appear as the “next logical step” in vanguard aesthetics, thus making the kabbalistic import seem less obscure for a Western non-Jewish audience.34 Indeed, Introduction contains Isou’s hundred-page effort to convince the reader of lettrism’s notably French aesthetic background while passing over any Jewish influence in silence. Therefore, the first chapter takes a closer look at Isou’s relation to the Jewish tradition and the characteristics of lettrism. The investigation into the relation between lettrism and the Jewish tradition entails certain methodological difficulties. One such challenge is the classical definition of the avant-garde as anti-traditional, which generates an apparent dichotomy between traditions and avant-gardes.35 However, the specious disassociation of these traditions is surmountable with the use of suitable terminology to describe the prevailing modes of appropriation. The nature of the thoroughgoing Jewish influence in lettrism is aptly described by the term “judaicity”.36 In a broad sense, it refers to actions that are “in character” with the interests traditionally promoted by Jews. In this context it denotes a special art form (together with aesthetics) and means of expression, 33 Cf. Rothenberg, Jerome and Harris Lenowitz, Exiled in the Word: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present, Port Townsend 1989; Albani, Paolo and Berlinghiero Buonarroti, Dictionnaire des langues imaginaires, trans. Egidio Festa and Marie-France Adaglio, Paris 2001. 34 This book focuses principally on the period between 1945 and 1965 when lettrism peaked on the French literary scene, while contextualising Isou’s early Romanian years preceding the period. 35 Criticism of its predecessors is a common feature in avant-garde aesthetics, see e.g. Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Durham 2003, 95–96. However, as Päivi Mehtonen notes, the twentieth-century avant-garde authors often “turned towards the Middle Ages in a quest for formless forms, abstract (antirealist) modes of narration, and rhetorical techniques playing with negation, ineffability and narrative impotence”. Mehtonen, Päivi, Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature, Helsinki 2007, 13. 36 The concept judéité derives from the works of Albert Memmi. For a further discussion, see Memmi, Albert, Juifs et Arabes, Paris 1974, especially pages 31–38.



Introduction 

 11

which distinguish lettrism from, for instance, both surrealism and traditional Jewish art. The Jewish ideas adopted by Isou derived from various sources, but he appropriated these into his aesthetics as judaicities. The judaicities in lettrism are covered in detail in the second chapter, which focuses on individual subjectivity, how it is affected and construed by language, and what measures can be taken in order to overcome such hegemony of language.37 The chapter looks at manifestations of anti-rationalism, the concepts of subreality and nothing (rien), and finally, the idea of secret writing. These themes and ideas are not exclusively Jewish, but Isou associated them closely with the Jewish tradition. Furthermore, these judaicities demonstrate different aspects of a ruptured subject-object relation, which Isou seeks to renew by transfiguring both literature and language. In short, he wanted to change the ways in which the individual relates to the world and to itself: thought is always conceptual and linguistic, yet concepts and language do not derive from the individual itself. How could they portray the world in a manner that does not, in fact, present someone else’s conception of it? Do we have a common idea of anything, for instance, even of colours? Is my blue your blue? Isou’s fundamental dilemma is related to the communication of individual experiences without the reduction that occurs in language. This problematic had frequently arisen in philosophy and the historical avant-garde. In the field of philosophy, the language criticism of the early 1900s, exemplified by the theories of Jewish philosophers such as Fritz Mauthner and Gustav Landauer, lies closest to lettrism both chronologically and ideologically.38 Their thinking was influential already in expressionism and dada through figures such as Jakob van Hoddis and Gustav Sack.39 Hence, in addition to lettrist avantgarde aesthetics, this book maps lettrism from the viewpoints of modern philosophy and Jewish thought, which enlighten Isou’s unique position between various traditions and schools of thought, and clarify his theoretical aspirations. 37 An insurgence against ordinary language or so-called everyday language recurs in avant-garde manifestoes, even though the avant-gardists were seldom able to define “everyday language” in any clear terms. See Bru, Sascha, “The Phantom League. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics”, in Sascha Bru and Gunter Martens: The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906–1940), Amsterdam and New York 2006, 11. Moreover, George Steiner observes that Jews had a pronounced role in launching critical speculation about language, including the “failure of the word”. Steiner, George, Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Giffors Lectures for 1990, London 2001, 232–233. 38 Cf. Grave, Jaap, Peter Sprengel and Hans Vanvoorde (eds.), Anarchismus und Utopie in der Literatur um 1900: Deutschland, Flandern und die Niederlande, Würzburg 2005. 39 Sack even implied a kabbalistic connection in Mauthner’s theories in his essay “Moderne Mystik” (Modern Mysticism). Sack, Gustav, Gesammelte Werke, Bielefeld 2011, 566.

12 

 Introduction

The judaicities do not, however, as such present a solution to the rupture of the individual’s relation with the social sphere (which is mediated by language). Isou’s answer to the problem entails the most omnipresent adoption of the Jewish tradition in his theories, that of messianism. The key character of Jewish messianism is that every action in the present moment is subject to the idea of the amelioration of the world before the prospect of a better (messianic) future. This is to say that in every action the future is taken into account, which, for its part, directs these actions. The configuration of messianism is particularly appropriable to the avant-garde owing to their shared futurospective character. Jewish transhistorical doctrines, such as messianism and its structurally homological counterparts – libertarian utopianism and the avant-garde – are motivated by a will to radically reform the present for the sake of a preferable future. In this sense, Isou’s messianism, together with its communal and social ideals, incorporates the heritage of the messianic and utopian doctrines of the Jewish expressionists and dadaists. Yet, unlike some of the dadaists, Isou steers clear of nihilistic pursuits. The textual methods Isou adapted from the Kabbalah risk ending up in speculative mysticism or sheer nihilism, but messianism opens a vector that hinges such a pitfall. Jewish messianism is based on openness towards the future. In addition to theoretical aesthetics, Isou elongates this idea of temporal “becoming” to the poetical practices of lettrism. Ideally, such an extension would alter and metamorphose language. While questioning the ability of language to mimic reality, he introduces the idea of messianic potentiality, which proffers a notion of future where the dichotomy of language and reality is finally overcome. This is to say that, in fact, the Jewish tradition provides both the problematics addressed by lettrism and the methodological framework it applied. The third chapter covers the background of Jewish messianism and situates Isou into its evolution. In modern philosophy, messianic structures are exemplified by various concepts that relate identically to the present. Such structures are inscribed into, for instance, Ernst Bloch’s Noch-Nicht (not yet) and Isou’s à venir (to come). The terminology describes a state of being that is incomplete and open towards a future fulfillment, which derives from messianic Kabbalah that conceived the aforementioned state in eschatological terms. The kabbalistic encounter with the fundamental incompleteness of the individual encouraged a methodological scrutiny that culminated in a strong language theory. Resulting from such an emphasis on language, the Kabbalah utilised numerous textual techniques that were later adopted by the lettrists (e.g., permutations, glossolalia, semantic blanks). Themes such as eschatology and nothingness were both derived from mysticism and further adapted to a modern aesthetic framework. Their application in lettrism leads to a fundamental discovery about Isou’s poetics: messianic potentiality betokens that even seemingly non-meaningful



Introduction 

 13

poems contain a promise of meaning. Lettrism thus circumvents interpretative attempts that seek unambiguous meaning, affirmation and universal truth. The aim is not solely to destabilise current ideological and metaphysical structures or the temporal present, but to reimagine the present as the advent of a better future.

Prolegomenon: the Messiah

Prolegomenon: the Messiah

The name of God in Exodus (3:14), ‫( אהיה אשר אהיה‬Heb. ehyeh asher ehyeh), is commonly translated as “I am that I am”. However, the Hebrew “ehyeh” is both a present and future tense. Therefore, the name of God is also “I will be what I will be” and, with a minor but essential augmentation, “I am that I will be”. The temporal “I am that I will be” pervades Jewish messianism from Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) onwards. The anthropocentric epithet “I am that I will be” claimed its power from the divine in the form of the Messiah. The Jewish Messiah is a specific individual who will redeem the Jews. The Hebrew word ‫משיח‬ (mashiah) literally designates “the anointed” king or priest. In classical Jewish eschatology the Messiah is a king from the Davidic line who is anointed with holy anointment oil and will rule the Jewish people during the so-called messianic age. Unlike Christianity, Judaism does not recognise Jesus as the Messiah. Theologically, the Messiah is a post-biblical concept that does not figure in the Torah. Over two millennia, there has been numerous aspects to the definition and function of the Messiah depending upon the spiritual and theological approach of the various, and often conflicting, Jewish trends. However, there is a consensus that the Messiah is a human being. Hence it should be noted that in Judaism the Messiah was an agent of God and not a saviour in the Christian sense. Neither does he displace God nor Torah. In common belief, the Messiah is usually conceived as a figure surrounded by transgressive, antinomic events that will eventually lead to a rupture with the current world. Such characteristics were undermined in medieval Jewish philosophy. Maimonides regarded the coming of the Messiah as a political deliverance, without any upheaval in the order of the world or apocalyptic elements. Alongside such a rational conception of the Messiah, there is a mystical one. The kabbalist Abraham Abulafia transferred the idea of the Messiah from a historical deliverance to a psychological realm: the Messiah was an individual quality. Moreover, this individualism meant that every Jew was a potential Messiah. Therefore, the Jewish Messiah is aptly described by the anonymous “I am that I will be”. Scriptures do not specify the identity of the Messiah, only his humanity, thus enabling messianic speculation. The emphasised role of the Messiah elucidates the frequency of self-proclaimed messiahs in Judaism, especially in Jewish mysticism. For instance, Abulafia, who is essential for the mapping of the influence of Kabbalah in lettrism, was the first kabbalist to regard himself as the Messiah. The perseverance of the messianic myth and automessianic speculation indicate the influence of Jewish messianic doctrines and the Kabbalah in avant-garde art and poetry of the first half of the twentieth century, at work in lettrism in particular.



Prolegomenon: the Messiah 

 15

Motivated by the history of the “I am that I will be”, Isou presents an essential conjecture: Messie est celui qui rendra tous les hommes parfaits et heureux (Juifs), mènera les Juifs à Jérusalem et assurera à tout jamais la domination des hommes normaux (Juifs) dans le monde. Le Messie s’appelle Isidore Isou?1 Messiah is he who will render all men perfect and happy (Jews), will lead the Jews to Jerusalem and will assure that normal men (Jews) dominate in the world ever more. The Messiah is called Isidore Isou?

1 Isou Agrégation, 273.

1 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew Toute création inédite est l’ œil de Dieu.1

1.1 Formative Years in Romania Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925, shortly after expressionism peaked in Germany and surrealism had begun to move centre stage in France. This was a fervent period also in the Romanian avant-garde, which was promoted by three cardinal art magazines: Contimporanul (published 1922–1932), Integral (1925– 1928) and Unu (1928–1935). Besides publishing works by Romanian artists, many of whom were of Jewish origin, the magazines’ editors were well connected to foreign artists, such as Herwath Walden and André Breton, as well as Romanian emigrants living in Paris – among others, Tzara, Fondane and Victor Brauner.2 The Romanian avant-garde was well informed of current West European aesthetics and poetics.3 The legacy of this intense period affected Isou when he began to take an interest in the arts. Most histories of lettrism settle for acknowledging Isou’s Romanian Jewish origin but leave his childhood and teenage years otherwise unaccounted for. However, this phase was crucial in light of the Jewish import in lettrist theory and poetics. Its importance is evident throughout Isou’s autobiographical notes regarding his adolescence in Romania and its standing in his work. As he acknowledges, je suis entièrement, dans chaque défaut, dans chaque clarté, dans chaque élan, dans chaque courbe, dans chaque réticence un Juif. Je suis tellement Juif que c’est peut-être le seul mot dans ma vie que j’écrirai avec majuscule, sans avoir l’impression d’ajouter une dimension, de combler une irrégularité, d’élever une notion par la mystification pompeuse d’une grande lettre.4 I am fully, in each defect, in each light, in each impulse, in each curve, in each reluctance a Jew. I’m so Jewish that it is perhaps the only word in my life that I write with a capital, 1 Isou, Isidore, Les journaux des Dieux, Paris 1950, 102. “Every original creation is the eye of God”. 2 For a further discussion cf. Raileanu, Petre, Gherasim Luca: Les roumains de Paris, Paris 2004; Pop, Ion (ed.), La rehabilitation du rêve: Une anthologie de l’avant-garde roumaine, Paris 2006. 3 This is illustrated by the fact that the first manifesto of futurism was published simultaneously in Le Figaro and the Romanian journal Democrația in 1909, thanks to Marinetti’s contact network. Sandqvist, Dada East, 384. 4 Isou, Agrégation, 209.



Formative Years in Romania 

 17

without feeling that I add a dimension to make up for a deficiency, raising a notion by the pompous mystification catered by an upper case letter.

Isou conceived of his Jewishness in ethnic and religious terms as something given and thus non-negotiable. Even though he recognised the burden of being Jewish in interwar Romania with its recurring pogroms, he did not wish to assimilate – had this even been possible. As a Jew, he was subject to anti-Semitism that escalated during the Second World War and culminated in the Shoah.5 However, in his works Judaism is not solely related to the Shoah and suffering, but rather to earlier, and from a Western point of view even exotic, traits of the Jewish tradition, such as mysticism. Granted, Isou was well aware of the outlandish character and intrigue his theories evoked in Paris, which suggests that his autobiographical accounts of Eastern Europe were also intended for the promotion of his artistic career in post-war France.6 Yet, unlike the “exotic” African folk art that was introduced into Western aesthetics by Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915), Judaism was a tradition lived in the heartlands of continental Europe. In this sense Judaism could not be regarded as unfamiliar as cultures from beyond “the Old Continent”. The label of exoticism is nevertheless apparent in Isou’s late novel Adorable roumaine (Adorable Romanian, 1978), which includes a reminiscence of his childhood and the neighbourhood he grew up in: Je suis né à Botoșani, localité située au nord-est de la Roumanie, tout près de la frontière russe. La ville est divisée en plusieurs quartiers, certains occupés par des gens riches et d’autres par de pauvres artisans à peine échappés à leur terre patriarcale.7 Mon père, commerçant aisé, avait hérité de ses parents une maison dans le quartier des « déguenillés »

5 Isou recalled vividly the treatment he received from drunken members of Antonescu’s Iron Guard in the early 1940s, who insulted him and claimed that God also loathed the Jews. Ibid., 241–242. Events such as the one described are most likely the reason behind the anti-Christian attitude prominent in Isou’s early works. 6 Similar exoticism was notable in Isou’s popular works as well. As numerous other authors, he wrote erotic literature (for raisons alimentaires) in which the setting was usually remote parts of Europe, such as Romania or Finland. Cf. Isou, Isidore, Nymphes de Carelie, Paris 1957. Indeed, in some bibliographies by the lettrists the book is listed by its working title Nymphes de Finlande under the rubric “ethics”. Isou, Isidore, Réponse à ‘La plastique lettriste et hypergraphique’, Paris 1956, 6. 7 It is likely that by these “paupers” Isou refers to the half a million Jewish refugees who arrived in Romania from Russia following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The refugees were Ashkenazi and did not speak Romanian. The Ashkenazim represented the negative stereotype of a Jew in Romania, in contrast to the more assimilated Sephardi Jews of Wallachia. Brustein, William and Amy Ronnkvist, “The Roots of Anti-Semitism: Romania before the Holocaust”, Journal of Genocide Research 4:2, 220–222.

18 

 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

(Calicime) et nous habitions là pendant l’été, alors que la saison de grande activité commerciale nous trouvait dans un immeuble neuf construit sur le marché.8 I was born in Botoșani, a town situated in northeastern Romania, just by the Russian border. The city is divided into several districts, some occupied by the rich and others by poor artisans who barely escaped to their patriarchal land. My father, a prosperous merchant, had inherited a house in a “ragged” neighborhood (Calicime) from his parents and we spent the summers there, whereas during the commercial high season we lived in a new building on the marketplace.

The suburb of “paupers” in Botoșani is described as mostly Hebrew (Jewish) and comprising nearly a quarter of the city. It was the darkest and most forlorn city district with battered unpaved roads with no foothpaths. The city itself was bustling with Jewish life, presented by its numerous (counting more than 70) prayer houses and two synagogues in the interwar period.9 The history of Botoșani is marked by its location at geopolitical and cultural crossroads. The town is situated in northeastern Romania, in the Moldavia region, approximately halfway between Iași and Cernivtsi (Czernowitz), which is currently situated in Ukraine. The geographical location of the cities forms an axis that coincides with the south-westernmost perimeter of the so-called Yiddishland, which denotes East European Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities situated between modern Latvia and northern Romania, central Poland and eastern Ukraine. These communities consisted not only of cities but also of smaller towns and villages, with dynamic reciprocal exchange (of agricultural, cultural products). During the interwar period the Jewish inhabitants of the area were in exchange with each other, but most often a longing for urban surroundings was manifested by those originating from more traditional, rural settings. The earliest Jewish population in Botoșani dates from the sixteenth century.10 The colony grew rapidly in size at the beginning of the nineteenth century with immigrants arriving from Galicia, Poland and Russia. As in other major cities of the region, the Jews of Botoșani were a significant part of the population.11 8 Isou, Isidore, Adorable Roumaine, Paris 1978, 9. 9 Laiş, Şlomo Leibovici, Evreimea botoşăneană. Mini-monografie, Tel-Aviv 2005, 251. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 According to the 1899 census the Jews represented about 52% of the population. In the 1930 census, the Jewish population of the town was 35,3%. The Jewish community did not diminish in size; the percentual decline is rather due to urbanisation. The Jews were townsfolk as farming and landownership were forbidden to them. Dieaconu, Daniel, Evreii din Moldova de Nord, de la primele aşezări până în anul 1938. Cu privire specială asupra judeţului Neamţ. Piatra Neamţ and Bucureşti 2009, pp. 147; Hundert, Gershon David (ed.), The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Vol. 1, New Haven 2008, 220–221, 287.



Formative Years in Romania 

 19

The Jews had their own cultural life (newspapers, journals, theatre, music, art) centred on Yiddish and Hebrew and were not thus solely dependent on Occidental cultural “imports”. However, the models of cultural life were fairly bourgeois and derived from the West.12 Jewish bourgeois life in the cities can be regarded as a rather straightforward acclimatisation to the lifestyles of the French and German middle classes of the time. The all-encompassing Western influence was particularly apparent in architecture and education.13 In the late nineteenth century, the better-off Botoșanian Jews built houses based on current French trends. For instance, a prosperous Jewish merchant built the renowned Moscovici house in Palladian style right in the middle of the city.14 In addition to architecture, Romania had opted for schooling in accordance with the French model.15 The Romanian elite, though located mainly in the capital Bucharest, was French-speaking and the Romanian aristocracy was educated in France. In other words, all Botoșanians were under the influence of Romanian language and Franco-Romanian culture. Therefore, the Jewish people of Botoșani spoke mainly Romanian and Yiddish, with German and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) being the other prevailing languages in the area. Individual language competence affected also the relations one had to current trends. During the nineteenth century East European Jews held varying positions to the inevitable encounter with modernisation. The main trends in the wide-ranging reactions to this were the secular Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), assimilation into a hegemonic nation state, Jewish nationalism, conservative-orthodox separationism, emigration (Zionism), socialism and a longing for a kind of “organic” Jewishness.16 In the light of his writings, the latter two were the most essential for Isou. The idea of an “organic” Jewishness was based on a 12 A study mapping this phenomenon thoroughly is Drace-Francis, Alex, The Making of Modern Romanian Culture. Literacy and the Development of National Identity, New York 2006. 13 Ibid., 8. 14 Laiş, Evreimea, 183. 15 Georgescu mentions the “German sphere” covering Bukovina and Transylvania and the “French sphere”, which covers Moldavia and Wallachia. Georgescu, Dakmara, Secondary Education in Romania, Strasbourg 1997, 15. From the aspect of the Bukovinian Jewish population, “Europaisation” meant that the Volksdeutsche identified with their ethnic heritage while German-speaking Jews could benefit from the “cultural capital” of the German language. Corbea-Hoisie, Andrei, “Expressionismus in Czernowitz”, in Amann, Klaus and Armin A. Wallas, Expressionismus in Österreich: Die Literatur und die Künste, Wien, Köln and Weimar 1994, 331. 16 Socialism supposedly resolved the “Jewish question” in the frame of an international classless society. Milfull, John, “Marginalität und Messianismus. Die Situation der deutsch-jüdischen Intellektuellen als Paradigma für die Kulturkrise 1910–1920”, in Hüppauf, Bernd (ed.), Expressionismus und Kulturkrise, Heidelberg 1983, 148; Wolitz, Seth L. (2006), “Ashkenaz or the Jewish Cultural Presence in East-Central Europe”, in Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer, History of

20 

 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

romanticised image of the so-called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), which was derived from Westernised Jews. The Ostjuden, Ashkenazim, were regarded as having conserved an “original” kind of Judaism in their tradition-oriented lifestyles in the East European small towns and countryside. Martin Buber was seminal in promoting such image of the Ostjuden.17 This ideal served as an archetype for the more assimilated urban Jewish population across the continent.18 The degree of Isou’s family’s assimilation remains unknown. Depending on the source, the Goldsteins are depicted either as a petit-bourgeoisie Ashkenazi family or upper-middle-class people who owned several grocery stores in the city.19 Nevertheless, Isou was at least of the second, perhaps third generation of Romanian-speaking Goldsteins – his grandparents were Botoșanians. His family was at least trilingual, speaking Romanian and Yiddish as well as the amount of Hebrew required at the synagogue. Isou attended the yeshiva (rabbinic school) so he was familiar with Biblical Hebrew.20 The yeshiva institution was founded on the tradition of Torah study, so it is likely that Isou’s first contact with the Kabbalah occurred there during the 1930s. In a mainly Yiddish-speaking community, language proficiency was a factor that constrained the access to texts in Hebrew, which includes most of the kabbalistic writings. It was not uncommon that only rabbis were fluent in Hebrew before the creation of the State of Israel and the revival of the language. Isou was a native speaker of Yiddish, who recalled the difficulties related to the study of the Kabbalah. According to him, if the

the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume II, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 2006, 317. 17 Milfull, Marginalität, 149. Buber’s most influential texts in this respect were “Jüdische Renaissance”, 0st und West l (190l), 7–l0; Die Legende des Baalschem, Frankfurt 1908. However, also pejorative uses of the term Ostjuden were fairly common in the Weimar republic by assimilated Jews. 18 The ideal persisted in Jewish art even after the 1940s, when the Nazis destroyed the shtetlekh. The ideal was well known in Botoșani and Isou referred to Buber’s ideas concerning the matter. 19 Thomas, Jean-Jacques, “Isidore Isou’s Spirited Letters”, in Quinney, Anne (Ed.), Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris. Francophone Writers from Romania, Amsterdam and New York 2012, 226; Hussey, Andrew, The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, London 2001, 39. 20 Sjöberg, Sami, “The Jewish Shtetl Tradition in the Franco-Romanian Avant-Garde: The Case of Isidore Isou”, in Nuorluoto, Juhani and Maija Könönen (eds.), Europe – Evropa: Cross-Cultural Dialogues between the West, Russia, and Southeastern Europe, Uppsala, 2010, 132–149; Hussey, Andrew, “‘La Divinité d’Isou’: The Making of a Name and a Messiah”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 36, 2000, pp. 132–142.



Formative Years in Romania 

 21

Cabbale (Kabbalah)[était] [d]ifficile pour notre compréhension, elle était certainement encore plus difficile pour les barbares (devenus chrétiens) qui ne savaient même pas comment pénétrer dans les textes premiers.21 Kabbalah was difficult for us to understand, it was certainly even more difficult for the barbarians (now Christians) who do not even know how to penetrate [to interpret] the first texts.

The difficulty with interpreting the Kabbalah was twofold: language hindered access to the kabbalistic line of thought, which was unique. Hence, Isou’s perception of the Kabbalah as a concealed doctrine is politicised as pro-Jewish. Additionally, the quintessential kabbalistic idea of a hidden truth within the text is conserved.22 Even more so, this hiddenness is sustained by the Jewish tradition rather than secular urban trends adopted by modern Jewry. This aspect of the Kabbalah would become essential in lettrism. Besides the urban Botoșani life, the countryside with its small Jewish communities was a source of inspiration for Isou – there is certainly a romanticist element in the background of his aesthetics. As already noted, the Jewish tradition existed in shtetl culture as a flipside to modern and urban Judaism.23 Shtetl is here understood as a complex phenomenon existing in Yiddishland from the early 1800s until the Nazi purges when Isou left Romania for Paris. Shtetl refers to the basic network that supports the life of a Jewish community – a synagogue, a ritual bath, a cemetery, schools and so on.24 It was not legally established and it should not be regarded as a completely Jewish world. Instead, it was a place where religions met as Jews interacted with the local gentiles, with language as

21 Isou Agrégation, 282. 22 Kabbalah is based on the hiddenness and ineffability of God (truth) and God’s features. Moreover, kabbalistic rituals were performed either in private by individual mystics or by clandestine groups consisting of mystics and their disciples. 23 See Apter-Gabriel, Ruth (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928. Jerusalem 1987. To arrive at a clear definition of the Yiddishland and shtetl culture is difficult due to the inconsistent useage of the terms. I apply Yiddishland as an umbrella term to designate the distribution of the shtetl culture in the actual geographical area where shtetlekh were situated. 24 Kassow, Samuel, “The Shtetl in Interwar Poland”, in Katz, Stephen T. (ed.), The Shtetl: New Evaluations, New York and London 2007, 125. In the Moldavian towns, ritual baths were attended by the non-Jews as well, as there were no others facilities available. The so-called Big Bath of the Jews in the paupers’ area was a meeting place for the Christians as well. Laiş Evreimea, 252; Dieaconu Evreii, 260.

22 

 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

the only dividing factor.25 This is to say that shtetlekh existed as a cultural background in the everyday life of the transnational Jewish minority of Yiddishland. However, the shtetlekh had never formed a unified culture but had their internal conflicts, which could span over decades. A fundamental dispute emerging in the late eighteenth century was the co-presence of two distinct currents of religious mysticism. As Immanuel Etkes has noted, the yeshiva institution was formed on the tradition of Vilna Gaon (Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, 1720–1797), who was antagonistic towards Hasidism. Hasidic mysticism, which weighs the emotion of faith over the scriptures, emerged during the eighteenth century and spread especially, thanks to Baal Shem Tov’s (Yisroel ben Eliezer, 1698–1760) efforts, in Jewish communities lacking a yeshiva.26 The yeshiva tradition is linked with the Kabbalah, meaning that the yeshiva may be regarded as an elitist institution. Yet, Hasidism claimed that even those with no knowledge of the kabbalistic mysteries have contact with God.27 This method made Hasidism and its leading rebbes powerful and popular. Such a democratic approach to religion must have seemed heretical in the eyes of the rabbis who held Torah study as their prerequisite. Surprisingly, Isou took a stand in the controversy between Kabbalah and Hasidism, which speaks for the influence of the former in his thinking. In Agrégation he ridicules Baal Shem Tov as a backward, uncivilised man (homme des forêts) from Volhynia.28 His antagonism towards Hasidism is illustrated by the notion that “hassidisme a été la grande et horrible morsure des chrétiens dans le judaïsme” [Hasidism was a great and horrible bite of Judaism taken by Christians].29 Isou was an outspoken advocate of the Kabbalah and the Jewish tradition in the form it was conserved in the ancient and medieval texts. From this aspect, Isou’s inclination to the shtetl is not surprising. Culturally, the shtetl was a stronghold of tradition – religious orthodoxy, traditional storytelling and Hasidism were prevailing. Jewish folklore and myths were preserved

25 Kassow, Samuel, “Introduction”, in Katz, Stephen T. (ed.), The Shtetl: New Evaluations, New York and London 2007, 2–3, 7. 26 Etkes, Immanuel, “A Shtetl with a Yeshiva: The Case of Volozhin”, in Katz, Stephen T. (ed.), The Shtetl: New Evaluations, New York and London 2007, 41–43. Baal Shem Tov was the founder and charismatic leader of the Hasidic movement. 27 Wiesel, Elie, “The World of the Shtetl”, in Katz, Stephen T. (ed.), The Shtetl: New Evaluations, New York and London 2007, 295. As Scholem paraphrases, the Kabbalah sought an unity with God, but in Hasidism the unity with God was a point of departure instead of an aim. Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971, 203–208. 28 Isou Agrégation, 283. Volhynia is situated in modern western Ukraine, in the heart of Yiddish­ land. 29 Ibid.



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 23

in these towns, as exemplified by Buber’s writings on Hasidism. During the turn of the century these traditional elements became key sources for the Jewish Renaissance, which acquired its name from Buber’s essay published in 1901. This Renaissance was not merely an aim conveyed by the older Jewish intelligentsia, but also an exploit of a young generation of Jewish intellectuals.30 Cultured Jewish thinkers and artists focused on the shtetl. The reason behind this “retrospection” was a quest for cultural authenticity, which was considered to have faded due to assimilation. For the urbanised Ashkenazi artists the city functioned as an extension of the shtetl-vision. Their vision “contained richness and variety but lacked opportunities of growth in the actual shtetl”, which prompted the romanticism of the small town traditionalism.31 This characteristic enabled the Jewish artist to reject shtetl traditions but still identify with both the shtetl and the city as a modern secular Jew.32 Even more so, the shtetl tradition could be exoticised and romanticised – as was done by Buber. For instance, a way to reconcile with the shtetl was to preserve it as a motif, although its formal presentation could be novel. Such an approach was chosen by Marc Chagall (Moiše Segal, 1887–1985) whose paintings of the 1910s combined the formal expression of romanticised shtetl imagery with an original avant-garde painting style that amalgamated elements of cubism and fauvism. Alongside the question of modernisation and tradition, the relation to the shtetl was also an issue of language. Generally speaking, the Jews who operated with Christian languages either reinvented their identity or eschewed their Jewishness.33 Each Jewish individual needed to ponder how one would position oneself with the rivalling endeavours of Jewish modernisation and tradition. For Isou, who was intrigued by the avant-garde but was unwilling to relinquish his identity as a Jew, to find a balance between these competing and conflicting traits was vital, because promoting religious orthodoxy could hardly be regarded as 30 The Renaissance particularly was influential in Berlin, Prague and Vienna. Mittelmann, Hanni, “Expressionismus und Judentum”, in Horch, Hans Otto and Horst Denkler (eds.): Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom Esrten Weltkrieg bis 1933/1938. Tübingen 1993, 255. From Vienna, cultural influences spread quickly to Bukovina and further East. Illustrating the younger generation are the Polish movements Khaliyastra and YungYidish. Cf. Hazan-Brunet, Nathalie and Ada Ackerman (eds.), Futur antérieur: l’avant-garde et le livre yiddish, 1914–1939, Paris 2009. 31 Alternatively, the city was a way of completely escaping the shtetl culture. Wolitz, Seth L., Brian Horowitz and Zilla Jane Goodman, “Cities in Ashkenaz: Sites of Identity, Cultural Production, Utopic or Dystopic Visions”, in Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Volume II, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 2006, 183. 32 Ibid. 33 Wolitz Ashkenaz, 327.

24 

 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

avant-garde. Moreover, had he preferred secularisation and alienation to traditional Judaism, the social standing of his family guaranteed certain benefits that would have facilitated this. At school he studied French (and perhaps German) and relied on private tutors. A family friend, an academician, introduced French theatre, poetry and novels to Isou.34 During the 1930s, while he was studying at the yeshiva, Isou became familiar with canonical French authors such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Flaubert. Coincidentally, at the time both Yiddish and Romanian lacked the mature and influential tradition of high literature and philosophy that both German and French circles had.35 Numerous Romanian emigrant artists, such as Tzara and Fondane, had opted for French and were regarded as exponents of French literature whenever it suited the ends of those making such assessments.36 However, choosing French over Yiddish or Romanian was not an issue for Isou during the 1930s. His adolescence was marked by influential Jewish personalities, such as the Zionist ideologue Abraham Leib Zissu (1888–1956), who later became the president of the World Jewish Congress in Romania.37 He was a revisionist Zionist who promoted the Jewish State and had strong messianic tendencies. In fact, thanks to Zissu, Isou became involved with the socialist-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair.38 The movement was secular, so Isou was not taking part in religious Zionism with its particular messianic views.39 During the Holocaust in Romania, leaders of the Hashomer movement were arrested and executed for anti-fascist action. Any involvement in such a movement was dan34 Thomas Spirited Letters, 226. 35 Cf. Schachter, Allison, Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century, Oxford 2012. 36 Another similar and recurring instance is Paul Celan, the Romanian Jew from Chernivtsi, who is often regarded within the frame of German literature. 37 Eram, Cosana, The Autobiographical Pact: Otherness and Redemption in Four French Avant-Garde Artists, Stanford 2010, 116. Zissu was born to a Hasidic family, which would later lead to a conflict between him and Isou due to the latter’s opposing of Hasidism. However, Jews opposed to assimilation pursued ethnic minority status and Jewish cultural autonomy, in which they were encouraged by Zissu. For several decades he advocated an “integral” Jewish nationalism (which was to emerge from a movement of “revival” and a return to authentic Judaism) and a right-wing Zionist ideology. By means of numerous publications and leaflets, Zissu propounded his radical programme advocating a spiritual return to Judaism and the foundation of a Jewish party. Volovici, Leon”,Zissu, Abraham Leib”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2010. 38 Thomas Spirited Letters, 226. 39 Yet, Isou’s formulation (cf. prolegomenon) of the Messiah as someone who leads the Jews to Jerusalem echoes the messianic idea in religious Zionism even though it is derived from earlier rabbinic literature. This signals that he was at least aware of the doctrine, even though not a follower himself.



Formative Years in Romania 

 25

gerous and potentially lethal. Even though Isou discarded Zionism before 1945, the importance of a particular Jewish political engagement underlines his desire to identify as a Jewish person instead of downplaying his ethnic background as was relatively common amongst assimilated Jews during the interwar period. Regardless of Isou’s involvement in the secular Jewish movement, he was by no means a secular thinker or a proponent of Haskalah. Exemplifying this, he stated that “nous sommes le premier peuple historique qui ait dépassé l’histoire par le Livre, par le Nom. Toute notre histoire est Yhwe” [we are the first historical people that has replaced history with the Book, with the Name. Our whole history is Yhwe].40 The formulation is kabbalistic in character, as it equates the name (of God) with the book (Torah) and, further, suggests a link between Jewish history and the search for the name of God in the Torah.41 Moreover, rabbinic thought includes the idea that the name of the Messiah existed before creation.42 However, even though some exegetical uses may involve the applying of proper names, here the “name” should not be taken literally but rather as an alternative term for a concept. In light of these historiographical developments, Isou’s conception of Jewish history is undoubtedly kabbalistic. Even though his formulation expressly recalls the Kabbalah, Isou’s religious claims are fragmentary. What is paradoxical for an avant-garde writer is his adoption of the Jewish tradition, which occasionally results in outright anachronisms, such as his remarks concerning Baal Shem Tov. Yet, Isou’s critique is contemporary and ranges beyond Hasidism: the fascist Romanian context of the early 1940s, when the Christian majority continuously persecuted the Jews, is also foregrounded. Isou claimed that Hasidism was an infiltration of Christian influences in Judaism, the integrity of which the Kabbalah had protected.43 This is to say that Isou regarded every form of syncretism as defective. His views on the issue are radical, but evidently they reject the popular Ostjuden ideal promoted by Buber and the Jewish Renaissance. Isou stated that he opposed Buber’s explications of Hasidism because they were impregnated by Christian overtones.44 In Isou’s case, the influence of the Jewish tradition was also evident in the dispute between the people of the shtetlekh and the secular proponents of Haskalah (maskilim) who criticised the former for being overridden by Hasidism.

40 Isou Agrégation, 274 41 For a further discussion on the Kabbalah of names, see chapter 2.1. 42 Blidstein, Gerald J., “Messiah in Rabbinic Thought”, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol 14, Detroit 2007, 112. 43 Isou Agrégation, 282–283. Kabbalah was, however, never an isolated or monolithic tradition, but was influenced, among others, by Jewish philosophy, Christianity and Neoplatonism. 44 Ibid., 283.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

The maskilim considered Haskalah the only way to modernise the religious shtetlekh.45 Botoșani was one of the key locations where Haskalah was promoted in the nineteenth century. Although the dispute had already begun in the eighteenth century, Isou used it to define his anti-rationalist position in the Jewish tradition. His radical perception was that rationalism – as a way of thinking – had led to the Holocaust and therefore he held on to the nonsensical sacred language, which could not have similar catastrophic repercussions.46 This is to say that ideologically Isou chose the anti-rationalist middle way between the maskilim and the Hasidim. Yet, his solution was rather unique as the Kabbalah-inclined yeshiva cannot be characterised as thoroughly rational either. In tracing the shtetl roots of Isou’s work, it is essential to note the playful, almost anti-rationalist, use of language in these communities: [T]he man of the shtetl is noted both for volubility and for laconic, allusive speech. Both pictures are true, and both are characteristic of the yeshiva as well as the market places. When the scholar converses with his intellectual peers, incomplete sentences, a hint, a gesture, may replace a whole paragraph. The listener is expected to understand the full meaning on the basis of a word or even a sound. […] Such a conversation, prolonged and animated, may be as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as if the excited discussants were talking in tongues. The same verbal economy may be found in domestic or business circles.47

The elisions in spoken Yiddish were the means of distinguishing between societal groups, but more importantly, the shtetl attitude towards language was far from the formal eloquence of nineteenth-century aristocratic France.48 In addition, the oral quality of the fragmented shtetl-Yiddish is reminiscent of twentieth-century avant-gardist sound poetry, which, indeed, echoes in lettrism. A certain cultural “distance” was crucial to the genesis of this phenomenon. The distance may be defined on an aesthetic level as a cultural gap. There was a cultural gap between the Jewish tradition and the secular Western European models of literature, with which the Jewish literati sought to conform.49 This signals that, beyond the scriptures and religious commentaries, there was little of what could

45 Kassow Introduction, 9. 46 Hussey Game, 39. 47 Zborowski, Mark and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People. The Culture of the Shtetl, New York 1962, 123. 48 A reminiscent sociolect exists today amongst yeshiva students, known commonly as Yeshivish. 49 Seidman, Naomi, “Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature”, in Katz, Stephen T. (ed.), The Shtetl: New Evaluations, New York and London 2007, 199



Formative Years in Romania 

 27

be dubbed Jewish literature in the late nineteenth-century shtetl.50 For the Jewish writer, the Romanian “little Paris” – a pet name for Bucharest – signaled the need to adapt to the secular European aesthetics previously unknown in the shtetlekh. The co-presence of the “new” and the traditional created a tension that made the Romanian Jewish avant-garde possible. The efforts to bridge the gap also resulted in an opposing approach: anti-Semitism in Romanian literature. In the spirit of the Jewish Renaissance, the Jewish writer seeking to be modern without abandoning Judaism had to reconcile two distinct traditions, shtetl culture and Western aesthetics.51 This means that Isou had to strike a balance between the Kabbalah and Western literature. In addition, if he was to incorporate the former into the latter, he had to make it appear as the next logical step in avant-garde literature so as to avoid driving away any potential readership that might have lingering reservations concerning Jews and Judaism in the post-war era. Aptly, his two Gallimard books approach the cultural gap from opposite directions. In Introduction the focus is on French aesthetics and the Jewish element is mainly latent, whereas Agrégation discusses Jewish history from a semi-autobiographical perspective with no reference to secular Western aesthetics. By reconciling these works with terms referring to cultural influence, the former is inclined to modernisation and the latter to the shtetl. This ambivalence between cosmopolitan aesthetics and transnational Jewish culture exemplifies Isou’s position in between various overlapping and incompatible ideological currents. During the interwar period in Romania, however, those falling between the two cultures were often marginalised. As Gavin Bowd has noted, “modernist [avant-gardist] iconoclasm was practised predominantly by those, particularly Jews, who were beyond the pale la roumanité”.52 Isou identified himself as a Jew, which implies his deliberate connection to Yiddishland rather than to Romania. 50 Yiddish was still a relatively young language as is shown by the proceedings of the Yiddish language conference in Cernivtsi in 1908. The conference promoted the idea of depicting Yiddish as the mother language of the transnational Jewry. Cf. Weiser, Kalman and Joshua A. Fogel, Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective, Lanham 2010. 51 Parodies of Western classics, such as Don Quijote, resulted from this situation. Seidman “Gender”, 200. Yet parody was not confined to the cultural gap, because the East European Jews also ironised their own myths – like messianism. Handelman, Susan A., Fragments of Redemption. Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, & Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1991, 43. 52 In Bowd’s use Romanianness refers to Romanian nationalist myths of identity. However, I disagree with his argument that in Isou’s case the dissolution of art would have led to the dissolution of all identity. Bowd, Gavin, “Orphans and Origins: Romania, France and Problems of Identity”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 36:2, 115. This is evident already in Isou’s desire to identify as a Jew.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

On the one hand, the use of avant-gardist style arguably did not necessitate a crossing of a threshold for Tzara, Fondane and others as it did for Western artists. The shtetl Jews were not socialised to secular Occidental aesthetics in a way that would sanctify the Western tradition. On the other hand, even Isou related his work to the experimentalists in French poetry rather than to their more conventional counterparts. What also supports this interpretation of the Romanian Jewish avant-garde is that the attempts of the Jews to endorse secular Romanian literature caused immediate counterreactions. George Voicu calls this phenomenon literary anti-Semitism, which refers to the disparagement of the Jews active in Romanian literature. The Jews, such as Tzara, were accused on seemingly literary grounds: their production was considered aesthetically inferior, the works were plagued by non-representativeness, and they supposedly had no profound knowledge of either Romanian language or the nation’s historical realities.53 This should be regarded as conventional anti-Semitist propaganda, as more than a third of the de facto population of Bukovina and Moldavia were Jews.54 Literary anti-Semitism shows that Jewish culture was depicted as severely distinct and that attempts to bridge the cultural gap between shtetl and Western aesthetics were subject to harsh criticism. In addition, the Jews were regarded as a pernicious influence on national literature and Romanian identity.55 It is noteworthy that in the interwar period such themes as non-representation and the overturning of prevailing aesthetic ideals recurred in avant-garde art. These features spread quickly in Romania due to the existing network that distributed Western aesthetic developments. The Romanianness of the Jewish works becomes indirectly apparent in the literary anti-Semitism. During the late nineteenth century the prominence of Jewish writers in Romanian literature began to grow.56 This coincided with the introduction of secular literary models in the shtetl and highlights the language dispute. In the nineteenth century Haskalah resulted in the revival of both Yiddish and Hebrew, which occurred in areas with indigenous national languages.57 However, the national modernisation of the shtetlekh in the twentieth century signified 53 Voicu, George, “Romanian Literary Anti-Semitism: Historical-Ideological Facets”, Studia Hebraica 3:3, 138. 54 Jews were mainly defined in ethnic terms, because the issue of Jewish citizenship in interwar Romania was complex. For a further discussion on the problematics, see Mendelsohn, Ezra, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars, Bloomington 1983, especially pages 183–195. 55 Voicu “Romanian”, 138. 56 Ibid., 139. 57 Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer: History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Amsterdam 2004, 13.



Formative Years in Romania 

 29

a radical change. Due to the introduction of education in Romanian, the more assimilated Jewish authors were writing in Romanian. However, their Romanian was regarded as inadequate and marred with the “Jewish-German jargon”, Yiddish.58 It is as if the literary anti-Semites wanted the Jews to remain in the shtetl. Accordingly, the radical literary anti-Semitism of the interwar period was coloured by complete denial of Jewish assimilation. Voicu determines that the situation was paradoxical because the Jews were the ones least desired to enter Romanian literature, although they were the only minority who wanted to do so.59 In 1927, when Isou was two years old, the devout anti-Semite and future Romanian prime minister, Octavian Goga, attacked the avant-garde by describing the symptoms of Romanian literature contaminated by the Jews. Goga claims that not only did the Jews provide “imported clichés” but also “pages of vaporous poetry, a strange literary psychosis with various exotic labels: expressionism [and] Dadaism”.60 Not only does Goga disparage the aesthetic value of Western aesthetics, but also he describes the Romanian Jewish avant-garde as disrupting the cohesion of the national literature. In Goga’s critique the avant-gardists are accused of cosmopolitanism, mental illness, and “vaporous poetry” that may be interpreted to denote the formal modernisations launched by them. More importantly, he fails to recognise the Romanian nationality of the co-founder of dada, perhaps because Tzara’s genealogy is Jewish. Literary anti-Semitism affected Isou’s career in Romania, because it gained influence during his adolescence. The culmination was an avant-garde journal called DA that Isou established with the Romanian Jewish Serge Moscovici (Srul Herş Moscovici, born 1925) in 1944, but which the Romanian authorities censored immediately.61 It may be observed, the influences Goga defined as “degenerate” derived mainly from the West. The “little Paris” tag suggests that early modern Romanian artists represented French aesthetics in the “Orient”.62 However, the Jewish artists emerging from the shtetl in the early twentieth century radically utilised the cultural gap when redefining the aesthetics resulting from the adoption of French culture in Romania. Therefore, it would not be appropriate to describe the avant-garde in Romania between early 1910s and late 1940s in terms of appropriation alone.

58 Voicu “Romanian”, 146. 59 Ibid., 149. 60 Goga, Octavian, Mustul care fierbe, Bucureşti 1927, 36. 61 Bowd, Gavin, “Isidore Isou, lettrisme et roumanité”, in Ana Guţu (ed.), La Francopolyphonie: Langues et identités, Chisinau 2007, 133. 62 See Mansbach, Steven A., Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939, Cambridge 1999, 246.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

The cultural gap and the Romanian Jewish milieu are tangibly present in Isou’s poem “Cris pour le 5.000.000 de juifs égorgés” (Cries for the five million butchered Jews, 1947). The piece alludes to German and Yiddish, which highlights the similarity of the two – in addition to far-right Romanians, the Nazis were responsible for the bloody pogroms in the Yiddishland. Furthermore, the poem treats a Jewish theme with vanguard poetic expression. The words of the poem are deliberately misspelt, which, together with onomatopoeic lines, reveal that the poem is meant to be performed.63 Moreover, the mélange of languages enables the poem to be interpreted as a polylogue of multiple voices or actors, where the Semite confronts the anti-Semite. IOUDN IOUDN schmisn moudn meinin [. . .] charf GOTT JAFF MENTCH WARF SCHRTRAFF OI WEI OI [. . .] Adonoi! ADONOI GUERINGUE!himler, guimlère, méringue jimlère, jèringue. HASS! lebanne – letrain ; le train lebanne le vanne – leganne – lemains lélan tfff-i tfff-i tfff-i tfff-i tfff-i tfffii tfff-i tfff-i Auschwitz – schwitz – schwitz Auschwitz – schwitz – schwitz Buchenwald! Bouhnwald! ADONOOOI! ADONOI! Belsen – bergen BELSEN – BERGEN! MATHAUSEN! mathaousenne MOGHILOW! MOGHILOOW!64

In addition to German and French words, and names of concentration camps to which Romanian Jews were exported (especially the Transnistrian Mogilev-Podolski), the repugnant mood is explicit in the German and Yiddish Hass (hatred). Despite this ambiguity of languages, the poem’s meaning is fairly clear. The

63 The original text includes markings for performance, which are omitted here for convenience. However, the markings do not indicate more than one voice. 64 Isou, Isidore, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, Paris 1947, 326–327.



