Literature & Theology, Vol. 25. No. 2, June 2011, pp.

185198
doi:10.1093/litthe/frr006 Advance Access publication 22 April 2011

A BOOK ABOUT NOTHING:

THE POETICS OF THE ROMAN
BLANC1
Sami Sjoberg

The article studies the roman blanc, the empty novel, as the culmination of
antirationalism in the 20th-century avant-garde. The authors were familiar
with the philosophical trends of their age, which they appropriated
antinomistically. Rather than taking for granted the correspondence of
language and experience, the avant-gardists sought to highlight the independent functioning of language by turning towards irrationality, obscurity
and ineffability. These themes emerged from medieval mysticism (Kabbalah),
a source of inuence for the avant-gardists. The blank book La loi des purs
by Isidore Isou charts both the praxis of language and what exceeds representation. The obscurity of the book evokes a poetics with a twofold relation
to the inherent negativity of the empty novel. This relation is in the article
further developed into two discrepant poetic approaches.

on ferait mieux, enn aussi bien, deffacer les textes que de noircir les marges, de
les boucher jusqua` ce que tout soit blanc et lisse et que la connerie prenne son
vrai visage, un non-sens cul et sans issue.2
Samuel Beckett

I. INTRODUCTION

The white page and its components, such as margins and spaces between words,
have had a notable impact on 19th- and 20th-century avant-garde literature.
From Stephane Mallarmes Un coup de des to dadaist experimentations and
beyond, blank spaces have become an integral part of a works meaning (be
it related to a single word or a case of more comprehensive typography).3 The
pinnacle of this type of experimental literature, the blank book, emerged in the
late 1950s and already during the following decade examples of it were numerous enough for the blank book to be designated a topos.4


Comparative Literature, University of Helsinki, PO Box 4 (Vuorikatu 3) 00014, Finland.

Email: sami.sjoberg@helsinki.
Literature & Theology # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved.
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Abstract

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SAMI SJO

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In France this topos goes by the name roman blanc, in which the term blanc
refers to both white and void. Hence the concept links the white page with
negative qualities such as absence and emptiness. However, I suggest that these
qualities do not merely give rise to a work of art that aims to criticise or even
negate preceding aesthetics, but that the blanc may indeed become an antinomic concept.5 Its antinomy is derived from the use of the blank book for
both subversive aesthetic (anti-art) and quasi-religious purposes. Beneath this
explicit aesthetic critique, the blank book may address mystical themes, such
as ineffability and divine absence. But does the blank book qualify as literature? And if so, how? It is necessary to understand the blank book as a critique
of conventional literature that includes its own undoing.6
These themes manifest themselves in the work of the unacclaimed Jewish
Romanian Isidore Isou (Ion-Isidore Goldstein, 19252007), the founder of the
lettrist movement, whose empty book La loi des purs (The Law of the Pure,
1963) is, in my view, an excellent example of the topos due to its theoretical
multifacetedness.7 In the books preface, Isou underscores the roman blanc as a
complete aesthetic exhaustion (epuisement) of the genre of the novel.8 This
suggests that the empty book should be regarded as an anti-art gesture, which
straightforwardly declares the obsoleteness of the novel.9 Yet, 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.10 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.11 Such understandings are accurate, but I will argue that Isous 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 Gods modality, are necessary for understanding the raison detre of his blank book.12 Furthermore, I suggest that these
inuences are not mere resemblances but result in quasi-religious strivings.
The Kabbalah-inspired quasi-religious efforts of Isou were similar but not
identical to those of Edmond Jabe`s, whose Le livre de questions (The Book of
Questions, 196373) was concurrent with La loi des purs. White spaces (blancs)
were essential in his works. For him, the blank denoted un espace quaucune
lettre ne designe;13 however, Jabe`s only wrote about white spaces without ever
producing an actual blank book. He was, in the manner of Blanchot, more
preoccupied with the abstract idea of the book than in its making. Whereas
Jabe`s considered the empty page as a non-messianic place of rumination,
for Isou the blank page entailed a messianic quasi-religious potential.14

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187

II. THE TWO POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC

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
La rencontre [The Encounter]