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subject of hatred is marked by the word “Ioudn” in the first line, which homophonically connotes German Juden (Jews), and amplified by the following word denoting a schism. Yet, Isou draws parallels between German and Yiddish. For instance, the pseudo-German line “Mentch warf schrtraff” can be read as a Yiddish-reminiscent and stylised version of the actual German form Mensch warf Strafe (“man threw punishment”). This statement in telegraphic style does not make sense, but the poem is not based on tropes: the effect and connotations it creates are more straightforward. The piece seeks to present a real experience of violence rather than a mere description. The vehement content is even more audacious when delivered in the form of an aggressive performance. Against this zealous backdrop, the poem’s religious dimension is no less straightforward. The religious underpinnings are apparent in the line containing the word Gott (God), which has a double sense as a German-Yiddish word in the poem. Arguably, it is not only an exclamation of exasperation but also an address to God due to the benedictions in the latter part of the poem (see below). Additionally, words in the fourth line are stylised from Semitic languages: “oi wei” denotes Yiddish oy vey (oh woe) and “Adonoi” the Hebrew Adonai (God). The ethnic violence and references to Judaism culminate in the last verses of the poem: OI! CHHEMA ISRAELLE ! élohénou lad ! élohénou EHAD ! chema israélle barouh adonai israelle Kidischanou israelle barouh mitzwotai wetziwanou…wetziwanou…wetziwanou…65

The poem can be read as a description of the violent fascist intrusion into the language of the shtetl. Isou incorporates both Yiddish and Hebrew in a way that relates to the everyday life of the Jews. In the first line he takes up “Chhema Israelle” (correct Hebrew “Shema Yisrael”), one of the fundamental Jewish prayers. The Shema is usually the first prayer the Jew learns as well as his last words. Therefore Isou posits the Shema in the last verse together with a reference to a benediction that opens with the words “Baruch Atah Adonai Elohenu” [Praised be Thou, Our God]. The imaginary “Kidischanou” connotes Kiddish, a Shabbat blessing. “Mitzwotai” refers to the 613 commandments in the Torah. The end of the poem is a word collage, based on the Kiddish verse “asher kidshanu 65 Ibid.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

b’mitzvohtav vetzi vonu l’chad leek ner” [who has sanctified us by his commandments and has commanded us to be a light to nations], which fades away with the repetition of an unfinished blessing. The blessings Isou incorporates in his poem are basic ones, which could indicate that he was not intimately familiar with Biblical Hebrew beyond what he had learned at the yeshiva and the necessities required at the synagogue – indeed the two prayers would seem to suggest precisely such a motivation. However, amongst native Yiddish speakers he was certainly not alone in his limited competence in Hebrew, which is why the two benedictions are likely to be known by the majority of Yiddish-speaking European Jewry regardless of their native tongue, and can thus act as a sort of lingua franca by connoting the particular situations of Jewish life, that is, when and where these prayers were recited. A further aspect Isou’s poem shows is that the use of multiple languages can result in an effect of conflict and mediate a sense of extreme violence without describing the events realistically. Here the historical background of the Shoah is essential for the interpretation of the poem. Even though German is burdened as the language of the Nazis (Mördersprache), the latent connections to German as the mother tongue of assimilated Jews, and the root the language shares with Yiddish, are distressingly present. Furthermore, the stylised words in the poem are poetic pastiches of actual words. They can be deciphered only by interpreting the interplay of languages according to the constraints set by an actual existing language that is predominantly absent from the poem. Hence, Isou’s poem provides only a reminiscence of languages (German, Yiddish, Hebrew). Such evocative reminiscence points to subjectivity rather than linguistic content.66 The pseudo-Semitic words connote Jews, German ones the Nazis. In performing the poem, what is said is not as essential as how it is spoken. Yiddish playing such a decisive role in his early poem, it is curious that Isou chose French as the language of his poetics.67 In retrospect he said to have opted for French due to his provincial dialect, which he considered unpleasant and even unintelligible for most people.68 Yet, the decision was by no means facile or straightforward for Isou who entertained the idea of “partir pour la Russie, . . . 66 The mysterious nature of Jewish scriptures was of interest already in medieval times. As Ruth Mellinkoff has noted, this aspect became visible during the late Middle Ages, when Hebrew or pseudo-Hebrew letters were used to symbolise Judaism in Christian contexts. In fact, although Hebrew held the position of a sacred language, Hebrew lettering was not necessarily always a positive symbol. Mellinkoff, Ruth, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, Berkeley 1993, 97. 67 He had discarded Romanian earlier, explaining that he had never written in that language because he was a Jew from a country that hated Jews. Hussey Game, 36. 68 Ibid., 40.



Isou’s Parisian Jewish Avant-Garde 

 33

aller à Berlin ou être un écrivain Yiddish. Puis lorsque j’ai découvert que la France représentait l’avant-garde, j’ai abandonné toutes ces idées” [leaving for Russia, going to Berlin or becoming a Yiddish writer. Then when I found out that France represented the avant-garde, I abandoned all these ideas].69 It is significant that Isou contemplated choosing Yiddish as the language of his poetry, even though the Shoah had almost completely erased the Yiddish-speaking audience. Furthermore, Yiddish is the only language he mentions while contemplating his options, which underscores its transnational character. Politically it would not have mattered had he written in Yiddish in post-war Russia or Berlin, but he would find readership only in French. In 1945, Isou began his journey to Paris, travelling through Hungary and Austria to Italy. He stayed in Rome as a guest of Guiseppe Ungaretti, a poet known for his fascist entanglements with Mussolini and futurism as well as being a member of the Parisian dada circle grouped around Tzara.70 More importantly, Ungaretti questioned the role of language and rationalism during the late 1930s, which Isou would later make the cornerstone of his poetics – inspired by the Kabbalah. The Italian poet wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of Isou to the author Jean Paulhan, who was the editor of the Nouvelle revue française and the editor in chief at Gallimard, the esteemed French publishing house.71 Two years later Gallimard published Isou’s first major works and he never returned to Botoșani or Romania.

1.2 Isou’s Parisian Jewish Avant-Garde Isou arrived in Paris on August 23, 1945, just months after Germany had surrendered and the war in Europe was over. The city had been liberated a year before and the future leader of the lettrist movement settled in a city in recovery. However, life in Paris was not the bliss he had hoped for: J’écris parce que Paris me fait peur. […] Il y a de l’aversion, de la colère, de la haine qui arrosent les racines des lettres griffonnées [et une] main pour l’irrémédiable tuerie judaïque.72 I write because Paris frightens me. There is aversion, anger, hatred flowing into the roots of scribbled letters and a hand for the irremediable Jewish killing.

69 Devaux, Frédérique, Entretiens avec Isidore Isou, Paris 1992, 45. 70 Hussey Game, 41–42. 71 Bowd, Gavin, La France et la Roumanie communiste, Paris 2009, 67. 72 Isou Agrégation, 413.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

The segment is written intimately, akin to a letter, but is meant to address anyone reading the book. Jews in Paris were still discriminated against after the war. Even though the Jews were no longer wearing imposed insignia, Isou attributes his impression of the sentiment in Paris to certain Jewish attributes: for example, the scribbled letters that denote the Hebrew alphabet. These were immediately recognisable and undoubtedly foreign in terms of content to the city’s Catholic majority. Isou’s arrival to the city was later chronicled by Robert Estivals, once a member of the lettrist movement, who stated that Isou “nous aura apporté, à Paris, sa schizophrénie et sa culture médiévale étrangère” [has brought us, to Paris, his schizophrenia and his foreign medieval culture].73 Foreign should be understood as a euphemism for “Jewish”, the same way the epithet “oriental” was commonly used during the interwar period. As Isou recalls, this was common when one spoke of “jeunes gens, comme moi, ‘Orientaux’ venus de Moldavie ou de Galatie, nés dans le ghetto organique” [young people, like me, “orientals” from Moldavia and Galatia, born in the organic ghetto] of the shtetl.74 In spite of such a dubious attitude, Estivals’s depiction is accurate in the sense that Isou’s novel aesthetics were indeed foreign to the French, especially as his ideas revamped those of medieval Kabbalah. By the same token, Estivals accounts for Isou’s quite substantial import of Jewish ideas to the French artistic scene – the aspect of lettrism Isou rather passed over in silence, especially when his aesthetics and possible predecessors were at issue. The Jewish history of lettrism did not reach its conclusion following Isou’s arrival to Paris; rather it was a prelude to the latter part of the 1940s when lettrism gradually began to establish itself through public manifestations and publications. During this era, lettrism should arguably be regarded first and foremost as a movement active in the field of the avant-garde, which involved a Jewish dimension. It was not a Jewish art movement, such as the East European Yung-yidish (1918–1921) or Khaliastra (1922–1924), because there was no strict divide between Jewish and non-Jewish members, nor was lettrism directed solely to a Jewish audience. In addition, before the end of the 1950s, Isou was yet to rephrase his theories in a more syncretist fashion, which eventually caused the distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish elements to become somewhat irrelevant in lettrism.75 73 Estivals, Robert, Le signisme. L’histoire du schématisme I, Paris 2005, 51. By schizophrenia Estivals refers mainly to Isou’s messianistic third-person rhetoric, not the latter’s periodic psychiatric hospitalisation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 74 Isou Agrégation, 416. 75 This is evident in Isou’s magnum opus La créatique ou la novatique, which was published in multiple volumes between 1965 and 1973. At this stage, Judaism was downplayed to one of the components of his theory, alongside Catholicism and Islam, instead of being the dominant one. For a further discussion on the topic, see the epilogue.



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Not only was Isou theoretically drawing from the Jewish tradition, his closest comrades were Jews who subscribed to the explicit Jewishness he propagated.76 This straightforward approach was a departure from the semi-clandestine Jewish existence of the interwar period (e.g. Tzara, Richter, Walter Serner) and the Second World War. As Isou states, “On n’a pas tué cinq millions de Juifs pour qu’on continue à vivre comme si rien ne s’était passé” [One did not kill five million Jews so that one could go on living as if nothing had happened].77 With his finger pointing at Germans and Christians, he decidedly promoted himself as a Jew and discussed the Holocaust and its immediate aftermath, adding to his reputation as a controversial figure in the early years of lettrism in Paris. Isou’s first recruit was Gabriel Pomerand (1925–1972), whom he had met by chance in a Parisian canteen designated for Jewish orphans in the fall of 1945. The nineteen-year-old Pomerand was of Egyptian Jewish descent and his mother had been deported to Auschwitz during the war.78 Deportations of Parisian Jews were common between 1942 and 1944, most of them ending up in extermination camps in the East via the French concentration camp Drancy, as was the fate of Isou’s compatriot Benjamin Fondane. Pomerand’s most noted book, Saint ghetto des prêts (Saint Ghetto of Loans, 1950), reminiscences the Paris Latin Quartier during the war years when everything was in short supply. It characterises the neighbourhood as follows: “Saint germain des prés est un ghetto. Chacun y porte une étoile jaune sur le cœur. [...] Saint germain des prés est un miroir pour le ciel” [Saint germain des prés is a ghetto. Everyone there wears a yellow star over his heart. Saint germain des prés is a mirror of heaven].79 The quartier was the place where Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany gathered and lived in cramped conditions in the early 1940s. The Jewish bourgeoisie, doctors and lawyers occupying humble servants’ rooms would resemble a ghetto by any definition. 76 The majority of artists in the movement were non-Jews, lettrism was a group of roughly 10 to 20 people throughout its existence. However, even some non-Jews utilised Hebrew in their works, such as Alain Satié in his Lectures hebraïques. 77 Isou Agrégation, 287. 78 Wall-Romana, Christophe, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry, New York 2005, 225. Gabriel was born in Paris to Jacob Pomerand and Rajjla Wajbrot. Together with Isou, he lived literally as an outsider under the bridges of the Seine. Letaillieur, François, “Gabriel Pomerand, le cri légendaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés”, Superior Inconnu 1:6, (1997), 68. Boris Vian jokingly recalls how Pomerand aspired to become a member of the French Academy and a billionaire. Having been homeless like Isou, he was initially a scruffy-looking young man who soon collected questionable merits such as some of the following: a “parasite, a prisoner, a student, a member of the resistance, a writer, a gigolo, a husband”. Vian, Boris, Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris 1974, 232. 79 Pomerand, Gabriel, Saint Ghetto of Loans, trans. M. Kasper, New York 2006, 16.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

Pomerand’s outspoken approach to his Jewish identity is manifested in the book in the form of Hebrew letters, as one recalls Isou’s statement of the Hebrew alphabet as a Jewish attribute. In Pomerand’s book Hebrew symbols became an integral part of the picture puzzles that accompany the text. Some of these words written with Hebrew letters are actual Hebrew words and meanings, such as ‫בוה‬ (“is higher”) that refers to noon in one of the pictograms, while others are nonsensical and do not seem to serve any onomatopoeic or homonymic purpose in the manner of Pomerand’s other puzzles. The book opens with a map (credited to Marcel Janco) that depicts the Latin Quartier in the sixth arrondissement as a fortress-like ghetto with the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church in the middle. Even though there is a mirror-written word “Germain” (recalling the phrase “a mirror of heaven”) on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, an important part of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, the text in Hebrew reads “new avenue” or “renovated boulevard” (‫)שדרת חדוש‬, thus omitting the word “saint” (‫)רחוב‬. This appellative gesture, which excludes the Christian tradition, sets the tone for the whole opus, regardless of Pomerand’s otherwise democratic approach to and his extensive use of various sign systems derived from different traditions. The Latin Quartier was marked by a significant Jewish presence. However, Pomerand’s allusion to the omnipresent yellow stars in Saint germain des prés did not refer exclusively to Jews. In fact, under German rule French non-Jews, who opposed the Nazi law regarding Jewish attire, began to wear yellow stars with texts such as “Buddhist” or “Goy”. In addition, yellow Stars of David were often adorned with the text “zazou”. These were worn by the non-Jewish liberal youth.80 Zazou denotes a French subculture, consisting of anti-fascist jazz and bebop fans. The zazous were particularly visible in the Latin Quartier alongside the Jews. They deliberately irritated the Vichy government and the Nazis, who labelled jazz as degenerate “judeo-nigger” music.81 Isou was outraged by such a comparison: “On dit que le jazz représente le jaillissement du primitivisme noir. Le jazz, c’est du faux primitivisme ! C’est [le primitivisme] du noir américanisé[.]” [It is said that jazz is the outpour of Black primitivism. Jazz is false primitivism! It is the primitivism of the americanised Black]. However, the advantage of jazz was that it lacked the “baggage of yesterday”.82 In this sense, it was something authentic and novel in the way the avant-garde aspired to be. Drawing the comparison further, Isou claimed that one day lettrism would be more important than jazz.83 Such an ambitious aim required the recruitment of 80 Wall-Romana Cinepoetry, 225. 81 Ibid. 82 Isou, Isidore, Œuvres de Spectacle, Paris 1964, 69. 83 Ibid.

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Fig. 1: An extract of a table in Pomerand’s Saint ghetto des prêts (1950) showing his use of the Hebrew alphabet.

additional members. Another central figure in lettrism was Maurice Lemaître (born 1926), who joined the movement in 1950. His given name was Moïse Bismuth and he derived from a French Jewish family. As a teenager he had barely and by a lucky accident avoided deportation during the Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver, a massive raid that rounded up more than 13,000 Jews living in Paris in 1942. Until the arrival of the Allied forces, extradition was a constant threat to Lemaître. His teenage experiences of persecution had an impact on his version of lettrism.84 Hence Lemaître could sympathise with Isou, a Jew who survived the Romanian pogroms and did not consider assimilation an option.85 Indeed, 84 Sudre, Alain-Alcide, Pensées sur l’œuvre cinématographique de Maurice Lemaître, replacée dans le champ du cinéma expérimental de l’après-guerre, in: Maurice Lemaître. Paris 1995, 54–78. 85 Regardless of the oppression and personal loss experienced by the three artists, lettrism was not directly related to the Shoah. However, as lettrism coincides with the Adornian post-war dilemma regarding the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, the Shoah aspect cannot be overlooked. In Agrégation, Isou asks “Comment avons-nous pu faire croître ces fleurs comme les choux gigantesques (nourris de pourriture humaine) que sont Mathausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz ? Tout cela dégoûte, tout cela est pathétique et de mauvais goût” [How were we [as humans] able to grow these flowers like giant cabbages (nourished by human decay) that are Mathausen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz? All this disgusts, all this is pathetic and foul-tasting] (252). Isou opposed the Nazi regime, but, arguably, the impossibility of post-Shoah poetry was not an incentive for him in the way it was for authors such as Celan and Samuel Beckett. Isou’s poetical influences derive

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

some of Lemaître’s works include the ominous yellow Star of David, often centrally arranged. Hence, in a fashion similar to Pomerand’s use of Hebrew letters, he made his heritage explicit. This is hardly coincidental, and arguably manifests a desire to promote Jewishness in the context of the avant-garde. The three artists formed the core of the movement during its early years, which lasted at least until the 1955 gallery exhibition, tellingly entitled “Isou, Pomerand, Lemaître”. Regardless of the kernel of the group being Jewish, lettrism was never a distinctly Jewish movement. Even so, Isou’s theories, which incorporated Jewish elements, were the most prominent in lettrism. By the late 1940s the movement’s only high profile publications were Isou’s two books published by Gallimard. Introduction aroused some interest among fellow artists and critics but Isou was soon labelled a plagiarist, for instance by the zaum poet Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevich).86 Tzara, Isou’s Romanian Jewish paragon, interpreted lettrism as mystical romanticism that sought to convince, by means of invented language, that it provides a “new aspect” to the rational world.87 Curiously, Tzara did not point out the Jewish influence in Isou’s theories even though he almost certainly was aware of the kabbalistic tradition at play.88 He seems to have respected Isou’s approach in Introduction, where Judaism is not mentioned. In addition, neither was Tzara himself in the habit of citing his sources. Another contributing factor to Tzara’s lack of enthusiasm may have been that the lettrists had imposingly interrupted the premiere of his play La fuite (Flight) at the Vieux Colombier Theatre in January 1946 and called for a new art, in other words, lettrism.89

from earlier aesthetics, and his work is not a case of language turning introvertedly into itself but rather an effort to extend the possibilities of communication. In short, he considered ordinary language to have been exhausted decades before the Shoah and envisioned this as a feature of French poetry in particular. 86 Home, Stewart, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War, Oakland 1991, 12. For an extensive original survey cf. Jolas, Eugene, “From Jabberwocky to Lettrism”, Transition 1948:1. 87 See Lemaître, Maurice, Quelques différences entre le futurisme et le lettrisme, Paris 1976, 11. 88 As Andrei Codrescu notes, Tzara was an Ashkenazi Hasidic Jew. Codrescu, Andrei, The Posthuman Dada Guide : Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, Princeton and Oxford 2009, 110. 89 I.a. Isou, Isidore, Alain Satié and Gérard Bermond, La peinture lettriste, Paris 2000, 34. Other lettrists include the Romanian painter Guy Vallot (Rodica Valeanu, 1923–1965), Jean-Louis Brau (1930–1985), Gil J. Wolman (1929–1995), Roland Sabatier (born 1942), Alain Satié (Alain Sabatier, 1944–2011), Woodie Roehmer (1946–2005), Micheline Hachette (1938–1993), Gérard-Philippe Broutin (born 1948), François Poyet (born 1948), Jean Pierre Gillard (born 1948), Albert Dupont (born 1951), Frédérique Devaux (born 1956), Michel Amarger (born 1957), Virginie Caraven (born 1970) and Catherine James (born 1977).



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Lettrism was, for the most part, a departure from dada’s aesthetics and Tzara’s “anti-poetics”.90 The lettrist Henri Joffe characterised Isouian poetics in relation to preceding and, in his view, insufficient literature, which still seemed to rely on the idea of mediation: En recherchant les secrets de la langue, ils sont arrivés à annuler la langue. Nous arrivons à la véritable compréhension du langage, de son sens, de son primitivisme où il n’était pas fixé, où il n’était plus immuable et systématique, où on criait pour exprimer les choses essentielles, les sons immédiats, où on pleurait pour les douleurs concrètes, où on hurlait pour des angoisses vivantes, où on riait pour des joies directes. On n’avait que les mots qui nous obligeaient à parler pour parler et ne rien dire.91 While researching the secrets of language, they [preceding poets] arrived at a nullification of language. We reached a real comprehension of language, of its sense, of its primitivism where it is not fixed, where it is no longer immutable and systematic, where one cries in order to express essential things, the immediate sounds, where one weeps for concrete pains, where one yells for living anguishes, where one laughs for direct joys. One has only words that oblige us to speak for the sake of speaking and to say nothing.

Joffe clearly criticises the reductive characteristics of language. Moreover, Isou was not restricted to a Beckettian criticism of language, where language is pushed to its expressive limit by means of experimentation. He wanted to overcome language in a more thorough manner: “En détruisant le mot, nous avons trouvé un matériel nouveau, aussi poétique que l’ancien, qui n’a plus de sens, plus de logique” [While destroying the word we found a new material, as poetic as the previous, which has no sense nor logic anymore].92 Isou hereby emphasises the experiential aspect of the paradilogical structure, one which remains outside of or precedes language. Accordingly, the new poetry would “divinise l’inexistence en la transformant en existence, l’obscurité en lumière” [divinise inexistence by turning it into existence, obscurity to light].93 This is to say that lettrism and its poetics included a religious element from the very beginning. Joffe is directly referring to the myth of Creation where divine utterance both cosmologically and ontologically transforms nonexistence into presence.94 Isou placed great emphasis on the aspect

90 Some critics, such as Barbara Gitenstein, have mistakenly labelled lettrism as neo-dada, even though neo-dadaism originated in the 1960s in the United States. 91 Joffe, Henri, “La langue et le lettrisme”, in Isou, Isidore (ed.), La dictature lettriste 1:1, 45. 92 Isou La dictature, 14. 93 Joffe “La langue”, 46. 94 A further discussion on this dimension in lettrist poetics follows in chapter 2.3.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

of divine utterance, which also seems to have influenced his ideas concerning sound poetry. The term “lettrism” originally referred to sound poetry, which in this case was letter poetry meant to be performed. Lettrist poems resembled those performed at the Cabaret Voltaire by dadaists some decades earlier, but included special paratextual symbols (often Greek), for instance, for guttural sounds and body noise. This systematises sound poetry and performances, but provides also a comprehensible picture of what the poems may have sounded like when performed in lettrist soirées. In his early book Precisions sur ma poésie et moi (1950) Isou provided an illustrating example of lettrist poetry by rewriting a verse by Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine” (Sea Breeze, 1865) depicts the poet’s frustration with the present order of things on a personal level: he longs to travel, but is restrained by responsibility for his wife and daughter. The original reads: La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres Fuir, ah, fuir là-bas où les oiseaux sont ivres.

A translation is not necessary, because Isou focuses solely on the phonetic aspects of the poem. His lettrist remake of the fragment is based on the theme of the original, the poet’s frustration. He manipulates Mallarmé’s eloquent verse by omitting some material and adding other, making frustration ring in the mouth of the poet, and arriving at a radically different result: Gdjagass, gdjagass, la berr est biste jétu toutétivre Foulfi, ah, foulfir hava hava où doandégo onquivre.95

Some of Isou’s early poems are indeed reinterpretations of various well-known poems by earlier vanguard poets, such as Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. Yet, as illustrated by the example above, in their written form lettrist poems consist of nonsensical “words” that resemble an imaginary language. Additionally, they seem to result from a permutation where an existing word is broken into its constituent units (letters) and reassembled according to specific rules of permutation. However, the early sound poems produced by the lettrists were not a new invention, as was suggested early on by figures such as Iliazd. For instance, there is an apparent kinship between Isou’s poems and the sound poems of 95 Isou, Isidore, Précisions sur ma poésie et moi, Paris 2003, 13.



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Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915), such as the well-known onomatopoeic “Kikakokú! Ekorálaps!” from 1897. Scheerbart’s other similar poem, “Monolog des verrückten Mastodons” (Monolog of an insane Mastodon, 1902) bears even a greater resemblance to Isou’s experiments of the 1940s: Zépke! Zépke! Mekkimápsi – muschibróps. Okosôni! Mamimûne ....... Epakróllu róndima sêka, inti .... windi .... nakki; pakki salône hepperéppe – hepperéppe!! Lakku – Zakku – Wakku – Quakku --- muschibróps. Mamimûne – lesebesebîmbera – roxróx – roxróx!!! ---------------------------------------------Quilliwaûke? Lesebesebîmbera – surû – huhû ...96

The ominous and defiant tone of the poem mirrors the defiant timbre of lettrist performances by Isou and Pomerand while also echoing dadaist poems of the 1910s, such as Hugo Ball’s “Gadji beri bimba” (1916).97 Evidently, “lettrism” as sound poetry would not prove equal to Isou’s persistent promotion of it as a poetic “innovation”. Yet, Isou had included paratextual symbols to instruct the performer on the correct recitation of the poem, terming these “les lettres potentielles”, or “potential letters”.98 These paratexts are lettrism’s main contribution to sound poetry. The letter poems of the 1940s were supplemented by hypergraphics in 1950. In the lettrist sense, hypergraphics is “basé sur l’organisation de l’ensemble des signes de la communication visuelle, à savoir : les signes alphabétiques, lexiques et idéographiques, acquis ou possibles, existants ou inventés” [based on the organisation of the signs of visual communication as a whole, namely: alphabetical,

96 Scheerbart, Paul, Unverantwortliche Gedichte, München 1987, 65. 97 For a concise account for the varied influences in lettrist sound poetry, see Puff-Trojan, Andreas, Schattenschriften: Deutschsprachige und französische Avantgarde-Literatur nach 1945, Wien 2008, 65–68. 98 Isou Introduction, 209.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

lexical and ideographic, acquired or possible, existing or invented].99 In other words, permutations were not restricted to a single alphabet, because hypergraphics amalgamated all known writing systems with “signs” invented by the author. Even though the result is nonsensical, even absurd, hypergraphics was intended to be a serious poetic method. Isou summarised the possibilities opened up by such an unusual way of constructing novels. As such, hypergraphics (formerly known as metagraphics yet to include invented markings) facilitates the inclusion of non-prosaic elements. This is to say that par l’introduction de la peinture dans le roman, la métagraphie devient non seulement pictoprose mais aussi collaprose (art des collages), photoprose, coloroprose (plusierus couleurs). […] L’écriture devient une sculptoprose, une architectoprose et en un mot, une cosmographie (cosmoprose).100 by the introduction of painting into the novel, metagraphics will not only become pictoprose but also collaprose (art of collage), photoprose and coloroprose (several colours). Writing will become sculptoprose, architectoprose and, in a word, cosmography (cosmoprose).

The inclusion of cosmography suggests a conception of language that differs radically from the language conventionally used in fiction. Accordingly, hypergraphics can be regarded as a quasi-language that has adopted some but not all features of ordinary language. However, it should not be merely as some kind of proto-deconstructive writing.101 Rather, Isou’s interest lies in the double bind of mysticism and aesthetics, which supplement each other. In order to overcome the dilemma caused by the sweeping character of words, Isou wanted to supplement writing with painterly elements.102 He does not elaborate on what exactly these elements are, but his works which apply hypergraphics 99 Sabatier Lettrisme, pp. 206. 100 Isou, Isidore, Les journaux des Dieux, Paris 1950, 143. Emphases removed. 101 A worthwhile clarifying aspect of the approach presented in this volume can be set up with Johanna Drucker’s characterisation of hypergraphics. According to her, the aim of the lettrists “was to atomize signifying elements past the point of communicative signification, to pulverize the sign, subjecting it to the discipline of a complexly conceived écriture whose play across surface and page was more in keeping with a deconstructive différance than any linguistic activity”. Drucker, Johanna, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923, Chicago 1994, 226. However, différance is a process preceding the birth of the material sign, and this process cannot acquire a material form. Moreover, Drucker’s statement is anachronistic and implies that lettrism is proto-deconstructionistic. Instead of such a claim, I suggest that, at least partially, both lettrism and deconstruction derive from a common genealogy, meaning that Derrida utilised elements from the same tradition as Isou. 102 Isou, Isidore, Mémoires sur forces futures des arts plastiques et leur mort, Paris 2000, 22.



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suggest that Isou wants to emphasise the materiality and visuality of writing. In other words, he wants writing to be looked at rather than through, challenging the transparency of ordinary written language. Indeed, when commenting on his early hypergraphic novels, Isou stated that they were composed of “dessins mués en idéogrammes inventés” [mute drawings in invented ideograms].103 However, hypergraphics still bears a strong resemblance to writing. Hypergraphics usually consist of black and white markings on a white page, which, furthermore, are often arranged into horizontal lines. Individual marks follow one another and can thus be “read” from left to right or vice versa. On some occasions hypergraphic segments supplement ordinary writing and cut individual words into parts, filling in the openings. Hence, hypergraphics should not be regarded as images but rather as poetry that highlights the visual aspect of language. Moving beyond the material surface of writing, Isou systemised this new “art of letters” in a manner previously unseen in the avant-garde. Isou indicates how one should try not to interpret hypergraphics as something similar to conventional writing: L’écriture [hypergraphique] possedait un but extrinsèque qui dépassait sa simple transcription. Elle faisait partie […] des moyens d’invocation mystiques. […] On esthétise [les hypergraphies], on élève au rang d’art leur sacralité.104 Hypergraphic writing possessed an extrinsic aim, which exceeded its simple transcription. It was part of the means of mystical invocation. One aestheticises hypergraphics, one elevates their sacrality to the level of art.

Hypergraphics is hereby filtered through the frameworks of both art and mysticism, and hence it maintains a double bind with respect to these fields. In other words, hypergraphics can be neither merely aesthetic nor straightforwardly mystical: one side cannot exist without the other. The coexistence of the fields in hypergraphics suggests that the Jewish context is essential in any methods of interpretation. By maintaining both the aesthetical and mystical dimension in 103 Isidore, Isou, Critique des erreurs de Maurice Lemaître dans la peinture, le roman et le cinema (1956–1978), Paris 1979, 93. The volume in question documents the exchange, at times even vehement, between Isou and Lemaître concerning the interpretations of lettrist theory. For instance, Isou calls Lemaître his “comrade-enemy”, which suggests that Isou was not the most undemanding person to be found, especially when one tried to come to terms with his theories. The tone of Lemaître’s responses is implied by Isou’s short commentary, which begins: “Je voudrais, maintenant, répondre à un texte éthique où l’auteur m’insulte personellement, pages intitulées Au revoir à un Messie fatigué” [Now, I would like to respond to an ethical text the author of which insulted me personally, [in the] pages entitled Farewell to an Exhausted Messiah]. Ibid., 231. 104 Isou Journaux, 137.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

his poetry and claiming a sort of double allegiance unconventional in the avantgarde, Isou theorised that lettrism was at the forefront of the avant-garde. Isou indeed claimed that lettrism was the “avant-garde de l’avant-garde” [avant-garde of the avant-garde], by which he sought to assert both the novelty of the movement and its discontinuity with tradition – in this case with the historical avant-garde (a break with tradition being a common feature in the avant-garde, as formulated by Poggioli and Bürger).105 Even though Isou claimed that the historical avant-garde was now “dead” due to the emergence of lettrism, he could not avert proclaiming the same destiny for his own movement.106 Already by calling lettrism an avant-garde he inadvertedly institutionalised the movement, because in art the avant-gardist horizon is only attainable via retrospection. Avant-garde theory, which conceptualises, characterises and defines avant-garde movements, domesticates the “new” whereas the avant-garde itself remains undefined in a constant state of flux, without a priori limits. This anachronistic claim made by Isou may, however, derive from the messianic context he appropriated. As such, the avant-garde is supposedly instantaneous and prompt to react to changes in its immediate world, especially when it comes to the cultural forms and conventions it opposes or with which it competes. Strictly speaking, lettrism was neither, unless one takes Isou’s disputes with several contemporary cultural figures, such as Jean Cocteau and André Breton, into account.107 Already in Introduction Isou analysed art history, including the history of the avant-garde until the 1940s, providing a model of the evolution of aesthetics. However, rather than limiting himself to cover the past, he augured that the same logic of evolution would continue within lettrism. Or, rather, this evolution provided a frame within which the movement would develop. Such a systematic view is uncommon in the avant-garde and belongs to the sphere of academic cultural history. However, Isou’s ideas are not composed according to academic standards nor are they meant to supplement any rational mode of thought. Rather, his model 105 Cf. Bürger Theorie; Poggioli, Renato, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia, Bologna 1962. Isou’s concept is repeated in several of his works, i.e. Isou La dictature. 106 In essence he had already suggested this in 1948 by stating that Breton’s movement was passé because it had been succeeded by lettrism. Cf. Isou, Isidore, Réflexions sur André Breton, Paris 2000. 107 Ibid.; Isou, Isidore, Mes définitions de l’œuvre de Jean Cocteau, Paris 2000. Coincidentally, Tzara stated that time had already caught up with surrealism, which meant that it was passé. Tzara, Tristan, Surréalisme et l’Après-guerre, Paris 1948, 29. Isou’s feuds with Cocteau and Breton were fabricated in order to perform a sort of a patricide: only by labelling these predecessors obsolete would Isou be able to claim a vanguard position. Cocteau had in fact promoted Isou’s film Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise on Venom and Eternity, 1951), which eventually won the avant-garde prize at the Cannes Film Festival – à grace de Cocteau being on the jury.



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introduces a theory of “les choses inconnues”, unknown things.108 Such an aim is a necessary symptom of any poetics that seeks to dispute language’s ability to emulate reality. If the communicative capabilities of language are distrusted, every thought that presents itself in linguistic form should be mistrusted as well. Eventually, the letter will be the result “d’une recherché ayant comme but la découverte d’une représentation inconnue” [of a research the aim of which is the discovery of an unknown representation].109 Gradually, the teleological development – the perfectioning of aesthetics and literary methods – of lettrism within the given frame appears not as much avant-gardist as messianic. Supporting this view is Isou’s statement, according to which “Le Juif est la racine simple et originaire de la connaissance devant les choses” [The Jew is the simple and originary root of the knowledge in the face of things].110 One should bear in mind the hidden quality of truth in the Kabbalah and its repercussion in language. Obviously, Isou is referring to the theory of unknown things in relation to a messianic framework. Indeed, once lettrism is regarded from the point of view of Jewish messianism, Isou’s frame of evolution, in a manner of speaking, provides a path that eventually leads to eschaton. I will return to this topic in the third chapter, but first it is essential to describe the general Isouian understanding of the development of aesthetics, which occurs simultaneously with the paradilogical temporal spheres. The frame of evolution is composed of a perpetual cyclical movement consisting of two phases that eliminate each other. Isou borrowed this idea from classical nineteenth-century art historical models, which depict the evolution of individual styles, such as Renaissance (divided into distinct early, full, late phases and, finally, mannerism). He termed the phases amplic (amplique) and chiselling (ciselant). The former denotes a period when there is “Aucune clôture qui puisse limiter le développement. […] Les espaces sont étendus, les possibilités mises à la disposition sont énormes” [No enclosure that can limit development. The spaces are expansive, the available possibilities are immense].111 In other words, the amplic phase is a kind of unrestricted exploration and application of aesthetics – it is a phase characterised by “innovation”. The latter, for one, is made up of the banalisation of these “unlimited” means and ideas, which is akin to manneristic exaggeration. Relating to this phase, Isou claims that the “artiste est un provocateur d’anti-œuvres” [artist is a provocateur of anti-works].112 This is to say that the phase of construction is ultimately followed by a phase of deconstruction, which 108 Isou Introduction, 86. 109 Isou Mémoires, 25. Emphasis removed. 110 Isou Agrégation, 257. 111 Isou Introduction, 89. 112 Isou, Isidore, Introduction à l’esthétique imaginaire et autres écrits, Paris 1999, 31.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

utilises the elements of the preceding phase in an inverted, non-constructive manner. Yet, even the second phase produces works of art and, hence, it cannot be called merely destructive. For instance, a work belonging to the latter phase could consist of “invisible narration” on empty pages. Isou’s model is highly abstract and, in the case of lettrism, it mainly serves the purpose of (arbitrarily) renouncing one’s own inventions and theories as obsolete, before making way for a new paradigm. Paradigm shifts indeed have a similar structure, but cannot be predicted in the Isouian manner, especially as the theory addresses yet “unknown things”. In the context of art history, Isou’s model is an absurd postulation, but in a messianic world of predestination the cycles are not mere human predications, because they adumbrate a distinct future-to-come. To further entertain Isou’s idea of the evolution of aesthetics, his epithet of the avant-garde of the avant-garde deserves some attention. The chiselling period preceding lettrism included all of the avant-garde thus far, ranging from impressionism to Breton and James Joyce.113 The avant-garde literature preceding lettrism had left individual letters somewhat untouched. With the exception of a handful of artists, such as Raoul Hausmann, Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini and Tzara who wrote letter poetry, avant-garde literature was based on words – after all, the futurists called their poetry parole in libertà, not lettere in libertà. In Isou’s view, what would later be called the historical avant-garde had reached its pinnacle, and he was confronted by a kind of an aesthetic Nullpunkt. Lettrism would launch a new amplic phase, in other words, it should have discarded all elements derived from the historical avant-garde. The discontinuity of lettrism with the historical avant-garde is similar to a messianic conception of future in which the so-called world-to-come is discontinuous with the present world as no project could resume from one to the other. Additionally, the teleological models of Isou and Jewish messianism are both futurospective: they establish a system that is open towards an eschatological end. In addition, Isou managed to conceptualise the historical avant-garde in a way that made lettrism seem both “new” and necessary; in short, the next logical step. However, based on the actual practices of the avant-garde authors instead of swearing by their manifestoes, the avant-garde discarded only the immediately preceding (aesthetics, culture, society), which did not mean that earlier themes 113 Isou constrained himself to French art and literature and does not mention early German romanticism, such as the Jena circle, with its (pre)avant-gardist aims. Joyce is an anomaly in Isou’s theory, but Isou could always fall back on the fact that Finnegans Wake was typeset, printed and published in France. According to the logic of the avant-garde, the preceding artists could no longer be regarded as avant-garde. However, this had not as much to do with Isou’s claim regarding the obsoleteness of surrealism than with Breton steering surrealism towards communism.



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and techniques could not be appropriated and utilised. Consequently, avantgarde writers (Ball, Goll, Tzara) turned, among others, to religious mysticism – such as the Kabbalah – for material and modes of practice. This resulted in a sort of a double entendre; what seemed novel to the average French reader, did not appear that way to someone acquainted with medieval Jewish Kabbalah. Within the kabbalistic corpus most medieval mystics, such as Abraham Abulafia, R. Joseph Gikatilla, and later on Moshe Cordovero, considered language an insufficient means of communicating any knowledge regarding divinity. By this notion they were not referring to the divine language created by God but to the earthly, conventional language of man. This is to say that the kabbalists’ mistrust of ordinary language exists, paradoxically, alongside the fundamental idea of language as the instrument of creation and primary focus of the Kabbalah. It would seem that artists and scholars familiar with the Kabbalah are particularly at risk of falling victim to the same paradox: criticising language by using language. Alongside assuming such an analytical attitude, Isou had a more subjective relation to Kabbalah. For him, it was a systematic rejection of romanticism, which provided a rampart for Jewish exegesis.114 Isou specifically accounted for the influence of Abulafia in his new art of letters. Illustrating the correspondence of their thought, he speculates: Peut-être aurais-je été Abraham, fils d’Aboulafia de Saragosse, celui qui partit à la recherche de la rivière mystique, Sabbation, et voulut obtenir la connaissance de l’essence incrustable de Dieu, par la permutation des lettres de l’alphabet et des chiffres talmudiques (N’est-ce pas mon lettrisme?).115 Perhaps I would have been Abraham, son of Abulafia of Zaragoza, he who left in search of the mystical river, Sabbation, and wanted to obtain the knowledge of the veiled essence of God, by the permutation of the letters of the alphabet and the Talmudic numbers (Is this not my lettrism?).

Isou concisely reveals that lettrism first and foremost addresses the hiddenness of God, which is to be discovered by means derived from the Kabbalah. The Abulafia he mentions was indeed from the Spanish town of Zarazoga and travelled to the Land of Israel in 1260 with the intention of locating the River Sabbation.116 Undoubtedly, Isou’s paragon was the kabbalist who had produced his key works 114 Isou Agrégation, 282–284. 115 Ibid., 355. 116 In rabbinical literature Sabbation is the river across which the 10 Jewish tribes were transported and about which so many legends subsequently accumulated that it was considered by some scholars to be altogether mythical. According to a version of the myth, Sabbation was a periodic river that cessated on the Sabbath.

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and techniques some 700 years earlier. The methods Abulafia utilised are sophisticated ways of manipulating language, which derive from a conception that language is based on names rather than representation.117 Abulafia called his Kabbalah the “Kabbalah of names”, which refers to divine proper names. The reflection based on these names was a way to attain a so-called prophetic experience, which is unitive and revelatory in character.118 Abulafia’s kabbalistic permutations make use of the letters of the alphabet, and especially of the Tetragrammaton and other names of God (Adonai, Elohim etc.), for the purposes of meditative training (see figure below). By immersing oneself in various permutations of letters and names, the kabbalist emptied his mind of all natural forms that might prevent his concentrating on divine matters and, thus, the prophetic experience. Another technique utilised by Abulafia, gematria, is based on the numerical value of letters in Hebrew that does not use distinct numerical symbols. The technique explains a word or group of words according to the numerical value of the letters, or by substituting other letters of the alphabet for them in accordance with a set of rules. Abulafia’s works use gematria extensively. His books require a thorough deciphering before all the associations of the numerical connections in them can be understood.119 Furthermore, Abulafia regarded the associative character of gematria as a way of discovering new truths – in other words, yet unknown ones. Gematria and permutations could result in very visual textual constructs, such as Abulafia’s so-called Tetragrammaton wheel. The starting point is in the middle, and the outer rim contains various permutations of the four-letter divine name. Here the letters are dissociated from any utilitarian means of communication and

117 The kabbalistic conception of language predates the theories of the two grand old men of modern semiotics, de Saussure and Peirce. However, there was intensive study of language in France during the nineteenth century, such as Champollion’s deciphering of hieroglyphics. Isou termed early lettrist poetry “alphabets of mystery” (alphabets mystérieux), which suggests an influence deriving from hieroglyphics – arguably, in a state before they were deciphered by Champollion. Isou Journaux, 172–173, 280. In addition, the Jewish kabbalists were also influenced by hieroglyphics. They regarded them as “inexhaustible writing” that allowed for an infinite number of interpretations – all of which were equally valid. Idel, Moshe, “Hiéroglyphes, clés, énigmes. La vision de G.G. Scholem sur la kabbale: Entre Franz Molitor et Franz Kafka”, Archaevs 7, 271. 118 Moshe Idel accounts for these as two distinct aspects of the Kabbalah: the Kabbalah of names is the esoteric one and the prophetic Kabbalah focuses on experiencing revelation. Idel Mystical Experience, 8. 119 The strenuousness of the task is not facilitated by Abulafia’s use of Greek, Latin, Italian, Arabic, Tatar and Basconian words in addition to Hebrew.



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Fig. 2: A rendering of Abulafia’s Tetragrammaton wheel by Giulio Busi. The letters of the inner rim are vowels whereas the outer consists of permutations on the Tetragrammaton.

are purported to be for inner reflection alone. In its aim, the Abulafian method is akin to that of Isou. However, in order to elaborate on the influence of the Abulafian Kabbalah on Isou, it is necessary to differentiate some later adaptations of the Kabbalah that preceded lettrism, because lettrism was far from the first appropriation of the Kabbalah in art.120 Isou’s point of reference is the twentieth century, so his use of the Kabbalah should be clarified in relation to modes of kabbalistic thought that succeeded Abulafia but predated lettrism. Alongside medieval kabbalistic language mysticism, lettrism is affected by the interplay between German thought and Yiddish culture, which is manifested in Central European literature, philology and language philosophy of the 1800s.121 Furthermore, the Kabbalah influenced German romanticism and philology during the nineteenth century. This sort of Kabbalah, however, is not a 120 An illustrative example is Tzara’s poem “La rose et le chien” (The Rose and the Dog), which fashions the verses in the shape of kabbalistic wheels, such as that of Abulafia. Tzara, Tristan, La rose et le chien : poème pérpetuel, Alès 1958. 121 One should observe that germanophone theories and ideological currents could spread rather effortlessly in East European Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities due to the similarity of Yiddish and German, at least among the intelligentsia.

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straightforward successor of the medieval Kabbalah. As the German poet and literary critic Friedrich Schlegel encapsulates the nature of the later current: “Die Ästhetik = Kabbala” [Aesthetics = Kabbalah].122 Schlegel’s conception of the Kabbalah emphasises the poetical and rhetorical character of kabbalistic language theory. Later on, germanophone language theory and poetry was influenced by this aesthetic Kabbalah (ästhetische Kabbala).123 Its approach focused mainly on kabbalistic rhetorics and aesthetics, downplaying the religious component. In other words, the purpose was to imitate language mysticism without adapting what is actually mystical in it – the striving towards an unknowable and unattainable God, which is essential to Isou’s thought. The origin of the aesthetic Kabbalah dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this era, the medieval Jewish Kabbalah was adopted by Christian mystics and philosophers, and this alternate corpus is accordingly known as the Christian Kabbalah. The permutations of these Christian kabbalists had little mystical aspirations in the Jewish kabbalistic sense: “Ihre Wortprodukte haben keine kommunikative oder repräsentative Funktion, sondern sind rein sprachliche Konstrukte” [Their word-products have no communicative or representative function, but are rather purely linguistic constructions].124 Even though observably similar, the Christian Kabbalah does not provide a similar ontological-epistemological backdrop or language theory to support the texts as the Jewish Kabbalah (see chapter 2). Although lettrism operated in the field of art, Isou’s conception of language and his criticism concerning this other kind of Kabbalah suggests that he assumed the medieval one. At first sight, the aesthetic Kabbalah’s characterisation of non-meaningful word combinations would equally seem to apply to hypergraphics, due to its non-communicative character. However, hypergraphics appears this way only when it is approached as ordinary language as opposed to a quasi-language with messianic inclination. Lettrism does not adapt the aesthetic Kabbalah, because in both lettrism and medieval Kabbalah, language is conceived of as being utterly

122 Behler, Ernst (ed.), Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Volume 35, Paderborn 1958, 399. 123 Andreas Kilcher terms the Schlegelian conception of the Kabbalah rather pejoratively as a false or confused Kabbalah (unechte Kabbala, verwirrte Kabbala). Kilcher, Andreas, Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als ästhetisches Paradigma. Die Konstruktion einer ästhetischen Kabbala seit der Frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart 1998, 348–349. In addition to Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling and Franz Molitor were key figures in the incorporation of the Kabbalah into German philology and idealistic philosophy. Cf. Busi, Giulio, “Beyond the Burden of Idealism: For a New Appreciation of the Visual Lore in the Kabbalah”, in Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), Kabbalah and Modernity. Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, Leiden and Boston 2010. 124 Ibid., 258.



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entangled with the existence of the world as opposed to having a mere descriptive relationship with it. Therefore, the emphasis Isou put on mysticism should not be regarded in relation to German romanticism but to the Abulafian Kabbalah. According to him, the Cabbale est une lutte systématique contre le romantisme. […] Le romantisme de la Cabbale n’est pas celui de la grâce extérieure mais le désir d’accumuler tout ce qui paraît inconnu. […] La Cabbale est le résultat de cette suprême défense de la Bible, cette exégèse de la prolongation jusque dans les racines de l’obscur.125 Kabbalah is a systematic struggle against romanticism. The romanticism of the Kabbalah is not that of an exterior grace but the desire to accumulate everything that seems unknown. The Kabbalah is the result of the supreme defence of the Bible [Torah], the exegesis of the prolongation into the roots of the obscure.

Isou validates the Kabbalah as the foremost means of inquiry into the divine. Moreover, his notion of God appears to derive unequivocally from kabbalistic mysticism, which “safeguards” the Jewish tradition by being limited to a certain group of connoisseurs, usually the rabbis. Isou also refers to the obscure character of kabbalistic texts, which preserves the element of the “unknown” imbued in the text of the Torah. Isou regards the Jewish mystical tradition as an exclusive one, which also limits the accessibility of the views and theories he introduces in Agrégation. As already noted, his theories did not gain wide recognition in postwar Paris, as misconceptions were common.126 Most critics do not account for Isou’s idea of perfection, the messianic age, which could only be attained by an ideal Jewish Gemeinschaft: “we Jews” who will be redeemed (by the Messiah). This messianic sense of community is contained in Isou’s theory concerning the future of both art and the Jews. The incentive for a Jewish community in the age of assimilation derived not only from the Shoah but also from philosophy, first and foremost manifested in Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946). Sartre suggested, in the vein of socialism, emptying the concept of Jewishness of content in order to render ethnic-cultural distinctions meaningless. However, he only managed to emphasise the distinction between the Jews and gentiles by leaning to the particularity of the former and thus postulating the very distinction.

125 Isou Agrégation, 282. 126 An exception to the rule of neglect and misunderstanding of lettrist theories came in the guise of a short critique by the writer and theorist Georges Bataille, consult chapter 2.1.

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 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

Isou answered Sartre’s theoretical impasse in Agrégation. He outlined a system for the Judaisation of France, which has drawn little attention since its publication and has been dismissed, rather unanimously, as megalomania. However, the idea cannot be disregarded as mere folly in light of its relation with the Kabbalah. Abulafia’s ‫( אוצר עדן גנוז‬Otzar Eden Ganuz, 1286), a commentary on the kabbalistic Book of Creation (‫ספר יצירה‬, Sefer Yetzirah), contains an enlightening passage, according to which the messianic end of times signifies the dwindling of the ranks of gentiles. Finally, their ranks will be destroyed whereas those of the Jews will rise.127 Abulafia’s apocalyptic scenario echoes the idea of a Jewish Gemeinschaft, which replaces all other religious sects at the messianic end. It is identical to Isou’s automessianic speculation (see prolegomenon), which entails that the Messiah renders everyone Jewish and assures that they (Jews) dominate the world. He identifies with Abulafia, particularly by emphasising Abulafia’s aim of defeating Christianity. Abulafia does not specify how the Christians will be destroyed – violently by death or by conversion – but Isou’s “altruistic” version stresses the latter. Even so, Isou finds little reason to defend gentiles after the Shoah: “Les chrétiens nous caressent maintenant parce qu’il nous ont égorgés tout récemment. […] C’est nous qu’ils brûleront bientôt, en holocauste” [Now the Christians caress us because just recently they butchered us. It is us who they will burn before long, in Holocaust].128 The antipathy evoked in Isou by “the Christians” – an utter generalisation – was to be opposed by means of the Kabbalah. Isou declared to his fellow Jews that “Il y a autre chose qu’un judaïsme de défense – celui pratiqué par vous. Il y a un judaïsme d’attaque! Il y a un missionnaire judaïque inscrit dans les paroles prophétiques de nos Livres” [There is something another than a Judaism on the defensive – that which you practise. There is a Judaism on the attack! There is a Jewish missionary inscribed in the prophetic words of our Books].129 In general, Judaism is uninterested in proselytising non-Jews, but Isou locates, however, such a tendency in prophetic Jewish literature. This is undoubtedly an allusion to Abulafia’s theory regarding the apocalypse and the Jews to be redeemed. After all, Abulafia wanted to convert the pope and traveled to Rome for this end.130 His ultimate purpose was to hasten the arrival of the Messiah.

127 Abulafia, Abraham Ms Oxford, quoted in Idel, Moshe, “Le temps de la fin: l’apocalypse et sa spiritualization d’Abraham Aboulafia”, Pardes 24:1, 119. 128 Isou Agrégation, 415. 129 Ibid., 423. 130 Abulafia travelled to Italy in the autumn of 1280 in order to convince Pope Nicholas III of his messianic speculations. Idel Mystical Experience, 3.



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Isou elaborated on the relation between kabbalistic Judaism and his conception of a more aggressive kind of Judaism, because he regarded the latter as too introverted. Instead, he envisions a new era that will establish a Jewish hegemony. Ce sera le temps messianique, car c’est le Juif qui régnera. Je crois que le temps est venu pour donner cette exégèse claire du judaïsme en attaque. Non rétractive, profonde, spécialisée, compliquée, dirigée vers l’intérieur pour la défense, comme des tunnels fortifiés et cabbalistiques. Mais violente, claire, vulgrarisatrice, comme un plan de débarquement en territoire ennemi.131 This will be the messianic time, because it is the Jew who will reign. I think the time has come to give this clear exegesis of Judaism on the attack. Not retractive, profound, specialised, complicated, inwardly directed for defence, like fortified and kabbalistic tunnels. But violent, clear, vulgrarisating, like a landing plan in enemy territory.

The assailing kind of Judaism is based on methods that appear to overturn any potential post-war bourgeois order and complacency. Moreover, Isou’s statement speaks volumes with regards to his conception of the Kabbalah, which he deemed secretive and implicit in character. Having elucidated his aim, Isou offers only a few concrete actions to support his plan for the Judaisation of France, most of which mirror the actions of the Third Reich and might be read with a pinch of salt. Yet, even here he takes up the Kabbalah and suggests the establishment of a new kind of mysticism or occultism: Créez des centres de judaïsation, camps d’agitation semblables à eux bâtis par tout noyau véridiquement vivant. Faites ce qu’ils nous accusent, partout, de faire (et que nous ne réalisons pas; que nous sommes si bêtes de ne pas réaliser). Nouez et construisez cette franc-maçonnerie, cette cabbale sémite, ce kahhale.132 Create centers of Judaisation, agitation camps like those built by any truthfully living core. Do what they, everywhere, accuse us of doing (and that we do not realise; that we are so stupid as not to realise). Establish and build this Freemasonry, this Semitic Kabbalah, this Kahhalah.

The “Kahhalah” is a Hebrew-esque neologism, which Isou does not elaborate on. One can surmise, however, that it is akin to the Kabbalah, which is rendered more accessible and thus keeping with the idea of Judaisation. The accessibility manifests on the very material level of letters – a suitable approach for lettrism – by opting out the letter “b” and using “h” instead. Here the open loop of the 131 Isou Agrégation, 423. 132 Ibid., 432.

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former designates the availability and openness of the newly established doctrine. However, the purpose of Isou’s plan may only be speculated about. It is likely derived either from reformist Judaism or Abulafia’s aim of having the pope convert in order to hasten the arrival of the messianic era. Besides these historical influences, in its contemporary context Isou’s theory was first and foremost a reaction to Sartre’s displeasing suggestion. Isou’s revisioned Kabbalah, which was included in the new art, inspired some critics to appraise him as a redeemer of the Kabbalah through lettrism.133 Indeed, the combination of the Jewish tradition and the avant-gardist “new” in such novel ways became characteristic of lettrism. Isou thus provided a vision of what the medieval “Kabbale absurde et incompréhensible”134 – absurd and incomprehensible Kabbalah – could be, once appropriated into West European avant-garde art at the heart of its cultural geography, Paris.

133 Codrescu Posthuman, 208. 134 Isou, Isidore, L’héritier du château, Paris 1976, 14.

2 Judaicities in Lettrism: Theory, Poetics, Praxis Notre Dieu, non plus, n’est pas un Dieu chrétien, parce qu’il procède comme un Dieu logique, dans un monde à lui, de l’Inconnu; mais que nous comprendrons un jour dans ce monde. On est avec lui sur un pied d’égalité parce que le classicisme judaïque ramène tout à l’échelle de l’individu.1

2.1 Anti-Rational Philosophy and Subjective Doubt Isou’s work incorporates elements that derive from Jewish mysticism and are appropriated to a modern cultural and aesthetic framework. Such an accommodation of the Jewish tradition is aptly described by a term that denotes actions and theories – or more generally any involvement – that are Jewish in character: judaicity. Judaicity does not seek to arrive at an “authentic” or constrictive formulation concerning the issue of Jewish identity, but rather to preserve its inherent pluralism, which is informed and shaped by the languages, literatures, philosophies and religious currents that make up Jewish culture.2 Authenticity (and who would be a suitable authority to define such a labourious term in the Jewish context?) is not at issue here, but rather Isou’s manifold theoretical developments that well up from the Jewish cultural undercurrent. The significance of tradition in lettrism is evident in Isou’s adaptation of the concept of divinity. He wrote in an era when modernity had already overthrown the idea of God – emerging from Kant’s first critique and culminating in Nietzsche’s death of God argument – and the focus of metaphysics had transferred to subjectivity. Taking this into account, Isou would not have much use for the notion of God. However, his critique of rational philosophy necessitates the inclusion of God as the guarantor of meaning. Just as romanticism had transferred the role of the creator from the divine to an anthropocentric realm, giving rise to a “modern” creative subject, Isou extended this subjectivity with kabbalistic elements that escaped rational thinking. This resulted in a conception of subjectivity that would ideally be all-inclusive meanwhile, paradoxically, ambiguous regarding its limits. 1 Isou Agrégation, 268. “Our God is not a Christian God anymore, because he proceeds as a logical God in a world of his own, [as] the Unknown; but whom we will one day understand in this world. One is on an equal footing with him because the Jewish classicism brings everything back to the level of the individual”. 2 For a further discussion, see Cohen, Joseph and Raphael Zagury-Orly (eds.), Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida, Paris 2003.

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In other words, it would be “holistic” without establishing the subject as a totality. Isou described such subjectivity in a rather obscure manner: Le judaïsme, c’est le Nom intime pour la [partie] secrète de l’individu. C’est le Nom que tous trouveront un jour, lorsque tous seront heureux.3 Judaism is the intimate name for the secret part of the individual. This is the name that all will find one day, once everyone will be happy.

Isou thus provides a starting point for the inquiry into this alternative subjectivity, which challenges contemporary thought from a Jewish point of view. Here Judaism is introduced into subjectivity as a hidden element that hinders the formation of any comprehensive ideals regarding the experiencing and acting conscious subject. Isou’s pervading criticism of philosophy by means of the Jewish tradition connects him to religious anti-rational thinking derived from the Kabbalah. His anti-rationalism is not synonymic to irrationalism, which is implicit meaninglessness. Instead, anti-rationalism is an outspoken mistrust and a profound undermining of rational thinking as it emerged from the Enlightenment. Anti-rationality became illustrative of the historical avant-garde with the emergence of expressionism at the early 1900s and dada during the 1910s. The avant-garde did not depict rationalism as a school, but as a more general “positivistic” trust in a would-be universal truth (logos) and essentialist claims of philosophy’s ability to categorise and analyse the phenomenal world. Such philosophies relied on the possibility of gaining knowledge, the truth, and in the ability of language to operate as a means of communicating the results. The avant-garde criticised the basic tenets of modern rationalism, such as its belief in progress. Already expressionism had refused to subject thinking to any categorisable mode and strict rationalism became less alluring and convincing as a result of the First World War. Such tendencies are obvious in the satires of Scheerpart and Georg Grosz, in Salomo Friedlaender’s thought and in the general anti-rationalism of dada. As the medium for the expression of thought, language played a key part in this exercise. The anti-rational approach necessitates an overcoming of the affirmative language of philosophy with poetic language that is able to depict and withstand the ambiguous, aporetic and paradoxical. Accordingly, artistic anti-rationality in lettrism is manifested by the use of literary and conceptual structures, such as the secret, that evade the dualisms characteristic of the bulk of rational philosophy.

3 Isou Agrégation., 269.



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Yet Isou’s criticism was not merely implied in his artistic works through poetic use of language; it was equally outspoken throughout his theoretical pieces. Referring to the ontologically inclined metaphysics (exemplified by Kojève, Sartre and even Bergson) in France, he writes: Je ne suis pas un polémiste aveugle désireux d’anéantir la réflexion métaphysique ou ontologique, mais un auteur ayant l’intention de préciser l’intérêt et les limites de cette activité pour mieux enrichir son secteur.4 I am not a blind polemicist wishing to destroy metaphysical or ontological reflection, but an author who intends to clarify the interest and limitations of this activity to better enrich his field.

Isou depicts in philosophy the fallacy of “absolute perception”, which ultimately was the reason for his scepticism towards rational philosophy. In his view, philosophy alone could not define concepts such as being without considering additional aspects (for example biology and neurology) of this being.5 Isou’s concept of being is holistic and seems to undermine the separation of its organic dimension: the philosophical outcome is always fragmentary and imperfect. It should be stressed that with his argument Isou challenges several well-established contemporary metaphysical conceptions, such as Heidegger’s idea of Dasein. However, the train of thought exemplified by Isou was not altogether singular in the historical avant-garde. In the 1910s, the Cartesian cogito argument was overridden by avant-gardist doubt and dubito ergo sum became the new ruling “principle”.6 The original argument establishes identity as given and not as a yet unanswered question or ongoing inquiry. In dada, the motivation for dubito was the overturning of any affirmation, which illustrates the utter futility of every reductive truth-seeking mechanism and doctrine. This development explains, in addition to the Kabbalah, why Isou regarded metaphysics as an inadequate means of theorising being. According to Isou, being and subjectivity were the stumbling blocks of the rational philosophy of his time. The inadequacy of philosophy was due to both strict categorical thinking and the insufficiency of language. For Isou, Hegelian dialectics represents the pinnacle of rationalism which he rejects: “Pour le philosophe allemande [Hegel] que nous critiquons, la vérité est donnée, tout est fait ; pour moi, la vérité acquise est insuffisante, tout est à faire avant d’arriver au 4 Isou, Isidore, Quelques anciens manifestes lettristes et esthapeiristes (1960–1963), Paris 1967, 8. 5 See ibid., 23. 6 Forster, Iris, Die Fülle des Nichts: Wie Dada die Kontingenz zur Weltanschauung macht, München 2005, 37.

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Paradis dans le Cosmos” [For the German philosopher whom we criticise, truth is given, all is done; for me, the acquired truth is insufficient, all is yet to be done before arriving at the Cosmic Paradise].7 Moreover, Isou promotes his anti-rationalistic dubito by undermining the functionality of dialectics. According to him, the “totalisations [de Hegel] sont des illusions dialectiques, auxquelles échappent toutes les valeurs qu’elles prétendent embrasser” [totalisations of Hegel are dialectical illusions, which escape all the values they claim to embrace].8 While criticism towards Hegelian philosophy was common amongst Isou’s contemporaries, such as Levinas and Bataille, the decision to backtrack to the thirteenth century and adopt medieval thought was rather unique.9 Given his background as a connoisseur of Jewish history, Isou was intimately aware of the anti-rational aspect of the Kabbalah. His resistance to philosophy, Occidental philosophy in particular, might have originated from the thought of Abulafia, who regarded the Kabbalah’s basis as a logic incompatible with the Western philosophical tradition. Abulafia looked on the Kabbalah as unequivocal with Jewish philosophy, especially with the rational variety promoted by Maimonides.10 His rational Jewish philosophy, which became popular later on, did not facilitate the idea of a contact with divinity. Furthermore, Abulafia and Isou held a similar attitude towards language. Language should be unconstrained by conventions and functions such as naming and objectification, even at the risk of rendering language anti-rational. Such language is very much in the vein of apophasis, which designates “an utter incapacity of language to grasp what infinitely exceeds it, a predicament of being surpassed irremediably by what it cannot say”.11 Appropriately, apophatic language originates in theology that regards God as utterly beyond the grip of linguistic expressions. In a similar manner, by forming ranks with Abulafia, Isou adopts a kabbalistic definition of God as the unknown (l’Inconnu), which asserts God beyond

7 Isou, Isidore, La Créatique ou la novatique, 1941–1976, Romainville 2003, 1207. 8 Ibid, 646. 9 Although Isou’s approach is unconventional, it does not lack comparison. Consider, for instance, the late poems of the Franco-German Jewish expressionist and surrealist poet Yvan Goll who wrote about Abulafia in the late 1940s. Cf. Goll, Yvan, Les cercles magiques, Paris 1951. 10 Abulafia adopted Maimonidean thinking that was occasionally influenced by Greek and Neoplatonic influences (such as Aristotle and Plotinus). Cf. Goodman, Lenn E. (ed.), Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, Albany 1992. 11 William Franke, On What Cannot Be Said. Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, Volume 1: Classic Formulations, Notre Dame 2007, 2. Furthermore, Derrida calls apophasis “the voiceless voice” that “at times so resembles a profession of atheism as to be mistaken for it”. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. John P. Leavey, jr., Stanford 1995, 35.



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rational inquiry.12 In a strict sense, Isou’s statement regarding the obtainment of knowledge about God should be interpreted with caution in order to refrain from aligning it with philosophical endeavours. Here the French “connaissance”, which is implied by the epithet “unknown”, does not denote knowledge in any philosophical, universal sense, but rather a “mystical wisdom” or “inner knowledge”, as already outlined in Isou’s paradilogy. This kind of “inner knowledge” differs radically from that of romanticism due to its implicit connection with the divine world. What does Isou’s “inner knowledge” entail in a modern framework? As he provided no detailed account himself, it is useful to compare his theory with that of a contemporary who was familiar with Agrégation. Indeed, in the late 1940s Isou was not alone with his musings, and the idea of a subjective anti-rational “knowing” echoes the thought of Bataille. However, regardless of the similar character of their theories, without a further account the parallels between Isou and Bataille remain somewhat superficial. For instance, Isou states that je ne suis pas d’accord avec des philosophes modernes comme par exemple […] Georges Bataille qui dit apporter le système du non-savoir absolu. Pour moi, l’être est un inventeur et un découvreur qui avance vers le meilleur.13 I do not agree with modern philosophers such as Georges Bataille who promised to represent the system of absolute non-knowledge. For me, being is an inventor and a discoverer who advances towards the best.

Isou refers to Bataille’s theory of non-knowledge. For Bataille, non-knowledge is a necessary precondition – this undermines knowledge (savoir) altogether. Knowledge fundamentally necessitates the subject/object dichotomy, which the Bataillean “subject” does not support because there is no clear distinction between the thinking subject and the object of thought. Even though Isou misinterprets Bataille’s non-knowledge by considering it a coherent concept and by identifying it with modern philosophy, he emphasises the difference in their thinking by assigning a central value to progress.14 Isou favours the anticipation of a future instead of presence that is essential for Bataille. 12 See Isou Agrégation, 264. According to George Steiner, the abstract character of the Jewish God played a part in the creation of literary motifs, such as silence, blankness and abstraction, in Jewish thought. However, these motifs do not simply establish a corpus of mysticism but also contribute to literature. Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, London 1976, 65, 297, 474. 13 Devaux Entretiens, 68. 14 Accordingly, non-knowledge cannot be absolute, because any “absolute” would require the establishing of distinct limits differing from the subject. Any “absolute” would reinstate the

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Isou formulates his aim clearly by drawing the line of rational inquiry here: “Dieu n’est pas mort, comme prétend l’auteur d’Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra  : Il reste encore notre projet, notre but” [God is not dead, as the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra claimed: He still remains our project, our aim].15 In Isou’s thinking one cannot affirm the death of the unknown, precisely because it is beyond the dialectic of affirmation and negation. Neither can one postulate that death (in its literal meaning) would be a characteristic of the unknown. As he augments, the “Dieu judaïque [est] ce centre d’inconnaissance […] autour duquel nous bâtissons le monde” [Jewish God is the centre of unknowing around which we build the world].16 In a nutshell, his anti-rationalistic manner asserts a logos by affirming God – or at least the name of God – while simultaneously situating this logos beyond the reach of any rational inquiry. Such an approach exemplifies an alternative theory of language, which is unable to grasp any logos but rather limits the field of rationalism, here including not only philosophy but all explanatory sciences – even rational exegesis – leaving room for mysticism. Because the logos is beyond cognition and meaning, it is beyond the scope of any analytical inquiry. The unknowability of God is thus a manifestation of unattainability in the phenomenal realm whereas “God itself” is beyond this realm. Therefore, Isou implies that the logos is nonphenomenal and cannot be manifested as presence: even though God is affirmed, God cannot be manifested in the world in which we live but rather remains absent. The nonphenomenal character

subject/object schema, which non-knowledge always already dissolves. In other words, non-knowledge is not a category but a continuity that does not allow for the establishing of such a totality. In fact, according to Bruce Baugh, non-knowledge can be specified only in opposition to absolute knowledge. In the Hegelian system, knowledge depends on the totality of the object, but the precondition of knowledge – the knower and his unknowability – undermines the system and extends unknowability to whatever is known. Death renders the individual imperfect and through the anxiety of death the individual becomes aware of the imperfect nature of being. Furthermore, the individual “communicates” with that imperfection. Baugh, Bruce, French Hegel. From Surrealism to Postmodernism, New York and London 2003, 84–85, 88. This mode of communication echoes Isou’s idea f divinity as the unknown. For Bataille, communication is possible in a continuity devoid of totalities: non-knowledge is comprehendible as a cognitive void. As Bataille states: “je communique avec l’« inconnu » opposé à l’ipse que je suis ; je deviens ipse, à moi-même inconnu, deux termes se confondent en un même déchirement, différant à peine d’un vide” [I communicate with the “unknown” opposed to the ipse I am, I become ipse, unknown to myself, two terms merge in a single wrenching, barely differing from a void]. Bataille, Georges, l’Expérience intérieure. Paris 2008, 145 [Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany 1988, 124–125]. For Bataille, non-knowledge precedes and is beyond all knowledge and hence the individual imperfection is unredeemable. 15 Isou Créatique, 1211. Emphasis removed. 16 Isou Agrégation, 259.



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of the logos results in the inadequacy of philosophy. This is due, as Isou argues, to the impossibility of any totalising philosophical “pure reflection” on phenomena. As he states, “cette connaissance [philosophique] plus profonde des choses et des idées […] est en réalité la simple divagation linguistique superficielle, à partir d’un lexique indépendant et cohérent, mais extérieur aux choses et aux idées dont on prétend réveiller la racine” [this philosophical deeper knowledge of things and ideas is, in reality, the simple divagation of superficial linguistics, starting from an independent and coherent vocabulary, but which is exterior to things and ideas, the root of which it pretends to reveal].17 Instead, Isou departs from his theory of “unknown things” by focusing on the logic of their organisation. He, like “Dieu, [dépassera] les choses […] par une connaissance de la « mécanique » de l’au-delà des objets” [God, will overcome things by a knowledge of the “mechanics” of the beyond of objects].18 Objects and things are regarded here as cognitive phenomena, beyond which Isou passes with a knowledge, reminiscent of that of the mystics, of what lies beyond the phenomenal world. This is to say that the Isouian logos cannot be universal in character. However, the Isouian venture of proceeding beyond phenomenal reality lapses back to the limits of subjectivity and the unknown. Isou never addressed this essential issue at length without connecting it to poetical expression, but Bataille raised it early on and it deserves further attention. In a short critique entitled “La divinité d’Isou” (The Divinity of Isou), dating from 1948, Bataille reviews Agrégation and focuses especially on the notion of divinity in the book. In the light of Isou’s conceptions of being and knowledge – not to mention his automessianic speculation – the most interesting part of the critique deals with the interchangeability of man and divinity in Agrégation. Bataille sternly criticises the idea because he interprets it as fundamentally Hegelian, whereas Isou sees it as stemming from Jewish messianism.19 Reflecting on the well-known atheist-anarchist phrase popularised by the French surrealists, Isou concludes that “Méprisant un monde où en dehors des imposteurs il n’y a NI DIEU NI MAÎTRE, la Paradilogie nous conduit vers la sociète où nous serons TOUS DIEUX ET TOUS MAÎTRES” [Scorning a world where, besides the imposters, there is not NO GOD NOR MASTER, the Paradilogy leads us towards a society where we will be ALL GODS AND ALL MASTERS].20 By revising the phrase, Isou incorporates one of the fundamental Hegelian oppositions, namely that of 17 Isou, Isidore, La mystification encyclopédique et ontologique de la philosophie devant la méthode créatrice, la conception kladosique et la finalité paradisiaque isouiennes, Paris 1967, 18. 18 Isou, Isidore, Les journaux des Dieux, Paris 1950, 203. 19 See Bataille Expérience, 127. 20 Isou, Isidore, “Les créations du lettrisme”, Lettrisme 4:1 (1972), 25.

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master and slave, which was important in the French interpretation of Hegel. For Bataille, who worked against this opposition, divinity and therefore servitude were not possible.21 The opposition between the two cannot be established if the fundamentally hierarchical servitude is erased. This is to say that if there is no objectifiable master, there can be no hierarchy linked to him.22 However, Isou dissolves the opposition not by denying God, but by eliminating the hierarchical power relation: the equality of individuals is achieved by effacing the position of the slave. In other words, Bataille underscores the possibility and, hence, the validity of the Hegelian opposition altogether, whereas Isou seeks, in a manner of speaking, a utilitarian way to resolve it. This is fundamentally the core idea of Jewish messianism expressed in Hegelian terms, even though the two do not resonate well together. Understandably, Bataille criticised the very conception Isou presented in Agrégation because he considered it as deriving from rationalism: La figure d’Isou n’est pas un vide dans un monde plein, ou c’est le vide qui laisse entrevoir… Ce qui laisse entrevoir est le plus pénible. « Tout solitaire est imparfait, dit Isou. Il doit trouver un visage qui puisse répondre au sein (vers lequel il s’avance) et dans lequel il puisse se vérifier comme Dieu dans le croyant… On appellera le divin Lecteur celui qui le rendra complet en le sanctifiant par la comparaison avec d’autres dieux (saints)… Cette partie intégrante de Dieu qui est le lecteur… ».23 The figure of Isou is neither a void in a plain world, nor it is the void that allows descrying... That what it allows to descry is the most painful. “All solitude is imperfect, said Isou. One must find a face that responds to itself (towards which it advances), in which he can verify himself as God in the believer... One calls the divine Reader he who will render him complete by sanctifying him in comparison with other gods (saints)... This integrating part of God who is the reader…”.

The passage Bataille focuses on in Agrégation includes the advance of the individual towards union with God. Here the Hegelian background of the critique is highlighted: Bataille describes the idea in Hegel’s thinking of being at the root of things, of being God, as a profound horror.24 For him such a position establishes the Hegelian project that absorbs all individuality. In this respect, Isou’s thinking 21 Bataille Expérience, 16. 22 Bataille’s atheology suggests that his thought can be referred to as mysticism without God or God as unknowable. See Connor, Peter Tracey, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, Baltimore 2000, 54. In 1953 Bataille stated that God was an effect of non-knowledge. Bataille, Georges, “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears”, trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall, in Stuart Kendall (ed.), The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Minneapolis 2001, 146. 23 Bataille, Georges, “La divinité d’Isou”, in Œuvres completes XI, Paris 1988, 380. 24 Bataille Expérience, 128.



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advances along the lines by which Levinasian philosophy criticised Hegel. The idea of the responding face (visage) does not yet entail a move outside the subject, but rather an experience of the presence of the unattainable other, and this experience is interior, subjective. The verification of the other is fundamentally a question of belief, but Isou transmutes it to mean that the existence of the subject, the “I”, is verified by the other. The idea resembles a sort of game of mirrors with the unknown divinity – the mere postulation of God as the source of an external gaze suffices. The relation between man and God is that they affirm one another, but the other face deprives the “I” of its omnipotence. In other words, the subject cannot be all-powerful because of the existence of God. Moreover, in the Isouian context it seems that only by mirroring itself via God could the subject ever know itself entirely. The obviously future-oriented characteristic of Isou’s text is the idea of being that is rendered whole. Bataille does not acknowledge such action because for him the continuity between the subject and the unknown persists. Moreover, Bataille interprets the “figure of Isou” as Isou proposed – as the Messiah. Any person desiring to be God confronts the same horror of being at the root of the world and of meaning as Hegel encountered. It is therefore, Bataille comments, pleasing to be the Messiah, but in the end, daunting to be God.25 For Isou the distinction between the Messiah and God was not as pronounced as Bataille interpreted it. Thus both the messianic endgame and the resolution of the dialectical opposition entangle and become a single idea of the interchangeability of man and God. Bataille illustrates this relation in his interpretation of Agrégation: Cela veut dire que je suis moi-même le fond des mondes et qu’il n’est rien de plus profond que moi dans la profondeur des mondes. Si Dieu est l’ombre de l’homme, il l’est de l’homme le plus « distant » (le plus glaçant). Mais l’homme le plus « distant » ne peut réellement différer de l’homme le plus familier, le plus « proche ». La « profondeur des mondes » est aussi bien donnée dans cet homme […]. Le messie, Isou l’ignore à demi mais il l’entrevoit :[…] il tient à une horrible possibilité de déverser dans le plus « lointain » le plus « proche », dans le plus « proche » le plus « lointain ».26 This means that I am myself the substance of the worlds and there is nothing deeper than me in the depths of the worlds. If God is the shadow of man, he is the “remotest” man (the most freezing). But the “remotest” man may not actually differ from the most familiar man, the “closest”. The “depth of the worlds” is also given in this man. The Messiah whom Isou partially ignores but descries: he holds on to a horrible possibility of emptying the “remotest” to the “closest”, the “closest” to the “remotest”.

25 See Bataille Divinité, 380. 26 Ibid., 380–381, emphasis added.

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Bataille criticises Isou for persisting on to the possibility of emptying the most distant to the nearest instead of relying on a continuity the way he did. This commentary obviously derives from Bataille’s Hegelian background: the phenomenological subject, who asserts truth in Hegel’s system, must be regarded as a totality. Therefore Bataille refers to the theory of Hegel as a theology where man has taken God’s place.27 Furthermore, regarding Bataille’s critique, to be able to empty out something means that the subject and object are established as distinct wholes. In Bataille’s system, in other words, God was dead and this interchangeability therefore impossible, whereas for Isou it is possible in a transgressive form. Bataille considers this transgressiveness to derive from Marxism, as he regards the idea that God is the shadow of man as Marxist.28 Indeed, Isou was a member of a communist youth group in Romania and familiar with the basic tenets of Marxism. He later answered Bataille’s critique by stating that “L’idée Marxiste – selon laquelle l’homme aurait déjà assumé les pouvoirs des dieux – est une rêverie idéaliste, un mythe mystificateur et destructeur qui ne correspond à aucune réalité de la connaissance logique et scientifique contemporaine” [the Marxist idea – according to which man would already have assumed the powers of gods – is an idealistic dream, a mystifying and destructive myth that does not correspond to any actual logical knowledge and contemporary science].29 The Marxian conception of humanised divine powers is incongruous with Isou’s messianic theory structured on the promise of the future attainability of these powers. Furthermore, Isou criticised Marx for adopting Hegelian dialectics regardless of its shortcomings.30 In commenting on Marxism in a brief passage of the critique Isou thus at the same time assures that Bataille has interpreted Agrégation from a Hegelian point of view and, while doing so, has misunderstood Isou’s theoretical point of departure and theoretical developments concerning Jewish messianism. In his critique, even though Bataille passes Jewish messianism without acknowledgement, he does approach its connotations in Agrégation with unique openness, taking his Catholic background into consideration. He claims that when putting himself in Isou’s position, he does not see anything that should have stopped him from doing the same.31 Bataille’s claim is made in a disparaging manner, but in the context of a critique that deals with interchangeability, it is perhaps equally an attempt to communicate from the aspect of the inner experi27 Bataille, Georges, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice”, trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies, No. 78 (1990), 12. 28 Bataille Expérience, 380. 29 Isou Création divine, 6, emphasis removed. 30 Isou , Isidore, Du socialisme théologique au socialisme des créateurs. Paris 1981, 36. 31 See Bataille Divinité, 379–380.



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ence. That is to say that the interiority and non-knowledge of an individual is felt by another who has similar extreme experiences.32 Bataille’s claim reveals the way he interprets Agrégation. Laughter, poetry and ecstasy do not produce results for understandable knowledge, and in these, the inner experience is found. The way Bataille diminishes Isou’s book reveals that he approaches it as a manifestation of non-knowledge. By pejoratively saying that Agrégation “est tout ce que l’on veut : un livre touchant, affreux, stupide, raté, puéril, génial, aussi risible, aussi gênant qu’un derrière nu” [is everything we want: a touching, ugly, stupid, failing, puerile, genius book, as ridiculous, as embarrassing as a bare rear], Bataille points out an unmotivatedness in it.33 He does not only put into question the seriousness of Isou’s messianic claims but rather undermines them completely. What he also manages to do, however, is to illustrate the book with a series of adjectives that is unnecessarily extended for the purposes of a mere critique, but applicable to highlight a non-productiveness inherent to the inner experience. Thus it is not simply critical or dismissive. What Bataille manages to filter from Agrégation is its latent Marxist input, which derives from Isou’s teenage years as a leftist activist. More importantly, he accurately illustrates how Isou postulates a secret part of the subject. As Isou himself stated, this veiled part should be identified with Judaism. In his thinking, therefore, Judaism is carved into the very idea of the subject, and being becomes a matrix that allows for a relation with the unknown.

2.2 Experientality and Inner Language In Isou’s paradilogical theory the hiddenness of God necessitates an “intimate awareness” of the divine. Due to this “inner knowledge”, it seems that the unconceptualisable can only be grasped in some way in and by experience. The experientiality of the logos refers here to its unattainability by means of rational inquiry, which resulted in an alternative conception of language in the Kabbalah. In the Kabbalah language has acquired a special ontological status, which thereby transgresses the conventional limits of language as a means of communication. The alternative conception of language is known as pansemiosis, and it denotes the equivalency between letters and physical reality. It is derived from the Jewish conception of creation by divine utterance utilising Hebrew, which 32 Baugh, 78. Bataille compared himself to Nietzsche and paralleled the relation with that of Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. The similarity of experience gives rise to a kind of “community”. Bataille “Nonknowledge”, 142–143. 33 See Bataille Divinité, 379.

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means that pansemiotic language is both an instrument of creation as well as a component of the created world.34 The conception is based on the idea that God created the world by means of language that has never relinquished this intrinsic creative ability. In other words, language functions as a mediator in the formation of things. This also suggests that – along the lines of a widely accepted Jewish exegetic interpretation – God created language in the first place. Hence, pansemiosis cannot be regarded in terms of conventional language. Such a language-transgressing semiosis poses a challenge to the modern study of signs. Illustrating the radically distinct conception of language in the Kabbalah and the inadequacy of philosophy in grasping pansemiosis, the somewhat baffled semiotician Charles S. Peirce states: It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe – not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth” – that all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.35

Peirce neglects to provide a coherent account of pansemiosis, but he depicts its ontological character nonetheless. This character is an obvious challenge to semiotics that is based on the idea of mediation and tends not to focus on ontological considerations that are beyond the ontology of signs. Pansemiosis, however, integrates these topics in language or, more accurately, denies any strict difference between linguistic and ontological existence – that is to say, between the sign and the thing. Peirce’s understanding of pansemiosis is in stark contrast with Isou’s approach, because the former does not incorporate the creative aspect of the latter. Isou illustrates his stance by saying that the “symétrie et la transcendance des LETTRES prendront la place de la symétrie et de la transcendance des Objets” [symmetry and transcendence of LETTERS will take the place of the symmetry

34 Abulafia generated a theory of language according to which Hebrew does not represent written or spoken language as much as it constitutes the principles of all languages, specifically the ideal sounds and combinations between them. This is to say that the ideal language, Hebrew, encompasses all other languages. Idel, Moshe, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, Albany 1988, 57. In a like manner, Devaux notes that hypergraphics contain the totality of existing “elements”, which is why it is similar to the Hebrew letter ‫( א‬aleph) that symbolises the unity of the world. Devaux, De la creation 1, 165. 35 Peirce, Charles S., “Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man”, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1868:2, 104.



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and transcendence of Objects].36 Letters hereby acquire the place of the unknown, which Isou’s theory focuses on. Accordingly, hypergraphics is “l’emploi total de l’univers des objets en tant que signes” [the total employment of the universe of objects as signs].37 By this Isou means that hypergraphics “contain” the object without differentiating between the object and the sign. Hence, language can no longer be regarded as an autonomic entity, because it can only function by way of its selfsame relation with objects. In addition to the sameness, there is a hint of secrecy, because the letters will not reveal any aspect of, for instance, the unknown. This is evident in Isou’s work “Explorations du ciel” (Explorations of heaven, 1961). The piece consists of hypergraphics on a colour background, which seem to proceed either horizontally or vertically, resulting in a kind of sign-based stargazing. In keeping with the idea of pansemiosis, Isou’s work suggests that heaven is made of signs that do not merely refer to but are an integral part of its fabric, of either cosmological or “unknown” objects in the universe. One variant of writing related to Isou’s work is the so-called celestial writing in late medieval Kabbalah, which is based on pansemiosis. Forms of letters were derived from observations of star constellations and these could be “read” as a kind of sacred writing.38 By virtue of the lack of language and conventional letters, the characteristics of these objects remain hidden meanwhile being, in a manner of speaking, highlighted thanks to hypergraphics. Isou’s work reveals how pansemiosis also manifests the distinct realms of subjectivity and language. The former is immanent and the latter interpersonal. In Isou’s theory, immanence denotes what is immediate to the subject, which in his case are experiences, while conventional language is external. Therefore, he postulates an immanence, an unattained “inner”, that is beyond language. Isou’s criticism of language recognises the dualism of immanence and language, which evokes the need for mysticism. Mysticism is necessary, because it epitomises that which falls outside language and cannot therefore be articulated.39 In this case, 36 Isou, Isidore, Mémoires sur les forces futures des arts plastiques et sur leur mort, Paris 1998, 26. 37 Isou Mémoires, 77. 38 Drucker, Johanna, The Alphabetic Labyrinth. The Letters in History and Imagination, London 1999, 125. An instance of such writing is the work of the seventeenth-century mystic Jacques Gaffarel, whose depiction of stellar constellations took the shapes of rudimentary Hebrew letters. Due to the Hebrew consonant script, the depictions allow for a variety of meaningful readings. Cf. Rothernberg, Jerome and Harris Lenowitz, Exiled in the Word: Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from Tribal Times to Present, Port Townsend 1989, 225. 39 As Peirce’s involvement already suggests, the disparity of language and the world in general, and experiences in particular, was addressed by language critical philosophy. It was an important development that was fuelled by kabbalistic mysticism and the so-called Sprachskepsis in germanophone letters at the end of the nineteenth century. This led to Sprachkrise, language cri-

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Fig. 3: Isou’s pansemiotic work Explorations du ciel (1961).

mysticism should be understood as a non-alignment with the limits of ordinary language, which includes an experience of unknowability. In a word, subjective experiences and language are incongruent. The suspension between experiences and language can be termed mysticism, even though it is not distinctively religious or atheist. Instead, such mysticism is based on the idealistic assertion that one is able to express not only the existence but also the contents of the subjective “inner world” or that which can also be termed “mystical knowledge”.40 sis, that was characterised by distrust in language in general and in the correspondence between language and the world in particular, which undermined established metaphysics and conventional literary techniques. The crisis was in essence a crisis of representation that followed from a critical response to rationalism in philosophy and realism in literature. This scepticism was poignantly voiced in the Sprachkritik, language criticism, of the Austrian-Jewish philosopher and writer Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner’s views seem to have been influenced by apophatic mysticism in which the strict dualism of language and its object remained unguaranteed. This is to say that the need for a new kind of epistemology was topical in linguistic philosophy long before Isou’s avant-gardist experiments with poetry. 40 Here the term “mysticism” is devoid of its pejorative use on the part of modern philosophers who mocked their colleagues tackling problems of language. An instance of this is Jean-Paul Sartre’s impression of Georges Bataille’s theory of inner experience.



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In Isou’s case, the problem is the mediation of immanence, which requires mysticism due to the inadequacy of ordinary language. According to him, experiences and the experiential world are radically detached from language. Isou’s anti-rational approach rejects the idea of an “omnipotent” epistemology and leads to what in philosophy is called epistemic privacy. Epistemic privacy refers to first person experiences, that is, whatever can be known to one person only, such as conscious mental states and bodily sensations.41 However, conscious mental states can still be conceptualised. Isou wants to proceed beyond such a possibility. In his theory, private feelings are deemed inexpressible by means of ordinary language and experiences are always one step ahead of language.42 This is to say that, at the experiential level, language does not dominate the subject. Isou’s view of the inexpressible experiences assigns the subject certain autonomy. He amalgamated this attitude with what he called infraréalite, subreality.43 Subreality is individual and disconnected from social reality. As such, it is congruent with the idea of epistemic privacy. However, Isou’s term contains a conflation of immediacy and mediation, because it designates not only immanence but also the existence of a common reality. The notion of subreality further suggests that he was not interested in overall, universal truth-claims but rather focused on expressing immanence that would, as he argued, constitute an individual “truth”. In addition to philosophy, subreality is also distinct from the surrealist image of the mind that relies on concepts and language even in a semi-conscious state. For Isou, such a means is rather a half measure, which cannot delve deep enough into subjective and private knowing. The idiosyncrasy of Isou’s perspective on individual experiences is further underscored by the use of the term Weltanschauung, worldview, and its implications.44 The Humboldtian notion maintains that worldview and language are interrelated and co-dependent. In a manner of speaking, they are two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, the term Weltanschauung may contain an aspect of communality, which refers to a shared social depiction of the world. However, in Isou’s case the sense of the term is utterly private and individualistic, which is somewhat clouded by his adaptation of the German concept and its particular

41 See Craig, Edward, “Meaning and Privacy”, in Hale, Bob and Crispin Wright (eds.): A Companion to the Language Philosophy, Malden, Oxford and Victoria 2003, 127. 42 Isou, Isidore, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, Paris 1947, 13–14. 43 See Isou Introduction, 13, 17. 44 In the philosophical sense the concept derives from Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement, 1790) and ever since there have been debates if Weltanschauung is a product of an unconscious intellect, which it undoubtedly was for Isou.

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Begriffsgeschichte. He utilised the concept of Weltanschauung seldom yet consistently in relation to subreality. For instance, in the context of lettrist art: La peinture est une surface vide sur laquelle s’inscrit la conception idéatique du peintre, le [sic] Weltanchauung [sic], le message optique du réalisateur.45 The painting is an empty surface on which the ideal conception of the painter is inscribed, the Weltanschauung, the optic message of the maker.

The ideal conception refers to a subreal “mental picture” rather than to concepts, because it has been engendered without language. Therefore, the Weltanschauung is a designator of the epistemically private, which marks the “individualistic” expression produced by the lettrist. The dichotomy of universality and individuality characterises both ordinary language and realistic representation, which Isou poignantly attacked: “la transcription du réel, en faisant de l’écriture, [est] l’appendicite du [sic] Weltanschauung” [the transcription of reality, by writing, is the appendicitis of the Weltanschauung].46 Isou parallels realistic representation with severe inflammation – an antagonistic attitude. He seems to suggest that if representation is taken as given, essentialistically, it cannot correspond with the individual Weltanschauung. Hence realistic representation is condemned to fail in its attempts to represent any extra-linguistic reality. The idea of an individual Weltanschauung should be regarded as something particular for every individual, since each individual uses language in a particular manner, like a dialect: “jeder Tropf seine eigene Weltanschauung habe, in seiner Individualsprache nämlich” [every drop has his own Weltanschauung, namely in his individual use of language].47 Taking the dictum a step further by bracketing language, one arrives at the epistemically private subreality of Isou. The notion of Weltanschauung further suggests that Isou was focusing on expressing immanence, because, as stated, he wanted to “rendre compréhensible et palpable l’incompréhensible et le vague” [render the incomprehensible and vague comprehensible and palpable].48 In order to reach this aim, the unknowable should be rendered knowable, but not in terms of epistemology. Isou’s formulation recalls the Kabbalah and especially ‫( דבקות‬devekut), the mystical union with God.49 Rather

45 Isou Mémoires, 29. 46 Isou Journaux, 142. 47 Mauthner, Fritz, Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Leipzig 1923, 431. 48 Isou Introduction, 17. 49 In the case of Abulafia, the union was formed rather between the kabbalist and an Agent Intellect, which is an aspect of divinity, while God itself was perpetually beyond the reach of any individual.



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unanimously the kabbalists agreed this to be the highest level attainable by the soul at the end of its mystic path, namely, the mystical cleaving to God. The devekut denotes how the mystic arrives at the brink of “nothing” by apprehending the limitedness of the human intellect. It is, in a word, a private experience, which is related to subreality. Only by letting go of this world, of its concepts, may the mystic come into contact with some aspect of divinity. It is attained only “by the paradoxical means of abnegation”.50 Devekut results in an intimate union, yet it does not entirely eliminate the distance between the creature and its Creator, a distinction that most kabbalists were careful not to obscure by claiming that there could be a complete unification of the soul and God. The kabbalists occasionally referred to the process of “forgetting” as the mystic approached non-thought. Furthermore, the unutterability of the private mystical experience means that the devekut is above all an individual experience. In the case of Isou, the kabbalistic devekut (also termed ecstasy) signified a way of personal dissolution, which was also a way to experimentally anticipate death. However, “Chez Isou, l’écstase [le devekut] dépasse cet état permanent ou limité pour […] figurer une foi créatrice” [In Isou, ecstasy surpasses this permanent or limited state in order to figure a creative credence].51 This is to say that subjectivity will not dissolve completely and that ecstasy will facilitate the implementation of pansemiotic writing. The ecstatic experience supposedly facilitates the overcoming of cognitive thinking by relying on experientality not reflected on. Experientality is an essential aspect of devekut in Abulafian Kabbalah, which – much like lettrist sound poetry – draws a parallel between permutations and music, which too could conduct the soul to a state of the highest rapture by the combination of sounds. The techniques of his prophetic Kabbalah were used to aid the ascent of the soul, such as breathing exercises, the repetition of divine names, and meditations on colours. Obviously, the body played an important role in the mystical process for Abulafia: it was not merely an exercise in contemplation. By the same token, experientality was equally essential for Isou: God’s unknowability in Isou’s writings should be interpreted in similar experiential terms as the devekut. Isou’s “unknown” designates a situation where the individual experience cannot be conceptualised and professed by language. This is basically a mystical experience, which seeks to transgress the boundaries of language but is simultaneously an experience related to language. This mystical experience is in line with Isou’s notion of subreality. As noted above, subreality suggests that subjectivity is not constructed as language, 50 Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971, 204. 51 Devaux, De la creation 2, 19.

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because the subreality of an individual is particular to that individual. Subreality does not need to be linguistic in the way linguistic reality, the world of mediation, is. This indicates that, in Isou’s regard, immanence is “alinguistic”. Such alinguistic subjectivity has an effect on epistemology. For Isou, the alinguistic subjectivity is commensurate with the insufficiency of language. This is to say that one of the first experiences must relate to language, because ordinary language gives rise to an experience of a limit between immanence and language. In this case the virulent problem is that by delimiting language (words and concepts) to the universal and extra-linguistic sensations to the particular or private, an unbridgeable gap emerges between the two.52 Universal ordinary language is inconsummerate with the privacy of experiences. What this means is that experiences are always one step ahead of language. The dilemma is that any “authentic” expression of these experiences necessitates an expression that also remains a step ahead of language. Such a realisation can be expressed as follows: Was ich erleben kann, das ist wirklich. Und ich kann es erleben, für kurze Stunden, daβ ich nichts mehr weiβ vom principium individuationis, daβ der Unterschied aufhört zwischen der Welt und mir.53 What I can experience is real. And I can experience, for short hours, that I no longer know anything about the principle of individuation, that there ceases to be a difference between the world and myself.

Here the realm of experience is outside ordinary language. Yet, in the end, language will assert a difference that blocks any alinguistic unity. It seems obvious that the only way to express experiences is to somehow overcome ordinary language, for instance by means of ambiguity. This ambiguity is essential in retaining the immediacy of alinguism. Mysticism appears as something that cannot be penetrated by means of ordinary language. Therefore both immanence and the immediate message are alinguistic. Isou’s requirement of a certain metastasis of language is explicit and engaging. He described that “Le mot est le grand niveleur [et] la première stéréotypie”, “[c’est pourquoi il] n’existe pas d’autre problème […] que celui de la représentation” [the word is the great steamroller and the first stereotype, which is why there is no other problem than that of representation].54 In other words, language is unable

52 Cassirer, E., The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, New Haven 1953, 189. 53 Mauthner Wörterbuch, 384. 54 Isou Introduction, 11, 14; Mémoires, 14.



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to represent what is individual and experiential.55 Accordingly, lettrist writing can be characterised as writing that functions by virtue of a rupture of language. [En] ôtant les sens des mots, c’est-à-dire en composant des « mots » sans signification rationnelle, les lettristes retirent à la langue son pouvoir d’abstraction à fin utilitaire. […] Cela signifie que le lettrisme n’est pas une langue nouvelle, qu’il n’est pas une langue conceptuelle, que l’on ne peut parler à son sujet de langage que comme code (de signes) s’adressant à la sensibilité ou préfigurant des notions encore non définies.56 In removing the meaning of words, that is to say, by composing “words” without rational signification, the lettrists remove the power of language to abstract [and they do so] to utilitarian ends. This means that lettrism is not a new language, that it is not a conceptual language, that one can only talk about it in linguistic terms as a code (of signs) addressing a sensibility or prefiguring notions not yet defined.

Lemaître emphasises that lettrism was never supposed to be a new conceptual language, a sociolect shared only by a few individuals. It evades modern linguistics and semiotics precisely because it does not share their terms, prefigurations and limitations concerning language. As Isou says, hypergraphics pose “des problèmes de plus en plus subjectifs d’expression [jusqu’]au déchiffrement du rebus et à opacité totale des notions offertes” [problems of more and more subjective expression until the decryption of the rebus and the total opacity of offered notions].57 In a word, lettrism averts imposed conceptions of language while seeking to redefine it. Due to these qualities that seek to revise language by means of distinction and critical distance, lettrism is able to purport poetry to be an enquiry into the unknown. The experience of the unattainable seems to be fundamentally ineffable: “Les sensations uniques sont si uniques qu’elles ne peuvent se populariser. Les sensations sans mots […] disparaissent” [The unique sensations are so unique that they cannot be popularised [expressed in language]. The sensations lacking words [to describe them] disappear].58 On the other hand, echoing pansemiosis, “Il y a des choses qui existent par leur nom seulement” [There are things that exist solely

55 Similar claim was made by Kojève, who regarded language (as a conceptual understanding of empirical reality) as a murder of things by making them approximate to us. Kojève, Alexander, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: leçons sur La phénoménologie de l’esprit, professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des hautes-études, Paris 1947, 373. 56 Lemaître, Maurice, “Qu’est-ce que le lettrisme ?” Lettrisme 1966:13. Emphasis removed. 57 Isou Journaux, 148. 58 Isou Introduction, 14.

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by virtue of their name].59 Hence, there is a need to make language manifest the ineffable by “detours”, such as non-communication and silence, that “short-circuit” transparent, ordinary language. This is realised in a linguistic framework by pointing out the limits of language and by endeavouring to expand or overcome them. Anticipating the undoing of language, Isou declared that LE MOT par la Fracture notre rythme. mécanique, Assassine des sensibilités (1). fossilisation, Uniforme indifféremment la torfixité et le turante inspiration. vieillissement Tord les tensions. Expose comme inutile l’exaltation poétique. (1) Le dictionnaire – cimetière des crimes grandioses. Larousse – leur histoire.60 THE WORD with its Fractures our rhythm. mechanicality, Assassinates sensibilities (1). fossilisation, Uniforms indifferently the permanence and torturing inspiration. aging Contorts tensions. Exposes poetic exaltation as useless. (1) The dictionary – cemetery of grand crimes. Larousse – their history.