Number of empty pages

sixteen

La chasse [The Chase]

one

Letreinte [The Embrace]

eighteen

La dispute [The Dispute]

one

La premie`re separation [The First Separation]

sixteen

La recherche du passe [The Search of the Past]

eighteen

La seconde rencontre [The Second Encounter]

eighteen

La joie de lamour partage [The Joy of Sharing Love]

eighteen

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Isous quasi-religious messianism, which penetrates his thinking, acquired

many of its characteristics directly from Jewish messianism. However, he
underscored the importance of messianism over Judaism: je ne crois pas
que Jesus-Christ fut le Messie, mais que le salut de lhomme depend dune
revelation a` venir, pensee qui justie en partie le judasme.15 Isou adopts the
forward-looking idea of a` venir [to come] from religious messianism and this is
a dening feature in the interpretation of La loi des purs, as will be argued in
this essay.16 The a` venir puts into question the meaningfulness of the present,
the here and now, by subjecting it to both anticipation and open-endedness. It
exemplies the desire to go beyond the present and rational.17 Based on the
idea of invisible narration, I suggest that the a` venir is a structural property of
Isous blank book and that this characteristic establishes a poetics distinct from
an anti-art context.18
In what follows, Isous blank book is approached as an appropriation of
kabbalistic features, which is quasi-religious in that it preserves a link to secular
aesthetics. The rst section examines the roman blanc that establishes two
kinds of poetics, anti-poetics and apoetics, which discern the blank page as
a signifying space and signifying potential, respectively. These approaches
can be seen as related to kabbalistic myths and ontology. The latter of these
poetics requires distinguishing between the blank book and a work of art,
which the second section deals with. The work of art is examined as a means
or a mode within a messianic quest, which renders the blank an antinomic
concept.

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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 ction, which the author establishes and the reader recognises.
In Isous work this kind of experimentation with the limits of literature, or
what was still regarded as literature, was not unprecedented.
Isous works preceding La loi des purs had already explored various ways of
overcoming everyday language.19 However, in order to be conceived as
language-critical literature, such experimentation must retain a certain afliation with language. Even the blank book preserves this link to language by its
guise and aesthetic grounding. First, 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 contains a trace of languageits removal. In this sense, the
blank book remains at the limit of literature as a kind of degre zero.
This degree zero can be regarded either as an experimental undoing of
literature or as literary potential. In a similar manner, lettrist Maurice
Lematre distinguished two kinds of roman blanc based on La loi des purs: the
empty novel (roman vide) and the prospective novel (roman a` faire).20 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 rst thematises the blank space as a locus and the second in terms
of temporality. The latter is distinctly quasi-religious, 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.
First, 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 representer quun symbole depuisement
dun secteur esthetique determine.21 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
signicance as an anti-art gesture: language is still the backdrop against
which the dismissive gesture is performed. Hence anti-poetics is inevitably

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related to language because by abstaining from the use of language,

anti-poetics afrms its existence.
Secondly, the blank book as a potentiality (the prospective novel) generates
a different signifying framework, one which is characterised by the a` venir.
This potentiality constitutes the blank page as a scene. In the words of Jabe`s,
the lieu du livre est vide emmure. Chaque page, precaire abri, posse`de ses
quatre murs qui sont ses marges.22 This is to say that the blank page is a frame
for absence. However, instead of being a self-sufcient 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.23 By prompting
potentiality, the blank page is dened 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 (a` venir).
Both illustrate Isous 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- prex designates, is not
mere opposition to language but a thoroughgoing lack of it.24 Isous idea of
invisible narration is ambiguous, because even though it is beyond sensory
perception, and hence afrmation, 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.25
The potentiality of Isous notion of invisible narration is incongruent with
the aesthetics of subversion, but recalls, instead, the Jewish myth of the black
and white re.26 According to this myth God wrote the Torah with black re
on white re that was conceived to be the skin of God. Hence this white re
is literally the substance of God and the Torah scrolls white parchment signies Gods innite substance.27 The myth also carried an eschatological
sense: in the Kabbalah, white re refers to the messianic world-to-come
' h
: <l
' Au, olam ha-ba), that is a` venir, while black re signals the present
(aB
world.28 In the Kabbalah, this parable afrms the divine attributes of the blank
page.
The interpretation of the re myth is quintessential as regards the prospective novel. In the medieval Kabbalah, as well as in later Jewish mysticism, as
represented by Hasidism, the previously exclusive focus on the Hebrew letters
of the Torah was also extended to cover the white spaces of the Torah scroll.
According to this conception, the Torah is formed not only by visible letters
but also by additional writing of the white space. However, these spaces were
not regarded as mere margins on the page, but were believed to include

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unreadable white letters, or, at least letters that could not be read like the black
ones.29
The claim of the presence of invisible narration in La loi des purs is presumably an appropriation of the Kabbalah. 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 signication. 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 presentationthe visual aspect, such as the visible whiteness of the pageand representation, the white page standing in for something else, that leads to religious connotations.
Isous 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 present as derived from messianism. 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.30 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 is invisible. Hence the term
Messiah, in Isous thinking, is rather synonymous with the revealer of a
mystery.31
What is the mystery that only the Messiah may reveal? As was noted above,
the white parchment was identied with divine substance in the Kabbalah. I
suggest that the blank pages in La loi des purs are similar, meaning that Isou
assigned some aspect of divinity to the blank page. Such identication was not
even foreign to Jabe`s for whom God was a metaphor for a void.32 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 literaturethe absence
of a discussion about Godbut rather a more thoroughgoing absence as a
prerequisite of God. This stance can be claried by considering the Jewish
conception of God.
The Jewish God is invisible, abstract and inconceivable. This God lacks
denition altogethereven the names of God are hidden.33 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.34 As a result,
God cannot be or become present in this world, which, however, does not