Isou’s distrust of ordinary language becomes critical in his thesis, according to which any poetic rapture becomes futile if expressed by words. As the poet is obliged to seek an alternative outlet for poetic exaltation and feelings, Isou suggests that poetic language should be adapted to correspond with this situation. For instance, lettrism utilised both letter permutations and hypergraphics, aiming at “unmediated communication” and seeking to overcome not only ordinary language but also conceptual thinking.61 Already the first lettrist publication, La dictature lettriste (Lettrist Dictatorship, 1946), dispenses radically with words: “Il n’existe pas de dictionnaire chez nous, nous n’avons pas de notions et de mots à vous offrir” [No dictionary exists among us, we have no notions or words to offer you] and that “Jamais, une langue ne sera pour les lettristes une assemble 59 Ibid., 17. 60 Ibid., 12. 61 Isou, Isidore, “Les véritables créateurs et les falsificateurs de dada, su surréalisme et du lettrisme (1965–1973)”, Lettrisme 2:16–20, 64.



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de notions et de mots établis définitivement” [Never, for the lettrists, will a language be an assembly of established notions and words].62 This formulation is an instance of an anti-rationalistic theory of language, because, according to them, “Notre langue […] est ainsi anti-dialectique, anti-sophistique, anti-philosophique” [Our language is anti- dialectical, anti-sophistic, anti-philosophical].63 The anti-philosophical – and also anti-epistemological – “language” focused on the inexpressibility of the subjective “inner” world. In general, such a strict anti-epistemological aim envisioned by Isou evoked immediate disapproval. Numerous critics, most notably Asger Jorn and Robert Estivals, accused Isou of solipsism.64 Estivals concluded that “pensée sans langage… Il fallait aller au-delà du langage connu pour découvrir et exprimer la pensée avant que le langage n’intervienne” [thought without language… One has to go beyond known language in order to discover and express the thought before language intervenes].65 The underlying problem in quasi-language is that, as Estivals noted, every expression should precede language. Such an aim was articulated in the idea of avant-langue, prelanguage, that would grasp the “inner” of an artist in a state that precedes conceptual thinking and language. Henri Michaux, a contemporary of Isou who also utilised the idea of quasi-language, evoked the idea of a new representation.66 According to him, such pre-language is “ouvert au monde autrement, créant et développant une fonction différente en l’homme, le désaliénant” [open to the world in another way, creating and developing a different function to man, unalienating him].67 Also Michaux considers language to raise a difference between the individual and the world. In a similar fashion, Isou claimed that quasi-language was supposed to express the “immediate message”.68 It is a key concept although it is an oxymoron. The “immediate” refers to immanence and “message” to mediation. These form a dualism encapsulated by the term. The immediate message required something of a “hollowing out” of language. According to Isou, the meaning in lettrist poetry “flickers” because the “lettres abstractisées sont devenues des valeurs quantitative, perdant le concept 62 Joffe, Henri, “La Langue et le Lettrisme”. In Isou, Isidore (ed.): La dictature lettriste 1:1, 42, 44. 63 Ibid., 45. 64 Jorn’s text “Originalité et grandeur (sur le système d’Isou)” (published in Internationale situationniste in 1960) sarcastically criticises Isou’s messianism from a secular point of view while accusing him of megalomania. 65 Estivals, Robert, Le signisme. L’histoire du schématisme I, Paris 2005, 7. 66 Michaux was familiar with lettrism, because he attended lettrist soirées in the company of the French critic Michel Tapié. See Bandini, Mirella, Pour une histoire du lettrisme, Paris 2005, 11. 67 Michaux, Henri, Œuvres complètes. Tome 3, Paris 2004, 1280–1281. 68 Isou Mémoires, 29.

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premier auquel on les attachait” [the abstractified letters have become quantitative values, losing the concept first attached to them].69 This is to say that, akin to Abulafian textual techniques, individual letters were separated from the problematics of representation characteristic of ordinary language. Yet, a new, hidden or private meaning can be assigned to these letters.70 Isou’s approach subtly adapts influences from the Abulafian Kabbalah, for which reason their common characteristics must be examined in further detail from the aspect of pansemiotic language. Both Isou and Abulafia engage in a particular language mysticism, which denotes not only the demotion and abrogation of language, but also a testing of its limits.71 Language mysticism, both medieval and modern, impugns the correlation between the experiential and linguistic realms and ultimately manifests their fundamental incompatibility. Accordingly, in Abulafia’s thinking: Mystische Erkenntnis bedeutet [...] die Kontemplation und Befragung der Sprache auf ihre immanente, göttliche Grammatik hin. Kabbala ist in diesem engeren Sinne nichts anderes als Sprachmystik.72 Mystical knowledge means the contemplation and questioning of language out of its immanent, divine grammar. In this narrower sense Kabbalah is nothing but language mysticism.

Moreover, as Günter Bader has noted, a distinct concept of language mysticism arises from the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia.73 Abulafia’s language 69 Isou La dictature lettriste, 24. The lettrist immediate message should also be regarded as a critique of surrealist automatic writing that – by resorting to ordinary language – affirmed the congruency of language and thinking. 70 Any private meaning, in the sense suggested by Isou, is a departure from preceding theories of language, such as language criticism. The lettrists’s language criticism faces a paradox, namely that the means and the object of criticism are one and the same. In other words, language is being criticised by language. Lettrist theory was written in plain French. Isou’s formulation expresses the fundamental difference between Sprachkritik and lettrism is that the former settled for an absence of an epistemological claim whereas the latter, with its antiepistemological emphasis, set out to challenge the ontological limits of both immanence and language. In other words, Sprachkritik categorised any epistemologically valid expression of immanence as impossible, but for lettrism the expression of immanence required a radical renewal of language. It seems that faced with such a task, Isou returned to his childhood’s yeshiva teachings about the Kabbalah. 71 See Wolosky, Shira, Language Mysticism. The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan, Stanford 1995, 3. 72 Kilcher, Andreas, Die Sprachtheorie der Kabbala als ästhetisches Paradigma. Die Konstruktion einer ästhetischen Kabbala seit der Frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart and Weimar 1998, 58. 73 Bader, Günter, Die Emergenz des Namens: Amnesie, Aphasie, Theologie, Tübingen 2006, 256.



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mysticism was distinct from his predecessors due to his rather creative use of Hebrew. According to Pierre Bouretz, Abulafia broke down the conventional structure of language (i.e. words and sentences) in order to create new linguistic units using previously unseen (inédit) combinations of letters and vowels.74 Abulafia’s mystic language is closely related to poetic language use. The overcoming of the grammar and logic of ordinary language – the language of philosophy – is similar to Isou’s avant-gardist efforts and his anti-rational critique of philosophy by means of poetic language. The themes of the unattainability of God and pansemiosis are once again prominent. Here pansemiosis should be seen to fuel Abulafia’s efforts. Since there is no referent for the word “God”, or it is equally unattainable, God may be indicated by topoi such as silence, non-communication, and secret. In pansemiosis these correlate with language’s inability to describe the world, due to the incorporation of language in the world. Thus, for instance, when denoting “nothing”, Abulafia and Isou do not refer only to the epistemological limits of language but also to the limits of an ontological “nothing”. Paradoxically, in pansemiosis the ontological limits align with those of language. Furthermore, Abulafia places “nothing” in connection with mystical experiences that cannot be described linguistically. Isou, for one, regarded every individual experience, in a manner of speaking, as “approaching nothing” when the experiences were described in ordinary language. In other words, language’s limited ability to describe phenomena result in the loss of the unique qualities experiences have per se. A similar distrust of language was characteristic of Abulafia, because he wanted to transcend the “natural understanding of reality” by means of permutations. Essential for the aspect of lettrism and language mysticism is that in Abulafia’s pansemiotic theory all kabbalists could create their own universe through the creation of new words due to the ontological nature of such semiosis. A basic assumption is that the form of the Torah was arbitrarily chosen by God and every other combination of letters will be as sacred and meaningful. In other words, every biblical verse is simultaneously “everything and nothing”.75 Hence a comprehensive interpretation of the infinitely meaningful Torah would be impossible, but the kabbalist could extract or create new meanings from the text. Such meanings would inevitably appear nonsensical. Furthermore, such an experimental approach to language is fundamentally poetic, regardless of the context. The Abulafian Kabbalah had established and developed textual techniques in a quest for some aspect of divinity. However, language should not be regarded as a by-product of such endeavours but rather as a means by which the quest is 74 Bouretz, Pierre, Témoins du futur. Philosophie et messianisme, Paris 2003, 349. 75 Dan, Joseph, Jewish Mysticism: The Middle Ages, Northvale and Jerusalem 1998, 80–81, 87.

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performed. In the Kabbalah, creation – both the original creation of the world as well as the individual creativity of the kabbalist (imitatio dei) – is intertwined with the Hebrew letters. The letters are not merely objects but the means of the kabbalistic enterprise. Furthermore, the inadequacy of ordinary language, the language of rational exegesis and philosophy, was criticised by breaking language down into its constituent units. As a technique, the following reconstruction was a fairly mechanical endeavour: a reassembling of the letters in the passages. However, early lettrist poetics similarly encouraged poets to dismantle words into their constituent letters and to recombine them in a way reminiscent of kabbalistic permutations. Accordingly, Isou’s permutations are not supposed to endorse any phenomenal reality as much as they were to radically differ from it by manifesting subreality. This avant-gardist idea actually repeated kabbalistic methods. If Abulafia’s permutations were nonsensical, Isou’s motivations were also other than communication. This nonsensical nature of his poetry is visible in an extract from Isou’s poem Recherches pour un poème en prose pure (Researches for a Pure Prose Poem, 1950): Ghprstnstzdgfblmkrstvxwtsrkmbfpntzsch nsntzze! FMNZ TGGGHTZ HH HHKRRVCPMPCRTRCPT76

Strikingly, the fragment appears unreadable, because it consists only of consonants. In this sense it is reminiscent of the consonant script of Hebrew, but no explicit message can be extracted from Isou’s text. Transliteration into Hebrew reveals no explicit message. Hence the motivation may be aesthetical – as the title suggests – but the other aspect of non-communication the poem foregrounds is more crucial. The poem may be seen to highlight the boundary between the known (conceptualised) and the unknown (cannot be conceptualised). Even though the existence of such a “threshold” is made manifest in the poem, the boundary is not essentialistic but rather a “middle”, which the anti-rational approach generates. The middle is, in a manner of speaking, hermeneutically resolute, but can and should be understood as a necessary element of a work. Hence, such indeterminacy is an intentional aesthetic effect. This ambiguity of the middle signifies the other seminal aspect this chapter raises. As concluded above, the logos is nonphenomenal and beyond the scope of philosophical inquiry. But as Isou’s experimental approach emphasises, the failures of cognition are important for meaning-creation. At the level of the work of art this signifies that hesitation, ambiguity, paradox and non-meaning must be 76 Isou, Isidore, Précisions sur ma poésie et moi, Paris 2003, 132.



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regarded as elements of the given work. Furthermore, these indicate the immanenent inner of the author. However, conventional means of interpretation, such as hermeneutics, are unsuitable for analysing these failures that are on the threshold of phenomenality. This is to say that universalist epistemology is rendered impossible due to the lack of a grammatical system and linguistic code: undefinable immanence, the unattainable “inner”, collapses the subject-object standard. In this sense the unttainability and unknowability of God is extended to comprise the individual. Hence, Isou seeks to rid himself of language as an element that shapes the social worldview. Instead, the worldview is private, “subreal” as it were, and unattainable by means of language that is based on generalisations and categorisations. Furthermore, the subreal is not subject to self-reflection: one cannot conceptualise the experiential. In this manner the mystic’s self-erasure is a perceptive description of a striving to rid oneself of thinking based on language. Therefore, in Isou’s thought, both immanence and the immediate message are alinguistic. By advocating the idea of such a message, his poetics establishes continuity between immediacy and mediation by being an opening of immanence towards other than immanence. This other is not represented as any absolute transcendence or beyond, but rather as an overcoming of the limits of immanence. In other words, it refuses the dualism of immanence and its other by forestalling “the dualisms of absence and presence, mediation and immediacy”.77 These dualisms are replaced by an ambiguity that preserves its ambiguous nature. Due to its capability to dissolve conventional and distinct limits, the immediate message can be regarded as an extension of immanence, which hinders both any clearly delimited immanence as well as a straightforward dualism of immanence and its other. Isou’s poetry, that is the manifestation of the immediate message, is such an extension if it is understood as an overcoming of mere immanence. The “limits” of immanence are subject to negotiation because every move beyond immanence, such as the immediate message, returns us to a new and expanded sense of the immanent.78 In other words, to rephrase Blanchot, immanence is what transcends transcendence.79 It is only appropriate to describe such an obscurity of immanence as a kind of mysticism. Secrecy refers to a hidden part of the individual, which is not synonymous to but relates to ontological and epistemological unknowability. Obviously, following such a restructuring of the basic idea of self-reflection by means of language 77 Ward, Graham, “Transcendence and Representation”, in Schwarz, Regina (ed.): Transcendence. Philosophy, Literature, and Theology. Approach the Beyond, New York and London 2004, 139. 78 See Schwarz, Regina (ed.), Transcendence. Philosophy, Literature, and Theology. Approach the Beyond, New York and London 2004, x. 79 See e.g. Mole, Gary D., Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Gainesville 1997, 60.

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and concepts, suggesting merely another conventional poetics would be unacceptable. Therefore, Isou holds on to his idea of “building the world around the unknown” and the means of this world-making is poetry. Choosing “nothing” as the main poetical vehicle or grounding “principle” maintains the unattainability of experiential and alinguistic immanence. However, both lettrism and the Kabbalah admit the possibility of eventually overcoming, at least some sense, of unknowability, which gives rise to a nothing of another character.

2.3 Rien as a Poetical and Mystical Measure Isou’s anti-rationality and poetic practices revolve around the unknown and, more specifically, the idea of God as the unknown. This not only signifies that Isou’s God is beyond perception, but also that God lacks features altogether. Such an utter featurelessness, which is devoid of essentialistic claims, evokes a concept of “nothing”. It is useful to approach the unknowability of Isou’s “nothing”, because both unknowability and “nothing” lack qualities and, by the same token, radically differ from the various concepts of nothingness (néant) of numerous philosophies contemporary to Isou’s, French existentialism being the most obvious instance.80 One of the distinguishing features of his poetics is his consistent conceptual use of the French negative rien (nothing).81 Accordingly, Isou focuses on the anti-metaphysicality of rien, which he regards as a means to dispute the rather elementary conceptions of nothingness in Bergson and Sartre, which were prominent in France at the time.82 Moreover, Isou’s “nothing” addresses the ontological and epistemological limitations of being in a fashion distinct to his contemporaries who were more interested in commenting on Heideggerian ontology. The rien Isou adopted also defies the definition given by Diderot in his Encyclopédie (1765), according to which “[Les gens] veulent former quelque idée qui leur représente le rien ; mais comme chaque idée est réelle, ce qu’elle leur représente est 80 Sartre’s magnum opus on the topic, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) had been published in 1943. 81 The distinct status rien has gained derives presumably from the word’s etymology. Rien traces back to Latin rem, the accusative of “thing”, that was in turn adapted to Old French in which rien equally denoted a “thing” or “being”. However, in modern French the word has acquired meanings that cannot be expressed in English without prefixes (“no-thing” or “any-thing”). One of its fundamental characteristics is derived from this evolution: rien is an ambiguous word the meaning of which is determined by the context. 82 Bergson regarded nothingness as an absurd idea while for Sartre it served mainly as a synonym for negation and absence.



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aussi réel” [People want to form some idea of what nothing represents to them, but as each idea is real, what it represents to them is also real].83 Diderot describes how representation necessarily betrays rien by making it “something” instead of “nothing”, but which, at the same time, remains fundamentally inexpressible. Such an approach idealises rien as a concept and suggests that it would be applicable in philosophy. Diderot’s approach exemplifies the fact that rien is inevitably associated with problems of representation – how can such a fleeting idea be described – and the limitedness of the language through which it is manifested. Essentially, Isou utilises a nonidealising alternative of the rien, which does not render “nothing” into something. An illustrative example of the use of such rien in poetics can be found in Isou’s early verse: Bombre, godo, godo, jtartelle tatou tompâtâfère. 18 – 17 – 19. Le quéffiant bicor quelficommé darnacoïou au don du guéfligant thondé cahlâ cafonglan. […] – 5 – 5 nk 1 – 2 – 12 sptccps 1 – 2 – 1 – 2 – 17 zghlhgz 17 drc 15.84

By reading the excerpt above one instantly notices the resemblance to French due to its employment both of diacritics and of some French-reminiscent neologisms, such as “jtartelle” or “quelficommé”. Keeping in mind Isou’s manipulation of Mallarmé’s verse, however, any “reconstruction” of meaning (in the sense of ordinary language) would prove impossible. Phonetically, the poem also reminds of dada poetry, such as Hugo Ball’s famous Karawane (1916) or Raoul Hausmann’s early letter poems. However, the latter part of the excerpt consists merely of consonant sequences and numerical segments or a code, which do not even resemble ordinary language but some kind of cipher. Alternatively, the final line seems to connote the Hebrew consonant script with its numerical letter values in a Latinised mode. The effect of the cipher is to prove how anxiously one wants to find meaning even in apparently indecipherable fragments. This is fitting, bearing in mind that Isou’s aim was to make the unknown a central vehicle of world-making. Without doubt he picked up the rhetorics of rien from his countryman Tzara who had utilised it extensively in his dada works. Isou provided the evolution of rien in aesthetic use, which he adopts from Tzara but redefines for his own purposes. In La Dictature lettriste Isou writes that lettrist poetry

83 Diderot, Denis, “Encyclopédie”, in Jérôme Laurent and Claude Romano (eds.) Le néant. Contribution à l’histoire de non-être dans la philosophie occidentale, Paris 2006, 410. 84 Curtay, Jean-Paul, La poésie lettriste, Paris 1974, 196–197.

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s’agit de: […] concrétiser le silence; de: écrire le rien.85 is about: concretising silence; about: writing the nothing.

The aim is obviously paradoxical: how could “nothing” manifest by writing when it remains beyond conceptual thinking and language? Isou’s peculiar claim concerning the rien should be read in the light of his conceptions of subjectivity and God. The motive for rien becoming a poetic principle derives from Isou’s theory of subjectivity, according to which individual experiences cannot be universally expressed. Hence, the rien betokens a cognitive limit beyond which nothing can be expressed by means of ordinary language. As noted in the previous chapter, according to Isou every individual cognitive faculty establishes a distinct subreality that is inconsummerate with shared, ordinary language. Another problem is that of the unknown and the individual’s “subreal” experience of it. In order to remain unknown, the object of experience cannot relinquish anything of itself. However, an experience has the ability to attain some aspect of this unknowability: as the experience of “nothing”. “Nothing” is, by definition, no cognitive phenomenon and as such it is unattainable, precisely because it is beyond the phenomenal realm. Moreover, it evades all attempts at conceptualisation, even though language often overshadows and obscures this fact. Due to language’s ability to suggest presence where there is absence, “nothing” cannot be addressed by language without rendering it something – even conceptually. The kabbalists were aware of this characteristic and, hence, the connection between divinity, “nothing” and unknowability is intertwined with language: For the Kabbalists and Jewish mystics in general, language seems to be accorded a special ontological status, at once material and transcendental, at once physical and metaphysical, at once attribute and essence […]. This is perhaps best illustrated by the practice in ecstatic Kabbalism that centers on God’s name in Hebrew, which is literally (physically) unsayable; the word standing in for God thus embodies the unknowableness of God.86

85 Isou, Isidore (ed.). La dictature lettriste. Paris, 2000, 16. 86 Katz, Stephen B., “The Epistemology of the Kabbalah: Toward a Jewish Philosophy of Rhetoric”, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995), 117. Ecstatic Kabbalah (also known as prophetic Kabbalah) refers to the variant represented by Abulafia, which concentrates on divine names and permutations as opposed to the sephirot doctrine of theosophical Kabbalah. In Abulafian Kabbalah the term “ecstatic” denotes a mystical experience attained by combinations of Hebrew letters. This “ecstatic” process was a conscious de- and reconstruction of Torah passages that were believed to contain hidden divine truths.



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What is here referred to as the unknowable, is ‫איו‬, ayin, the Hebrew word for “nothing”. For the kabbalist, it presents the divine realm where no linguistic terms apply and thus all negative ones are equivalent – some kabbalists even regarded ayin as the only appropriate name for God.87 In this case, the ayin can be termed as the ambiguity of “nothing” and the unknown (God). The ayin “connotes negativity and nonbeing, but what the “mystic means by divine [“nothing”], is that God is greater than any thing one can imagine, like no thing”.88 Hence, Isou refers to it as the unknowable. In these cases, the ayin-as-God is considered as the unattainable logos. It becomes apparent that ayin is not only ontological but also epistemological. It does not suffice to regard “nothing” as only a philosophical cosmogonic term at the expense of its linguistic qualities. The complex ayin stands for “nothing” while “no thing” was in existence, but yet it also designates the limit of what language is able to communicate. In other words, ayin does not allow for conceptual thinking or the use of language although it simultaneously is the name for “nothing”. “Nothing” defies language that suggests a false presence to absent or non-existent things. Therefore, ayin designates the limit between linguistic communication and mystical experiences that are often labelled as “ineffable”. Accordingly, “nothing” is “knowable only through the language that embodies [it], though that knowing is imperfect”.89 Such knowing based on a kind of lack is common in the Kabbalah and lettrism: there is only a trace of what is lacking and ayin is the name of that trace. In the kabbalistic universe, the ayin is pansemiotic, which means that the term has an actual ontological equivalent. The pansemiotic ayin is not existential absence, but rather para-ontological “nothing”, which is independent of inten87 Lurianic Kabbalah systemised the doctrine of divine emanations. This daring symbolism is associated with most mystical theories concerning an understanding of the Divine, and its particular importance is seen in the radical transformation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo into a mystical theory stating the precise opposite of what appears to be the literal meaning of the phrase. Essential in this theory was the term ‫אין סוף‬, Ein-Sof , which denotes boundlessness. The term appeared in kabbalistic literature after the beginning of the thirteenth century and its early use was sporadic. Moreover, it was originally used as a proper name (without a definite article), but after the year 1300 its use became habitual. For a further discussion, see Scholem, Gershom, Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala, Berlin 1962, 233–238. From this point of view it makes no difference whether Ein-Sof itself is the true ayin or whether this ayin is the first emanation of EinSof. From either angle, the monotheistic theory of creatio ex nihilo loses its original meaning and is completely reversed by the esoteric content of the formula. 88 Matt, Daniel C., “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism”, in Robert K. C. Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, New York and Oxford 1990, 121. 89 Katz “Kabbalah”, 188.

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tions, defies taxonomies and is philosophically inconceivable. In lettrism this kabbalistic “nothing” is extended from a cosmological and linguistic realm to the experiential realm of the individual, which is immanent. What “nothing” signifies in Isou’s theory may be considered as akin to the kabbalistic ayin entwined with language. In this light, Isou’s idea of forming poetics around the idea of rien is challenging. In order to fully understand the notion, numerous applications and features of rien in addition to that of Isou’s have to be taken into account. He partook in an ongoing discussion in French aesthetics and metaphysics with his interpretation of the rien and this discussion revealed rien as an instance where rationalism truly seemed inadequate. For Isou, the rien is seminal due to its implicit relation with subreality. Before the 1940s, the word rien was usually used synonymously with néant (nothingness) in French letters and philosophy – the very rationalist thinking Isou opposed. However, in some sporadic uses, the word has arguably become an alternative concept, or quasi-concept, essentially distinct from nothingness. This rien is characteristic of language-centred art movements and philosophical currents which are either alternative or marginal, with lettrism and dada being such instances. The rien is a case where the dadaist import in lettrism is particularly obvious.90 In general, the theme of “nothing” was fundamental already in dada, and to some extent, even in German expressionism. “Nothing” was utilised in the French manifestoes of the dada movement as a rhetorical and quasi-philosophical device, especially by Tzara and Francis Picabia.91 This usage has generated interpretations that tend to constrict the rien to nihilism, which is rather inaccurate.92 This is to say that the rien of dada is examined from within a certain philosophical discourse even though the term is too ambiguous for such restriction. This is the case with Isou’s rien as well. Accordingly, the nihilism argument – originally directed towards dada – is derived from a confusion of concepts. As was noted above, philosophy and philosophical nihilism are occupied with the concept of nothingness (néant) rather than rien. Rien, for one, is too versatile 90 Isou clarified his relation to dada in the 1973 essay “Les véritables créateurs et les falsificateurs de dada, su surréalisme et du lettrisme (1965–1973)”. 91 Cf. Forster Die Fülle des Nichts. Richard Sheppard also mentions an unacclaimed dadaist, Albert Chemia, who, in Tunis, applied rien in his manifesto according to “standard” dadaist use. See Sheppard, Richard, Modernism–Dada–Postmodernism, Evanston 2000, 285. 92 This is understandable considering the tendency in mainstream philosophy to identify rien with néant. Rien is more common and colloquial than néant, which is a philosophical and theological concept. It is, however, problematic that the German Nichts can be translated as either rien or néant.



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to be entirely synonymous with néant, since it can appear either as an adverb, pronoun (ne…rien) or noun. The dadaists often utilized this ambiguity in order to refrain from the philosophical use of language calling for a conceptual claritas. Rather, they applied the negative rien without a definite article. From another point of view, the rien can be regarded as an alternative Lebenskonzept. In this approach the linguistic qualities play an equally important role, because the rien negates positive contents, which leads to a kind of “suspended uncertainty”.93 The structural ambiguity of the word is seminal in its conceptual functioning as well. The dadaist use of rien abstains from a systematic philosophy of nihilism, because dada did not want to propagate any idea or formulate any ideal.94 The dadaist rhetoric relating to rien is obviously anti-institutional and anti-ideological but not entirely anti-idealistic, because rien can become a device of negation. Such negation does not constitute an alternative system, but it does constitute an alternative: rien marks a desire for something else, for something more (or more precisely, something infinitely less).95 The desire is for a “reinstatement” of the object although rien is objectless. But how can a conceptual use of language abstain from philosophy? According to Iris Forster, the dadaist application of rien is conceptlessness that is still grasped conceptually. She points out that rien causes a kind of loss of structural integrity, because the concept adheres to a certain middle (die Mitte) between destruction and construction. Hence, it reflects an underlying dadaist attitude: indifference.96 This view epitomises the reluctance of the dadaists to promote any ideology. The middle and the idea of indifference are key in understanding the use of rien by Isou. The themes of indifference and dialectical middle derive from Schöpferische Indifferenz (Creative Indifference, 1918), the magnum opus of the German-Jewish expressionist and philosopher Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946).97 Like Isou’s thinking, his theory makes use of what he regards as a key shortcoming of Hegel’s totalising dialectics. In a nutshell, Hegel bases his dialects on a rigid binary, commonly known as the principle of the excluded middle (Dritte, tiers).98 93 Forster Die Fülle des Nichts, 47. 94 Ibid. 95 Plus rien signifies either “no more” or “more rien”, that is, “more nothing”. 96 Ibid., 47, 50. 97 Friedlaender more or less appropriated Max Stirner’s idea of a “creative nothing” (schöpferischen Nichts) and called it indifference: Friedlaender’s term is a sort of a “neutral nothing”. For a further discussion, see van den Berg, Hubert, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zürich und Berlin, Heidelberg 1999, 356ff. 98 The idea of the excluded middle derives from Aristotelian logic, and the principle is that when one has two contradictory terms, one is right and the other is wrong – there is no middle ground.

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In Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic, 1812–1816), Hegel states that “Etwas ist entweder A oder Nicht-A; es giebt kein Drittes” [Something is either A or not-A; there is no middle].99 Even in this case, Hegel appears a true harbinger of rationalism.100 Friedlaender connects the middle with “nothing”. He highlights the blind spot of dialectics by arguing that difference ist das Inmitten, es ist der schöpferisch Berührungspunkt der unterschiedenen, vereinzelten Erscheinungen. Er ist nichts, das heißt nichts Unterscheidbares. Alles andre Verstehen des Nichts ist Mißverständis. [...] Ohne dieses Neutrum sind Position und Negation wesenlos.101 is the middle, it is the creative point of contact of differentiated, isolated phenomena. It is nothing, that is nothing distinguishable. All other understandings of nothingness is misunderstanding. Without this neuter, position and negation are insubstantial.

Friedlaender argues that the exclusion of the middle in fact renders dialectics unusable. What his approach suggests to the Hegelian dialectics criticised by Isou is poignantly stated by Levinas. He, in a counter-Hegelian manner, clarifies the ambiguity and usefulness of the middle: “Penser le néant et ne pas être, ce n’est pas la même chose. Le tiers exclu, c’est : il y a A et NON A. Notre logique est une logique du tiers exclu” [To think of nothingness and non-being, it is not the same thing. The excluded middle, it is: there is A and NOT A. Our logic is a logic of the excluded middle].102 However, the logic of the middle is not logic in any philosophical sense, but an approach that evades dialectical systems and, therefore, is suitable for Isou’s use. To maintain the middle is a challenge for any kind of theory and poetics. In order to avoid a simplifying and affirmative interpretation of the rien, it should be noted that by repetition the word loses its meaning and the rhetorical structure becomes obscure. For instance, dada manifestoes often repeat the word rien thrice. The threefold repetition derives from rhetoric and poses the problem of what is repeated.103 Isou realised this uniterability and avoided similar repetitions. Yet, this dilemma was realised by Tzara as well. He sheds light on the “véritable portée du rien” [true meaning of nothing] by saying that rien can only 99 Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschaft der Logik, Teddington 2006, 119. 100 Hegel’s “rationalism” demonstrates how he was interpreted in France by Kojève, who disregarded Hegel’s concept of “becoming” (Aufhebung). 101 Friedlaender, Salomo, Schöpferische Indifferenz, Norderstedt 2009, 129. 102 Quoted in Saint-Cheron, Michaël de, De la mémoire à la responsabilité, Paris 2006, 36. 103 The threefold repetition derives from a common rhetorical structure, which usually asserts three options. The first two are inadequate and the third the one the orator encourages to adopt. An anti-rationalist could manifest his or her aim as: “not affirmation, not negation, but radical indifference”.



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express itself as a reflection of individuality, which is why rien is universally valid only through individual use.104 In other words, the individual is foregrounded over universality – which is the only possible approach to rien. The “nothing” that expresses itself only as a reflection of individuality is a somewhat obscure formulation, but it highlights the individual character of rien in Tzara’s use. It is a quasi-concept at best, because it has no universal composition or contents. In other words, rien is a non-identity the contents of which are unique to each individual. The quasi-nature of the concept derives from its non-universal character that challenges universalist modernist philosophies. Following Tzara, the “individualist” rien was further developed by Isou in accordance with his Kabbalah-derived theories. For Isou, rien signifies a “personal nothing” that simultaneously stands for the limitedness of language, similarly to subreality. As noted, Isou’s stance is that not only is language unable to express the subtleties of individual experiences and feelings, but also the relation between language and experiences should be contested altogether. Isou refers explicitly to preceding aesthetics and suggests that lettrism would supplement poetics by the rien. Moreover, he presents a development of poetics, which connects language and “nothing”. For Isou, the rien formed a fixed relationship with the limits of language.105 Rather than being another concept, it encapsulated the idea of a certain “beyond”, which pointed to the inapplicability and insufficiency of institutionalised, ordinary language. Isou interpreted Tzara’s rien as a term signifying the complete devastation of language, whereas he would himself redefine the word in a “constructive” and, perhaps, altruistic sense. This sense is evident in his scheme as follows: T. Tzara[:] destruction du mot pour le RIEN I. Isou[:] l’arrangement du RIEN – LA LETTRE – pour la création de l’anecdote106 T. Tzara: destruction of the word for the sake of NOTHING I. Isou: the arrangement of NOTHING – THE LETTER – for the creation of the anecdote

The most visible renewal is the way Isou links the individual letter with rien. In light of his theory of the unknown, this signifies that each letter is connected to the unknowability of God. This approach is highlighted by the use of the article (le) to accompany rien reveals that it is a noun instead of a mere negative and, thus, it draws attention to ontology. In Tzara’s case, the formulation refers to the 104 Tzara, Tristan, Œuvres complètes, tome 1, Paris 1975, 419f. 105 Isou did not consider rien from the point of view of conceptual historiography, but rather as the result of a certain development in avant-garde literature. 106 Isou Introduction, 43.

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art of detaching the word from its meaning: the repetition of the negative/noun in different contexts renders it ambiguous. According to Forster, the dadaist use of rien negates any positive contents.107 The rien hence ostensibly refers to the limits of language; it is a quasi-concept devoid of specific content. Isou redeems the rien from Tzara, because while preserving its ostensible character, he connects it with the basic lexical unit. Furthermore, Isou suggests that this will enable the formation of poetics based on the “arrangement of the rien” – in other words, centred on the rien. By “anecdote” Isou indeed refers to poetics, the rules by which poetry is formed. Thus his task reads as the application of rien for the creation of a new poetics. Even though Isou’s theory of poetics is fragmentary, the above definition of rien suggests that a new poetics should derive from the “unknown”, the experiential logos that underlines the limits of language.108 The formulation itself is not devoid of obscurity, but Isou’s aim should be taken to be the arrangement of the letters, which do not as such signify anything intelligible or objectifiable. In praxis, the use of permutations is based on the “limit experience” about language, which is marked by the rien. Accordingly, Isou’s permutations are not supposed to endorse any phenomenal reality, as they were to radically differ from it by producing a kind of solipsism: the permutations allow the poet to create a subreality based on individual experiences. In order to emphasise the particularity of an individual, Isou rephrased the aim of lettrist poetry a year later in Introduction: the task was to “écrire les riens”.109 By using the plural form, Isou adopts Tzara’s notion of rien as an accentuation of individuality. The singular form would suggest the superiority of his subreality over that of others or an ontological standpoint, as noted above. However, in recontextualising Tzara’s rien Isou seems to focus only on one of its aspects: his approach portrays Tzara’s rien as a nihilist corrosion of language, an effacement of meaning, even though he and Tzara obviously had the same aim concerning the uniqueness and private nature of experience. This is highlighted by the definite article he assigns to Tzara’s rien. In this light Isou misinterpreted the dadaist use of rien and restricted its ambiguity to a single purpose. From a broader perspective, this is linked with his idea of being the “pioneer of the avantgarde” and the “patricide” it necessitates. 107 Forster Die Fülle des Nichts, 47. 108 The experientiality of the logos refers here to its unattainability by means of rational inquiry – it cannot become an object of thought and hence it remains unknown. However, an experience has the ability to attain some aspect of this unknowability: as the experience of a non-thought. 109 Isou Introduction, 17.



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Even though Isou’s rien is fixed to language his distinguishing of the term from néant is unique. His Jewish background is seminal also with regard to his theories of language and “nothing”. Indeed, religion becomes the definitive watershed, even concerning nothingness. Recalling his antagonism towards Christianity, he stated: “le vide, le néant, le non-être=éléments chrétiens” [the void, nothingness, nonbeing=Christian elements].110 For Isou, néant is something fundamentally Christian that is absent in the Jewish world. In addition, it is the very concept of nothingness applied in Western philosophy that Isou relates to Christianity. Apparently, rien was connected to the functioning of language, whereas néant was more profoundly metaphysical. In an interview with the lettrist Frédérique Devaux Isou concluded that à mesurer […] au-delà de ce rien, il existe un néant plus vaste, le rien du rien en quelque sorte, [par lequel] l’esprit recouvre ses limites raisonnables[.]111 measuring beyond this nothing there is a vaster nothingness, a sort of nothing of nothing, by which the spirit recovers its reasonable limits.

In this sense Isou’s argument is still sober-minded. Nothingness is something that cannot be known, whereas rien is manifested as hesitation, ambiguity and indeterminacy. However, he suggests that it would be possible to proceed past the néant or rien in order to perform a “penetration into the unknown” – a formulation that derives from the Kabbalah.112 The utopian character of this notion became fundamental in lettrism and suggests that rien is regarded as potentially unstable, a quasi-concept at best. The spiritual emphasis Isou put on rien was rather unique, but it reflected his stance in the rien/néant discussion of the early and mid-twentieth century. The focus of his rien-derived poetics is one of the blind spots in Hegelian rationalism. Such indeterminacy was essential, because lettrism sought, like Friedlaender and Tzara had earlier on, to proceed beyond the rigid logic introduced by Hegel’s rationalism.113 Isou was indisputably an anti-rationalist, particularly when Hegel’s dialectics was at issue. During and following the Second World War 110 Isou Agrégation, 283. 111 Devaux, Frédérique, Entretiens avec Isidore Isou, Charlieu 1992, 30. 112 Sabatier, Roland, Le lettrisme: les créations et les créatures, Nice 1989, 36. 113 In the French translation of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, Nichts is translated as rien. However, in Hegel’s thought this rien denotes the absence of a given thing, making it comparable to Sartre’s use of nonbeing. Rien as absence is a rather awkward conception from the point of view examined in this essay but speaks for its diversity of uses. For a further discussion on the Hegelian rien, see Grosos, Philippe, “Critique de la raison pure, remarque sur l’amphibolie des concepts de la réflexion”, in Le néant, 430ff.

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some of Isou’s contemporaries were equally critical of Hegelian philosophy, not least due to its rigorous use of the terms rien and néant. Thinkers critical of Hegel such as Blanchot, Bataille and Levinas all applied rien distinctively in their philosophical and literary works, but still in a similar manner to that of Isou. Accordingly, néant’s metaphysical emphasis was the main reason for abandoning the term. As the three thinkers distanced themselves from “unproblematic” metaphysics and conceptual thinking, they resorted to “nothing” in all its ambiguity. As Blanchot illuminated: “Le néant est encore trop proche de la matière et de la pensée. Le mot RIEN me semble d’avantage convenir” [The nothingness is still too close to matter and thought. The word NOTHING seems to provide a convenient advantage].114 For Blanchot, rien was more convenient than its metaphysical counterpart for the purposes of literature. However, Bataille’s formulation of the matter was more important as he was familiar with Isou’s work and the ideas expressed in Agrégation. He provided the most profound clarification of the predilection for rien: Inutile de dire que ce RIEN a peu de chose à voir avec le néant. Le néant, la métaphysique l’envisage. Le RIEN dont je parle est donnée d’expérience, n’est envisagé que dans la mesure où l’expérience l’implique. Sans doute le métaphysicien peut dire, lui, que ce RIEN est ce qu’il envisage s’il parle de néant. Mais tout le mouvement de ma pensée s’oppose à sa prétention, la réduit à RIEN. Ce mouvement de ma pensée veut qu’à l’instant où ce RIEN devient son objet, il s’arrête, il cesse d’être, laissant la place à l’inconnaissable de l’instant. Bien entendu, j’avoue d’ailleurs que ce RIEN je le valorise, mais le valorisant je n’en fais RIEN.115 Needless to say, this NOTHING has little to do with nothingness. Nothingness is envisaged by metaphysics. The NOTHING which I speak of is given in experience, is envisaged only insofar as experience implies it. Without doubt the metaphysician can say that this NOTHING is what he envisages if he speaks of nothingness. But the movement of my thought opposes his pretence, the reduction to NOTHING. This movement of my thought prefers that at the very moment when this NOTHING becomes its object, it stops, it ceases to be, leaving room for the unknowable of the moment. Of course, I moreover confess that by this I valorise the very NOTHING, but by valorising it I do NOTHING to it.

What is important in relation to Isou’s thinking is that Bataille especially highlights the experiential nature of rien. In Isou’s thought experientiality was the motif for the postulation of subreality. Bataille’s rien also marks a certain limit, but this limit does not mark transcendence in the same sense as néant, but rather the limit of language. For Bataille, the experientiality of rien defies conceptual thinking and, hence, he is faced with the problem of how to express such an 114 Blanchot, Maurice, Misère de la littérature, Paris 1978, 30. 115 Bataille, Georges, Œuvres complètes, tome 8, Paris 1976, 259.



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ineffable experience. Unlike Isou, who developed imaginary and private signs to overcome a similar dilemma, Bataille demands a dissolving of categorical thinking that requires a re-evaluation of language. The radical ambiguity of rien serves this aim. Bataille chooses a route different to that of Isou, but for him rien seems to remain a concept, even though he seeks to redefine it in a manner that would not render it compatible with philosophical discourse. Where Bataille stopped short, Levinas succeeded in this enterprise. He applied rien to designate an ambiguous “nothing” and in this sense it exemplifies what Friedlaender speaks of as the middle. In Levinas’s thought, rien defies conceptualisation, and in this sense it is truly “nothing”. Rien differs from néant in that it is “nothing” as an “ambiguïté du néant et de l’ inconnu” [ambiguity of nothingness and the unknown].116 Hence, the rien conceals itself by failing to be identical with the form in which it presents itself.117 By the same token, the rien is not cognisable in itself, but rather exhibits the inability to capture the presence of the present.118 This is to say that Levinas applies the French negative rien to designate an ambiguous “nothing” instead of nothingness (néant), which Western philosophy has treated almost as an ontological category rather than a true anti-concept. Rien defies conceptualisation and in this sense it is truly “nothing”. Levinas appears to treat nothingness as no-thing-ness, meaning that it is usually considered as something the only quality of which is that it has no qualities. The rien is “nothing” as an ambiguity of nothingness and the unknown.119 Hence, the indeterminacy of rien is akin to the kabbalistic conception of ayin-as-God, which contains a similar confluence of unknowability and “nothing”. In this sense the Levinasian rien is congruent with the Isouian conception. The unknowability of rien is the main focus of both Isou’s and Levinas’s thinking on the topic. Levinas defines rien as that which withholds itself from presence in me.120 At first sight, Levinas seems to name the rien and apply it in philosophical discourse, which would render rien false content. However, the rien conceals itself by failing to be identical with the form in which it presents itself.121 As it cannot be made into an object of thought, the rien signals the impossibility of grasping the present without the aspect of openness. 116 Levinas, Emmanuel, Dieu, la mort et le temps, Paris 2002, 92. 117 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Hague 1961, 192. 118 Kavka, Martin, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Cambridge 2004, 181. 119 In German Franz Rosenzweig’s term Ichts (from ich, me, and Nichts) is structurally somewhat closer to the Levinasian application of rien. 120 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Beyond Intentionality”, in Montefiore, Alan (ed.), Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge 1983, 113. 121 Levinas Totalité, 192.

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The rien evidently leads to the problematics of unknowability. The distinction between the terms rien and néant is equally important for Isou as for Levinas, but Isou adds an ideological dimension to the concept, néant is associated with Christianity and Occidental philosophy. In short, whereas néant denotes a metaphysical nothingness, rien is a more intuitive and experiential nothing – it does not affirm any dualism or goal. In Isou’s thinking, rien signifies that there is an unknown (inconnu) part of being that is dynamically connected with the kabbalistic notion of God as the unknown.122 Hence, rien is a way to connect subjectivity and reconnect language. Any cogito-derived subject seems an impossible totality: the subject is unable to grasp itself completely and there is always a part of being that remains unaccounted for. In this manner, Isou seems to extend the aspect of unknowability to cover the individual subject. One should bear in mind that the mystic approach of divinity signifies a forgetting of identity, not any end of existence. However, the rien is connected, first and foremost, with human subjectivity. Rien is essentially constrained to individual consciousness as it signals individual experiences and the lack of conceptual language. Rien is what withholds itself from being and presents itself as a lack in self-conscious being. This leads to a rather difficult but not unprecedented formulation according to which the unknown in being would be a “ground” for the art which essentially is a search for methods to express this unknown in some way. One of the ways in which one could seek to express the unknown was letter permutations. In the Kabbalah the use of permutations was intended for a reader expected to invent new meanings for the combinations of letters.123 Pansemiotically, no permutation can be regarded as pars pro toto but as something that evokes new things in the universe – things which need not be concrete. With this in mind, the potentiality of permutations in the poetic application of rien is exemplified by Isou’s Sonnet infinitésimal (Infinitesimal Sonnet). The piece plays with the sonnet structure (abab cdcd efe fgg) without providing semantically meaningful content – a suitable approach for lettrism. Moreover, the sonnet shows how a sign system can be utilised to create a poetic form without any specific linguistic content. In this manner it exemplifies Lemaître’s axiom about lettrism being a non-conceptual “language”. Equally, kabbalistic letter combinations could provide nonsensical results even though the letters were replaced in accordance with a language system based on temurah. Accordingly, the temurah expresses the belief that nonexistent letters are as meaningful 122 Isou Créatique, 966. 123 Idel, Moshe, “Infinities of Torah in Kabbalah”, in Hartman, Geoffrey H. and Sanford Budick (eds.), Midrash and Literature, New Haven 1986, 148–149.

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Fig. 4: Isou’s Sonnet infinitesimal exemplifies a poetic use of metacharacters which usually gain a specific meaning in a text and are meaningless individually.

a part of the verse as those that already exist. Here it is comparable to a sonnet structure, because it is the system according to which the individual signs are arranged. What the poem manifests is a “language” that stems from rien as a poetic principle. Yet, simultaneously, the sonnet is also subject to pansemiosis. In this vein, Isou formulated that:

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La chose se transformerait en lettre, c’est-à-dire en élément abstrait ayant une valeur fantomatique envisagée sur un plan étranger à sa réalité concrète.124 The thing would turn into a letter, that is to say, into an abstract element with a phantasmal value considered on an unfamiliar level of its concrete reality.

By adopting the pansemiotic conception of language, Isou connects language with subreality: that which is unfamiliar to physical reality. The “phantasmal” and “unfamiliar” in the excerpt both refer to what is unknown, and what is also preserved as the ambiguous rien because it is not named. Yet in Isou’s thinking the flickering rien encapsulates the positive belief of its attainability, at least for the individual in the quest of penetrating into the unknown. The representation of any “beyond” can be only an indirect unveiling of the limits of language: the representation of the ambiguous rien must happen in a manner in which rien is not identical to itself. For instance, the rien cannot be made known through metaphor, because in this case the metaphor would be without content and no referential relationship could be established. Isou’s rien, designating the “unknown”, marks the limits of language and the phenomenal world. In other words, the “unknown”, rien, is standing in for the “beyond language”. Yet success in expressing the existence of rien requires a failure of language – for example an inability to signify. As Robert Denis has noted, in mystical contemplation language is carried towards the zero degree (le degré zéro) of communication, which is then “divinised”.125 This means that rien designates the “unknown” by standing in for something that cannot be made an object of thought. Hence the unattainable nonphenomenal logos is connected with the Isouian rien, which seeks to communicate only the experience connected to the unattainable: non-thought. Accordingly, Isou’s poetics is a radical departure from conventional poetics and even experimental poetics that is occupied with ordinary language. Isou’s non-meaning-grounding poetics should be based on a rien that is unidentical to what it designates. What the rien designates is experiential and has no reference, because “nothing” has no qualities or existence. Rather, it is “something that is not something”.126 It is unattainable to universalist rational thinking, but here imagination extends the field of inquiry. 124 Isou Mémoires, 43. 125 Denis, Robert, “Glossolalie, langue universelle, poésie sonore”, Langages 23, 95. 126 Salminen, Antti, From Abyss into Nothingness. Five Essays on Paul Celan’s Poetics, dissertation, Tampere 2010, 46. Isou addresses the problem of nothingness explicitly only in relation to silence. According to him, “Il n’existe de silence total. Le silence pur, véritable, est seulement une idée intentionnelle” [There is no total silence. Pure, real, silence is only an intentional idea].



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Whereas Levinas called for being open to the infinite, Isou introduced an aesthetic theory that relied on infinite imagination. He conceived that imagination was infinite in character. According to him, the infinitesimal relieved art of the material artefact and further allowed for the imagination of another “element” that could be nonexistent or possible. The artist could even present impossible frames (châssis impossibles), or anything at all.127 As Isou instructs the reader in his “Manifestes brefs infinitesimaux” (Brief Infinitesimal Manifests, 1963): Dans le cadre de l’art infinitésimal: Léchez le mur, l’air ou le vide; inventez la substance d’un goût neuf, impossible. […] Palpez l’air ou le vide ; inventez une matière tactile neuve, inexistante. […] Respirez l’air ou rien, inventez des parfums inconcevables.128 Under the framework of infinitesimal art: Lick the wall, air or vacuum; invent the substance of a new impossible taste. Feel the air or vacuum; invent a new, non-existent touch material. Breathe the air or rien, invent inconceivable perfumes.

Here, Isou encourages a mode of aesthetic imagination that is severed from the material world, objects and the established mental representations of those objects. By introducing such infinity to aesthetics, Isou extended conventional conceptions of what art could be. Arguably the word “art” here should be bracketed, because Isou is referring to a way of thinking that is not particularly aesthetic. In other words, art based on infinite imagination still requires the correct institutional framework (such as a gallery or a book) to be considered art. Yet, “art” should indeed be used, because it distinguishes imagination from a faculty that is purely rational. As such, there is a likeness between the unknown and imagination in relation to subjectivity. In this context, the rien – seminal in Isou’s poetics – gains a new function. To illustrate this, the infinitesimal thought serves the idea of rien for three reasons. Firstly, because it is devoid of material constraints, such as writing or a book, it does not require or cannot have any kind of representation. Secondly, imagination allows for “surreal” constructions that defy everyday experience and philosophical logic – such as Bergson’s idea of the impossible square circle. This capability readily undermines all mimetic demands for a straightforward emulaHe further refers to Bergson and the problem of nothingness in Heidegger and the phenomenologists. Isou Introduction, 200. 127 Isou, Isidore, Introduction à l’esthétique imaginaire et autres écrits, Paris 1999, 34, 37–39. 128 Isou, Quelques, 8. Isou formulated his “manifests” in the fashion of the playful instructions by artists affiliated with Fluxus, such as Yoko Ono.

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tion of shared reality. Thirdly, the rien eventually draws the limits of imagination, which implies a situation where I am able to imagine that there is “something” I cannot imagine. Here the self-conscious cogito attempts (but to no avail) to grasp an object that does not exist. Yet, I can only affirm the self-conscious recognition of the limit of thinking, beyond which there is: . Non-thought is unthinkable. This is what Isou means by saying that L’élément imaginaire se sauvera sans cesse d’une sphère cohérente, formée de paliers et à travers laquelle on évolue d’une façon rigoureusement compréhensible. Il est le résultat d’une rupture qui fait commencer son domaine au-delà d’un abîme.129 The imaginary element saves itself interminably from a coherent sphere, formed of plateaus and through which one evolves in a rigorously understandable manner. It is the result of a rupture that began its domain beyond an abyss.

The imaginary element rejects the sphere of comprehension and, thus, domestication into the cognisable. More importantly, Isou affirms that infinitesimal art does not first and foremost address the divide between what is real and what is only imaginable, but rather the imaginary element is the very possibility of imagination – that is, the preceding condition that enables the self-reflective and intuitive comprehension of the limits of the intellect. As the rien is experienced by the self-conscious being as a lack, this being is able to reflect on the lack, imagine what he or she lacks. The Kabbalah was afflicted by a similar dilemma. The kabbalists had constantly to be aware of the limitations of intellect. In fact, through contemplative exercises the kabbalists sought to rid themselves of thinking altogether. This process meant that the kabbalist would eventually arrive at the limit of possible human thought and came face to face with “nothing”, ayin. Such interplay between “nothing” and non-thought illustrates that “nothing” cannot be thought about and manifests itself only as ambiguity. Evidently, rien does not establish a coherent representation, but rather illustrates its rupture. The non-conceptual character of rien requires another kind of expression as its ambiguity marks the overlapping of two distinct discourses. In introducing rien into his work, Isou simultaneously introduces literary language to the field of philosophy. Literary language is not constrained the way the language of metaphysics is. Within philosophical discourse, the rien is an anomaly, an intrusion of the literary. However, the rien is not simply a figure that dislocates its object metaphorically, but rather it marks the figuralisation of language in general. It is an instance of what Blanchot called, precisely, literary language. 129 Ibid., 12.



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Literary language puts the significative capabilities of language into question.130 Writing is presented against a backdrop of “nothing”, because it is a “rupture avec le langage entendu comme ce qui représente, et avec le langage entendu comme ce qui reçoit et donne le sens” [rupture with language understood as that which represents, and with language understood as that which receives and gives meaning].131 Words as lexical markings can be repeated independently and, in the end, they are devoid of signified content. Iterability is also at the heart of Isou’s criticism of ordinary language. According to his argument, words cease to signify, and it is peculiar that humans understand each other at all. Going further one can state that language not only objectifies but, in a manner of speaking, eradicates its object. However, literary language leaves the object untouched by virtue of metaphoricity and ambiguity.132 Accordingly, in Blanchotian terms, a word is a non-identity lacking subjective definitions: writing is fundamentally exterior to the subject. For Blanchot the “idéal de la littérature a pu être celui-ci: ne rien dire, parler pour ne rien dire” [ideal of literature could have been this: to say nothing, to speak in order to say nothing].133 By returning to rien as a negative, Blanchot wants to say nothing. Simultaneously, this negative formulation preserves the rien not by saying “nothing” but by clinging to its ambiguity. Later Blanchot described the centrality of this unstable and fleeting word: “Rien, c’est qu’il faut: supporter l’ insupportable rien” [Nothing, this is what is needed: bear the unbearable nothing].134 For him, the rien is at the same time an insupportable burden and an unavoidable necessity. The rien is an instance of the literary that appears unbearable or even impossible when introduced in philosophical discourse. Isou’s poems often take such ambiguity even further than specialised literary language. This is achieved by replacing words with letter permutations, hypergraphics or even mere empty spaces. These examples appear radically distinct from literature, but they all manifest rien, which has a background in literary language. This is to say that rien evades conventional literary practices while func130 For Blanchot, the literary language applied in fiction is ineffective, because it has lost the capability to master objects by its “puissance to say”, that is, to signify. This suggests that literary language is based on a distinct kind of referentiality to conventional language. 131 Blanchot, Maurice, L’entretien infini, Paris 1971, 390. 132 In this sense, Blanchot’s literary language performs the Heideggerian (and Eckhartian) Gelassenheit, a passive relation to what is spoken of, a kind of “releasement” of the object. 133 Blanchot, Maurice, La part du feu, Paris 1949, 314. The theme of “saying nothing” is an important feature in late modernist literature and the philosophy of the so-called linguistic turn. For instance, cf. Beckett, Samuel, Nouvelles et textes pour rien, Paris 1958 and Derrida, Jacques, “Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations”, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris 1987, 535–595. 134 Blanchot, Maurice, Le pas au-delà, Paris 1973, 177.

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tioning the way literary language operates. As such, rien is a cardinal instance of anti-rational poetics. It is a poetical measure in the sense that it highlights a limit between different kinds of discourse even though it lacks contents. The so-called secret writing further highlights the connection of rien and mysticism. It demonstrates that rien is a special – and seminal – case even in lettrist poetics and the general mechanism of lettrist poems is based on the sort of writing, which conceals its potential object.

2.4 Hypergraphics: Twentieth-Century Secret Writing Secrecy is a precondition in the Isouian system: in his poetics, his conception of subjectivity, and the relation between language and rien. As Isou writes with a vocabulary reminiscent of mysticism, “Le judaïsme, c’est l’Homme et son visage secret qui est la fixité dans la perfection” [Judaism, it is Man and his secret face, which is the fixity with perfection].135 Read in the kabbalistic context, the perfection Isou alludes to is linked with the hidden character of the individual and can be attained through successful exercises equipped by the Abulafian Kabbalah. Regarding his own work and persona, Isou stated that “Je garde 90% de mes textes secrets[.] On connaît 10% de ma personnalité quand on a lu mes œuvres publiées…” [I keep 90% of my texts secret. By reading my published works, one knows 10% of my personality].136 He hereby recapitulates the idea of the “hidden” subreality, the makeup of which even lettrist works refuse to reveal. One of the earliest of Isou’s works exhibiting secrecy and hiddenness is his Les journaux des Dieux (The Journal of Gods, 1950, hereafter Journaux), which combines handwriting, pictograms, drawings and Braille script, superimposed in various colours. The resulting combination appears nonsensical, but as all of these elements are communicative, the sense of hidden information is present throughout the book. Journaux depicts the stories of the Hebrew Bible, such as those of Joseph and Jacob. The book contains parts in red Braille, which – according to Isou – are written by God because God is blind. (Ironically, the reader’s visual perception is required, because the Braille is not embossed.) Assigning such a feature to God is rather unique and posits that the individual is free from the omnipresent gaze of God. However, the single characteristic (sight) with which Isou describes God reveals God as visually impaired and, thus, he arrives at a somewhat anthropomorphic characterisation of divinity – God can write but not see. 135 Isou Agrégation, 259. 136 Isou L’héritier, 12.



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Fig. 5: Isou’s first hypergraphic novel Les journaux des Dieux (1950) depicts Biblical stories.

One immediately notes that the images in the stories depict modern milieus, persons and objects, such as a map of Paris, a baguette, a gendarme, a handgun and a toilet seat. The book demonstrates Isou’s remakes of biblical history that he appropriated to the twentieth-century French environs. It is both geographi-

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cally and chronologically far from where the biblical events are regarded to have originally occurred, but it is where he, the potential Messiah, resided. Paris thus becomes a new Jerusalem. However, beyond the superficial imagery there lies secrecy, as the images work as rebuses. They are immediately recognisable to the French reader while the full content with its various connotations is not. Secrecy is also intrinsically related to medieval Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah addressed theological issues of utmost importance, kept within a closed circle of mystic exegetics. Jewish philosophy also dealt with similar issues regarding the limits of the human intellect, but an essential distinction should be made between hidden knowledge (Kabbalah) and unattainable knowledge (philosophy). The means of acquiring knowledge, attached to these poles, are radically different, as mysticism is not limited by rationalism as it is in philosophy. This is to say that in philosophy the unattainability is absolute whereas in the Kabbalah it is contingent. Within Jewish philosophy such limitations are not, however, always clearcut. This is evident in Levinas’s aphoristic statement, according to which “le découvert ne perd pas dans la découverte son mystère, le caché ne se dévoile pas, la nuit ne se disperse pas” [the discovered does not lose its mystery in the discovery, the hidden does not unveil itself, the night is not dispersed].137 Levinas describes that philosophy is incapable of attaining all aspects of the individual consciousness. Isou, for his part, was more straightforward in linking hiddenness with the Kabbalah. As he says, one should not forget that “on agit dans le sens de la grandeur de Dieu, […] sous la direction du révélateur du système des procédés d’invention et de découverte promis par les prophètes de la Thora [one acts in the sense of the greatness of God, under the direction of the one who reveals the system of the processes of invention and discovery promised by the prophets of the Torah].138 His formulation echoes that of Abulafia, who claimed that at the end of time the ranks of the Jews will be attached to the name of God. Furthermore, Abulafia’s idea means that the revealed will be hidden and the hidden revealed.139 In other words, in the context of the olamim, once the unknowable God manifests itself, the current world will become hidden. For Abulafia, it seems, a boundary exists between the olamim, one which does not allow simultaneous access. Hence the secret persists even following such a fundamental change. As Isou noted, secrecy is present throughout his texts, especially in works applying hypergraphics. At first sight they consist of invented signs and seem to function as automorphic letters, where the signifier and the signified are, so to 137 Levinas Totalité, 291. 138 Isou Créatique, 1165. 139 Idel “Le temps”, 119.



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speak, one and the same. However, this is not the case if hypergraphics is conceived as secret writing – in that case the signified is not one with the signifier but rather unattainable. In order to grasp how hypergraphics function as secret writing, one has to take into account their emphasised materiality. As noted above, for Isou hypergraphics deals with the arousal of connotations and pre-linguistic affects, which toy with the reader’s imagination, engaging possible interpretations such that the markings acquire a plenitude of meaning. In this light, invented markings are not based on ciphers nor do they have recognisable resemblance or convention to connect them with pre-linguistic experiences. The effect of hypergraphics is most conspicuous when conventional text is integrated with invented signs. In such cases, invented signs fragment conventional text by means of another medium. I call these interventions visual apostrophes. Besides indicating a missing letter or a word in the text, the original literal meaning of the word apostrophe (Greek: apostrophos “turning away”) is also preserved. In conventional text, the visual apostrophe represents a turn away from conventional notional language that makes room for another medium. However, the visual apostrophe maintains its relation to language, because often the apostrophe is linguistically motivated: the apostrophe can rather straightforwardly replace a word or a letter. Beyond this immediate level, hypergraphics suggests a manifold relation to language. On the one hand, hypergraphics is a form of visual expression, but visual only in the limits imposed by written language. Invented markings tend to have the semblance of signs, because they are monochromatic and appear in contexts where written signification is found. In short, they emulate the conventions of writing. On the other hand, invented markings fragment the text with their apparent lack of meaning. Once grasped in the context of language, the lack of linguistic signification is supplemented by invented markings apparently concealing their meaning. Yet the materiality of hypergraphics arouses a feeling of the presence of the text and of a presence “behind” the text: what do they conceal? Therefore, the more conventional language fails, the more the presence of the unobjectified and unknown is pronounced. Such presence manifests in the following visual apostrophe by Isou: L’individu voulait voir les surfaces dont il parlait visuelle­ment.140

et les calculer

The individual wanted to see the surfaces it spoke of […] and calculate them visually.

140 Isou, Isidore, Amos ou introduction à la métagraphologie, Paris 2000, 20.

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Although the particular apostrophe is not as advanced as those applying hypergraphics, it nevertheless emphasises the co-presence of the visual and the written in the script. No linguistic meaning is lost by the introduction of the black rectangle. Yet its mode of signification is ambivalent. The rectangle may be either a mere self-referential presentation or it may be depicted as representation. In the latter case, the black rectangle is comparable to note clusters in early twentieth-century modernist music.141 As such, the rectangle is a “condensation” of every possible sign superimposed on each other and obliterating individual markings. These different modes of signification are not contradictory. The nature of the visual apostrophe is such that it presents a pause or a cut in the text, it shuns one medium in order to make way for another, but it may leave a trace of what is removed from the first. For example, consider replacing the rectangle with an adverb, such as “automatically” (automatiquement). This supplementation is not linguistically necessary but possible and illustrates how easily the rectangle is interpreted as something other than itself. Therefore, the lack of language or the traces of it are ambiguous in visual apostrophes. Although hypergraphics supposedly refers to what falls outside conventional language, Isou’s theory is in many ways problematic. Due to his utopian attitude he sought to make the incomprehensible palpable by “writing the rien”. Isou was referring to experiences beyond the limits of communication, yet he did not discuss the obvious problem of mediating something unobjectified. The existence of unmediated experiences is debatable, because if we experience something we do not simultaneously conceptually reflect it. Although the possible existence of such experiences is not denied, their direct mediation is certainly impossible, because it would require the objectification of the very experiences one seeks not to objectify. Furthermore, in Isou’s thinking some experiences are unobjectifiable, such as those related to God. Hence, by questioning meaning, lettrist writing undermines the capability of language to correspond to the world it describes. Visual apostrophes indeed criticise the assumption that the individual and experiential could be fully communicated through language. Such examples of visual apostrophes may be called notionless hypergraphics. In this case, the hypergraphics establishes no coherent sign category. Therefore, in notionless hypergraphics the verbal and visual signs do not mingle, but proclaim their autonomy. Notionless hypergraphics cuts the text, opening it to a fullness of meaning. Furthermore, the lack of meaning in the artwork is in itself meaningful, owing to its intentionality. Although hypergraphics challenges the capabilities of writing to serve as a medium and communicate 141 Henry Cowell pioneered the technique in The Tides of Manaunaun (1917). In France, especially Olivier Messiaen applied note clusters in the early 1940s.



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by mediating information, as a medium it is capable of mediating the presence of the absence of the unobjectified in the artwork. Accordingly, Marie-Hélène Montbazet’s term “suggestive signifier” (signifiant suggestif) illustrates the ambiguity of hypergraphics.142 Hypergraphics resembles language but yet is not language: by suggesting a new mode of representation, it annuls the established language without establishing a new one. Moreover, Montbazet’s term applies to the perception of hypergraphics as open-ended representation: there is no guarantee of a referent that exists in the here and now. Her notion suggests on one hand the responsibility of the reader in the reconstruction of signification, and on the other, it emphasises the autonomy of writing – meaning that the script is “writing” for its own sake. In a similar fashion, the kabbalistic notion of secret writing at once both denotes the hiddenness of the experiential information (there is no explicit referent) and reveals the very hiddenness itself (the emphasised materiality of writing). Hence, secret writing is writing at the limit of language. Secret writing was a key method in mysticism, also in Jewish mysticism. In mysticism, as well as in lettrism, language is in crisis, because it cannot perform its most basic function. It entails a general epistemological doubt cast on the efficacy of language as a means of communication.143 For instance, Isou argues that individual experiences are insufficiently mediated by words, which gives rise to a mystical aspect of language by means of the interruption in the flow of information. Accordingly, hypergraphics – Isou’s solution to the problems of language – is formally comparable with Abulafian permutations, owing to their non-epistemological character, and the isomorphism between the two has quasi-religious overtones.144 Pinpointing these overtones is arduous however, insofar as Isou’s relation to mysticism was by no means unambiguous and straightforwardly fathomable. According to Isou, instead of “l’aveugelement mystique (ignorance de Dieu) et […] l’aveuglement nihiliste (négation de Dieu)” [the mystical blindness (ignorance of God) and the nihilistic blindness (negation of God)], the focus of poetic experimentation should lie on lettrist permutations, which are the means of attaining mystical union.145 Blindness is a common metaphor for such a union in the rhetoric 142 Montbazet, Marie-Hélène, Exposé sur les créations de Alain Satié, Paris 2004, 55. 143 Wolfson, Elliot R., Abraham Abulafia – Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Teosophy, and Theurgy, Culver City 2000, 58. 144 Quasi-religious refers here to having some, but equally lacking some other, characteristics of religion. Undoubtedly the avant-garde appropriated textual means of mysticism, but whether, for instance, lettrism is full-fledged mysticism, is disputable. Even though Isou affirms God, the aspect of irony cannot be completely debarred from his theories. 145 Isou Amos, 12.

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of Kabbalah. Yet, here the mystical blindness suggests a kind of degenerate mysticism, which does not denote Kabbalah.146 More generally, Isou did not claim that lettrism would not be a form of mysticism but merely stated which kind of mysticism it was not. This negative affirmation can be further elucidated through a comparative inquiry regarding secrecy between lettrism and the Abulafian Kabbalah. Abulafia’s seminal ‫( חיי העולם הבא‬Life in the World to Come, 1280) explains at length techniques, such as gematria, which reveal divine secrets by comparing certain textual fragments of the Torah and names with one another. He adds that all kabbalists know that every section of writing in the Torah contains things that are comprehensible to some but remain secret to others.147 This formulation does not merely connote personal intuition, but rather in mysticism the secret establishes a community: the secret is reserved for an elite in order to hide it from those unworthy. In other words, kabbalistic secrets were to be disseminated only among the members of a small group and lettrism appears to have adopted a similar attitude. According to Isou, “le secret de la Divinité n’a pas été percé par l’individu réel” [the secret of Divinity has not been pierced by the real individual].148 This means that the “everyday man” was unable to resolve the secret of God. Moreover, as was noted above, Isou longed for a community consisting solely of Jews.149 Such a closed community formed around the secret requires some sort of initiation, as does hypergraphics. This process, however, is seldom made explicit in any thorough way. Hence, it keeps its secret, exemplifying language mysticism. In the context of language mysticism, unattainability and inexpressibility, including the textual techniques connected to them, group together under secrecy. In the case of Isou and Abulafia, secrecy is manifested in the form of secret writing, which resembles written language but is fundamentally incomparable to ordinary language due to its opacity.150 Secret writing invites recognition 146 Isou appears to refer to the Christian Kabbalah, which is a separate theologico-theosophical development from the Jewish Kabbalah. Originally, Christian Renaissance scholars were drawn to the Jewish Kabbalah and utilised its elements in constructing their own theories. For a further discussion, cf. Dan, Joseph, Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and their Christian Interpreters, Harvard 1997. 147 Aboulafia, Abraham, La Vie du monde à venir, trans. Georges Lahy, Roquevaire 2009, 105. 148 Isou, Isidore, “La Création divine, la transformation récente de l’église catholique et la révé­ la­tion messianique”, Lettrisme, 4:5, 6. 149 This view was, however, quickly forsaken as lettrism (as a group of individuals) never was a particularly Jewish movement. The mainstream of members derived from a French Catholic background. 150 Paul Klee’s figurative letters were also based in Kabbalah and he called his “pictorial writing” secret writing (Geheimschrift). For instance, Klee’s letter picture Heavenly Sings over the Fields (Himmelzeichen über dem Feld, 1924) resembles a horisontally opening Torah scroll including actual and pseudo-Hebrew letters. Cf. also Abstract Writing (Abstrakte Schrift, 1931) and



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as writing since its components (black markings on a white background grouped in lines) are immediately associable with text. In short, secret writing provides the appearance of writing, the meaning of which remains unattainable. In practice, secret writing is the action by which “language” is used to communicate something that is beyond expression and formation.151 In the context of language mysticism, such unattainability is usually assigned to God. Religious secrecy and writing are interlinked in language mysticism. Elliot R. Wolfson illustrates this link by noting that The concealment of the secret is dialectically related to its disclosure. [T]he utterance of the mystery [concealed by the secret] is possible because of the inherent impossibility of its being uttered. […] The secret has an ontological referent that is separate from the phenomenal realm and thus transcends the limits of human understanding and modes of conventional discourse.152

Secret is thus a manifestation of unattainability in the phenomenal realm. Wolf­ son’s idea of the secret exemplifies the fundamental ineffability and unattainability of truth – in this case, God. Hence, the secret is pre-constructed rather than being constructed in praxis. Suggesting such pre-constructedness, Wolfson terms the ineffability in language mysticism the “apophatic secret”.153 This notion emphasises the impossibility to attain the contents of the secret, which are essentially hidden. However, the apophatic secret has both a linguistic and an ontological aspect. Apophasis is necessarily linguistic, as it is a characteristic of language and a strategy of rhetoric. The ontological aspect is likewise connected to language, through reference to the intertwining of language and being in Kabbalah via pansemiosis. Due to its thoroughgoing linguistic emphasis, the apophatic secret is suitable for the analysis of secret writing as represented by Isou and Abulafia. Isou entered into the lineage of authors utilising secret writing, such as Joseph Taitazak and Michaux, by stating that “le roman deviendra une écriture

Novel in Secret Writing (Novelle in Geheimschrift, 1935). As Aichele notes, in “deconstructing, revalidating, and reconfiguring the visual properties of historical writing systems, [Klee] was prefiguring the post-World War II activity of the Lettrists. [T]he Lettrist group advocated reforming language through the probing, dismantling, and reinvention of historical letter forms”. Gandelman, Claude, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts, Bloomington 1991, 62–63; Aichele, Porter K., Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, Cambridge 2002, 175, 209. 151 Idel, Moshe, “Hiéroglyphes, clés, énigmes. La vision de G.G. Scholem sur la kabbale: Entre Franz Molitor et Franz Kafka”, Archaevs 7:1–4, 284–285. 152 Wolfson Abulafia, 15. 153 Ibid., 22.

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secrète” [the novel will become secret writing].154 His pseudo-letters evoke the apophatic secret by suggesting the existence of meaning while leaving (the) meaning itself hidden. However, such hiddenness does not unveil the meaninglessness of writing but rather expounds the existence of a secret. In order to be religious or quasi-religious, the secret in Isou’s theory has to be pre-constructed as in Kabbalah. According to Isou, deciphering his novel Journaux, written in secret writing, would be as impossible as the decipherment of the whole of Kabbalah – even though, as he points out, some rabbis claimed to have succeeded in the latter.155 Accordingly, Le roman se sacralise authentiquement. Il acquiert un caractère d’inviolabilité. On appelle ce système de notation  : la ‘Hiérographie’ (écriture sacrée) ou l’acte de sacralisation de l’écriture.156 The novel sacralises itself authentically. It acquires a character of inviolability. This notation system is called: the “Hierography” (sacred writing) or the act of sacralisation of writing.

In this case, too, secret writing has a quasi-religious motivation: in its elementary meaning, sacralisation denotes setting something apart. In this case Journaux is separated from the corpus of preceding avant-garde texts and is joined with, at least on an intentional level, the sacred texts of Judaism. Furthermore, although Isou’s work is modern, it exemplifies a radical form of inexpressibility inspired by medieval practises where writing “seems a subject in its own right but remains theological in implication and attitude”.157 Even though hypergraphics appears to be simply emphasising the materiality of writing, it is inseparable from language mysticism. Hence, the aim to explicate the secret in language mysticism addresses two kinds of openness; medial and ontological. Firstly, the praxis of secret in hypergraphics necessitates a linguistic perspective. In hypergraphics the open-ended signification evokes parapraxis, which neither affirms nor negates (a meaning or the medium). Parapraxis provides an epistemological insight into the issue of secret writing. Secondly, the pre-constructed secret evokes a religious teleological vector. Due to this vector, secret writing is imbued in ontology.

154 Isou Journaux, 175. At this point Isou envisioned secret writing as a poetic method capable of proceeding further than the language collages and portmanteau words of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 155 Ibid., 178. 156 Ibid., 174. 157 Wolosky, Shira, Language Mysticism. The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan, Stanford 1995, 2.



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In lettrism, secret writing assumes concrete qualities, the pictoriality of writing being one of its most obtrusive characteristics. As language seems to cease to signify, its material and visual aspects take the foreground. Hypergraphics utilises the visual appearance of writing by interpolating elements of visual arts into writing.158 Hence, hypergraphics is inherently intermedial.159 However, hypergraphics, as secret writing, undermines its own medium: if hypergraphics mediates, how and what does it mediate? The praxis of hypergraphics must be elaborated in order to discern its quasi-religious features. Hypergraphics both emulates and distorts the conventions of language. It entails what Isou calls “hidden signification” (signification cachée), which illuminates the workings of secret writing in general.160 Firstly, “signification” denotes meaning and affirms hypergraphics as a language-like medium. Secondly, “hidden” pertains to secrecy: the adjective underlines the quality of signification in secret writing. Signification is affirmed but in a way that hides the representational relationship: the existence of a secret is revealed but not the secret itself. In other words, hypergraphics denies access outside of itself, to the object it supposedly or potentially signifies. The signification remains openended. Furthermore, the ontological referent of the secret is nonphenomenalisable and, hence, unobjectifiable. In this sense it is unsurprising that Isou calls the objectifying function of language an “obsolete representation” (représentation passée) by which he emphasises the materiality of hypergraphics and its avant-gardist potential in relation to antecedent poetry.161 Yet again, he seeks to establish lettrism as the vanguard of the avant-garde. In order to further examine the functioning of secret writing, which is simultaneously its inadequacy to function as ordinary language, one has to pinpoint the locus where media coalesce. Irina Rajewsky’s take on intermediality as a kind of Spielraum, leeway and flexibility, stresses the intermedial “space” as a margin 158 In aesthetic terms lettrism considers painting and writing one and the same: “La peinture sera de plus en plus abstraite. Le signe, à travers ses changements mêmes, deviendra un mystère” [The painting will be more and more abstract. The sign, through the same changes, will become a mystery]. Isou, Isidore, Histoire du roman. Des origines au roman hypergraphique et infinitésimal (1944–1989), Paris 1990, 151. 159 According to Irina Rajewsky’s comprehensive definition, intermediality deals with “Medien­ grenzen überschreitenden Phänomenen, die mindestens zwei konventionell als distinkt wahrgenom­ mene Medien involvieren” [Phenomena that cross medial borders, involving at least two media that are perceived as conventional but distinct]. Rajewsky, Irina, Intermedialität, Tübingen and Basel 2002, 199. 160 Isou Introduction, 18. It is noteworthy that secret makes manifest the one who hides something by means of secret. In the case of God’s secret, the secret is considered to be hidden by God and thus God manifests through the secret. 161 Isou Mémoires, 37.

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where multiple rules and syntaxes coincide.162 Secret writing, that undoes its own premises as a medium, cannot be approached with similar affirmative optimism. If anything, in this case the leeway is a lacuna in which semiotic systems do not merely occur simultaneously but are rather subjected to rupture. Without a coherent signification which makes signification identifiable within a given semiotic system (e.g. language, painting), categorical restraints and dichotomies – such as visual art/writing – dissolve.163 The rupture of such a signification in hypergraphics, evoked by secret writing, causes indeterminacy, because the secret is a secret concerning the ability to signify. Do hypergraphics signify? To remain secret, the signification must be withheld and can never be dissolved or disseminated. As an instance of secret writing, hypergraphics establishes parapraxis. Parapraxical writing is a textual technique that results in neither affirmation nor negation, but rather retains to a certain middle producing indeterminacy. In a manner of speaking, parapraxis enables secret writing to hide its meaning without rendering the medium itself meaningless. By neither affirming nor negating, parapraxical writing is an epistemological challenge because it obstructs attempts to conclusively interpret the writing. Therefore, secret writing incorporates a potential meaning due to which it cannot be definitely discarded as a medium. Structurally, parapraxical writing is based on an ambiguity-ridden neither/ nor-structure. Mark C. Taylor utilises the term to signify a failure or a slip.164 In this case the failure is that language does not mediate meaning – at least not in any conventional sense. Moreover, the prefix “para” designates a liquefying of dualisms, such as presence and absence. It signifies “something simultaneously [on] this side of the boundary line, threshold, or margin, and at the same time beyond it”.165 By this definition, the leeway appears as an opening, as a proper interplay between what is interior and exterior. In this case, Isou’s secret writing is simultaneously a language-like medium and a visual and material surface. There is, however, a promise of meaning behind the immediacy of the letter. Moreover, parapraxis functions also according to a both/and-structure. “Para” does not only designate both sides of the boundary but it is the boundary itself. It connects “inside and outside, confusing them with one another, […]

162 See Rajewsky, Irina, Intermediales Erzählen in der italienischen Literatur der Postmoderne, Tübingen 2003, 37. 163 However, also a counterargument can be formed: the disappearance of such limits transfers the choice – of which semiotic system to follow – to the interpreter. 164 Taylor, Mark C., Tears, Albany 1990, 224. 165 Miller, J. Hillis, “The Critic as Host”, Critical Inquiry, 3:3, 441.



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forming an ambiguous transition between one and the other”.166 However, the boundary should not be regarded as a borderline: The leeway is not only ambiguity, but also an opening in which the mélange of signifying systems occurs. In fact, “para” implies the impossibility of drawing any definite limits. Therefore, parapraxical writing cannot involve the inscription of a boundary as Taylor suggests, but rather a comprehensive blurring of boundaries.167 In other words, parapraxical writing is a confluence that maintains ambiguity by not developing into a synthesis. Isou stated that the unification of systems of signification occurring in hypergraphics must not be confused with synthesis.168 Obviously, synthesis would require the identification, and finally, the renunciation of any specific characteristics of a given medium. For instance, any visual abstraction is, as such, incompatible with language, because it undermines the mode of signification present in writing. In other words, synthesis is unable to preserve the ambiguity typical of “para”. Therefore, parapraxical writing merges media in such a way that the merged elements do not fully relinquish their integrity but rather maintain a separation. There occurs no such amalgamation as in the intermedial Spielraum. The incomplete unification is due to “para” that suspends both coherent writing and intermediality. Arguably, parapraxical writing circumvents the basic functions of language (such as naming, objectification, separation and identification) while preserving the apophatic secret. In secret writing language is no longer a transparent medium but rather a bearer of a potential meaning. According to Isou, the unattainability of a letter acquires the place of the object’s unattainability.169 Firstly, the apophatic secret supplants phenomenal reality with language mysticism still retaining a relationship between the two. This is to say that the unattainability characteristic of language mysticism is assigned to a linguistic framework. Isou states not only that language is connected to objects solely by means of signification, but that objects themselves are never touched by language and cognition. Indeed, language never gets through to the thing in question, but rather mediates regardless of its own approximateness and inadequacy. Secondly, Isou posits himself against pure visuality in pertaining to the materiality of writing: in adopting the letter instead of pure abstraction, he retains a relationship with the real world. Yet, by letters Isou appears to designate signs more generally, especially the invented

166 Ibid. 167 See Taylor Tears, 224. 168 Isou Amos, 14. 169 Isou Mémoires, 26.

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ones. Hence, in secret writing “signs” have a potential meaning, which contains a promise that they could be actualised as proper signs.170 Indeed, the potential is a promise of a future meaning. In other words, it is a promise of the eventual disclosure of the secret. However, in any present moment, hypergraphics can be termed notionless, even though it includes the teleological vector. The notionlessness of hypergraphics evokes experiences of ineffability and nonphenomenalisability, which are at the heart of language mysticism. Moreover, hypergraphics keeps its secret regardless of the potential meaning, because this meaning – the promise of a meaning – cannot be actualised in any present moment, but is always yet to come. The apophatic secret denotes uncognisability and the impossibility of rational inquiry, because the referent is beyond knowing. Moreover, in the case of hypergraphics, the secret is not only epistemological but also ontological. As Wolfson’s definition of the secret suggests, there is an ontological realm to which the secret is connected, even though the referent itself is beyond epistemological inquiry. Arguably, this ontological secret is the foundation of Abulafia’s and Isou’s thinking. As parapraxis implies, the secret dispels the dualisms recurring in rational modes of thinking. In this sense the apophatic linguistic secret is similar to the ontological one. The secret evades dualisms by reverting to temporality. It cannot be known, but it shows the unattainable (and nonphenomenalisable) at the temporal limits of the phenomenal world. The secret cannot be noumenal either, because the temporal referent does not exist yet – it cannot be postulated as something but neither is it rien. Such a referent lacks qualities and is utterly beyond cognition. Therefore, the secret is able to maintain the promised meaning by suspending it as meaning-to-come. Accordingly, language mysticism is based on the temporal understanding of meaning, by which secret writing evades binaries. In this vein, Isou underlined the teleology of secret writing by stating that hypergraphics “envoie vers l’avenir un message total” [sends a total message towards the future].171 This is to say that even though the total message is only potentially meaningful before the factual arrival of the future, in secret writing “il y avait l’utilité du secret, le besoin du mystère qui était […] de nature religieuse” [there was the utility of the secret, the need for a mystery that was of religious

170 The problem is that who is making the promise and to whom? In a theo-mystical context, Caputo assigns the “origin” of the promise to a “khoral night”, and this promise is carried in language. Caputo, John D, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Unconditionality, the Coming God and Derrida’s Democracy to Come”, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 4:3, 20. In Isou’s case, due to his affirmation of God, the promise is biblical and a theological pre-construct. 171 Isou Mémoires, 31. Emphasis removed.



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nature].172 By suggesting such a requirement, he refers to the sacralisation of writing. Furthermore, Isou emphasises the divine character of the nonphenomenalisable referent of the secret by calling hypergraphics “sacred writing” (écriture sacrée), with sacred referring to divinity.173 In this case, sacredness denotes the preservation of the referent as uncognisable. Hence, hypergraphics suggests that divinity – the God Isou affirms – lies beyond cognition, which warrants lettrism as language mysticism. This is to say that permutations and hypergraphics, which are characteristically permutative, are teleological within a religious framework. In the religious context, the affirmation of God remodels secrecy and the character of the secret is transformed from linguistic to ontological. In secret writing, as exemplified by Journaux, the secret of signification rests on the author: he can be regarded as holding back the secret. This is to say that Isou’s secret writing is considered as a private language-like coding of meanings even though the medium (hypergraphics) does not establish a signification that is unenclosed for all. In this case, hypergraphics is regarded to reveal its secret only to an elite, in the vein of Kabbalah. However, instead of no mediation occurring, secret writing ostensibly unveils the existence of a secret, and this apophatic secret is the very secret of signification. This is to say that the secret suggests the possibility of a coherent signification. However, the secret cannot be void of contents, because it requires a referent: if “the secret that there is no secret were to be revealed, then there would be no secret to reveal since there would be nothing to conceal”.174 Hence, secret writing discloses an individual experience evoked by the nonphenomenal realm. Yet, within the religious framework the secret is not, so to speak, Isou’s. Rather, though paradoxically, the secret is likewise unattainable for the author – it is not a part of his phenomenal world nor does it establish a signification. Moreover, as God is beyond cognition, the referent is not noumenal but rather radically unattainable due to its pronounced temporality. Furthermore, in the kabbalistic framework the secret reveals an aspect that is not linguistic and epistemological. According to Wolfson, in Abulafian Kabbalah

172 Isou Journaux, 171. 173 Ibid., 174. 174 Wolfson Abulafia, 22–23. Wolfson brushes here the Derridean employment of the secret, which mainly focuses on the secret’s exertion of power, albeit it would be void of contents. Even though Derrida approaches the secret with apophatic language and even from the aspect of “the messianic” (messianism without the Messiah), his endeavour is still on the verges of atheism instead of language mysticism grounded on a pre-constructed secret. For further discussion, see Derrida, Jacques, Passions, Paris 1993; Almond, Ian, “Derrida and the Secret of the Non-secret: On Respiritualising the Profane”, Literature & Theology, 17:4, 457–471.

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secret is the ontological foundation of subjective being.175 In other words, the foundation of being cannot be known, and unknowability is its “modality”. This form of secret undermines any coherent subject: the subject is unable to grasp the contents of the secret and can only attain its existence on an experiential level. Hence, secret evokes an “unexperienced” experience that is irreducible to intentionality.176 In this sense, the secret is related to the effect rien has on the subject. The experientality of both rien and secret writing require the shutting down of a rational consciousness, which simultaneously manifests this action. In addition, the ontological secret withholds something that is unattainable and unknowable within being. It penetrates the constitution of being, which, in Levinasian terms, opens an “otherwise”: it is not a being nor a non-being, but rather a not-yet-being.177 In an atheist framework, the easy if not facile answer is to follow the Derridean statement according to which the secret is that there is no secret: that there is no extra-phenomenological ontological referent. However, here religion supplements philosophy since essentially the existence of such a referent depends on belief. Moreover, any overcoming of the secret does not attest to the unity of being but rather to the union of being and God. As Abulafia states, “Il est moi et Je suis Lui ; il est interdit [impossible] de divulguer cet énoncé de manière plus explicite que cela” [He is me and I am Him; it is forbidden (impossible) to disclose this enunciation in a more explicit manner than this].178 Thus, even in the case of such a union, the limitedness of language sustains the apophatic secret. Therefore, both language and meaning become subject to potentiality. This is to say that in Isou’s case, the potentiality evokes messianic aspirations. Even Abulafia’s work on the secret requires messianic intervention in order for the secret to be disclosed for the individual – it will still be unattainable to language. An intervention that is beyond the present order of thing is required. Only the Messiah will be able to disclose the secret. From this aspect, the Messiah is the one to overcome the very structure of the secret by liquefying the boundary between cognition and the cognitive void. This signifies that the cognitive void is subject, or rather open, to the possibility of change. Hence, the messianic potential is structurally that of the ontological secret. 175 Wolfson Abulafia, 24. 176 Wolfson, Elliot R., “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas”, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14:1, 193–224. 177 The idea of a not-yet-being is essential in Jewish messianism, cf. Kavka Messianism. In particular, Abulafia was well versed in Maimonides’s theory and his ‫( מורה נבוכים‬Guide for the Perplexed, twelfth century), thus also familiar with Maimonidean messianic ideas of nonbeing as not-yet-being. 178 Quoted in Idel, Moshe, Maïmonide et la mystique juive, Paris 1991, 81–82.



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Isou’s messianic inclinations further illustrate his engagement with the Jewish tradition, modern Jewish philosophy and aesthetics. His thought derives from a tradition that complements philosophy in questioning temporality and teleology. Such a supplementation is necessary because lettrist poetics is thoroughly messianic, which means that it cannot be analysed in terms of presence, which is the measure of meaning in philosophy and literary analysis. Therefore, the following chapter examines the messianic qualities of Isou’s thought, their relation to language and the ways in which they are manifest in his poetics.

3 Messianism and Temporal Poetics L’avenir du monde sera joué entre la conception juda­ïque qui croit le bonheur et la finalité humaine et la conception chrétienne qui croit dans la mort, la souffrance. Et qui désire l’abolissement de ce monde.1

3.1 Modern Messianism devant la lettre Any study of Isou and lettrism would be significantly lacking if it neglected to acknowledge the influence of messianism and the focus on temporality therein. The messianism that permeates his thinking takes many of its characteristics directly from Jewish messianism.2 Occasionally Isou even stressed the importance of messianism over Judaism: “je ne crois pas que Jésus-Christ fut le Messie, mais que le salut de l’homme dépend d’une révélation à venir, pensée qui justifie en partie le judaïsme” [I do not believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, but that the salvation of man depends on a revelation to come, a thought that partly justifies Judaism].3 Instead of the already arrived (and deceased) Messiah of Christianity, Isou’s focus lies, in line with Jewish messianism, in the anticipation of the Messiah. The revelation is yet to come, which justifies and motivates his automessianic speculations and teleological endeavours. As he declares, “j’ai trouvé en Isou ce premier besoin de réussite et de perfection : garantie messianique” [I found in Isou that foremost need for success and perfection: messianic guarantee].4 He uses the third person because Isou is not his real name – nor a mere nom de guerre for that matter – but the one used in his messianic enterprise. Hence he takes advantage of the Abulafian Kabbalah with respect to names and the role of 1 Isou Agrégation, 288. “The future of the world will be played between the Jewish conception, which believes in happiness and the human finality, and the Christian conception that believes in death, in suffering. And which desires the abolishment of this world”. 2 Jewish messianic thought developed in German-Jewish philosophy, which is not always discernible from religious speculations. For instance, in some studies the messianic element is not distinguished from nineteenth-century libertarian utopianism. Michael Löwy argues for an elective affinity between the two currents, even though one derives from religion and the other from economic politics and anarchism, cf. Löwy, Michael, Redemption & Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe. A Study in Elective Affinity, London 1988. For the artistic appropriation of Jewish Messianism in German expressionism, see Liska “Endgames”. 3 Isou, Isidore, Quelques anciens manifestes lettristes et esthapeiristes (1960–1963), Paris 1967, 2. Emphasis added. 4 Isou Agrégation, 292.



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proper names in rabbinic thought. According to his reasoning, because there has been no other Isou, the name itself embodies a latent creative potency. The messianic mindset, which is a mode of thinking that is subject to openness towards the future, runs through Isou’s theoretical writings. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s it is firmly linked with Jewish thought. Isou did not only allude to Jewish messianism but also made use of its innovations in his literary pieces. Every kind of messianic progress in Isou’s thinking is connected fundamentally to religiousness and ethnicity. The coinage “Je nomme Juif tout ce qui aide l’avance du monde” [I name as Jewish anything which assists the advance of the world] redefines the word “Jewish” in terms of, seemingly secular, creative activity.5 However, this can also signify the advancement from this world to the messianic future. Isou further characterises the term in a more specific manner: “Il n’y a rien qui, en étant progrès, ne soit pas juif, car cela hâte l’avenir, le nôtre[.] Le rôle des Juifs c’est […] de créer Dieu dans le monde”. [There is nothing that, being progress, is not Jewish, as this hastens our future. The role of the Jews is to create God in the world].6 Isou plays here with the modern belief in progress and the desire to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and thus redemption.7 The notion of “creating God in the world” crystallises the starting point of Isou’s messianic undertaking: it is a protest against a world that is regarded as completed and irreversible. In general, the importance of messianism in Jewish thought correlates with occurrences of crisis, persecutions and pogroms throughout history. In times of oppression, messianic anticipation has provided a sense of futurity and hope for the Jewish people. Isou identified this hope with Jewish messianism.8 The most important aspect of Jewish messianism entails a transcendence of material history: the consolation provided by hope derives from the overturning and vitiating of power structures, be they political, economical, or religious. Amongst the practicers of messianism is a formidable will to destabilise the status quo. 5 Ibid., 280. Moreover, Isou adopts no essentialist ideas of Jewishness that would derive from tradition. 6 Ibid., 277. 7 In Judaism there are various overlapping and controversial attitudes concerning the hastening of the arrival of the Messiah. These range from antinomic activities (such as intentionally breaking the Halakha, the Jewish law) to views held by religious Zionists which necessitate the reclaiming of ancestral homelands (located in modern-day Israel and its environs). For a further discussion, see Ya’ocov, Yehoiakin ben, Concepts of Messiah: A Study of the Messianic Concepts of Islam, Judaism, Messianic Judaism, Christianity, Bloomington 2012. 8 Hope was identified with Judaism in particular, because Isou regarded Christianity as a religion of death since, in his view, Jesus had already arrived and died. Cf. Lemaître, Maurice, Isidore Isou, Paris 1954, 9.

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The dissolving of such authoritarian societal structures can be characterised as anarchy even though the teleologies of anarchism and messianism differ radically.9 In this broad sense the appeal of messianism to modern Jewish thinkers, even secular ones, is wholly intelligible.10 Messianic thinking justifies the desire for a change beyond current ideologies such as Marxism or socialist utopianism. In Jewish messianism the visions of future focus on either space or time. Scholem emphasises the importance of differentiating between ‫( עתיד לבא‬atid la-vo), which denotes the future and becoming, and ‫( עולם הבא‬olam ha-ba) that designates a world-to-come.11 The first connotes messianic time whereas the latter is a realm of a manifest God. Based on these, Scholem discerns two kinds of messianism, apocalyptic and mystic. Apocalyptic messianism amalgamates messianic time and the world-to-come by positing the Messiah at the end of days. The result is an empiric future. In the second mode there is no apocalyptic event but a process of cleansing the soul and an inner wandering. In this variant messianic time and the world-to-come remain separate.12 However, Scholem’s typology of messianism is constrictive and often the two aspects of messianic future were combined without any apocalyptic event.13 In 9 Jewish messianism entails antinomies such as transgressive behaviour on the behalf of the Messiah. The motivation for the transgression of Jewish law in the later Kabbalah was to add to the state of fallenness and to hasten redemption by virtue of these immoral actions. Cf. Bradley, Arthur and Paul Fletcher, The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, Abingdon and New York 2011. For a broader discussion on the revolutionary tendencies amongst Jews involved in the avant-garde, cf. Sjöberg, Sami, “Literaturrevolution in Continental Jewish Aesthetics”, Arcadia. Zeitschrift für literarische Kultur 50:1. 10 As Anderson acknowledges, German expressionists adopted elements derived from traditional Jewish messianism and developed their own version of theology. Anderson, Lisa Marie, German Expressionism and the Messianism of a Generation, Amsterdam and New York 2011, 16–17. 11 Scholem, Gershom, Tagebücher nebst Aufsätzen und Entwürfen bis 1923 (1917–1923), Frankfurt am Main 2000, 380. In preceding literature these concepts were often misleadingly treated as synonymic. 12 Ibid., 380–381. 13 Of the twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars, Scholem was the one who, especially in his late works, stressed the apocalyptic quality of Jewish messianism and underplayed the personal aspect of messianism. His limited view has since been contested as it serves mainly the purposes of his own project of Jewish historiography. In fact, the majority of the Kabbalah assigns only a minor role to apocalyptic scenarios. Given that some key modern thinkers, such as Benjamin, depended on Scholem’s insights on the tradition of Jewish mysticism and messianism, the apocalyptic conception of messianism became unjustifiably potent among German-Jewish scholars during the interwar period. Hence, it is interesting to notice that Isou’s post-war messianism is devoid of such influences and lacks this apocalyptic element. Isou seems rather to understand redemption in developmental terms as opposed to a rupture. More importantly, this emphasises his independence from the German-Jewish study of Kabbalah and suggests a



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this sense, the twofoldedness can be understood as emphasising a particular place (akin to paradise) or a messianic age that centres on the perfection of the world we currently inhabit. Hence it should not be confused with the Christian idea of afterlife. The perfection of the world often entails a radical change in the present world. In other words, messianic thinkers were agents in the same history they imagined transcending. However, this perfection should not be regarded as a straightforwardly apocalyptic event, but rather through the idea that even the smallest gesture may “mend” the world and bring about the messianic age.14 What the key gesture is cannot be known in advance. This is demonstrated by the structure of possibility, the “not yet”, which is a temporal suspension between the present moment and the eternality of the future. In other words, the possibility is the dynamics of a lack that implies fulfilment or supplementation. Such a stand illustrates a philosophy of possibles suggested by Christian Miquel: Les forms à-venir n’existant pas encore de nos jours, rêvées, fantasmées ou soigneusement élaborées, sont en effet autant de possibles non encore déterminés. La philosophie des possibles, pose que rien n’est prédonné, tout est toujours possible et ouvert à de nouvelles formes, non encore imaginées.15 The forms to come, which do not exist yet, dreamed, fantasised or carefully elaborated, are indeed all possible and not yet determined. The philosophy of the possibles asserts that nothing is pre-given, all is always possible and open to new forms, not yet imagined.

This temporal suspension causes open-endedness. However, Miquel’s definition is limited because it discusses “forms to come”, which implies noumenality in the Kantian sense of the term, in other words, some kind of preconception of these forms.16 However, the “to come” cannot be postulated as an object of thought. The messianic vector lacks all intentionality, since logos/telos (God, Messiah) is unattainable in any present moment. Particularly interesting in this context is the messianic visions of Levinas, which – like those of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig – asserts a teleologi-

direct contact with the original kabbalistic texts in the yeshiva during the 1930s, even though the exact curriculum remains unknown. This further suggests that Isou’s messianism indeed had it roots in the Romanian Jewish tradition rather than in Western Jewish philosophy and secular art. 14 The Hebrew term for mending the world is tikkun olam. For a further discussion cf. Shatz, David, Chaim Isaac Waxman and Nathan J. Diament (eds.), Tikkun Olam: Social Responsibility in Jewish Thought and Law, Lanham 2005. 15 Miquel, Christian, La pensée du rien: petit traité de nontologie, nihilisme et sagesse, Paris 2007, 58–59. 16 In Kantian thought noumena are intelligent existences independent of sense perception. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2. Auflage, Norderstedt 2009, 118ff.

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cal vector of existence. It entails openness to the infinity of the future instead of any future that would actually arrive, something called messianic anticipation. Because of this anticipation, based on the promise of the Messiah, ontology (of presence) proves to be inadequate, requiring messianic faith as its supplement. Correspondigly, in Isou’s paradilogy the idea of redemption is composed of the “attente du Messie qui […] indiquerait ainsi les voies d’accès au Paradis, ou à une société de joie perpétuelle” [anticipation of the Messiah who would indicate the entry paths to Paradise or to a society of perpetual joy].17 In accordance with Jewish messianism, he assigns the capability of fulfilling the world to the Messiah. Even though Isou stresses the anticipation and the importance of the Messiah, he does not exclude his own messianicity. Yet it is clear that only the Messiah has the means necessary to actualise the promised future. The nature of this future is somewhat ambiguous: even though Paradise refers to the world-tocome, the “society of perpetual joy” may either be a synonym for it or designate messianic time. This indeterminateness seems to be intentional for Isou, or, it may simply reflect an inconclusiveness concerning how these aspects intermingle. Either way, his messianic desire is centred on the actualisation of the Messiah and the redemption that follows. In contrast to Isou’s messianic view, secular utopian versions of the world-tocome concentrate on the liquefaction of political and economical constraints of the present world as they envision a change through revolution, which is akin but not identical to the messianic event.18 Naturally, secular visions are devoid of the divine element and the idea of perfection is less important than reimagining the current state of affairs, so to speak. Another discrepancy between the messianic and utopian versions of teleological aims is the figure of the Messiah. The latter of these versions is mainly concentrated on change as a matter of community whereas the former requires the individual Messiah.19

17 Isou, Isidore, “La Création divine, la transformation récente de l’église catholique et la révélation messianique”, Lettrisme 4:5, 1972, 8–9. Emphasis removed. 18 Russell Jacoby suggests an alternative way to categorise secular messianic thinkers. According to him, there are “iconoclastic utopians” who “dream of a superior society” and “blueprint utopians” who plan meticulously what the future society would look like. Scholem, Bloch and Benjamin, and even Isou to some extent, would all fall in the first category. They were simultaneously immersed in German romanticism as well as medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides – acknowledging his inability to depict God. Jacoby, Russell, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, New York 2005, xiv–xv, 122–123, 133. Jacoby’s typology is, however, inadequate in terms of accounting for any religious influence of messianism and the genealogy of the olam haba in these thinkers. 19 Modern messianisms can be characterised as messianisms lacking the Messiah, which Derridean scholars call “messianic”. Cf. Derrida, Jacques, Spectres de Marx, Paris 1993.



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In classical Jewish messianism the Messiah, the anonymous human, is either an exterior or an interior one. Until the twelfth century, the Messiah was depicted as a particular person that had been the Messiah throughout his life without revealing himself, but who is nevertheless aware of his messianicity. Messianic anticipation thus entailed that this person would eventually reveal himself as the Messiah and function as a catalyst for the messianic event, eschaton. The anonymity of this figure spurred messianic speculations and numerous people were recognised as messiahs.20 The belief in the coming of the Messiah runs through medieval Kabbalah.21 In addition to his influence on Isou, Abulafia is an important figure in the history of messianism. His system represents a turning point in messianic speculation in general and in kabbalistic messianism in particular. For Abulafia, the idea of the Messiah as a historical person was meaningless. Instead, he promoted a view that transferred the idea of the Messiah from an external divine agent into an individual one. According to Abulafia, the Messiah should not be regarded as some other person but rather as a dormant quality in each person – given that the messianicity of a person would eventually successfully manifest itself.22 Unlike the previous understanding of a personal Messiah who merely concealed his divine character, in the Abulafian interpretation, being an agent is a quiescent feature of the individual. Abulafia’s definition is circular, because the postulated messianic characteristic of a person can only be affirmed a posteriori. However, it does not affect the potentiality, which is directed towards a future actualisation. Abulafia’s revolutionary notion was the amalgamation of the messianic potential and the messianic figure into an individual quality. Given the groundbreaking nature of Abulafia’s notion of the Messiah, he was able to redirect messianic speculation and rephrase it as an automessianic claim. In fact, he was the first kabbalist to proclaim that he was, indeed, himself the Messiah.23 The situation Abulafia faced was novel: instead of conceiving the Messiah as someone other, he became concerned with his own messianicity, a potential he 20 Consider early figures such as Menahem ben Judah and Simon bar Kokhba. For a further account, cf. Mandel, Yankel, Dictionnaire des Messies juifs, Paris 2009. Perhaps the prime example of an exploitative automessianic figure is the seventeenth-century kabbalist and rabbi Sabbatai Zevi, whose culminative antinomic act was to espouse a Torah scroll. 21 Buber accounts for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which, according to him, allotted the Kabbalah “den großen messianischen Zug” [the great messianic train]. Buber, Martin, Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman, Frankfurt am Main 1906,10. 22 Idel, Moshe, “Multiple Forms of Redemption in Kabbalah and Hasidism”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 101:1, 36. 23 Mandel Dictionnaire, 71. By virtue of this formulation, Abulafia’s thinking is echoed in certain modern Jewish conceptions of being, such as in Levinasian thought.

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designated as “unknown”.24 For Abulafia, the inner unknown Messiah was akin to otherness. He came face to face with the unknowability within, which would relentlessly resist attempts at domestication into the known and cognisable.25 Abulafia’s theories reveal the kabbalistic elements, which Isou appropriated. However, looking at Abulafian theories alone is insufficient because Isou also takes into account the historical development of Jewish messianism. Messianic visions succeeding Abulafia began to reorient themselves so as to better comply with emerging rationalism. Another turn in the evolution of Jewish messianism occurred during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Following the appearance of numerous would-be messiahs between the thirteenth and late seventeenth century, Jewish messianism began to reorient itself away from the idea of an anthropocentric Messiah.26 In modern times, messianism drifted ever closer to secular modes of thought. Beginning roughly at the end of the eighteenth century, such tendency was shown, for instance, by Haskalah that termed its mission – to enlighten the Jewish people – “messianic”.27 This appropriation illustrates how common the messianic rhetoric was in the shtetl, because even the proponents of Enlightenment fell back on such a characterisation in order to ensure the allure and positive reception of their message. Symptomatically, during the nineteenth century, the legacy of Jewish messianic movements began to be associated with secular doctrines, including utopian socialism, bundism and anarchism. At the beginning of the twentieth century Jewish messianism was already distinctly secular. By this time, secular doctrines had replaced God with man both at the beginning and end of history. The secularisation of messianic ideas resulted from insights in contemporary philosophy, among other factors. Jewish intellectuals, such as the German expressionists, adopted Nietzsche’s “Death of God” argument.28 Nietzsche’s contribution to Jewish messianism was that God was no longer considered the guarantor of the end of history and redemption. The resulting metaphysical void was replaced with a messianic structure that lacked the divine aspect. Naturally, the hope for a better future did not dissipate with the 24 Cf. Abulafia, Abraham, La vie du monde à venir, trans. Georges Lahy, Roquevaire 2009. 25 I will return to the Janus character of the inner Messiah, but it is necessary to acknowledge already here the problematics of Abulafia’s thinking regarding the issue and its relatedness to modern Jewish discussions on the concepts of being and otherness. 26 Illustrating this, Leopold Zunz, the founder of Wissenschaft des Judentums, called the revolutions of 1848 as the Messiah. Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel, “Messianic Movements”, in Berenbaum, Michael and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica, Detroit 2007, 121. 27 Ibid. See also Lederhendler, Eli, “Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric in the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism”, in Frankel, Jonathan (ed.), Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, New York and Oxford, 14–33. 28 Anderson German Expressionism, 28–29.



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arrival of the modern period. During this time, messianism did not completely reinvent itself as much as it perpetuated itself – in the form of a mindset – in a new secular framework.29 In addition to the metaphysical revolutions of the nineteenth century, political and economical ones also played a part in the development of Jewish messianism. Buber, himself a Zionist, accounted for the secular recontextualisation of messianism by stating that Jews were active in revolutionary movements due to their ambivalent relationship with the state and the critique thereof, which stemmed from the Jewish messianic legacy.30 In particular, utopian leftism echoed some of the basic tenets of Jewish messianism, such as the idea of a future world, recuperating them and downplaying the aspects of faith and personal maturation paving the way for the messianic event.31 Modern Jewish thought called for a new evaluation of tradition, in the sense that it represents a time “beyond”, or at least other than, the time of history, in which man is regarded purely as a mere historical being. Modern Jewish thinkers, through their particular experience of the twentieth century, were uniquely predisposed to this resistance.32 The status of Jewish messianism in the early twentieth century elucidates the particularity of Isou’s messianic theories. In order to understand the full calibre of Isou’s messianic thinking and his position in the tradition of Jewish messianism, it is necessary to focus on the modes of Jewish messianism during the interwar period in greater detail. In France, Jewish messianism was identified with the revolution of 1789, which had brought about a more egalitarian society. The task of the Jewish Messiah who would restore the nation of Israel for the Hebrew people was seen in direct relation to the recreation of France for the French. Moreover, as already noted above, most Saint-Simonian socialists were symphatetic to the cause of Jewish messianism.33 However, northern Romania remained until late within the 29 One can debate whether secular messianism, which is structurally homological with religious messianism, should be regarded as Jewish messianism or “messianic” in the Derridean sense. 30 Isou regarded Buber, as well as his early role model Zissu, as Hasidim and was therefore sceptical regarding their theories. For a further discussion on Jewish leftism deriving from Eastern Europe, cf. Izrine, Jean-Marc, Les libertaires du Yiddishland, Toulouse 1998. 31 Isou’s relation to secular leftist thought was anything but straightforward. According to him, Marx was Christian when being a historian, but Jewish when he envisioned a terrestrial happiness or dreamed about the eternality of men. Isou Agrégation, 284. However, Isou’s critique should be regarded through the strict opposition he establishes between Judaism and Christianity. 32 Bouretz, Pierre, Témoins du futur, Paris 2003, 11. 33 Wistrich, Robert S., From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel, Lincoln, 195; Jaher, Frederic Cople, The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State Formation, and the Liberal Paradigm in America and in France, Princeton, 81.

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scope of German and Hasidic influence, which is why the development of German-Jewish messianic ideals echoes in Isou’s works. Secular messianism was particularly potent among the (assimilated) German-Jewish intelligentsia. The return to Jewish messianism among German-Jewish leftists served a double aim. It worked as a “reflection figure” (Reflexionsfigur) for the Jewish identity discourse and contained readily available mindsets (Denkfiguren) for more general theoretical formations.34 In this respect, two German-Jewish philosophers of the interwar period prevail: Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, whose theories are less extravagant than those of Isou. Even though neither is outright present in Isou’s early works, their legacy is apparent in Isou’s theories and paved the way for them. Both of these German thinkers believed in a kind of redemption of culture that would affect and eventually dissolve or, at least, renew the society. In Bloch’s and Benjamin’s theories, the messianic should be regarded as a particular mindset through which they combined the elements of a theory of language, political theory and history of philosophy with Judaism.35 Merging these various aspects, Bloch’s early chef-d’œuvre, Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918), exemplifies modernist revolutionary ideas and straightforward utopianism. Bloch assigns to art and philosophy the power to work against the horrors of the modern era, such as war, and, ultimately, regards these disciplines as a foretaste of the messianic world-to-come. This conception is echoed in Isou’s ideas concerning the messianic qualities of art, especially poetry that could affect the future between individuals and divinity.36 Yet, as noted, in secular messianism subjectivity had been placed centre stage by the death of God. For Bloch, messianic desire betokens an insufficiency of the self: it is the reluctance to remain entirely within the confines of oneself and one’s own subjectivity.37 This is to say that the desire is to attain utopia as a community. Already here Bloch evokes a prominent sense of futurity. In a more meticulous manner, Bloch’s ideas suggest that to “create utopia is to turn one’s desire outward, to diverge radically from that which already exists”.38 In other words, the focus of attention should be drawn away from the present. The desire is already temporal as its object is projected into the future. Despite of the metaphysical void left by the absent God, Bloch conceives of humankind as open to the messianic time. The openness enables a move beyond art and philos34 Dubbels, Elke, Figuren des Messianischen in Schriften deutsch-jüdischer Intellektueller 1900– 1933, Berlin and Boston 2011, 415. 35 Ibid., 16. 36 Yvan Goll’s late poetry presents a similar tendency, cf. Sjöberg 2015b. 37 Bloch, Ernst, Geist der Utopie, Frankfurt am Main 1971, 386. 38 Anderson German Expressionism, 41.



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ophy, to “der Messias, die Apokalypse […] das Apriori aller Politik und Kultur” [the Messiah, the apocalypse, the a priori of all politics and culture].39 Messianism sets the undertone of Bloch’s utopian theory. His apparent recourse to Judaism is due to his goal of configuring the future revolutionary collective through messianism.40 He does not, however, go as far as Isou in theorising how this Jewish Gemeinschaft should be constructed. In this light, it is not surprising that in Bloch’s thinking Judaism symbolises first and foremost a quality of mankind, its dynamic becoming. In this respect Bloch is an apparent predecessor of Isou who parallels the idea of progress with Judaism. Messianic hope was fundamental to the visions of both, which exemplifies the anticipation and becoming. To describe this becoming, Bloch conceived the idea of not-yet (Noch-Nicht), which is more of a mindset than a mere concept.41 This not-yet concerns everything that has not actualised its potential. The yet unrealised potential also defines the present self in its actions that are directed towards a future perfection – the eschaton or something similar. In Bloch’s utopianism the not-yet is a sign for the utopian world-to-come. This world is, however, not that of the religious (olam haba) but rather a secular one of the ethically responsible human being. As the idea of the not-yet suggests, that what is possible is what is not yet actual. This describes the structure of the concept of utopia as utopos: it is no place yet, but in some cases it is a possible world. In addition to the material utopia, Bloch includes ideological facets in his seminal not-yet. In Geist der Utopie, he divides the concept into two aspects, those of not-yet-conscious and not-yet-become, the former being the prominent source of utopian impulses. The not-yet-conscious cannot, however, be an ontological category because it is the subjective correlate of the not-yet-become that refers to material reality.42 Here the Blochian subject reaches out beyond itself by the unknowability embedded in the idea of the not-yet-conscious. Hence the not-yet-conscious is in a subordinate relation to the actual material utopia. The subject wishing to overcome its own boundaries is fundamental in Isou’s aesthetics, as the preceding chapters illustrate. This desire becomes linked with the Blochian not-yet once it is inserted into a messianic framework. This elucidates Bloch’s previously mentioned ideas concerning art. According to Bloch, aesthetics bears the primary transcendent experience (Transzendenzerfahrung) of

39 Bloch Geist, 433. 40 Dubbels Figuren, 294. 41 Ibid., 360. 42 Bloch Geist, 331

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the not-yet-conscious, which is unknown or not-yet-known.43 This transcendent experience is contained in the German Noch-Nicht that can be apprehended both as a not-yet, stressing an expected future actuality, and as a lack or absence in the present.44 Such formulation exemplifies the structure of the not-yet in Jewish thinking: the not-yet projects into the future that which eludes definition and cognition in the present. Bloch describes this unknowability as the “metaphysics of our darkness” (Metaphysik unseres Dunkels), by which he means that the subject cannot experience and occupy itself, therefore only its immediate past is present to itself.45 Bloch suggests that there is no immediate experience in the Isouian sense, because a delay will always remain between the experience and the conscious refletion of this experience.46 In order to overcome the temporal constraint of presence, the subject must reach beyond its own boundaries. According to Elke Dubbels, Bloch used the language of Jewish messianism as dominant metaphorically motivated symbolic language. However, in the case of metaphorically motivated symbols, the connection between the symbol and symbolised appears to be contingent.47 From such a point of view, the Messiah is an empty metaphor lacking its object. One can then pose the question: where does the rupture of the organic connection between the symbol and its object derive from? To answer the question, which is equally relevant to Isou, it is necessary to consider Benjamin’s conception of language. Where Bloch assigned a key role to art and philosophy in his messianic quest, Benjamin’s messianism links a theory of language with the philosophy of religion. In Benjamin’s thought, the two are linked by the concept of revelation (Offenbarung).48 For Benjamin, the focal point of contact is language, because the encounter of the expressible and the inex43 Dubbels Figuren, 152. The “not-yet-known” signifies either a postulation or seeing an effect take place without knowing its cause. 44 Levitas, Ruth, The Concept of Utopia, Hemel Hempstead 1990, 88. 45 Bloch Geist, 372–373. 46 In this sense, Bloch’s formulation resembles the idea of messianic time in Agamben’s thought for whom messianic time means the delay occurring between temporal experience and the spatialisation of time. See Agamben, Giorgio, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford 2005, 67. 47 Dubbels Figuren, 346. Such an approach to language presents a departure from Isou’s messianic language that is devoid of metaphor due to its entanglement with pansemiosis. However, the disunity between the subject and divinity needs to be thematised, which requires accounting for according to Benjamianian theory of language. 48 In Benjamin’s thought, revelation is such a disclosure of the secret that maintains certain unknowability. For Benjamin, non-intentional truth is not an unveiling (of truth) that would destroy the mystery but rather a revelation that “does justice” to it. In other words, revelation does not signify or refer but affirms itself by the fact that it is in force. For a further discussion, see



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pressible happens within the limits of language. Benjamin remains in the sphere of cognition, which provides the basis for language, and is unwilling to exceed its limits. He seems reluctant to imagine any “beyond”. The messianic pursuit is to resolve the clash between the antipodes and so Benjamin forms a genealogy of language in order to advocate the importance and necessity of the messianic “mission”. According to this genealogy, mankind originally received language from God and the language of Creation is the very essence of humanity. Benjamin calls this language paradiesische Sprache, paradisiacal language, which maintained the unity between God and humans. However, this divine language was demolished by the Fall and human language was introduced instead.49 For Benjamin, human language is a continuous reminder of disunity with God. As such, human language can have no part in the creative infinity of the divine word and, for humans, language has become simply a medium. According to Benjamin, the messianic task is the rehabilitation of the unity between humankind and God, so language (and literature) became emphasised in his theory. Unsurprisingly, numerous self-fashioned creator-messiahs surfaced in Benjamin’s wake.50 The romanticist idea of a creator-messiah enjoyed a prolongation in expressionism where literature was assigned redemptive powers. Isou did not, however, assume the idea in the form in which it had been put forward by expressionism, but rather emphasised the perseverance towards and the eventual unity with divinity. Working against the persuasiveness of secular Jewish philosophy and art of his time, Isou redeems God by assigning God the most fundamental position in his theory: the unknown. In order not to suggest that the individual could have a straightforward cognitive contact with God, which was regarded impossible in the Jewish tradition, Isou characterises God in a negative, apophatic manner. Accordingly, Isou depicted the Jewish God as the centre of unknowing around which the world is constructed. By positing God as the unknown, he states that God is beyond rational inquiry and the cognitive faculties of man. In addition to the apophatic quality of God, Isou describes a process of world-making, which should be here understood as subjecting all creative efforts to the superior unknowability of God.

Hagestedt, Jens, Reine Sprache: Walter Benjamins frühe Sprachphilosophie, Frankfurt am Main 2004, 42–44. 49 Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2, Frankfurt am Main 1977, 149. 50 Benjamin’s theory has been criticised for its romanticist input as his conception of Kabbalah was derived from German romantics. The reformulation of Kabbalah by writers such as Hamann, Schlegel and Novalis was influential in Benjamin’s thinking and the base of his mystical conceptualisations lies in this so-called false Kabbalah. For a further discussion, see Goodman-Thau, Eveline (ed.) et al, Kabbala und Romantik, Tübingen 1994.

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Isou’s description of the unknowability of God derives from the Jewish tradition. The Jewish God is invisible, abstract and inconceivable. This God lacks definition altogether – even the names of God are hidden.51 In the Kabbalah, the absence of God is derived from the myth of creation, where the present world is apprehended as radically distinct from God.52 As a result, God cannot be or become present in this world, which, however, does not signal non-existence or any Nietzschean thanatology of divinity. All in all, the Jewish starting point is the self-concealment of God.53 As such, any direct contact with divinity is precluded. Regarding the Jewish God, there is a reminder of Bloch’s not-yet-conscious in Isou’s formulation of God. In a word, Isou’s theory is based on a transcendental experience, or to be exact, an experience about the unknown, and this experience opens the way to a restored unity. This unknown is, paradoxically, the “primary impulse”, meaning and reason for everything knowable, rational and analytical. However, as rationalism seemed over-optimistic as to its abilities to describe the world, Isou recognised a need to return to the primary impulse, God. In Jewish messianism he found a convenient solution for overcoming the reductive “tyranny” of presence. In this manner, the fifty-year period in Jewish messianism preceding Isou’s lettrism was focused on secularisation and communal spirit at the expense of a personal Messiah. Given the predominance of such gemeinschaftliche messianic ideas during the turn of the twentieth century and even through the interwar period, Isou’s anthropocentric messianism appears outright anachronistic. He foregrounded anew the figure of the Messiah that had been influential up until the late seventeenth century. A reasonable explanation for this may be that messianic hope has always surfaced during a time of crisis in the Jewish community, especially following the Shoah. Isou’s impudent post-Shoah plans for the judaification of the whole of France required a central figure that was not the secular romanticist artist-genius but rather the “de facto” redeemer of the Jews. Rhetorically, he held on to this vision until 1965.54 51 Devaux, Frédérique, De La Création à la société paradisiaque. Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque, tome 2, Paris 1998, 163; Ofrat, Gideon, The Jewish Derrida, New York 2001, 20; Baum, Devorah, “Le Rien et les juifs”. In Vides. Une rétrospective, Zurich 2009, 425. 52 Cf. Matt, Daniel C., “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism”, in Forman Robert K. C. (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, New York and Oxford 1990, 121–159. Additionally, the notion of absence has further theologico-cosmological meanings in the Zoharian Kabbalah, one of which is the interpretation of evil not as something distinct but rather as the absence of good. 53 Ofrat Jewish, 54. 54 Cf. Isou Création divine. Later Isou revised his theories with a new vocabulary, but that did not change their fundamental messianic structure or character.



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Fundamentally, Isou conceives of the Messiah as a revealer of a mystery. Once the individual has successfully actualised the Messiah, and the messianic future has arrived, he will reveal divine mysteries to all.55 In this vein he states: “Je vous révélerai un jour ce qui est vrai dans les Tables de Moïse et […] ce qui est vrai ou faux dans la Cabbale. J’interdirai qu’on écrive sur moi, d’autres Cabales”. [One day I will reveal you what is true in the tablets of Moses and what is true or false in the Kabbalah. I forbid that other Kabbalahs be written about me].56 The statement suggests that Kabbalah, at least some of its forms, indeed holds the key to actualising the Messiah and restoring the lost unity with God. According to Isou, only by virtue of this union can the “real” truth of God be figured out and unveiled, as Moses had acted as the interpretative medium between God and the Israelites. The Kabbalah, for one, was a human mediation and exegesis of the truth originally authored by God in the Torah. Hence, Isou demands that there be no further interpretations (Kabbalahs) of him in the quest to find the divine, unmediated truth. Isou’s messianic undertaking is indebted to the divine characteristics of the Hebrew letters and and their utilisation in the Kabbalah. By the correct utilisation of kabbalistic techniques, the Messiah is to be found at the heart of one’s being.

3.2 The Messiah within and in Becoming The major difference between Isou’s notion of messianism and the messianic doctrines adopted by German-Jewish intellectuals and artists is the re-emergence of the individual Messiah in Isou’s theory. He did not subscribe to the Nietzschean divine thanatology and argued instead that God remained the teleological aim of messianic activity. Such an argument obviously links Isou with earlier discourses of Jewish messianism, but through a twentieth-century point of reference. Far from being oblivious to this matter, Isou credits the resurgence of the Messiah in his thinking to Abulafia. He acknowledged a more or less arrant indebtedness to Abulafia, particularly due to Abulafia’s kabbalistic system that combines messianism with a distinctive language theory. Abulafia’s conception of messianism was complex to begin with, because it adopted political, noetic and to some extent even astrological modes of thinking.57 He was intentionally reimagining messianism through these lenses in order to pave an eschatological way that would be hidden from the uninitiated. Essential for such an elusive system is the idea of interior redemption. Here it does 55 Isou, Isidore, Les journaux des Dieux, Paris 1950, 280. 56 Isou, Isidore, Fondements pour la transformation intégrale du théâtre, Paris 1953, 239. 57 Idel “Redemption”, 36.

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not signify the redemption of an individual soul or any corresponding notion. Instead, Abulafia regarded the Messiah as a dormant intellectual power, which, paradoxically, exists as a transcendent entity prior to the eschatological performance.58 In other words, the Messiah is postulated as a potential quality of the individual. Reflecting further on the issue, Abulafia grasped the notion of the Messiah in a threefold manner: The term mashiyah is equivocal, (designating) three (different) matters; (a) first and foremost the true Agent Intellect is called the messiah […] (b) and the man who will bring us out of the exile from under the rule of the nations due to the power that is emanated upon him from the Agent Intellect – he will (also) be called messiah. (c) And the material human Intellect is called messiah, which is the hylic [potential] intellect that is the redeemer and the saviour and has influence over the soul and all elevated spiritual powers. It can save the soul from the rule of the material kings and their people and their powers, the lowly bodily desires. It is a commandment and an obligation to reveal this matter to every wise man of the wise ones of Israel in order that he may be saved because there are many things that oppose the opinions of the multitude of the rabbis, even more so differ from the views of the vulgus.59

The exclusive, almost arrogant, nature of Abulafia’s theory is evident in the way he belittles the majority of (conservative) rabbis and common people, who will not be among the ones to be redeemed. This is the political dimension of Abulafian messianism, which highlights the break with conventional and traditional Jewish religious thought. In this sense Abulafia’s views are also antinomian. His system is indeed devoid of any democratic approach to redemption, which would not be introduced before the rise of Hasidism in the late eighteenth century. As Isou rejected Hasidism due to its popular character and Christian elements, Abulafia’s earlier elitism may have appealed to him. Abulafia’s vision of the Messiah is neo-Aristotelian in that it seeks to actualise the intellect.60 Yet, instead of considering the matter unidimensionally, he grasps the term “Messiah” as a kind of conceptual cluster, as he distinguishes three “aspects” or “meanings” of the Messiah. Firstly, the Agent Intellect can be understood as the “mind” of the universe, which enables human cognition.61 In 58 Idel, Moshe, Messianic Mystics, New Haven and London 1998, 61, 69. 59 Abulafia, Abraham, MS Rome-Angelica 38, fol. 9a. Quoted in Idel “Redemption”, 39–41. 60 Abulafia extracts elements from the neo-Aristotelian theory of the knowing subject and its object during the process of intellection, but assumes that God may become the subject of human knowledge. 61 The concept derives from Maimonides. According to him, the human intellect should gain all possible knowledge and perfect itself. At this stage it would be, so to speak, on the same ontological plane with the Agent Intellect, allowing a conjunction of like entities. Ivry, Alfred R,



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this sense, the Agent Intellect is regarded as the medium through which God is in contact with people – should they be initiated enough to make contact with the Intellect. Secondly, the Messiah is the human redeemer in history who is sufficiently knowledgeable and enlightened to pursue contact with the Intellect. Moreover, he will “lead the Jews to Jerusalem”, as Isou would formulate the matter. The third aspect of the Abulafian Messiah is the most important one for Isou. The individual intellect differs from the preceding subtype of the Messiah that is an actualised intellect, in that the third kind rules over one’s inner powers alone.62 The third type embodies the idea of an inner Messiah. Abulafia does not, however, elucidate the experience related to the potential Messiah within: how does the potentiality affect the way the individual regards itself and its cognition in the present? How does one position oneself in relation to the unknown? The potential intellect (which is the Messiah) should be understood in temporal terms. As noted in relation to Bloch’s not-yet, potentiality is a twofold temporal term, which designates both a lack in the present and a realised change in the future. The actualisation of the intellect is precisely such a development because it is simultaneously connected with two temporalities – the present and the projected future. The relation with such internal Messiah-to-be is structurally recurring in Isou’s contemporary Jewish philosophy and messianism. Regarded in terms of presence, the unknown located within being is meontological.63 The meontological present has a number of appropriations in modern Jewish messianisms. In addition to Isou, meontological thinking is particularly pronounced in the

“The Logical and Scientific Premises of Maimonides’ Thought”, in Alfred L. Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfson and Allan Arkush (eds.), Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, Amsterdam 1998, 75; Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, “Kabbalah and Science in the Middle Ages: Preliminary Remarks”, in Freudenthal, Gad (ed.), Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, New York 2011, 500. One notes how the idea of individual perfection is later echoed in the Hegelian idea of being at the root of things and, according to Bataille’s interpretation, God-like. In fact, this is the point where Bataille implicitly understands Isou’s project as somewhat messianic, even though he does not take mysticism into account. 62 Idel “Redemption”, 41. 63 Meontology, from Greek to mē on, nonbeing. Levinas described his concept of subjectivity as “meontological”. Meontology is not oudenology, referring to nothing (Gk. ouden, nothing), but as the prefix designates (the Greek mē is a conditional negation), meontology is in relation to being. The major recent studies on the subject are Kavka, Martin, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Cambridge 2004; Laurent, Jérôme and Claude Romano (eds.), Le néant: contribution à l’histoire du non-être dans la philosophie occidentale, Paris 2006; Laurent, Jérôme (ed.), Dire le néant, Caen 2007 and Cunningham, Conor, Genealogy of Nihilism, London 2002, which has a theological focus.

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works of Bloch and Emmanuel Levinas.64 It should be acknowledged here that Jewish meontology is messianic and thus temporal in character. Accordingly, meontology designates the “study of unmediated experiences of lack and privation, [which inaugurate] the realization that I live in a moment best described as not-yet”.65 This is to say that meontology includes a vector of potentiality, equally crystallised in the French term à venir (to come) as in the Blochian NochNicht. The à venir entails openness to a future that is characterised as an “infinite qualitative temporal intensification” and “a passion for the impossible”.66 It undermines the present moment as a totality. The à venir puts into question the meaningfulness of the present, the here and now, by subjecting it to both anticipation and open-endedness. In a word, it exemplifies the desire to go beyond the present and the rational. Yet, quite fittingly and contrary to ontology, in meontology knowledge cannot be grounded in the object in subject-object schemas.67 The topic of inquiry cannot be a coherent (exterior) object. In other words, meontology studies what cannot be made into an object of thought but what is, however, connected to being. One of the persisting themes in Jewish meontologies is a radical openness to the future, which makes Jewish meontologies those of time. This emphasis links Bloch’s utopian thinking with meontology, but also calls for scrutinising the thought of Levinas to some extent in order to provide a more holistic conception of Isou’s, often unspecified, position in the tradition of messianism. In Bloch’s utopianism the not-yet is a sign for the utopian world-to-come whereas Levinas presents a modernised version of traditional Jewish messianism. Isou’s meontological messianism, for one, is based on the overcoming of the not-yet, which is quasi-religious in character. By virtue of their differing theoretical contexts, Isou and Levinas posit nonbeing in distinct ways, but accounting for both is relevant for emphasising Isou’s position to his contemporary Jewish philosophy in terms of temporality as well. After all, he sought to rid himself of rational thinking by uncovering additional and alternative conceptions for his key concepts, such as being and the Messiah. For instance, for Levinas nonbeing is beyond ontological order and metaphysics, 64 Of the Jewish philosophers studied here, only Levinas described his thought as meontological. I do, however, apply the term to all three cases, because the role of nonbeing in ontological inquiry is emphasised in each respectively. 65 Kavka Messianism, 1. 66 John D. Caputo concludes that the Derridean à venir is “being-toward [sein-zu] something that is always ahead but never comes” (emphasis removed). Caputo, John D., “Temporal Transcendence. The Very Idea of à venir in Derrida”, in Caputo, John D. and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), Transcendence and Beyond. A Postmodern Inquiry, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2007, 13, 191, 197. 67 Furuya, Yasuo, A History of Japanese Theology, Grand Rapids 1997, 114.



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which means that in a Kantian manner he is seeking to limit philosophical consciousness.68 Being “is”, but cannot become an object of inquiry to be reflected upon. Isou, however, conceives of nonbeing as situated within being. For him, nonbeing is an aspect of being as a yet unrealised potentiality. Despite their different approaches, both Levinas and Isou introduced Dasein – the mode of being of human beings – as a nontotality. Levinas formulated this lucidly: “Dasein is in such a way that its ‘not-yet’ belongs to it, and yet is not yet”.69 In addition to its nontotalising nature, the argument shifts the focus from the full presence of being to the (teleological) meontology of the present. The meontology of Levinas subjects us to a radical openness to the future which we have no means of overcoming conceptually. In addition, the ungraspable present moment is always partially unknown due to its state of eternal becoming. Bloch’s version of the suspension is the term not-yet. Its Levinasian rendering is structurally almost identical, but appropriated into the conceptual language of continental philosophy. To put this in philosophical terms, Dasein is forever in a state of becoming, but in such a way that it cannot be completely differentiated from non-being. Levinas further specifies that the utopian future is the hope of realising what is not-yet. It is the hope of a human subject, still a stranger to himself, a Dass-sein, who is at a distance from the site where he would be able to be himself, Dasein.70 This signals that Dasein is on its way to an actuality that is realisable only in the future. Hence, Bloch’s not-yet structure supports the forever delayed becoming of the coherent Dasein.71 In this sense it is possible to speak of messianic meontology, especially that of Isou which concentrates on personal perfection, as strategies to “mend the Dasein” although this mending is always not yet. Isou’s treatment of messianism is rather original and even though Levinas’s approach is rational in comparison, it is the very rationality that evokes the dilemma of the Messiah and the subject. What kind of relation could the cognitive subject have to otherness and the unknown, that is, to the Messiah? The most revealing concept for the dilemma of the subject and the unknown is the well-known Levinasian il y a, which functions as an empty placeholder. It designates an impersonal existence that is devoid of existents and which ruptures the subject-object relation. In Simon Critchley’s 68 See Kavka Messianism, 19. 69 Levinas, Emmanuel, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo, Stanford 2000, 14. 70 Ibid., 99. The German dass adds conditionality to Levinas’s comprehension of being. 71 However, Hermann Cohen interpreted the Maimonidean doctrine to mean that the Messiah will always be subject to the not-yet; that he will never actually arrive. Handelman, Susan A., Fragments of Redemption. Jewish Thought & Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem & Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1991, 162. This is to say that being could never proceed from Dasssein into a coherent state of Dasein.

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words, the experience of il y a leads to a reversal of intentionality, where things seem to look at us instead of them being the objects of our gaze.72 Accordingly, the il y a transcends both interiority and exteriority, meaning that it “is” between being and nothingness.73 Yet the il y a is fundamentally meontological due to its relation to being; it points beyond being. Levinas affirms that ontology and meontology occupy the same space (the same), but so does the il y a, which is between being and nothingness.74 The il y a marks the limit at which a totalising consciousness is no longer possible due to the very unobjectifiability of the concept itself. The il y a characterises the relation the consciousness may have to the unknown that hinges the formation of a coherent subjectivity. From this aspect, another concept applied by Levinas proves important – one that is crucial for Isou’s poetics. The rien is essential for the self-understanding of the present Dasssein in messianic anticipation. Levinas defines rien as that which withholds itself from presence in me.75 At first sight, Levinas seems to name the rien and apply it in philosophical discourse, which would render rien false content. However, the rien conceals itself by failing to be identical with the form in which it presents itself.76 That is, the word and the notion linked to it are not able to represent what they stand (in) for. Therefore, the rien has a Janus-like character that sustains the not-yet. As it cannot be made into an object of thought, the rien signals the impossibility of grasping the present without the open aspect of anticipation. The subject cannot overcome the aspect of openness. The only absolute in rien is its indeterminacy that inserts a persistent haemophilic flow into Dasein, which cannot be blocked by any totalising effort. In a strict sense, rien is not connected to a nonbeing in-becoming (that could be actualised at some finite point in time), but to a nonbeing delaying the very process. Kavka explicates that messianic anticipation is this openness to the eternality of the future.77 The infinite future is then the “open topos” Bloch refers to and messianism is a “projection” into it.78 Levinas’s approach does not offer any means of overcoming the not-yet, 72 Critchley, Simon, Very Little…Almost Nothing. Death, Philosophy, Literature, London and New York 1997, 57. 73 Levinas, Emmanuel, Le temps et l’autre, Paris 1989, 309. 74 Llewelyn, John, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2002, 6. 75 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Beyond Intentionality”, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge 1983, 113. 76 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague 1961, 192. 77 Kavka Messianism, 195. 78 Yet, arguably, messianism in the religious sense is not as important to Levinas as is the capability of his meontology to criticise Western metaphysics.



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because he regarded the Messiah as forever delayed. In this sense, the messianic hope is still based on anticipation, but there is no motivation for this anticipation. This suggests that Levinas was seeking to secularise the structure of messianism by emptying it of religious content. In contrast to Levinas, Isou suggests mystical means of realising the potential Messiah within oneself. As noted above, he adopted from Abulafia a form of kabbalism that had redefined the messianic in line with individuality.79 The emphasis on individuality had repercussions not only regarding the psychological aspect of the Kabbalah, but also in its cosmology. In short, this signals a shift from a kabbalistic cosmogonic nothingness (ayin) to the individual not-yet of the Dass-sein. Appropriately, a kabbalistic convention reflects this momentuous transfer. Here the kabbalistic limitless Ein-Sof functions as the starting point of permutation. Moreover, the shift from the unknown to subjectivity occurs in relation to rien: Ein est cet espace réservé, qui n’est rien, et attend d’apprendre qu’il est. C’est pourquoi si on permute “Ein” (‫ )אין‬en “Ani” (‫)אגי‬, on obtient “je”, “moi”. C’est-à-dire que dans le “rien” il y a le potentiel de l’existence. Ce “Je”, sait qu’il existe, mais comme il ne reçoit pas le reflet de son existence, il est “rien”.80 Ein is the placeholder, which is not anything, and waits to learn that it is. Hence, if one permutes “Ein” (‫ )אין‬to “Ani” (‫)אגי‬, one obtains “I”, “me”. That is to say that in the rien there is a potential for existence. This “I”, knowns that it exists, but as it does not receive the reflection of its existence, it is rien.

The permuted “I” escapes the attempts of cogitation and should not be confused with the self-conscious subject. As noted above, the rien does not offer itself as an object, nor does it accommodate any kind of straightforward representation. In a word, the “I” that is discovered by permutation remains hidden. As Isou states, the Messiah is “[une qualité] intime pour la bouche secrete de l’individu” [an intimate quality for the secret mouth of the individual].81 The secret mouth is likely an allusion to Saint Augustine who speaks of the “secret mouth of the heart” in his Confessions.82 It is surprising that Isou opts for a Christian figure in defining the Messiah, but the fragment should be regarded first and foremost from a rhe79 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, “Philosophy and Kabbalah: 1200–1600”, in Frank, Daniel H. and Oliver Leaman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish History, Cambridge 2003, 236. 80 Lahy, Georges, Kabbale extatique et Tshérouf. Techniques de meditation des anciens kabbalistes, Roquevaire 2003, 41. 81 Isou Agrégation, 259 82 Saint Augustine writes that Saint Ambrose ate the joyous bread of God with the secret mouth of his heart. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan, New York 1988, 97.

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torical angle. The mouth is a metaphor that emphasises a departure from rationality and a bond with the non-rational sentiment or experience. As this “bodily” opening seems to be hidden from the individual itself as well, the problem of the self-conscious subject and the unknown as a lack persists. The lack inherent to potentiality is contained in Isou’s concept rien. In his thinking, rien signifies the unknown part in being that is identified with the future.83 What appears as a mere homology between two kinds of unknowability, the human futurity and the divine, is actually a more profound link between the faculties of man and divinity. In this case the unknown is derived from the Abulafian idea of messianic potentiality and the rien designates the unknown in being, which in this case refers to the potential Messiah. Abulafia’s postulation of the Messiah as a latent intellectual ability evokes a suspension in the idea of potentiality. The Messiah is both not-yet and in-becoming – but only for the time being, not always in the state of becoming. The static nature of the potential in the present is alleviated by the factual belief in the possibility of change. The assertion of the Messiah as a psychological factor indicates that the present moment with its inherent unknowability (as a whole) may be overcome. Therefore the Abulafian kabbalists believed that a consummative move was possible. This is to say that the present was not labeled by eternal anticipation or ennui but optimism concerning the individual’s transhistorical transformation. The anticipation of the Messiah is not a process in any philosophical sense, because the rien connotes an intuitive and experiential nothing – it does not affirm any dualism or goal.84 Derived from the Abulafian idea of messianic potentiality, the rien designates the unknown in being, which in this case refers to the potential Messiah. The Messiah is not-yet, but not always not-yet as in Levinas’s thinking. In Isou’s meontology the transcendent is not considered as absolute, but instead as something that can be assimilated into immanence at a transhistorical eschatological moment. However, it should be noted that in such messianic meontology nonbeing is not beyond being, as for Levinas, but within being.85 The most elaborate account for such a mode of being in Isou’s thought is found in his later theoretical writings. It should be noted that during the late 1960s, he revised his messianism by introducing a quasi-secular concept that

83 Isou, Isidore, La créatique ou la novatique, Paris 2003, 966. 84 Isou’s messianism averts the Hegelian pitfall, conjured up by Bataille, of complete knowledge thanks to the placement of rien as the point of departure for his poetics and reflections on being. 85 This conception probably emerged in Isou due to Abulafia, who adopted Maimonidean thinking with Greek and Neoplatonic influences (such as Aristotle and Plotinus), although Maimonides was anti-Aristotelian with respect to the idea of human perfection. See Kavka Jewish, 75.



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substitutes for that of the Messiah. Hence Isou institutes a concept that is revived from Sartre for anti-existential use: L’être se sauve des techniques déplaisantes, non par un pour-soi de [sic] néant, qui est une sous-technique philosophique, un ersatz également arriéré, mais par un super-pour-soi, constitué des procédés de la méthode de création, orientés vers la société paradisiaque.86 Being saves itself from the unpleasant techniques, not by a pour-soi [being-for-itself] of nothingness, which is a philosophical sub-technique, and also a backward substitute, but by a super-pour-soi constituted by the processes of the method of creation, directed towards the society of paradise.

The super-pour-soi, the Messiah, could be translated as being-for-beyond-itself, which elaborates a being that is no longer limited by the present, but contains the aspect of potentiality within itself. As the prefix designates, the super-poursoi is above the consciousness of the present and has the capability to actualise the past in the present and turn towards the future. It is the central concept in Isou’s transhistorical ontology, which he calls hyperontology (hyper-ontologie).87 As the prefix designates, yet again, Isou’s version of ontology is a departure from philosophical ontology and more in line with the temporal ontology of Jewish messianism. So, whether by means of the super-pour-soi or the Messiah, Isou’s theory is messianic. The not-yet persists and defines being in Isou’s thinking. As the epithet the secret mouth suggests, the Messiah is hidden and subject to a mystical experience, because it is cognitively unattainable. In fact, the mystical experience of the not-yet can be understood as an experience of language since the representation of cognised thoughts happens in language. The representation of any “beyond” can be only an indirect, ostensive showing of the limits of language. In the present, the Messiah is an empty representation in the sense that it has no imaginable, cognisable object. Therefore, the Messiah and rien must function in a like manner. The representation of the ambiguous rien must happen in a manner in which rien is not identical to itself. For instance, the rien cannot be made known through a metaphor, because in this case the metaphor would be without content and no referential relationship could be established – just like the Messiah in Blochian parlance. This is to say that the “Messiah” is an anomaly in language, something of an empty placeholder. The unknowable thus presents a thoroughgoing problem for language, which messianism needs to endure.

86 Isou Créatique, 964. 87 Ibid. This “ontology” was suitable to Isou’s paradilogical system.

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This leads to the conclusion that Isou’s messianic language needs to keep a secret in order to preserve the unknown. Furthermore, in the messianic framework the secret reveals an aspect that is not merely linguistic and epistemological. According to Wolfson, in Abulafian Kabbalah secret is the ontological foundation of subjective being.88 This form of secret undermines any coherent subject: the subject is unable to grasp the contents of the secret and can only attain its existence on an experiential level. Hence, secret evokes an “unexperienced” experience that is irreducible to intentionality.89 The ontological secret withholds something that is unattainable and unknowable within being. It penetrates the constitution of being, which, in Levinasian terms, opens an “otherwise”: it is not a being nor a non-being, but rather a not-yet-being.90 Secret is also the manifestation of such mode of being on the level of language.

3.3 Messianism and Language The focus on language in Isou’s messianism is derived from Abulafia’s letter-focused Kabbalah and amplified by the evolution of the messianic Kabbalah. Moreover, Isou’s theories coincide with the “reuse” of religious theories of language during the early twentieth century, demonstrated by Buber, Bloch and Benjamin.91 In Isou’s aesthetics, as well as in Abulafian Kabbalah, the designation “unknowability” marks the inability of language to describe the very unknown. It seems that Isou surmounted his scepticism concerning language by discovering Abulafia’s works, which contained readily available kabbalistic techniques for overcoming the limitations of conventional language. In the frame of twentieth-century Jewish thought, language is an essential element in Isou’s and Benjamin’s versions of messianism. In both, language caters to the desire to restore the lost unity with God. Language has an important function in this undertaking even though it needs to be elevated from its insufficient and reductive role. Once inserted into a messianic framework, language becomes temporal since it claims a teleological aim. The teleological restoration 88 Wolfson, E.R., Abraham Abulafia – Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Teosophy, and Theurgy. Culver City 2000, 24. 89 Wolfson, E.R., “Secrecy, Modesty, and the Feminine: Kabbalistic Traces in the Thought of Levinas”, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 14:1, 193–224. 90 The idea of a not-yet-being is essential in Jewish messianism, cf. Kavka Jewish. In particular, Abulafia was well versed in Maimonides’s theory and his ‫( מורה נבוכים‬Guide for the Perplexed, twelfth century), thus also familiar with Maimonidean messianic ideas of nonbeing as not-yetbeing. 91 For a further discussion, cf. Bouretz Témoins; Handelman Fragments.



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of the unity is common to Isou and Benjamin even though their approaches differ in respect to the abilities they assign to language to reach the aim. Another common feature in their thought results from the insertion of language into the messianic structure: language becomes subject to the not-yet as well, because the assumed aim undermines language in the present.92 It becomes more akin to literary language, but does not relinquish its utility because it is considered futurospective. Language no longer signifies in the here and now. Meaning and representation are no longer self-evident nor is the automorphic letter of hypergraphics self-sufficient. Hence, in the present, language – what Benjamin would call human language – is characterised by a lack as it adopts the role of languageto-come. This means that language becomes open-ended and temporally laden. Human language may still have some limited capabilities in pointing beyond its own incorporated lack, but these qualities are not available for the analytical and rational discourse of philosophy. This became evident in Isou’s and Levinas’s treatements of the rien, which encapsulate a persistent indeterminacy, a constant “slipping away” from the reach of cognition and conceptual language. These features become even more pronounced when inserted into a messianic framework. Isou’s contemporary Edmond Jabès dealt with similar dilemmas in literature, which is why his poetical “aphorisms” are useful here, even though he was not an avant-gardist, nor did he write about Abulafia in particular. Jabès encapsulates the problematics of language and meaning once it is integrated with messianism. “Le passé est représentation – figure – . L’avenir, absence de figure – vide – . L’interdiction de reproduire est commandement du futur” [The past is representation – figure – . Future, the absence of figure – void – . The prohibition to reproduce is a commandment of the future].93 Jabès notes that the past – the whole of history – is only accessible through representation, as it can no longer be present, but future lacks representation altogether, because it is never present. In this sense, future never exists in itself nor can it be represented by language. In order to preserve its fleeting character, the future can only be ostensibly pointed to by a void. In addition, Jabès deduces that the prohibition of graven images is temporal in character. His claim thus reads that no representation of the future should be produced and writers should settle for emptiness instead. Once this requirement 92 Caputo regards the messianic promise as being inscribed in language itself: “Language is opened by the promise of a language to come […] [b]ut we are not in a position to determine in advance any specific content, to hold up a determinate ideal or program”. He continues by describing a restlessness that endures “until we welcome a future that will never come, which is an impossible future, the future of the impossible”. Caputo, John D., “Shedding Tears Beyond Being: Derrida’s Confession of a Prayer”, in Caputo, John D. and Michael J. Scanlon, Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession, Bloomington 2005, 110. 93 Jabès, Edmond, Le Parcours, Paris 1985, 53.

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is explicated, Jabès goes on to speculate that “Le futur a, peut-être, pour inconnu, son image” [The future has, perhaps, for unknown, its image]. The statement is messianic in character as it connects future with the unknown and suggests that the two are linked. By claiming that future has an image for the unknown, Jabès not only personifies future but shows that (human) language indeed lacks the means necessary to “prematurely” attain any aspect of the future that remains as unknown as God. In the Jewish sphere, the themes of language and the unknowability of God were fundamental especially in the Abulafian Kabbalah of names. Even though Benjamin’s ideas of Kabbalah and language derive from sources different to those of Isou, Benjamin’s formulation of the interrelation between language and divinity informed Isou’s stance as well. Benjamin’s starting point is the claim that the Fall caused the disunity of humankind and God and that this fundamental break has persisted ever since. His emphasis on language is noteworthy as he explains that the unity was endowed solely in divine language. In Benjaminian lore, the expulsion from Eden – and not the Tower of Babel – accounts for the separation of languages. By the banishment language becomes mediated, which means that words are nothing more than signs instead of the creative word of the divine language. This is to say that following Benjamin’s thinking, after the Fall language would no longer be pansemiotic.94 Even though the idea of creation by language was present already in early Jewish exegesis, it became seminal in the Kabbalah.95 Benjamin ascribes to kabbalistic sources as he describes how the human subject had no access to the “immanente eigene Magie” [own immanent magic] of language after the Fall.96 By such magic Benjamin seems to mean pansemiosis, but in a form influenced by romanticism and the aesthetic Kabbalah and not in the sense promoted by the prophetic Kabbalah.97 Isou does not provide a similar detailed genealogy for language to Benjamin’s, but this aspect was embedded in the historiography of kabbalistic pansemiosis. For Isou, language – in a form broadened with hypergraphics – was the sole route to messianic unity, even though “human language”, the language of communication, was inherently insufficient. The messianic element recurs in relation to language also in Abulafia’s case: the will to transgress language can be realised through the messianically charged language-to-come. However, kabbalistic techniques did not render the Hebrew language any more meaningful, 94 Benjamin never adopted the concept and it is used here for the sake of cohesion. 95 Cf. Kaplan, Aryeh, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice, Boston 2004. 96 Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, 153. 97 Moreover, Sprachmagie is based on the accurate functioning of words within the context of magic and not on their insufficiency.



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but rather added a number of nonsensical combinations of letters. These should be regarded as a kind of repertoire for the language-to-come and did not need to be intelligible the moment they were created. In Kabbalah, God would function as the guarantee of meaning so nonsensical combinations could be regarded “not-yet-sensical”. This is to say, that in Kabbalah, meaninglessness could persist far better than in the Benjaminian human language. After all, the kabbalists could always revert to having “discovered” the names of hidden things or things not yet in existence. Yet, Benjamin falls back on the idea of language-to-come as well when he seeks to advance from the Jabèsian stalemate. Jabès’s formulation only suspends representation that is left open by the aspect of future. Benjamin, for one, proceeds from the standstill by subscribing to a messianic task regarding language. He wanted, like Isou and Abulafia, to restore the unity with God in a utopian future via the divine language. Yet, Benjamin’s messianism seeks, in a Scholemian manner, to amalgamate messianic time (atid la-vo) and the world-to-come (olam ha-ba), which signals an anticipation of an empiric future. This betokens the existence of an apocalyptic element, which also signifies a change in language. Regarding the emphasis on future, Benjamin’s language-oriented messianism is akin to Isou’s. For Benjamin, the creative activity of individuals can be characterised as language that reaches towards God’s divine language and the lost unity.98 All creation strives to redemption through language. In this sense Benjamin would still see eye to eye with Isou who deemed permutations essential to the eschatological process. According to Isou, the process is composed of the “attente du Messie qui dévoilerait le contenu du pouvoir réel et création [anticipation of the Messiah who would reveal the contents of the real power and creation].99 This is not the secular creator-messiah, but the Messiah outlined in Jewish messianism, whose capacities include knowledge of the divine world-creating language. Evidently, the pansemiotic aspect of hypergraphics would be actualised at the moment of the arrival of the Messiah. In contrast to Isou optimism, Benjamin’s messianic desire is inherent to a certain mode of messianic thinking rather than an actual path along which humans, via their language, might progress toward even the partial fulfilment of this desire. From Benjamin’s point of view, Isou’s strive towards the messianic future would be a supportable undertaking, but it alone would be insufficient and could never attain its teleological aim. What is radically distinct from the Isouian model is Benjamin’s conception of language and meaning. According to him, while growing “bis ans messianische Ende ihrer Geschichte” [until the 98 Ibid., 149. 99 Isou “La Création”, 8–9.

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messianic end of their history], the various languages do not convey meaning.100 Instead, the meaning remains hidden. There is a certain kinship here with the Blanchotian literary language lacking utility, but Benjamin is undermining the whole semiosis. He is saying that our successful use of language is based on the belief that language carries meaning. This is to say that the restorative attempts by humans are in themselves always insufficient and require a larger process that is beyond the mere human efforts. Hence Benjamin’s messianism is paradoxical, or perhaps rather suspended, because the messianic realm is both predestined and withheld.101 Departing from Benjamin’s ideas, Isou subscribes to the predestination of the messianic realm but considers it concealed only in so far as it is subject to the actualisation of the Messiah who will redeem all and bring about the very realm. As noted above, in his thinking the messianic desire could actually reach its fulfilment in the messianic future. Therefore, he adopts the idea of the messianic potential, crystallised by the term à venir, and makes it manifest in a linguistic framework. Consequently, the concealed nature of hypergraphics should be regarded from the aspect of language-to-come. According to Isou, hypergraphics is based on the “univers des elements de notation idéographiques, lexiques, syllabiques et alphabétiques passés et à venir, acquis et imaginaires” [universe of the elements of ideographic, lexical, syllabic and alphabetical notation, which are past and to come, acquired and imaginary].102 By this formulation he escapes the Jabèsian standstill and claims that, in addition to representation on a historical axis, his writing system also includes representation from the perspective of future. This radical formulation is obviously paradoxical, but it is based on the kabbalistic optimism regarding the arrival of the messianic future. By introducing the messianic dimension into poetics, Isou fundamentally manipulates the very idea of meaning Benjamin ascribed to human language. It addresses the fundamental characteristic of hiddenness. In this sense, Isou’s fashioning makes Benjamin appear almost a dualist. Regarded from the poles that would limit Benjamin, lettrist poetics is not based on transparent language (accessible meaning), but neither is it fundamentally opaque (inaccessible meaning). These static aspects do not take temporality into account and, hence, are unsuitable as means of interpreting hypergraphics. Rather, the potential is a third option – a stipulation – and in the linguistic framework it is manifested as a potential meaning, which may be opaque in the present but contains an aspect 100 Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Werke, Band IV/1, 14. 101 Anderson Expressionism, 47. 102 Robin, Armand, Essai d’histoire comparée du lettrisme, de l’informel-a-signes et de quelques peintres-a-signes indépendants, Paris 1963, 27. Emphasis added.



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of change projected into the future. Essentially, as in the not-yet, the aspect of change is included in this sense of meaning. It is inscribed into the core of hypergraphics as meaning-to-come that simultaneously actualises pansemiosis. The potential is manifest in Isou’s language theory in the guise of the à venir. Intriguingly, there is a similar reminder present already in Abulafia’s thinking. His Kabbalah is centred on discovering the divine names, which are pursued by letter permutations. Furthermore, these permutations are harnessed to a messianic task; firstly, because Abulafia’s Kabbalah is based on the belief that God’s name could be revealed through permutations. This may require the use of several languages, but is nevertheless considered a reachable aim. Secondly, Abulafia believes that all possible permutations would become readable at the eschaton.103 In other words, the Messiah would be able to erase the boundary between unknowability and knowability. This idea signifies the belief that the Messiah would be able to transcend the inevitable limits of language. Hence, the Messiah in kabbalistic messianism is capable of avoiding the pitfall inscribed in Benjamin’s conception of language. The transcending of the limits of language occurs once the unity with God is restored. The unity referred to in this context is historical. As Isou states in Agrégation, he regards Moses as a paragon and parallels the coming Messiah with the Jewish prophet’s encounter with God. Isou visualised the meeting, or “vertical alliance” as he terms it, with divinity as follows: Un homme s’élève sur la montagne de Sinaï et parle en tête à tête avec l’inconnu sans être épouvanté. Il revient avec les Rébus déchiffrés en les offrant à tous. Méthode pour parler avec la divinité sans trembler.104 A man rises onto Mount Sinai and speaks face to face with the unknown without being terrified. He returns with decrypted rebuses offering them to all. A method of talking with divinity without trembling.

In other words, at the level of language, the contact with God can be obtained by utilising allusions and visual means to support them – not by communicative “human language”. Furthermore, the process of encryption is reminiscent of lettrist works. In this light, hypergraphics is a sophisticated version of the rebuses Isou designates as the means of communication between Moses and God. Likewise, they require deciphering. Moreover, where Moses still translates between languages – perhaps the divine and human language – and distributes the con103 Idel, Moshe, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia, Albany 1989, 106; Idel, Moshe, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, Albany 1988. 104 Isou Agrégation, 258.

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tents to all, Isou discards human language in favour of the messianic language-tocome and the not-yet-sensical combinations of signs. It becomes obvious that the temporal axis of Isou’s messianism is also an extension of language and meaning. The augmentation of language with temporality thus incorporates potentiality and the potential to change is inherent in the not-yet-sensical permutations and allusions. Isou’s ultimate aim is to reach the messianic state or bring about the messianic event “grâce à laquelle l’inconnu se transforme en connu” [thanks to which the unknown transforms into the known].105 In his theory, messianism likewise plays an important role in creation. Both Isou and Abulafia comprehend creation as an act that, once fulfilled, would allow the creator (mystic or artist) to come into contact with God.106 Isou’s idea of creativity is that it parallels the original Creation. Moreover, in a Benjaminian manner, it aims to restore the unity with God. Even though Isou would bank on Abulafian Kabbalah, his idea of a creator-messiah still implies a certain naïve and romantic belief that literature alone could bring about the redemption.107 This results from the chronological and contextual distance between his messianism and that of Abulafia. As the very means of coming into contact with God are the manipulation of language by permutations, Isou’s messianic project is inevitably poetical. Isou’s messianism includes paradoxes, such as overturned causalities, just as the Abulafian conception, and they have common implications in relation to language. The permutations and reciprocal interchange of letters signal a use of language with poetical innovation, because these techniques undermine the constraints of the language system. Additionally, gematria utilises the numerical values of Hebrew letters to non-conventional ends. This is to say that the Abulafian Kabbalah already included a (non-utilitarian) poetical element that has been largely unrecognised, but which, however, indicates that the parallel traditions of aesthetics and mysticism in Isou and Abulafia are not extremely separate.108 In other words, Isou did not introduce the poetical element into the permutation technique, but rather it is a characteristic of that technique. The poetical element further clarifies the dilemma of the subject’s solipsism. From Isou’s point of view, human language appears to embody a radical break 105 Isou, Isidore, Œuvres de spectacle, Paris 1964, 311. 106 By “creator” Isou refers to artists who follow Lettrist theories. It can be identified with an artist who ascends towards a union with God, separated from the secular artist. The essence of the creator is thus the creator’s actions. 107 The formulation is reminiscent of romanticism, but in Isou’s case it acknowledges the aspect of pansemiosis. 108 For instance, there are evident twentieth-century adaptations of Abulafia’s Kabbalah by Jewish poets such as Yvan Goll, Moses Feinstein, Nathaniel Tarn, Jack Hirschman and Jerome Rothenberg.



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between the interior and the exterior, which extends to the “inner” of the subject due to the hidden messianic quality. The only way to overcome the break is to apply the not-yet-sensical elements of the “inner language” that will, at some point, become language. This actualisation of meaning – the messianic promise – goes hand in hand with the actualisation of the Messiah. Language is intimately linked with cognisability and, in messianism, with an unknowability that has the potential to change. The process of the actualisation of the Messiah was fundamentally connected with language while the Messiah would render all experimental permutations and other combinations of symbols meaningful. It was a case of hitting the right key, so to speak, following which the entire universe would unfold by virtue of pansemiosis. In the Abulafian Kabbalah the mystical techniques focused on the most material elements of language. These techniques were applied in order to reach a mystical state, and to attain this experience was to void oneself of all thought.109 Non-thinking is, however, problematic: one always remains conscious of not thinking – it is this difficulty that remains associated with the muting of consciousness. Although the required self-voiding would eventually prove impossible, the process towards it is important for Isou because it is a creative one. Creation, in general, marks for him a transhistorical unison with the original creation of the world. This process of creation ultimately leads to “l’ambition d’atteindre Dieu, d’arriver à vivre dans le sein de Dieu, de devenir Dieu” [the ambition to reach God, to come to live in the bosom of God, to become God].110 Here God signifies every entity that is not restricted by the not-yet, because God has eternal existence. To become like God in this respect, to be freed from the omnipresent not-yet, is the fundamental principle of Isou’s transhistorical messianism. This interconnectedness is clarified by his statement: “s’il me fait le Messie, l’Éternel sera mon Dieu. D’ailleurs, je n’ai jamais eu d’autre Dieu que l’Éternel” [If it makes me the Messiah, the Eternal will be my God. Besides, I have never had another God besides the Eternal].111 The deified temporal measure, Eternal (note the capital letter) denotes a quality the unknown deity has – even though such characterisation renders it slightly less unknown and apophatic. Its nature still remains hidden even though Isou continuously alludes to the existence of the unknown. By the same token, his poetics is utterly secretive in character due to the temporal suspension involved.

109 Idel Messianic, 3. 110 Isou Créatique, 969. 111 Isou Agrégation, 298.

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3.4 The Praxis of Messianic Secrecy: Textual Potentiality The messianic vector in Isou’s works ranges beyond the philosophical and religious problematics of non-rationality. Temporality becomes an aspect of poetics once the centrality of presence in meaning production is undermined. Isou illustrates this by writing that “Isidore prétend bégayer un langage future. Il n’est donc jamais présent, mais à venir” [Isidore claims to stammer a future language. It is therefore never present but to come].112 He hereby challenges the focus on presence that has been a key presumption in Western metaphysics. The emphasis on presence and the present moment were equally common in modern Jewish philosophy. Even Benjamin’s language theory is concentrated on presence. Isou’s language-to-come appears to differ from Benjamin’s thesis, which regards the divine language as perpetually unattainable. For Benjamin, there was an element of secrecy, a hidden meaning, carried in human languages.113 This is the very secret Isou claims to attain in the future, even though he opted for hypergraphics instead of conventional language. In this sense, hypergraphics manifest hiddenness without revealing what is concealed and, thus, maintain the secret. Isou’s works introduce what could be called poetics of potentiality. The creative act of the poet in the present acknowledges a temporal axis that is open towards future, and the poet includes this open-endedness in the work. Hence, the poetics of potentiality does not ground meaning as long as presence is considered as the measure of meaning. The teleological “arc” suspended between the present and the future causes an anachronistic grounding: the meaning of hypergraphics – their ability to signify – derives from the future. As such, the anachronistic grounding is a structural promise of meaning that is carried in each instance of hypergraphics and textual blanks. In the present, the future-to-come is beyond cognition and, hence, reference. By the same token, meontology also affects Isou’s poetics. Accordingly, sharpening the somewhat heuristic mentality of Isou’s poetics, non-meaning-grounding poetics should be based on rien that is unidentical to what it designates. As such, it has no qualities in the present. However, even though rien is associated with lack in the present, it has the potential to change. As noted above, Isou bases his poetics on rien that is not a void but rather a “grounding-in-becoming”. The anachronism is possible because of the eventual return of the divine language and the guarantee of meaning via divine unity. Therefore hypergraphics is able to maintain the promised meaning by suspending it as meaning-to-come.

112 Isou Œuvres de Spectacle, 129. 113 Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV, 14.



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In this vein, Isou stated, with rhetoric typical of messianism, that he had uncovered “la méthode de création qui est ce secret des Dieux que le Messie doit apporter [et] je considère mes apports novateurs – artistiques ou philosophiques – comme des étapes de la démarche messianique”. [the method of creation that is the secret of the Gods that the Messiah must provide and I consider my innovative contributions – artistic and philosophical – as stages of the messianic endeavor].114 Isou claims to have access to the creative divine language and straightforwardly connects it with the poetics of potentiality. However, he expresses only that the divine language exists and does not reveal its contents. Here he fosters both Abulafia’s elitism and Benjamin’s constraints regarding the general unreachability of the paradisische Sprache. Isou revises Benjamin’s theory by revitalising the Messiah who is able to overcome the restrictions of the present. Moreover, the messianic endeavour of the poet has already begun with hypergraphics, which entail a search for meaning beyond hiddenness. The messianic aspect of lettrist poetics guarantees the relevance of the lack. In other words, the lack (of meaning) in the present is integrated into a framework of the poetics of potentiality, by which the lack becomes meaningful as such. At the level of language this signifies that instead of a semiotic void, the lack is “saturated” with potentiality. Such is the case with Isou’s work “Anti-lettries” (1958): The anti-lettries illustrate the chiselling period in lettrism, where lettrist poetic “novelties” are eventually overcome under the guise of maintaining the alleged pioneering quality of the works. Having been around long enough, the techniques are eventually discarded.115 The ideal is based on the contradictory idea of being the avant-garde of the avant-garde. Accordingly, the four poems above illustrate potentiality and a play with temporality in lettrist poetics. The title of the “Lettrie blanche” (White lettrie) suggests that the poem is printed in white on a white background and, hence, is invisible.116 The lettrie alludes to the Kabbalah, as the following chapter indicates. Identical, except for the title, “Lettrie vide” (Empty lettrie) opts for another kind of potential. The title suggests that the poem may be empty of conceptual contents. In this light, the poem could be interpreted as a representation of the future in the Jabèsian sense. Within a messianic framework both possess potential: the blank can become readable and the emptiness can be overcome by non-conceptual contents. Isou’s theory suggests that these contents could be experiential and, hence, in the subreal domain. Furthermore, the “Alettrie” implies an unawareness of poetics, which means that 114 Isou “La Création”, 12. 115 For instance, lettrist sound poetry was succeeded by aphonic, silent poetry that was based on gestures. 116 A lettrie is a lettrist poem, which is supposedly purely formal and devoid of semantic content.

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Fig. 6: Isidore Isou’s quadruple poem Anti-Lettries.

it is not produced, so to speak, following a poetical rule. This is an effort to explicitly distance oneself from one’s own poetics, which is, of course, thoroughly artificial and somewhat futile. However, by considering it within the framework of mystical forgetting, the lettrie acquires a “kabbalistic” meaning. Finally, “Lettrie anéantissante” (Destroyed lettrie) betokens the removal or destruction of poetical material, after which the poem has been (re)named. The poem thus denotes a preceding act – it is anachronical, since the devastation can only be observed retrospectively. These four instances illustrate how the empty frame cannot be regarded only in the Jabèsian sense of emptiness as Isou’s play with temporal layers and causality is more advanced.



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Here the language mysticism discussed in the second chapter is again of relevance. As elaborated, in lettrism messianism is connected to language mysticism by way of secret writing. The apophatic secret – defined by Wolfson – denotes uncognisability and the impossibility of rational inquiry, because the referent is beyond knowing. Moreover, as the idea of the secret suggests, there is an ontological realm to which the secret is connected, even though the referent itself is beyond epistemological inquiry. Arguably, this ontological secret is the foundation of messianism in Abulafia’s and Isou’s thinking. The double sense of the secret is relevant to poetics due to pansemiosis that integrates the ontological world with language. As the method of “writing on the limit” (parapraxis) implies, the secret dispels the dualisms recurring in rational modes of thinking. In this sense the apophatic linguistic secret is similar to the ontological one. Instead of being based on a binary structure, the ontological secret implies a “third way” of being that is based on temporality. In modern Jewish thought, Levinas pioneered the idea of such a third way. According to him, L’essentiellement caché se jette vers la lumière, sans devenir signification. Non pas le néant, mais ce qui n’est pas encore.117 The essentially hidden throws itself toward the light, without becoming a signification. Not nothingness, but that which is not yet.

Unlike the “static” nothingness, the “dynamic” not-yet contains an essence of potentiality. Hence, the secret evades dualisms by reverting to temporality. It cannot be known, but it shows the unattainable (and nonphenomenalisable) at the temporal limits of the phenomenal world. The secret cannot be noumenal either, because the temporal referent does not exist yet – it cannot be postulated as something. Such a referent lacks qualities and is utterly beyond cognition. Therefore, the secret is able to maintain the promised meaning by suspending it as meaning-to-come. This allows the integration of aspects of unknowability into the works without having to unravel the very contents of the unknown. Accordingly, the messianic aspect of language mysticism is based on the temporal understanding of meaning, by which secret writing evades binaries, such as the fixed known/unknown.118 In this vein, Isou underlined the messianic 117 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité, Paris 1994, 287. 118 Isou disregards Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung (sublation) that seeks to overcome the rigid binary (positive/negative) of Aristotelian logic by incorporating both the positive and negative terms and amalgamating them. For instance, Hegel cultivates the dialectical opposition of being and non-being into “becoming”. Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschaft der Logik, Teddington 2006, 20,

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teleology of secret writing by stating that hypergraphics “envoie vers l’avenir un message total” [sends a total message towards the future].119 This is to say that even though the total message is only potentially meaningful before the arrival of the messianic era, in secret writing “il y avait l’utilité du secret, le besoin du mystère qui était […] de nature religieuse” [there was the utility of the secret, the need for a mystery that was of religious nature].120 Here the utility of the secret replaces the utility of conventional language and writing, while being intentionally dissimilar to Blanchotian literary language. Furthermore, Isou emphasises the divine character of the nonphenomenalisable referent of the secret by calling hypergraphics “sacred writing” (écriture sacrée), with sacred referring to divinity.121 In this case, sacredness denotes the preservation of the referent as uncognisable. Hence, hypergraphics suggests that divinity – the God Isou affirms – and divine language lie beyond cognition. Secrecy was central in the lettrist enterprise, not just in Isou’s works. As he candidly characterised, he, Pomerand, Lemaître and other lettrists ont défendu le monothéisme […] de l’Ancien Testament, nécessaire à l’unification des mécanismes spirituels et pratiques, […] ouverts à la révélation messianique permanente, c’est-àdire à l’évolution, en attendant le dévoilement du messianisme.122 defended the monotheism of the Old Testament, necessary for the unification of spiritual and practical mechanisms, open to a permanent messianic revelation, that is to say, evolution, pending the unveiling of messianism.

This is to say that permutations and hypergraphics, which is characteristically permutative, are teleological within the messianic framework. Accordingly, these permutations contain secrets “envoyés par le […] lettriste vers le futur” [sent towards the future by the lettrist], which, for their part, will be unveiled at the arrival of the messianic era.123 In the messianic context, the affirmation of God remodels secrecy and the character of the secret is transformed from linguistic to ontological. In secret writing, as exemplified by Isou’s Journaux, the secret of 120. Therefore, it seems that Isou’s understanding of Hegelian dialectics is a rather partial simplification. For Hegel, however, “becoming” is meaningful in the (phenomenological) present moment, whereas for Isou the meaning of the temporal not-yet cannot be made present. 119 Isou, Isidore, Mémoires sur les forces futures des arts plastiques et sur leur mort, Paris 1998, 31. Emphasis removed. 120 Isou Journaux, 171. 121 Ibid., 174. 122 Isou, Isidore, Critique de Mahomet et du Coran suivie de note supplémentaire sur Mahomet et le Coran et de critique des dirigeants actuels de l’État d’Israël, Paris 1975, 21. 123 Isou Mémoires, 32.



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signification rests on the author: he can be regarded as holding back the secret. This is to say that Isou’s secret writing is considered as a private language-like coding of meanings even though the medium (hypergraphics) does not establish a signification that is unenclosed for all. In this case, hypergraphics is considered to reveal its secret only to an elite, in the vein of Abulafian Kabbalah. However, instead of no mediation occurring, secret writing ostensibly unveils the existence of a secret, and this apophatic secret is the very secret of signification. This is to say that the secret suggests the possibility of a coherent signification. However, the secret cannot be void of contents, because it requires a referent: if “the secret that there is no secret were to be revealed, then there would be no secret to reveal since there would be nothing to conceal”.124 Hence, secret writing discloses an individual experience evoked by the nonphenomenal realm. Yet, within the messianic framework the secret is not, so to speak, Isou’s. Rather, though paradoxical, the secret is likewise unattainable for the author – it is not a part of his phenomenal world nor does it establish a signification. Moreover, as God is beyond cognition, the referent is not noumenal but rather radically unattainable due to its pronounced temporality. As Isou wrote: “le journal de Dieu est écrit en des alphabets mystérieux pour que les hommes ne lui ravissent pas les secrets célestes. Isou publie pour la première fois, le journal de divinité et le divulgue aux hommes” [the journal of God is written in mysterious alphabets so that men do not entice the celestial secrets from him. For the first time, Isou publishes the journal of divinity and divulges it to men].125 This view is reminiscent of his statement regarding Moses and the decrypted language of God. Isou takes up a kabbalistic theme of divine secrets that should not be revealed. However, he does not claim to know what these secrets are – he merely states their existence. Moreover, it is notable that Isou does not claim authorship, but rather assumes the role of a disseminator. By disseminating the celestial secrets, he implies a desire to establish a community consisting of an elite that is or will be acquainted with these secrets. The secret, with its unattainable content, is a structure that establishes a community and leads to a use of language that is peculiar to that community. The community can be constituted on the secret alone – the exis-

124 Wolfson Abulafia, 22–23. Wolfson brushes here the Derridean employment of the secret, which mainly focuses on the secret’s exertion of power, albeit it would be void of contents. Even though Derrida approaches the secret with apophatic language and even from the aspect of “the messianic”, his endeavour is still on the verges of atheism instead of language mysticism grounded on a pre-constructed secret. For further discussion, see Derrida, Jacques, Passions, Paris 1993; Almond, Ian, “Derrida and the Secret of the Non-secret: On Respiritualising the Profane”, Literature & Theology 17(4), 457–471. 125 Isou Journaux, 280.

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tence of a secret is, in such case, regarded as a sufficient guarantee of the existence of its unattainable referent (i.e. God). Even though Isou’s statement concerning the divine secrets is not without irony regarding the Jewish messianic tradition with its numerous automessiahs, he reveals pivotal aspects of secrecy in the very tradition. For instance, the mysterious alphabet is a direct reference to pansemiosis in which writing has the capability to affect ontological reality. On the whole, the apophatic secret is not merely a secret of signification, of any decoding or recoding of meanings, but rather a secret that is entwined in the messianic promise of language; that language will eventually signify and mediate meaning. Furthermore, the secret is necessarily always “to come”, because otherwise it would lose its structure as a secret. The secret cannot be disclosed due to the unknowability and unattainability of the referent. In this manner, the secret appears as a manifestation of a cognitive void, which is beyond the phenomenological realm and to which the structure of the secret – within the phenomenological – points. In this context, secrecy in Abulafian Kabbalah is elucidatory. What is particular to Abulafia’s thinking, is that the Messiah is regarded as an unknown potential within being. Abulafia associated the state of concentration resulting from the permuting of letters with a crucial moment in the mystical experience of a union that embodies the character and function of the Messiah.126 Hence, the messianic potential is structurally that of the ontological secret. As with the apophatic secret, even this potential will be actualised at some future point that however continuously withdraws further into the future without ever arriving. Only the Messiah is capable of actualising the third way of being by transforming the not-yet-being into being. This is anchored with language as the means of actualisation are the permutations of letters insofar as they reveal a divine name. Isou termed this “le Nom ineffable permis au Messie seul” [the ineffable Name permitted only for the Messiah].127 In Abulafian Kabbalah, messianicity is connected with the correct combination of letters: the right combination will actualise the messianic potential within being. This is to say that anyone can attain the combination that reveals the divine name.128 Accordingly, instead of an affirmative voice, Isou pondered of being “peut-être le Messie” [the Messiah, perhaps].129 Such automessianic uncertainty endures inevitably until the messianic potential is brought to fruition. For Isou, the Messiah is rather synonymous

126 Cf. Abulafia La vie. 127 Isou Agrégation, 355. 128 Idel Messianic, 61, 69. 129 Isou Agrégation, 348.



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to a revealer of the secret.130 The potential Messiah within can be actualised by the means provided by the Kabbalah, which betoken a revelationary unveiling of the hidden contents of the secret. However, this event is indefinitely postponed. Ultimately, language is the mainstay of the secret even in its ontological sense. In the Kabbalah, language is not merely an epistemological device, but an instrument of creation that includes the ontological aspect. Isou claimed to have uncovered “ce secret des Dieux que le Messie doit apporter” [the secret of the Gods that the Messiah must provide] in order to consummate the world.131 This secret is that of the divine name, which corresponds with the Messiah. As Abulafia writes, “le secret du nom […] est le Messie de Dieu et Moïse se réjouira” [the secret of the name is the Messiah of God and Moses will rejoice].132 It reveals the apophatic secret as twofold: the ontological secrets regarding any reality or truth are in this context always already linguistic. Vice versa, any linguistic secret contains an ontological element. The apophatic secret entails what Wolfson calls uncovering the truth as a form of un-truth. Essentially, what “is authentically true is that which is uncovered in its coveredness, the secret spoken by not being spoken”.133 The truth, which can be called the cause or the origin, is absent and beyond cognition. It is “celle qui dans la mystique relie directement l’univers du langage comme forme propre du monde spiritual à sa racine dans le Nom divin” [the one that, in the mystical, directly connects the universe of language – as the form particular to the spiritual world – to its roots with the divine Name].134 Or, as Levinas specifies, Sans que cette irréalité, au seuil du réel s’offre comme un possible à saisir, sans que la clandestinité décrive un accident gnoséologique qui arrive à un être.135 Without this unreality, at the threshold of the real, offering itself as a possible to be grasped; without the clandestinity describing the gnoseological [epistemological] accident that occurs to a being.

According to Levinas, the unreal – the ontological referent of the secret – does not submit itself to an epistemological grasp because it is beyond the phenome130 Devaux, Frédérique, De La Création à la société paradisiaque. Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque, tome 1, Paris 1996, 33. 131 Isou La Création, 12. 132 Abulafia quoted in Idel, Moshe, Maïmonide et la mystique juive, Paris 1991, 81–82. Abulafia seems to assign an additional meaning to the Messiah, which is linguistic. However, in the pansemiotic mode the name of God equals God instead of mere reference. 133 Wolfson Abulafia, 28–29. 134 Bouretz Témoins, 267. 135 Levinas Totalité, 287.

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nological threshold. The threshold of the phenomenal realm is to be grasped in temporal terms, designating that anything beyond this realm is not yet. Hence, the meaning-to-come in secret writing is a projection to the future in the present. Isou’s messianism is characterised by temporal movements and counter-movements, such as teleology and anachronisms. There are various levels of predestination and hiddenness, which are subject to contingency. The divine name is the secret that must unravel and, furthermore, this name is equated with the Messiah by Abulafia. Accordingly, the predestination of the divine name derives from the Kabbalah of names and motivates the search for the very name. In various versions, the individual who succeeds in revealing the name actualises his messianic potential within. In other words, the individual becomes the Messiah. At the very moment, the Messiah will render all not-yet-meaningful permutations, fragments and spaces meaningful. Yet, the empty space is not merely a locus of anticipation, a kind of manifestation of messianic hope. In accordance with the Jewish tradition, Isou recognised the empty page as an aesthetical space, which contains a remainder of divinity.

3.5 Empty Book, the Skin of God A pinnacle of Isou’s temporal poetics is his empty book La loi des purs (The Law of the Pure, 1963). The book consists of mere chapter headings that are followed by varying number of empty pages. The white page and its components, such as margins and spaces between words, were central in Isou’s œuvre, in which blank spaces have become an integral part of a work’s meaning. Isou called his book a roman blanc, in which the term blanc refers to both “white” and “void”.136 Hence the term links the white page with negative characteristics such as absence and emptiness. However, these qualities do not only give rise to a work of art that aims to criticise or even negate preceding aesthetics, but the blanc may indeed become an antinomic concept in the meaning characteristic of messianism. Its antinomy is derived from the use of the blank book for both subversive aesthetic (anti-art) and messianic purposes. Beneath this explicit aesthetic critique, Isou’s blank book addresses the themes of ineffability and divine absence, already familiar from the preceding chapters. 136 The blank book is defined here as a print consisting of white pages which has been bound into book form and has both a title as well as a named author. Material preceding the 1950s also exists; consider for instance the famous blank page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) or the “Poema kontsa” (Poem of the End, 1913) by the Russian futurist Vasilisk Gnedov. For other examples cf. Gibbs, Michael (ed.), All or Nothing. An Anthology of Blank Books, Cromford 2005.



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In order for the blank book to qualify as literature, it is necessary to understand the book as a critique of conventional literature which includes its own undoing.137 La loi des purs is an illuminating example of such aesthetical overturn due to its theoretical multifacetedness. In the book’s preface, Isou underscores the roman blanc as a complete aesthetic exhaustion (épuisement) of the genre of the novel.138 This suggests that the empty book should be regarded as an anti-art gesture, which straightforwardly declares the obsoleteness of the novel.139 Yet, applying messianism, he strived for an alternative to a mere rejection of the novel. By introducing the idea of invisible narration (a-optique), Isou caused an “inversion” of the blank page, which rendered emptiness a signifying space.140 Therefore, instead of mere destruction, the blank page manifests hiddenness. Isou thus goes beyond any understanding according to which both the manifest vacuity of the blank book cannot hide anything readable or visible, and, the lack of signs simply emphasises the materiality of the medium.141 Such understandings are accurate, but Isou’s unusual way of perceiving the blank page and his notion of invisible narration were not a case of facile abstraction, but come close to the conception of the white page as found in the Kabbalah. This correlation suggests that examining certain kabbalistic characteristics, such as the particular notion of God’s modality, are necessary for understanding the raison d’être of his blank book in the messianic framework. Isou’s efforts were similar but not identical to those of Jabès.142 White spaces (blancs) were essential in his works as well. For him, the blank denoted “un espace qu’aucune lettre ne désigne” [a space undesignated by any letter].143 137 For instance, Maurice Blanchot identified negative forces, such as absence and negations, at work in language. Words as lexical markings can be repeated independently and, in the end, they are devoid of signified contents. Accordingly, in Blanchotian writing, a word lacks subjective definitions. Blanchot, Maurice, La part du feu, Paris 1949, 314; Blanchot, Maurice, Book to Come, Stanford 2003, 226. The theme of “saying nothing” is an important feature in late modernist literature and the philosophy of the so-called linguistic turn. For instance, cf. Beckett, Samuel, Nouvelles et textes pour rien, Paris 1958; Derrida, Jacques, “Comment ne pas parler : Dénégations”, in Derrida, Jacques, Psyché : Inventions de l’autre, Paris 1987, 535–595. 138 Isou, Isidore, La loi des purs, Paris 1963, 7–8, 14. 139 An anti-art gesture, such as refusing to produce art, is meaningful only in the context of art. Cf. Harrison, Charles, “Notes Towards Art Work”, in Arbello, Alexander and Blake Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge 1999, 204–210. 140 See Isou La loi, 15. 141 Mœglin-Delcroix, Anne, “Ni Mot, ni image: livres vierges”, in In Vides. Une rétrospective, Zurich 2009, 405. 142 Jabès’s Le livre de questions (The Book of Questions, 1963–1973) was concurrent with La loi des purs. 143 Jabès, Edmond, El, ou le dernier livre, Paris 1973, 20.

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However, Jabès only wrote about white spaces without ever producing an actual blank book. He was, in a Blanchotian manner, more preoccupied with the abstract idea of the book than in its making. Whereas Jabès considered the empty page as a non-messianic place of rumination, for Isou the blank page entailed a full-fledged messianic potential.144 In line with other works by Isou, the forward-looking idea of à venir is a defining feature in the interpretation of La loi des purs. Based on the idea of invisible narration, the à venir is a structural property of Isou’s blank book and that this characteristic establishes a poetics distinct from an anti-art context. Typically, the blank book is void of contents and has a minimalist appearance. However, even though the contents of La loi des purs are stripped to a minimum, they are reminiscent of a narrative due to the chapter headings. This structure is as follows: Chapter heading Number of empty pages La rencontre [The Encounter] sixteen La chasse [The Chase] one L’étreinte [The Embrace] eighteen La dispute [The Dispute] one La première séparation [The First Separation] sixteen La recherche du passé [The Search of the Past] eighteen La seconde rencontre [The Second Encounter] eighteen La joie de l’amour partage [The Joy of Sharing Love] eighteen

The second and fourth “imaginary” chapters are distinctly shorter, which gives the book a rhythmic pattern. Together the names of the chapters appear to form a narrative but the narrative is nonexistent. The headings suggest that the genre of La loi des purs is romance, but they may also allude to, for instance, a religious ecstatic experience. It seems that the titles are deliberately ambiguous and that the literary character of the book is based on a resemblance to conventional fiction, which the author establishes and the reader recognises. In Isou’s work this kind of experimentation with the limits of literature, or what was still regarded as literature, was not unprecedented. However, in order to be conceived as language-critical literature, such experimentation must retain a certain affiliation with language. Even the blank book preserves this link to language by its guise and aesthetic grounding. Firstly, the book is an object that by its mere familiarity is associated with writing. Secondly, as a culmination of the aesthetics of subversion, the blank book epitomises the annihilation of language simply because it

144 For Jabès, see Franke, William, On What Cannot Be Said. Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, volume 2, Notre Dame 2007, 376–379.



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contains a trace of language – its removal. In this sense, the blank book remains at the limit of literature as a kind of degré zero. This degree zero can be regarded either as an experimental undoing of literature or as literary potential. In a similar manner Lemaître distinguished two kinds of roman blanc based on La loi des purs: the empty novel (roman vide) and the prospective novel (roman à faire).145 Even though identical in appearance, these dissimilar kinds of novels give rise to distinct frameworks, one being of aesthetic subversion and the other of messianism. The first thematises the blank space as a locus and the second in terms of temporality. The latter is distinctly messianic, but in order to grasp the poetic dissimilarities inherent within these two types the particular linguistic character of the former cannot be overlooked. Based on this distinction, the poetics linked to the empty and the prospective novel can be described as anti-poetics and apoetics respectively. Firstly, perceived as a part of a historical development of subversive aesthetics, the empty novel is the negation of the contents of the novel where language has been extinguished. Accordingly, Isou asserts that the “expression vide”, which refers to a blank, “ne peut représenter qu’un symbole d’épuisement d’un secteur esthétique déterminé” [empty expression cannot represent but a symbol of a specific aesthetic sector’s exhaustion].146 This kind of omission is inherent to anti-poetics: it is based on the complete abandonment of the practices typical to the genre of the novel, which form poetics. Yet, anti-poetics requires that one be familiar with the poetical conventions it discards. The overcoming of language can never be complete, because the empty novel would lose its significance as an anti-art gesture: language is still the backdrop against which the dismissive gesture is performed. Hence anti-poetics is inevitably related to language because by abstaining from the use of language anti-poetics affirms its existence. Secondly, the blank book as a potentiality (the prospective novel) generates a different signifying framework, one which is characterised by the à venir. This potentiality constitutes the blank page as a scene. In the words of Jabès, the “lieu du livre est vide emmuré. Chaque page, précaire abri, possède ses quatre murs qui sont ses marges” [place of the book is an enclosed emptiness. Every page, precarious refuge, has its four walls that are its margins].147 This is to say that the blank page is a frame for absence. However, instead of being a self-sufficient object, as the way the white page is conceived in anti-poetics, “Il existerait […] un lieu ‘blanc’, voire un espace vivant dans lequel se rencontrent les possibles” [There exists a “blank”

145 Lemaître, Maurice, Entretiens avec Pietro Ferrua sur le lettrisme, Paris 1982. 146 Isou La loi, 8. 147 Jabès El, 28.

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place, regarded as a living space in which the possibles meet].148 By prompting potentiality, the blank page is defined in terms of temporality. The page is not mere exhaustion in the anti-poetical sense, but rather it frames both what potentially “is” on the page (invisible narration) and what is not yet (à venir). Both illustrate Isou’s notion of the white page as potential rather than total absence. Due to its quality of potentiality, the prospective novel is characterised by an apoetics that denotes a more comprehensive emancipation from the scope of language than anti-poetics. Apoetics, like the “a-” prefix designates, is not mere opposition to language but a thoroughgoing lack of it.149 Isou’s idea of invisible narration is ambiguous, because even though it is beyond sensory perception, and hence affirmation, it cannot be simply dismissed as non-existing. The potential of invisible narration is in its contingent existence. It can, but should not necessarily, be understood in terms of writing, that is, as invisible writing. In fact, Isou occasionally opted for “white writing” over anti-poetical emptiness.150 The potentiality of Isou’s notion of invisible narration is incongruent with the aesthetics of subversion, but recalls, instead, the Jewish myth of the black and white fire.151 According to this myth God wrote the Torah with black fire on white fire that was conceived to be the skin of God. Hence this white fire is literally the substance of God and the Torah scroll’s white parchment signifies God’s infinite substance.152 The myth also carried an eschatological sense: in the Kabbalah white fire refers to the messianic world-to-come (olam haba), that is à venir, while 148 Devaux, Frédérique, De La Création à la société paradisiaque. Isidore Isou et la pensée judaïque, tome 2, Paris 1998, 80. 149 Whereas the prefix “anti-” designates opposition, the “a-” denotes “being without” or lacking. See Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Oxford 1995. Moreover, the “a-” is fundamentally ambiguous, because it permits a range of meanings. For a further discussion, see Mortley, Raoul, “The Fundamentals of the Via Negativa”, The American Journal of Philology 103:4, p. 429–439. 150 See “Les anti-lettries” in the preceding chapter. 151 This myth was not exclusively kabbalistic even though it was highly influential in the Kabbalah. According to this view, the Torah is simultaneously the word of God and, as a physical object, the scroll. In Jewish philosophy of late antiquity as well as in the medieval Kabbalah the Torah was not simply a symbol for God but rather God was identified with it. The Torah was conceived as a precept of a sort that had predated Creation. Monotheism, which Isou regarded as the ultimate achievement of Judaism, did not allow the pre-Creation existence of beings other than God. The evident contradiction was resolved with the myth of the black and white fire. 152 Idel, Moshe, Absorbing Perfections. Kabbalah and Interpretation, New Haven and London 2002, 49. Even Jacques Derrida identifies, albeit not unambiguously in the context of Judaism, the fire as absent centre, original meaning and divine speech, whereas ashes (written signifiers) are a “dead” trace of the very meaning; see Ofrat, Gideon, The Jewish Derrida, New York 2001, 92. Derrida, however, reconstrues the whole discussion for his own purposes, highlighting the Kabbalah as a kind of atheism due to its focus on textuality. See Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination, London and New York 2004, 375–377.



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black fire signals the present world.153 In the Kabbalah, this parable affirms the divine attributes of the blank page. The interpretation of the fire myth is quintessential as regards the prospective novel. In the medieval Kabbalah as well as in Hasidism that Isou disapproved, the previously exclusive focus on the Hebrew letters of the Torah was extended to cover the white spaces of the Torah scroll as well.154 According to this conception, the Torah is not only formed by visible letters, but the white parts of the scroll constitute additional writing. However, these spaces were not regarded as mere margins on the page, but were believed to include unreadable white letters, or, at least letters that could not be read like the black ones.155 The claim of the presence of invisible narration in La loi des purs is an appropriation of the Kabbalah, as so many of Isou’s ideas relating to temporal poetics. Yet the blank book appears to be a more profound instance of “white writing” than the Torah, due to the complete absence of conventional writing. This is to say that the prospective novel is not a critique of literature in the vein of the empty novel, because there is no backdrop of language to suggest the primacy of a given system of signification. The potential of the blank page is its capability to function as a framework of various kinds: the implosion of the linguistic backdrop “opens” the blank page for both presentation – the visual aspect, such as the visible whiteness of the page – and representation, the white page standing in for something else, that leads to religious connotations. Isou’s idea of invisible narration is most cogent when regarded in temporal terms and as an instance of messianism. In this context the notion of invisible narration embodies a desire to overcome the not-yet. Furthermore, the messianic aspect of invisible writing includes the idea of an “elite readership” consisting solely of the Messiah or the enlightened few. Regardless of such restrictions, this readership is involved in a subjective temporal transition. It requires a psychological transformation of the reader who apprehends in advance what others will achieve in the messianic future.156 Hence invisible narration may be described as writing-to-come, which necessitates the framework of the blank book. In this case invisibility involves a material requirement, a framework that makes the invisibility manifest. A non-elite reader is unable to overcome the hiddenness of what

153 Lahy, Georges, “Introduction et présentation”, in Abraham Aboulafia, La Vie du monde à venir, trans. Georges Lahy, Roquevaire 2009, 5. 154 Isou seems to have utilised the Hasidic myth regadless of his antagonism towards the movement. 155 Idel, Moshe, “White Letters: From R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev’s Views to Postmodern Hermeneutics”, Modern Judaism 26:2, 170, 185. 156 Ibid., 173.

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is invisible. Hence the Messiah, in Isou’s thinking, is the revealer of secret. Even Buber shares the same vision of God revealing the white mystery of the Torah in the times to come.157 This is to say that the theme was current in Jewish thought when Isou produced his blank works and, eventually, La loi des purs. The constancy of the theme evokes the question regarding the mystery that only the Messiah may reveal: what is it? As was noted above, the white parchment was identified with divine substance in the Kabbalah. The blank pages in La loi des purs are similar, meaning that Isou assigned some aspect of divinity to the blank page. Such identification was not even foreign to Jabès for whom God was a metaphor for a void.158 However, Isou understood absence as a basic attribute of divinity. The absence of God was not, for him, the same as in much of modernist literature – the absence of a discussion about God – but rather a more thoroughgoing absence as a prerequisite of God. As noted above, the Jewish God is considered absent to begin with. By virtue of such formulation, for Isou the absence of all attributes of God’s essence marked God’s elusive existence.159 For him, emptiness thus becomes firsthand evidence of God, which the blank book contains. This stance can be clarified by considering the Jewish conception of God Isou adopted. Arguably, when God is associated with “blank” features and integrally with absence in general, emptiness becomes the modality of presence. It is not the presence of a given object, but rather the presence of an absence. The absence of God does not result in nihilistic reflection, or evil, but in an affirmation of the existence of the absent God.160 Isou confirmed that “la présence de cette absence c’est-à-dire le blanc, l’absence comme cadre (et non comme rien) [signifie] chez l’auteur lettriste une ouverture” [the presence of this absence – that is to say the blank – , absence as a frame (and not as nothing) signifies, in the case of a lettrist author, an opening].161 In this context the blank book is essential in any attempt to make this modality manifest, because, as the work of Jabès suggests, absence 157 Devaux De La Création 1, 33. Devaux mentions the same approach in stating that one day God will reveal the white text and everyone will be a future God. See Devaux De La Création 2, 86; Chalier, Catherine, Judaïsme et altérité, Paris 1982, 293. 158 Jabès, Edmond, “My Itinerary”, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 12:1, 4. 159 Devaux De La Création 1, 163. Isou’s stand is similar to that of subsequent figures in the French phenomenological tradition who posit “God without being” or “otherwise than being” (such as Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion). However, this strain of thought is already found in Heidegger’s thinking. Even earlier, God was posited as hyperessential in negative theology by figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and Angelus Silesius. Furthermore, Jewish thinkers were influenced by these very figures. See Matt “Ayin”, 122. 160 Jabès considered God absent, but for him God was present in the book, as a full stop. The full stop is included in the name of the final volume of Le livre de questions. 161 Quoted in Devaux De la Création 2, 88.



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is detectable only if there is a place that is empty. Furthermore, the framework of this manifestation must be able to stand in for what is not there – that is to say, to represent. Language has such a capability, and even though the blank book contains no language, at least in the conventional sense, it is a limited setting that may be representative – if only by playing with the familiarity of its material interface. When opening a book we expect content, such as language, and thus representation. Therefore the blank book is essentially a framework in which the reversed modality of God is manifested. The messianic potential of the blank book in Isou’s case is incongruent with other secular or quasi-religious models of temporality in literature, such as those of Blanchot and Jabès, in which aesthetics is highlighted. La loi des purs should not be read simply according to secular poetics because the work has messianic significance in the nature of hiddenness. However, the distinction between secular and quasi-religious poetics should not be made without examining the reciprocal differences between these poetics and works of art that do not correlate with the mere physical objects. The idea of hiddenness in the prospective novel can be understood in several messianic ways. The blank, signifying absence, evokes the openness of a work of art. This structural openness indicates that the work (œuvre) is not directly identifiable with the blank book as material object (as an empty novel would be more or less). Instead, the prospective novel is characterised by a “surplus”, a potential meaning. Characteristic of this surplus is that the prospective novel is “plein de tout ce qui peut – doit – s’y faire, de positif, de négatif, de réel, d’imaginaire, de possible, d’impossible” [filled with everything that could – should – constitute it; positive, negative, real, imaginary, possible, impossible].162 In other words, it is a plenitude of potential meaning.163 Equally, the abstract notion of a work of art is distinctly different in Blanchot’s and Isou’s models of literature. Blanchot’s idea of a “book to come” (livre à venir) addresses an ideal book that is impossibility, because the book to come is perpetually “to come”. Furthermore, Jabès added kabbalistic elements to Blanchot’s book to come.164 The main difference between the prospective novel and the book to come is that the latter was a fully abstract ideal and hence Blanchot made no distinction between the terms “book” (livre) and “work” (œuvre). The 162 Lemaître Entretiens, 214. Emphasis removed. 163 Such openness establishes a work of art that is cumulative and social in the vein of Umberto Eco’s open work (opera aperta), which the reader or viewer completes by means of interpretation. Cf. Eco, Umberto, The Open Work, Cambridge 1989. 164 For the possible influence of the Kabbalah on Jabès, see Del Nevo, Matthew, “Edmond Jabès and Kabbalism after God”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65:2, 403–442.

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book to come is aporetic – it cannot, by definition, be written. It is an ideal that repels actualisation, because “if it has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was”.165 The prospective novel, for its part, is based on a more complex interdependence of the material and the ideal. It requires a non-identifying with the material object, because even though the physical object exists, its potential meaning is not yet actual. In other words, the book to come does not require material constraints like the prospective novel does. These constraints are necessary, because the prospective novel may stand in for what is absent or imperceptible. Whereas Blanchot’s book to come underscores the autonomy of literature, the prospective novel – as a work – is beyond the immediate material framework (the blank book). The incommensurability of the book and the work forms the prospective novel. In this light the quintessential feature of apoetics is the open quality of the work: the prospective novel is in a state of becoming, a roman à venir, the ontological openness which is caused by the work’s future orientation. Whereas the empty novel is “closed”, in prospective novel absence frames the idea of the arrival of the work as something potential. However, as a manifestation of the absence of God, the blank necessitates a personal experience of absence. Even though La loi des purs, as a physical object, exists, “l’œuvre est toujours à venir comme le Messie. Elle est promesse, avenir” [the work is always to come like the Messiah. It is promised, future].166 The prospective novel is in a state of becoming, which is a messianic promise. Isou’s theories contain a genuine striving towards perfecting the world even though this endeavour is not religious, in a traditional sense, but rather quasi-religious. The prospective novel is an apparatus in this messianic project, not an end in itself such as the book to come. The book to come is characterised by an absolute non-arrival whereas the prospective novel indicates only the possibility of arrival. The instrumental nature of the prospective novel in Isou’s messianic project invokes the other meaning of the blank: the blanc that refers to “void”. The link between white and void is made for instance by Jabès: “when you say ‘invisible’ you are pointing to the boundary between the visible and the invisible; there are words for that. But when you can’t say the word, you are standing before noth-

165 Derrida, Jacques, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford 2005, 9. 166 Devaux De la creation 2, 136. Devaux’s formulation is problematic in the same way as Jewish messianism: Who is making the promise and to whom it is made? In Isou’s case the messianic promise is historical and biblical. However, the parties to this promise, affirmed in the passive voice, remain unknown. Hence the work is fundamentally an open-ended structure in which the promise is neither present nor absent.



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ing”.167 Jabès’s vivid imagery leads to an experience of nothing, even though his approach is reclusive and therefore foreign to Isou’s personal quest. The experience invoked by Jabès nevertheless recalls the blank with its reference to emptiness. The blank, not as mere presentation but representation, is what frames the presence of the absence of God. This represents God as inconceivable. Isou highlighted the blank as a cognitive void, a lack of sensory perception and conceptual thinking, by declaring that “tout était blanc, si blanc que je ne comprenais même pas” [everything was blank, so blank that I do not even understand].168 The first person form is seldom used by Isou and it foregrounds the private nature of the overwhelming experience evoked by the blank. The blank that is beyond conceptualisation does not denote the whiteness of the page, but inconceivability itself. Representation is capable of standing in for what is not there or to point to what is beyond conceptualisation. Both of these possibilities are beyond language, because at best they point to the boundary that exists between cognition and the cognitive void. Isou’s messianic objective is to liquefy this boundary. From the messianic aspect, the prospective novel can be regarded as a means of contemplation by which the elite reader aims to grasp what is hidden. This messianic pursuit is focused on the inconceivability and absence of God. Isou grasped God as the unknowable aim of messianic teleology.169 The unknowability of the Jewish God, the presence of the absence of God, is the “ground” on which the actual world takes form. This is to say that the world is built around a centre that is the absence of God. Advancing towards the centre is what constitutes the messianic quest, which aims to overcome this world and elicit the messianic future. The messianic process is characterised by a desire to reveal a mystery, to encounter God who is absent. Since God’s presence is absence, the desire is objectless and the object cannot be restored by the desire. Apoetics proves useful in voicing this desire, because objectless representation, such as the blank, is antinomic – at least in the conventional use of language. The inconceivable can be represented by a blank that is poetic, meaning that it may lack a point of reference.170 The lack of reference shatters representation, because the blank represents nothing. Hence, the failure of representation is an effect that is capable of

167 Auster, Paul, “Book of the Dead: An Interview with Edmond Jabès” in Gould, Eric (ed.), The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabès, Lincoln 1985, 19. 168 Isou Agrégation, 134. 169 Ibid., 259. 170 For a similar effect in poetic language, see Loevlie, Elisabeth, Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett, Oxford 2003, 213–215.

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evoking an experience of nothing but this effect is available only at the instant in which cognition fails. Incognisability is indeed at work in La loi des purs. According to one critic, “Isou fait retour à une forme de vide. Ce vide a lieu […] quand le mot ne colle plus à la chose et lorsqu’il y a [un] univers […] inimaginable” [Isou reverted to a form of void. This void takes place when the word is no longer connected to the thing [it denotes] and when there is an unimaginable universe].171 The blank, as openended representation, opens the instant by which it evokes the experience of nothing. This instant reveals the presence of the inconceivable. It is an instant that does away with the conventional sense of perception while opening perception to the incognisable. The experience signals the untraversable gap between men and God, of their distinct modalities, which can only be bridged by the Messiah. La loi des purs reveals the multiplicity of potentials embodied in the blank. The blank may be grasped as mere aesthetic subversion, but my intention has been to focus on its quasi-religious qualities, which in Isou’s case suggest both structural and ideological similarities with the Kabbalah and Jewish messianism – which are illustrated by the à venir. Isou’s appropriation of these doctrines is quasi-religious due to the fundamentally ambiguous character of his theory. Even though the distinction between anti-poetics and apoetics suffices to distinguish the secular aspect from the more religious one, La loi des purs does not affirm one interpretation over any other. Instead, ambiguity remains a fundamental feature of the work. By framing these endeavours, La loi des purs does not denote an absolute void but rather a non-rational emptiness induced by religion, which is furthermore experiential. Hence at issue is not Isou’s roman blanc as nothing but instead a work that allows one to arrive at the verge of “nothing” by producing an effect by which cognition fails. In fact, only when producing this effect can there be a poetics, an apoetics, of the prospective novel in the sense presented here. In Isou’s use the blanc, in referring to both white and emptiness, becomes a philosopheme. The empty page is not merely matter (devoid of matter), but frames the absence of God thus affirming God. The empty page forms the framework for representation and is the precondition of meaning. The peculiar quality of the Jewish God, the inverted modality, allows the use of the blanc as an affirmation of God even though the physical result appears simply to be a white page. To recapitulate: The question is not whether the page is empty but what the very emptiness signifies. Therefore it should also be noted that the empty page may represent the invisible as it can only present the visible.

171 Devaux De la création 2, 145.

Conclusions

Conclusions

Au-delà de cette modernité, Isou retourne au commentaire infini du Talmud, et allie alors cette modernité à l’une des plus anciennes et des plus fortes traditions du monde judaïque.1

Lettrist poetry, particularly that composed by Isou, seems to emerge from a world of its own. Indeed, each instance of hypergraphics establishes a kind of a singularity, which portrays an utterly unknown and experiential realm. Steve Martinot explains appropriately that a “textual singularity is a moment where the text loses touch with its world and becomes selfreferential, where it relies upon what it has constructed as its own expression to ground the language it depends upon for that expression”.2 This is the initial impression one receives when looking at – or reading – hypergraphics: that hypergraphics is meaning in its own right, in the sense of automorphic letters. However, this modern-day vanguard “sacred” writing requires interpretation that is not imposed, but rather that which emerges from the ample tradition these forms accommodate in themselves. The Jewish influence in lettrism becomes apparent through the theoretical and practical aesthetic frameworks of Isidore Isou, who successfully appropriated elements derived from the medieval Kabbalah into the twentieth-century avant-garde. Medieval kabbalism and messianism, together with their later adaptations, were at play in lettrism at the most fundamental level of its poetics. Remarkably, lettrism employed the Jewish tradition in lieu of aesthetic innovations all the while propagating the newness of their inventions. The Kabbalah, in particular, is centred on a potent theory of language, and Isou utilised its readily available techniques in his avant-garde poetry. In addition to such immediate similarities as textual techniques, Isou adapted manifold Jewish themes such as eschatology and a particular linguistic ontology (pansemiosis) to a modern aesthetic framework. What is particular to Isou’s poetics is his utilisation of the cultural ambiance of the medieval Kabbalah, which results in the ambiguous characteristics inherent to lettrist poetics. By virtue of this equivocation, hypergraphics “brings the unknown into relation with the known, but without reducing the difference

1 Devaux De la création 2, 142. “Beyond this modernity, Isou returns to the infinite commentary of the Talmud, and then combines this modernity with one of the oldest and strongest traditions of the Jewish world”. 2 Martinot, Steve, Forms in the Abyss. A Philosophical Bridge between Sartre and Derrida, Philadelphia 2006, 140.

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that binds the two incongruities into a selfsame identity”.3 This is to say that lettrist writing maintains the middle without reduction. Considering the middle from the aspect of singularity, it is a kind of a scattered one because singularity is not synonymous with unity. Lettrist poetics is based on ambiguities manifested both in the methods it applies (parapraxis, glossografia) and the themes it discusses (divinity, religious utopia). Moreover, the “unknown” accommodates even complex combinations of (non-)existence. In the case of the individual, the unknown is not an utter beyond, but rather it “shows itself as the irrecuperable ground of privation” within consciousness.4 The belonging-together of the known and the unknown (or the not-yet-known) are moments of something that cannot come to presence in language. The ability of hypergraphics to associate itself with these modes is due to its role as an indirect “standing in for” the middle. These traits derive from deep-seated traditions that Isou was influenced by before the initial launch of lettrism in France. Hence the study has accounted for the ideological, aesthetic and political currents in interwar Romania, which were relevant to Isou and the development of lettrism. The cardinal Jewish influence on Isou derived from the small Jewish town environs, where folklore and religious mysticism were prominent. Evidently, the presence of tradition-centred Jewish thought in lettrism demonstrates that the avant-garde did not exclusively stem from urban, metropolitan surroundings. However, the shtetl could not provide a setting for the avant-garde due to its conservative character, as Isou acknowledged. Hence the contextualisation of Isou’s Jewishness, his background and working conditions in Paris, does not only benefit the discussion on the “Jewishness” of lettrism but also demonstrates that ideas derived from the Jewish tradition influence the broader popular conception of the avant-garde as a novelty-oriented aesthetical construct. In addition, by looking at Isou’s works and theories through this lens one is able to discern his significance in his contemporary intellectual circles. Even though lettrism may have been a marginal movement during the 1940s and 1950s, it was significant in that margin, because it addressed issues that were not widely discussed at the time: mainly the complete dissolution of meaning in language, which was influential in the so-called linguistic turn during the 1960s. Curiously, departing from the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde, Isou fell back on the Jewish tradition in order to motivate this elusive meaning. Isou’s primary impulse leading to the creation of lettrism was the conception of language as an intrusion of the social into the individual consciousness. 3 Wolfson, Elliot R., Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death, Berkeley 2006, xii. 4 Kavka Messianism, 189–190.



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By the same token, not only does the individual never truly communicate his or her innermost experiences and feelings, but also language contains political and social ideologies and structures that are external to that individual. In Isou’s regard, such strictly secular ideals and practices distanced the individual from God and the eventual union with the divine. Therefore he espoused an anti-rationality that would elude the dominant discourse. The ambiguous rien is essential in this enterprise, because it evades conceptualisation and, hence, domestication into hegemonic discourse while leaving room for imagination. Yet, beyond the immediate level of politics, rien and the structure of a secret indicate the religious dimension of lettrism: lettrism is not straightforwardly contented with anti-rationality as a means of criticism, but rather regards anti-rationality both as a prerequisite for and a manifestation of religious elements. In this sense, lettrism addresses the elusive meaning in light of the Jewish tradition. Isou’s project becomes comprehensively meaningful when it is regarded as a temporal undertaking. Temporality is an intrinsic feature of his thought, which focuses on the overcoming of the present moment as the measure of being and meaning. Isou utilises messianism in order to venture beyond the evident lacks in being and language. Accordingly, his theory promises a return to a “sensible” order of the divine kind where being and meaning are fully present. In such a future world God guarantees meaning, which the Messiah will reveal at the eschaton. This moment presents the eventual overcoming of ungraspability and ambiguity. The ambiguities Isou made use of were not limited to poetics but extended both to the figure of the Messiah and his own persona. In his personal life Isou balanced between the negation and affirmation of religion: he was not a downright non-believer or a straightforwardly religious person in the sense of a practising Jew. Indeed, “[Isou] serait à la fois en le paraphrasant, un Juif orthodoxe « du père, orgueilleux et croyant aux pouvoirs de la Création » et un Juif émancipé qui tente de nous libérer du joug dogmatique prône par cette religion qu’il situe comme le modèle initial” [by paraphrasing, Isou would be both: an Orthodox Jew “of the father, proud and believing in the powers of Creation” and an emancipated Jew who tries to free us from the dogmatic yoke of that religion which he situates as the initial model].5 Even here conscious indifference proves more important than affirmation or negation. In fact, it is this very indifference that has fuelled the various interpretations of lettrism’s religious character. The answer is that the case of Isou does not provide an unambiguous answer. After this, one can reiterate the initial question of “so what”? Isou was a Jew who received a Jewish education at the yeshiva. During his artistic career, he took 5 Devaux, De la création 1, 185.

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advantage of his Jewish background by tapping into its rich cultural tradition, seeking to appropriate this material for, so to speak, an amelioration of the world. Moreover, he wanted to be the Messiah: Et lorsque ce véritable Messie viendra, alors seulement, Abraham Aboulafia, David Reubéni, Schlomo Molko, Sabetai Zwi, Mardochée d’Eisenstadt, Jakob Leibowitz Franck, Théodor Herzl, tous acquerront leur véritable sens. J’aurais bien voulu, à cet instant, qu’Isidore Isou soit le dernier, l’Accomplisseur, le Messie, celui qui aurait annoncé, dans le monde, la vérité de la victoire judaïque et du bonheur des hommes, sur la terre.6 And when the true Messiah comes, only then, Abraham Abulafia, David Reubeni, Schlomo Molko, Sabbatai Zevi, Mordecai of Eisenstadt, Jacob Leibowitz Frank, Theodor Herzl, all will acquire their true meaning. I would have liked that at that moment Isidore Isou would be the last, the Achiever, the Messiah, he who announced, worldwide, the truth of the Jewish victory and happiness of men on earth.

These self-proclaimed messiahs will be affirmed unsuccesful once the true Messiah arrives: until then, uncertainty will hang over the matter. The seminal feature of the Messiah Isou mentioned was the actualisation of the future world, which would entail a divine union that would also render all lettrist poetry meaningful and sensible. In short, lettrist writing will become intelligible in the messianic future. The anticipation of this future means that in order to be meaningful, all actions in the present must somehow relate to the future-to-come. It also signifies that the current state of affairs is rendered more bearable by way of hope. Lettrism addressed problematics that were topical in the historical avantgarde and succeeded in embodying many themes prominent in preceding avantgarde aesthetics. Therefore, this investigation should be considered as a case study that is intimately related to a broader issue, the various relations between the Jewish tradition and the avant-garde. Peculiar to the Jewish avant-garde authors preceding lettrism, such as German expressionists or emigrants living in Paris, is an intertwining of avant-gardist and traditional elements, deriving from Jewish folklore and religion. This was one instance where Jewish artists were reinventing literary tradition in the context of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. A full history of the Jews in Continental avant-garde circles is yet to be mapped and written. The story of the Romanian Jew Isidore Isou did not, however, begin in a world devoid of meaning: rather, his poetic and messianic endeavours employed preceding as well as contemporary cultural, philosophical and religious elements.

6 Isou Agrégation, 356.



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One of the most persisting notions in Isou’s œuvre is the controversial idea of the avant-garde of the avant-garde. In the light of this volume’s title, it aptly describes his position as a vanguard Messiah. The term contains a certain pleonastic quality in terms of temporality: the “vanguard Messiah” has a double relation to the future, because the Messiah in Jewish messianism is to-come and the “vanguard” reaches towards the future from the present, seeking to actualise the future in the present. However, it also describes how to remain at the forefront as an aesthetic pioneer, or at least how to claim being one, while utilising elements from the tradition that is ultimately passé from the vanguard’s point of view. In the light of lettrist theory, it is surprising that Isou’s Jewish inclinations remained unaffected for more than 20 years. Given the Jewish understanding of the Messiah, these elements were thoroughly imbued in his poetics and aesthetics. However, even the Jewish element eventually came to be regarded as passé, mainly in the sense of the far-reaching tradition it signified. If the vanguard Messiah would question the “essence” of what the Messiah signifies, could he still be the Messiah?

Epilogue: Towards a Quiescent Judaism

Epilogue: Towards a Quiescent Judaism

L’épanouissement bénéfique […] de l’Art Sacré ne peut s’effectuer que par ce double élargissement: de son univers esthétique, lettriste; et de son contenu théologique et philosophique, rapproché de l’Intégralité.1

A significant change took place in lettrist theory regarding Judaism after Isou’s La loi des purs (1963) and Œuvres de spectacle (1964), when he began to doubt the purposefulness of Jewish elements in his aesthetics. The issue was already touched on above in relation to Isou’s secularised conception of the Messiah and the idea of hyperontology. This new paradigm meant that after “de la Thora de Dieu puis de la Thora mosaïque il y aurait ainsi une Thora isouienne synonyme de Thora de la Culture” [the Torah of God and the Mosaic Torah there thus would be an Isouian Torah synonymic to a Torah of Culture].2 Isou’s lack of incentive to venture beyond any religious influence is in line with his paradoxical idea of being in the vanguard of the avant-garde. It seems that according to the arbitrary internal development of lettrism, Isou altered his stance to the Jewish textual corpus. Hence, in the mid 1960s, he began to emphasise the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of the traditional Jewish texts instead of religion, as well as the utilisation of these aspects in a quasi-theological framework. The reason for this shift most likely stemmed from contemporary politics. During the mid and late 1960s, Isou generally refocused his theories in order to better address current social problems and socio-political issues. The events of the spring of 1968 in Paris had a clear relation to Jewishness, which paralleled the rise of French leftist thought. Much of these developments resulted from Charles De Gaulle’s conservative right-wing politics. For instance, his anti-Semitic remarks following the Six-Day War in 1967 politicised much of the already dissatisfied French Jewish youth, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, commonly dubbed the leading figure of the student uprising.3 However, both Gaullist rhetoric and 1 Isou, Quelques, 3. “The beneficial development of the Sacred Art can only be done by this double enlargement: of its aesthetic, lettrist, universe; and its theological and philosophical content, approaching Wholeness”. 2 Devaux De la création 2, 74. According to Devaux, the Torahs of God and Moses are distinct. The first is unorganised and chaotic whereas the latter is organised by Moses who elucidates historical events. 3 In fact, until 1967 France had been the prime supporter of the State of Israel – a role that has since been assumed by the United States. The year presents a turning point in Franco-Israeli relations.



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Jewish political militancy were components of much broader social issues such as government decentralisation and the renewal of the education system.4 Here, the Jewish discussion was related to the situation of national and ethnic minorities in France at the time. Urbanisation had meant the further growth of suburbs around French cities during the 1950s and 1960s. Tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews, who had retained French citizenship, returned from the former French colonies in Africa where they were in danger of persecution from the empowered Muslim majority. In addition to the returnees, there was a growing demand for workers in France, which led to widespread work-related immigration. French working-class Jews had a long tradition in secular leftist movements, originally due to limited language skills, which emphasised the need to unionise. The impact of the secular left is evident in Isou’s ponderous work Créatique ou la novatique (1941–1976) (written in 1976–1977), which is, regardless of its name, more a revision than retrospection.5 At the time, Isou was involved in the Parisian UER des Arts plastiques, d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’art under the direction of Professor Bernard Teyssèdre, where he was awarded a doctorate based on his published work rather than an actual thesis.6 Hence, Créatique is as close to a thesis as Isou ever wrote. The book can be read as a manifesto of a kind, written in nine tomes each over 300 pages. Without acknowledging the alterations to his earlier theories, in these volumes Isou outlines his system that represents a kind of new beginning of political lettrism (one that is thereby launched with its own (pre)history already “documented”). Of course, with Judaism so centrally involved in lettrist theory from the very beginning, the movement had always been political. In Créatique, the most significant divergence from his early theories is the obvious toning down of the penultimate Jewish element. As Isou declares, “je suis isouien et non mosaïque” [I am Isouian and not Mosaic].7 For instance, the utopian and 4 Hyman, Paula, The Jews of Modern France, Berkeley 1998, 202ff. 5 The title is difficult to translate as it refers to Isou’s theories regarding creativity and creation as well as the ephemal idea of “making new”. 6 Curiously, only Pietro Ferrua has noted Isou’s doctorate, which he describes as a rare occasion even in France – for instance, Michel Butor was unable to obtain one. The degree allowed Isou (and Lemaître who was likewise awarded) to teach in French universities. Ferrua, Pietro, “Romanian Avant-Gardes as Export Products: The Case of Isidore Isou and Letterism”, in Papers for the V. Congress of Southeast European Studies, Kot K. Shangriladze and Erika W. Townsend (eds.), Bloomington 1984, 142; “Introduction”, in Pour et contre Bertozzi, Isou, Isidore (ed.), Portland 1987, 9. The UER (unité d’enseignement et de recherché; teaching and research unit) in question was established by Teyssèdre, who supervised numerous theses combining art theory and practice. The unit still exists at the Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. 7 Isou, Isidore, Les fruits dorés de la grande loi trop élevés pour les porcs de la société moderne suivi de Au-delà du mythe dans le jeu de Dieu et exégèse, Paris 1966, 12.

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rather wild idea concerning the Judaisation of the French population, so typical of Isou’s early thought, is altogether absent. This absence is only emphasised by the “new” theological dimension introduced in Créatique, called hypertheology, which focuses syncretically on the “peoples of the Book”, in other words, the doctrines of the three major monotheistic religions and their reciprocities. This syncretism is reflected in a doctrine Isou began to outline in 1966. According to the common naming procedure of lettrist theories, it was derived from a Greek root. The doctrine was named “kladology” (kladologie), after the Greek word klados signifying a branch.8 Concisely put, Isou’s aim was to systemise a whole Weltanschauung by providing an umbrella term for his interpretations of different scientific and cultural fields (“branches”), such as economics, psychology, and of course, religion. In the case of the latter, the result was the “hypertheological” unification of the three major religions’ dogmas. Isou’s newfound syncretism also signified a change in his personal attitude towards Judaism. He accounted for this renewed relation first in the late 1980s, a decade after Créatique, and the tone of the statement differs decidedly from that in Agrégation: Ma redécouverte du judaïsme a été, aussi, complétée par la constatation de la nécessité de la dimension, de la lamelle, de l’entaille, de la théologie, dans l’éventail de ce que j’ai appelé, au début, la culture organique, et qui est devenue la kladologie, au-delà de l’athéisme de ma jeunesse de sioniste de gauche, marxiste[.]9 My rediscovery of Judaism was also complemented by the recognition of the need for the dimension, the chip, the cut, the theology, in the range of what I called, at the beginning, organic culture and which became the kladology [that is] beyond the atheism of my leftist Zionist, Marxist youth.

Isou evidently regarded Judaism as an insufficient element in the cultural renewal promoted by the New Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as academic Marxism or the French counterculture in general. When Judaism is reduced from a guiding principle to a mere component of his own theory (kladology), it is presented in an essentially different sense than in his works of the late 1940s. In Agrégation, Isou still regarded the Torah as the building block of Judaism, and the Kabbalah as providing the necessary mysticism, both of which had preserved the “essence” of Judaism during the somewhat hegemonic Christian reign in Europe. However, in Créatique he re-estimates his arguments regarding both, and pro-

8 Sabatier Lettrisme, 17–18, 206. 9 Isou, Isidore, “Lettre sur la méthode de création, la Thora et le Talmud”, in Le mouvement lettriste, n.17 (automne-hiver) 1989–1990, 7.



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claims having uncovered fundamental deficiencies in the exegesis of the Jewish textual corpus. His disillusionment with the Kabbalah and kabbalistic techniques of textual manipulation is palpable: Les recherches sur les lettres des textes sacrés et sur les nombres représentés par ces lettres permettent aux mystiques d’aboutir à des clefs qui, malheureusement, ne leur ouvrent aucun domaine neuf de la Culture et de la vie.10 Studies on the [Hebrew] letters of the sacred texts and the numbers represented by these letters allow mystics to reach keys that unfortunately do not open any new field of Culture and life.

This account of the Kabbalah and its methodology is overshadowed by an obvious disappointment in kabbalistic exegesis and its inapplicability to Isou’s reimagined “Torah of culture”. Furthermore, it suggests that Isou was, at least in the early years of lettrism, anticipating some sort of societal change – regardless of whether or not its final form would have been in line with messianism. Even though this disenchantment did not necessarily signify a personal loss of belief, in this period Isou placed his own theories centre-stage at the expense of his Jewish heritage. More importantly, Isou began to emphasise his ideas about a holistic culture instead of the more conventional view according to which culture is composed of various fragmentary fields and arenas. The Isouian Torah of culture is analogous to the Torah proper, which is regarded as the divine Word and hence as containing the entire Creation. Due to this analogy, Isou’s idea of kladology becomes redefined in a holistic manner. The model for such an interpretation of culture is derived from Jewish tradition ranging beyond the Torah. According to Isou, the Talmud attempted to unify the fields of culture without success. Furthermore, because the Talmud failed in this attempt, it is included in Isouian kladology, which would supposedly have succeeded in the same endeavour. By virtue of the Isouian interpretation of the Talmudic tradition, his change of heart regarding Judaism has been seen as originating from an internal change in Judaism: according to the lettrist interpretation, the spirit of Talmudic and kabbalistic exegesis is regarded as having replaced the original prophetic spirit of revelation.11 Devaux characterises this new interpretation of Judaism in lettrism as a combination of religious traditions and artistic efforts. Accordingly, the religions of revelation – most of all Judaism – represent the pedestal on which the Isouian œuvre is built. In this interdependent combination one cannot exist without the 10 Isou Créatique, 2199. 11 Devaux De la création 2, 60.

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other. Even so, Judaism served as a model for the Isouian system of creation.12 Devaux’s interpretation is somewhat exaggerated, at least in that the religions do not require Isouian theory to supplement them. By a slight reformulation, however, one arrives at the idea of a fundamental “belonging together” of the religious and aesthetic fields in lettrism. Yet, in a pamphlet dated to 1966, Isou himself pointed out a difference between the religious and aesthetic fields while contradicting his previous writings. According to him “le lettrisme cherche dans les lettres de poésie sonore et non Dieu ; la kabbale cherche Dieu et non la poésie sonore. En faisant le lettrisme, je ne pensais pas à la kabbale” [In letters, lettrism seeks sound poetry and not God; the Kabbalah seeks God and not sound poetry. When conceiving lettrism, I did not think of the Kabbalah].13 This statement should be seen in the light of artistic trends of the 1960s and the criticism lettrism received during that period. Both sound and visual poetry were experiencing a renaissance while mysticism had become prominent amongst New Age groups, with which Isou did not want lettrism to be aligned. Therefore, as we have seen above, the opposite of his claim was true: Isou reflected continuously and tenaciously on the Kabbalah when forming his initial lettrist theories. Nonetheless, the Kabbalah was far too exotic for the average French reader and continuously underlined Isou’s foreignness, whereas sound poetry was emerging and becoming popular. This reflects a certain opportunism in relation to other avant-garde movements, such as L’internationale situationnisme, which distanced itself from lettrism in the late 1950s and became influential during the 1960s leading up to the events of the spring of 1968. Unlike the lettrists, Debord and other situationists produced only a few concrete works of art that could be recuperated by the art world. Moreover, the situationists had criticised Isou’s theories rather thoroughly, which may have encouraged him to rephrase them.14 Coincidentally, that year Isou fell ill and required hospitalisation. His final hypergraphic novel, Jonas ou la corps à la recherche de son âme (Jonas or the Body in Search for its Soul, 1984, henceforth Jonas), deals with this period. In the light of the situation at the time, it is a retrospection and final coda of the hypergraphic technique.15 The novel describes Isou’s stay at a mental institu-

12 Devaux De la création 1, 19, 155. 13 Isou Fruits dores, 165. 14 An illustrating example is Asger Jorn’s satire of Isou’s messianic aspirations. Cf. Jorn “Originalité”. 15 Notably Isou “insisted” on having a cover that would be reminiscent of the classical look of Gallimard providing a visual link to Introduction and Agrégation. Acquaviva and Buzatu Isidore Isou, 117.



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tion and his meetings with the doctors and other patients. On the visual side, Jonas combines photos, erotic drawings and scientific diagrams into collages together with musical notation and cartography. These are further supplemented by textual fragments written in various alphabets: Chinese, Greek, Indian and Hebrew. Additionally, there are stamped envelopes, X-rays, and an alphabet of body positions.16 The most striking part of the book consists of naivist drawings where Hitler and Nazis appear together with psychiatrists, somehow sharing a common goal that can be interpreted as the repression of Isou’s personality. More importantly, through this anti-Semitic perspective his Jewishness is indirectly present. In terms of this aspect, the Hebrew fragments are distinct from other elements and further underline his Jewishness. Even more so, Isou makes an elusive remark about the Jewish tradition by stating that Freud personally disobeyed the “principe juif hébreu, qui veut qu’on ne se fasse pas de Dieu, une image ‘de bois’, passagère” [Hebrew Jewish principle, which means that we do not render God as a transient, “wooden” image].17 In the light of this statement, Isou acknowledges the religious idea of God in Judaism by referring to the second commandment. Through his reflection on the modality of God, Isou’s knowledge of Judaism is revealed. Hence his Jewish heritage resurfaces as a well-established fact.

16 Ibid., 90. 17 Isou, Isidore, Jonas ou la corps à la recherche de son âme, Paris 1984, 73.

Timeline Year

Timeline

The Life of Isidore Isou

1925 Ion-Isidor Goldstein is born to a family of five (one older and one younger sister) on January 29 in Botoșani, Romania

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events The Romanian avantgarde journal Integral is established André Breton organises the first surrealist group exhibition, which includes works by Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Hans Arp Robert Desnos’s Pam­ phlet contre Jerusa­ lem (Paphlet Against Jerusalem) discusses the “social disorder” resulting from Jewish immigration to Paris The Jews of Romania have been legally equal for two years

1926

Louis Aragon’s book Le paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant) Numerous articles address the threat that the mainly Jewish “circle of Montparnasse” poses to the French tradition in art

1927

Martin Heidegger publishes Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)

1928

The establishment of the monthly literary avant-garde journal Unu in Romania;



Year

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Events in the History of Lettrism

 175

Associated Historical Events contributors include Sașa Pană, Tzara, F.T. Marinetti and Breton

1929

Georges Bataille (together with Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and Georges Limbour) launches the art review Documents (published until 1930) The film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí Georges RibemontDessaignes founds the journal Bifur

1930

Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto The film L’âge d’or (The Golden Age) by Buñuel and Dalí

1931

The “années tournantes” (1930–1931) manifest a turning point whereby the post-war milieu in the arts ends

1932 Isou most likely begins studies at the Botoșani yeshiva

The Botoșani police forbid Jews from speaking Yiddish on the streets

1933

Hitler’s rise to power; numerous GermanJewish intellectuals emigrate

176  Year

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Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events

1934

Ernst’s collage book Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness)

1936

Bataille’s Acéphale (until 1939) Léon Blum elected French prime minister; workers anticipate revolution

1937

The Nazi “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition, showcasing avant-garde art, is seen by three million people Discriminatory laws against the Jewish population issued in Romania; violence against Jews and Jewish property becomes more frequent

1938 Isou’s bar mitzvah

Return of the citizenship law, stripping approx. 225,000 Jews (37% of the Jewish population) of their Romanian citizenship

1939 Various petty jobs during teenage years: in a textile factory, drug store, printing company, and later as an assistant accountant

The Second World War begins in September British Government issues the “White paper” limiting the number of Jewish immigrants to Mandate Palestine James Joyce’s Finneg­ ans Wake is published in Paris



Year

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The Life of Isidore Isou

1940 Isou likely attends the beth midrash, given his family’s economic and social standing

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

 177

Associated Historical Events Government schools expel Jewish teachers and pupils in Romania, Botoșani; Jewish congregations establish beth midrashim (high schools) in prayer houses Wide­spread anti-Jewish pogroms in Romania orchestrated by the Iron Guard The disintegration of France and establishment of the Vichy government More than 700,000 books are seized from bookshops and destroyed in France

1941 Isou becomes an editor of the semi-clandestine magazine Palestina

Yellow badges become mandatory for Jews in Moldavian towns, including Botoșani Romanian authorities order the dissolution of all Jewish organizations Jewish real estate nationalised in Romania Jewish men aged 18 to 50 put into forced labour; a total of 148 people from Botoşani are deported to Transnistria

178  Year

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The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

1942 Isou writes the manifesto of lettrism (published 1947)

Associated Historical Events Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris; deportations of Jews to extermination camps Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre “establish” existentialism

1943 Isou is involved in the Hashomer Hatzair group

Sartre publishes L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) Romanian deportations end in March–April

1944 Isou founds the avant-garde journal DA with Serge Moscovici, its first issue is censored

Liberation of Paris in August King Michael I’s coup in Romania in August The Botoşani autonomous municipal administration is established, which includes a group of Jewish experts

Isou’s first lettrist drawings Isou becomes the leader of a Zionist group following the coup by King Michael I, and becomes a mem­ber of the Young Communists 1945 Isou is active in the pro-Communist Frontul Național Democrat (National Democratic Front) in order to expedite his emigration

Gabriel Pomerand becomes a member (until 1964) of the lettrist group

The journal Les Temps modernes is launched by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir King Michael I of Romania capitulates to the communist government in March



Year

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Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Isou leaves Romania and travels to Italy via Hungary and Austria

 179

Associated Historical Events The Second World War ends as Japan formally surrenders in September Algerian independent movement repressed

Isou stays as a guest of Guiseppe Ungaretti in Rome during the summer Isou arrives in Paris on August 23 1946 Homeless in Paris with Pomerand

La dictature lettriste (Lettrist Dictatorship)

The first public lettrist event held on January 8 when lettrists interrupt Michel Leiris’s lecture preceding the opening of Tzara’s La Fuite

Sartre publishes Réflexions sur la ques­ tion juive (Anti-Semite and Jew)

François Dufrêne joins the movement Rumours of threats to Gallimard demanding the publication of Isou’s manuscripts 1947

Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and to a New Music) published in April L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un Messie (Aggregation of a Name and a Mes-

The counter-lettrist event “Après nous le lettrisme” (After us, lettrism) organised by Iliazd on June 20

Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel) is published and becomes highly influential amongst the French intelligentsia

180  Year

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Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events

The first article on lettrism in English written by Eugène Jolas for transition

CoBrA group is founded in Paris

siah) published in October 17 1948

Réflexions sur M. André Breton (Thoughts on André Breton)

Bataille’s critique La divinité d’Isou

1949 Public scandal concerning the pornographic content of la Mécanique des femmes ; Isou imprisoned

Isou ou la Mécanique des femmes (Isou or the Mechanics of Women) banned until 1977

1950

Les journaux des Dieux (The Diaries of Gods)

Collège de Pataphysique is established in Paris The State of Israel is established

Robert Estivals becomes a member (until 1957)

Zionist organizations are banned in communist Romania

Maurice Lemaître, Gil J. Wolman and JeanLouis Brau join the movement

Tzara publishes Parler seul (Speaking Alone), a text written during his psychiatric rehabilitation (following trauma from the Nazi Occupation)

Traité d’économie nucléaire. Le Sou­ lèvement de la Jeu­ nesse (Treatise on Nuclear Economy. Youth Uprising)

Précisions sur ma poésie et moi (Clarifications on My Poetry and Me) Mémoires sur les Forces Futures et des Arts Plastiques et sur leur Mort (Memoire on the Futre Forces of the Plastic Arts and their Death)

The publication of Raymond Queneau’s Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Letters, Numbers, Forms), which includes invented letter-symbols



Year

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Selected Publications by Isou

1951

Events in the History of Lettrism

 181

Associated Historical Events

Isou’s film Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise on Venom and Eternity) wins in its category at the Cannes Film Festival Guy Debord joins the movement

1952 Paints a series of 37 paintings Les nombres (Numbers) and creates his first photographs for Amos

Fondements pour la transforma­ tion intégrale du theatre (Fundamentals for Revolutionising the Theatre)

Breaks with Jean Paulhan who declines to publish Isou’s new pieces in the NRF

Esthétique du cinema (Aesthetics of Cinema)

1953

Fini le cinéma français (No More French Cinema) Amos ou introduc­ tion à la métagra­ phologie (Amos or the Introduction to Metagraphology)

1954

1955

Guy Debord breaks with Isou and launches L’internationale lettriste

Asger Jorn launches the Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste (Internatio­nal Movement for an Imaginary Bauhaus) in Switzerland Lemaître publishes Qu’est-ce que le lettrisme? (What is lettrism?)

Manifeste du mono-lettrisme (Manifesto of mono-lettrism) suggests the use of only one or

The Algerian War begins

182  Year

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The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events

two phonemes in sound poetry 1956 Invents infinites- Introduction à une imal aesthetics, esthétique imagi­ or esthapeirism naire (Introduction to Imaginary Aesthetics)

Massive immigration to Palestine and Israel from Botoşani reduces the number of Botoşanian Jews by half to 10,000

1957 Marries on July 28

L’internationale situationniste is launched

1958 Birth of Isou’s daughter, Catherine Goldstein

First record of lettrist poetry

The literary magazine Tel Quel is launched Claude Chabrol’s film Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge) inaugurates the nouvelle vague of French cinema

1959 Creation of aphonism 1960 Exhibition of supertemporal works, where the public is encouraged to take part and complete the works

Manifeste de l’art supertemporel (Manifesto of Supertemporal Art)

1961

Le lettrisme et l’hypergraphie dans la peinture et sculpture contem­ poraines (Lettrism and Hypergraphics in Contemporary Painting and Sculpture)

Initiation à la haute volupté (Initiation to High Voluptuousness), banned until 1977

Oulipo is founded All French colonies of sub-Saharan Africa become independent



Year

Timeline 

The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

1962 1963

Associated Historical Events Algerian independence

Le Grand Desordre (The Great Disorder) La Loi des Purs (The Law of the Pure)

1964

 183

Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste (The Force Fields of Lettrist Painting)

Roland Sabatier joins the movement The movement participates in the exhibition Salon de l’Art Sacré in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Alain Satié, the brother of Roland Sabatier, joins the movement

Œuvres de spectacle (Show Pieces), Isou’s final publication via Gallimard 1965 Isou’s first solo exhibition abroad (in Turin)

Ballets ciselants (Chiseling Ballets)

The movement participates in the Paris Biennale

1966 Isou develops kladology

Théorie nucléaire de la monnaie et de la banque (Nuclear Theory of Money and Banking)

François Poyet joins the movement

1967

Exhibition of lettrist books at the Bibliothèque Nationale

Œuvres aphonistes Jean-Paul Curtay joins (Aphonist Works) Lettrism

The Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in June Guy Debord publishes La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) Raoul Vaneigem publishes Traité de savoirvivre à l’usage

184  Year

 Timeline

The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events des jeunes générations (The Revolution of Everyday Life)

1968 Isou undergoes periods of psychiatric hospitalisation

Manifeste pour le bouleversement de l’architecture (Manifesto for the Revolutionising of Architecture)

1970

Antonin Artaud torture par les psy­ chiatres (Antonin Artaud Tortured by Psychiatrists)

1971

Manifeste pour une nouvelle psychopathologie et une nouvelle psychothérapie (Manifesto for a New Psychopathology and a New Psychotherapy)

1972

Gérard-Philippe Broutin joins lettrism

Anne-Catherine Caron becomes a member of the group The suicide of Pomerand

1973 Further and last periods of psychiatric hospitalisation

1974

Introduction à une nouvelle concep­ tion de la science (Introduction to a New Conception of Science) Jean-Paul Curtay publishes La poésie lettriste (Lettrist Poetry)

Spring of 1968 uprising in Paris



Year

Timeline 

The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

1975 Isou criticises the Koran and the current leaders of Israel

Lemaître awarded a doctorate by l’UER des Arts plastiques, d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’art based on his published work

1976 Isou awarded a doctorate by l’UER des Arts plastiques, d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’art based on his published work

“First International Symposium on Lettrism” organised in Portland, Oregon; attended by Lemaître

1977

La créatique ou la novatique (1941– 1976) deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale

Associated Historical Events

Ban lifted on Isou’s two works due to changes in censorship laws A museum for the history of the Jews in Romania is established

Jonas ou le début d’un roman (Jonah or the Beginning of a Novel) 1979

1980 Isou is naturalised as a French citizen

 185

Jean-François Lyotard’s treatise La condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition) is published Fondements d’une nouvelle chimie et d’une nouvelle physique (Fundamentals of New Chemistry and New Physics)

Frédérique Devaux becomes a member of the group (until 1997) The lettrist “university” Leonardo da Vinci established The foundation of the international lettrisminfluenced art

186  Year

 Timeline

The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events

movement Inismo by Gabriel-Aldo Bertozzi in Paris; the movement was presented by Isou 1981

The group organises an exhibition, “La lettre et le signe, nouvel object plastique dans l’art contemporain”, together with the members of inism

1982

“Semaine lettriste” (Lettrist Week) at Centre Pompidou

1983

“Lettrism – Into the Present” exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art

1984

Jonas ou Le corps à la recherche de son âme (Jonas or a Body in Search of its Soul) Poèmes lettristes, aphonistes et infinitésimaux (Lettrist, Aphonist and Infinitesimal Poems)

1987 Isou participates Pour et contre in documenta 8 Bertozzi (For and in Kassel Against Bertozzi) Introduction à l’hyperbiotique, à l’hyper-pathologie et à l’hyper-thérapeutique (Introduc-

Palestinians in the occupied territories begin an uprising against Israeli occupation (first “intifada”)



Year

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Events in the History of Lettrism

 187

Associated Historical Events

tion to Hyperbiotics, Hyperpathology and Hypertherapeutics) 1988

Virginie Caraven joins the movement

1989

Histoire du roman des origines au roman hyper­ graphique (History of the Novel from its Origins to the Hypergraphic Novel)

The Berlin Wall and most communist governments of Eastern Europe fall, thus ending the Cold War

1991

Manifeste de l’excoordisme (Manifesto of Excoordism)

The Soviet Union is dissolved and its states become independent

1992

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau pioneer bio art with their “Interactive Plant Growing”

1993 Isou paints his last canvasses

Lettrism is commemorated at the Venice Biennale

1994 Isou is diagnosed with a cerebellar disorder 2000 Final public appearance for a lecture at the Sorbonne

Republication of key early works by Éditions Al Dante and Cahiers de l’Externité

2002

Lettre pour une nouvelle Résis­ tance (Letter for a

188  Year

 Timeline

The Life of Isidore Isou

Selected Publications by Isou New Resistance), Isou’s last text

2003

First public edition of La Créatique ou la Novatique

2005

Republication of Les Lettristes sont irrécupérables jusqu’à la société de l’éternité concrète, paradisiaque (The Lettrists are Irreplaceable until the Society of Concrete, Paradisiac Eternity), the last text published by Isou

2006 Isou creates his final piece, Sym­ phonie n°5 2007 Isou dies on July 28 (aged 82) in his room on rue Saint-Andrédes-Arts; he is cremated in the presence of 30 people and his ashes are preserved in the Père Lachaise funerarium

Events in the History of Lettrism

Associated Historical Events

Bibliography

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Index

Index

Abulafia, Abraham 14, 47–49, 52, 54, 58, 71, 76–78, 100, 104–105, 110, 112, 119–120, 127–129, 133–134, 136–139, 141–142, 145–147, 150–152, 166 Aragon, Louis 174 Augustine 133

Diderot, Denis 80–81 Dufrêne, François 179

Baal Shem Tov 22, 25 Ball, Hugo 4, 41, 47, 81 Bataille, Georges 58–59, 61–65, 90–91, 175–176, 180 Baudelaire, Charles 24 Benjamin, Walter 6, 122, 124–125, 136–141, 144–145 Bergson, Henri 57, 80, 95 Bertozzi, Gabriel-Aldo 186 Blanchot, Maurice 79, 90, 96–97, 159–160 Bloch, Ernst 6, 12, 122–124, 126, 129–132, 136 Brau, Jean-Louis 180 Brauner, Victor 16 Breton, André 16, 44, 46, 174–175 Brod, Max 1 Broutin, Gérard-Philippe 184 Buber, Martin 20, 23, 25, 121, 136, 158 Buñuel, Luis 175

Flaubert, Gustave 24 Fondane, Benjamin 16, 24, 28, 35 Frank, Jacob Leibowitz 166 Friedlaender, Salomo 1, 56, 85–86, 89, 91

Camus, Albert 178 Caraven, Virginie 187 Caron, Anne-Catherine 184 Chabrol, Claude 182 Chagall, Marc 1, 3, 23 Cocteau, Jean 44 Cohen, Hermann 117 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 168 Cordovero, Moshe 47 Curtay, Jean-Paul 183–184 Dali, Salvador 175 de Chirico, Giorgio 174 De Gaulle, Charles 168 Debord, Guy 172, 181, 183 Desnos, Robert 174–175 Devaux, Frédérique 89, 171–172, 185

Einstein, Carl 1, 17 Ernst, Max 174, 176 Estivals, Robert 34, 75, 180

Gikatilla, R. Joseph 47 Goga, Octavian 29 Goll, Yvan 47 Grosz, Georg 56 Hausmann, Raoul 46, 81 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 57–58, 62–64, 85–86, 89–90 Heidegger, Martin 57, 174 Herzl, Theodor 166 Hitler, Adolf 173, 175 Jabès, Edmond 137–139, 153–155, 158– 161 Janco, Georges 4 Janco, Marcel 1, 4, 36 Joffe, Henri 39 Jorn, Asger 75, 181 Joyce, James 46, 176 Kojève, Alexandre 57, 179 Landauer, Gustav 11 Leiris, Michel 175, 179 Lemaître, Maurice 37–38, 73, 92, 148, 155, 180–181, 185 Levinas, Emmanuel 58, 86, 90–92, 95, 100, 117, 130–134, 137, 147, 151 Limbour, Georges 175 Lissitzky, El 1 Lyotard, Jean-François 185

 Maimonides, Moses 14, 58 Mallarmé, Stéphane 24, 40, 81 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 175 Marx, Karl 64 Mauthner, Fritz 11 Michaux, Henri 75, 105 Mignonneau, Laurent 187 Molko, Schlomo 166 Mordecai of Eisenstadt 166 Moscovici, Serge 29, 178 Mussolini, Benito 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich 55, 120 Pană, Sașa 175 Papini, Giovanni 46 Paulhan, Jean 33, 181 Peirce, Charles S. 66 Picabia, Francis 84 Picasso, Pablo 174 Pomerand, Gabriel 35–38, 41, 148, 178–179, 184 Poyet, François 183 Queneau, Raymond 180 Reubeni, David 166 Richter, Hans 1, 35 Robin, Armand 8 Rodrigues, Benjamin Olinde 1 Rosenzweig, Franz 117

Index 

 201

Sabatier, Roland 183 Sack, Gustav 11 Sartre, Jean-Paul 51–52, 54, 57, 80, 135, 178–179 Satié, Alain 183 Scheerbart, Paul 41 Schlegel, Friedrich 50 Scholem, Gershom 6, 116 Segal, Arthur 4 Serner, Walter 35 Soffici, Ardengo 46 Sommerer, Christa 187 Taitazak, Joseph 105 Teyssèdre, Bernard 169 Tzara, Tristan 1, 3–4, 9, 16, 24, 28–29, 33, 35, 38–39, 46–47, 81, 84, 86–89, 175, 179, 180 Ungaretti, Guiseppe 33, 179 van Hoddis, Jakob 11 Vaneigem, Raoul 183 Verlaine, Paul 40 Vilna Gaon 22 Walden, Herwath 16 Wolman, Gil J. 180 Zdanevich, Ilia (Iliazd) 38, 40, 179 Zevi, Sabbatai 166 Zissu, Abraham Leib 24