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191

III. THE WORK IN A STATE OF BECOMING

The idea of hiddenness in the prospective novel can be understood in several

quasi-religious ways. The blank, signifying absence, evokes the openness of a
work of art. This structural openness indicates that the work (uvre) is not
directly identiable with the blank book as material object (as an empty novel
would more or less be). 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 sy faire, de positif, de
negatif, de reel, dimaginaire, de possible, dimpossible.39 In other words, it is

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signal non-existence or any Nietzschean thanatology of divinity. All in all, as

Gideon Ofrat has noted, the Jewish starting point is the self-concealment of
God.35 Yet for Isou, in accordance with the kabbalistic conception, this absence did not indicate mere non-existence; instead, the absence of all attributes
of Gods essence marked Gods elusive existence.36 For him, emptiness thus
becomes rsthand evidence of God.
Arguably, when God is associated with such 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 reection, or evil, but in an afrmation of
the existence of the absent God.37 Isou conrmed that la presence de cette
absence cest-a`-dire le blanc, labsence comme cadre (et non comme rien) [signie] chez lauteur lettriste une ouverture.38 In this context the blank book is
essential in any attempt to make this modality manifest, because, as the work
of Jabe`s suggests, absence 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 therethat 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 representativeif 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 quasi-religious potential of the blank book in Isous case is incongruent
with other secular or quasi-religious models of temporality in literature, such
as those of Blanchot and Jabe`s, in which aesthetics is highlighted. La loi des purs
should not be read simply according to secular poetics because the work has
messianic signicance 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.

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a plenitude of potential meaning. Such openness establishes a work of art that

is cumulative and social in the vein of Umberto Ecos open work (opera aperta),
which the reader or viewer completes by means of interpretation.40
Equally, the abstract notion of a work of art is distinctly different in
Blanchots and Isous quasi-religious models (of literature). Blanchots idea
of a book to come (livre a` venir) addresses an ideal book that is impossibility,
because the book to come is perpetually to come. Furthermore, Jabe`s added
kabbalistic elements to Blanchots book to come.41 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 (uvre).The book to come is aporeticit cannot,
by denition, be written. It is an ideal that repels actualization, because if it
has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was.42 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 Blanchots book to come underscores the autonomy of literature, the prospective novelas a workis
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 a` venir, the ontological
openness that is caused by the works future orientation. Whereas the empty
novel is closed, in the 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, luvre est toujours a`
venir comme le Messie. Elle est promesse, avenir.43 The prospective novel is in a
state of becoming, which is a messianic promise. Isou was not detached from
the religious dimension of messianism, which is to say that he was accommodative of the messianic promise. His theories contain a genuine striving towards perfecting the world even though this endeavour is not religious, in a
traditional sense, but rather quasi-religious.44 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 Isous 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 Jabe`s: when you say

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invisible, you are pointing to the boundary between the visible and the
invisible; there are words for that. But when you cant say the word, you are
standing before nothing.45 Jabe`ss vivid imagery leads to an experience of
nothing, even though his approach is reclusive and therefore foreign to Isous
personal quest. The experience invoked by Jabe`s 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 etait blanc, si blanc que je ne
comprenais meme pas.46 The rst 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 conceptualization does not denote the
whiteness of the page, but inconceivability itself. Representation is capable of
standing in for what is not there or point to what is beyond conceptualization.
Both of these possibilities are beyond language, because at best they point to
the boundary that exists between cognition and the cognitive void. Isous
messianic objective is, it seems, 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
stated that the Dieu judaque [est] ce centre dinconnaissance vers lequel nous
avancons [] et autour duquel nous batissons le monde.47 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 world-to-come.
The messianic process is characterised by a desire to reveal a mystery, to
encounter God who is absent. Since Gods 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 antinomicat 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.48 The lack of reference shatters representation, because the
blank represents nothing. Hence, the failure of representation is an effect that
is capable of evoking an experience of nothing but this effect is available only
at the instant in which cognition fails.
Incognizability is indeed at work in La loi des purs. According to one critic,
Isou fait retour a` une forme de vide. Ce vide a lieu [] quand le mot ne colle
plus a` la chose et lorsquil y a [un] univers [] inimaginable.49 The blank, as
open-ended representation, opens the instant by which it evokes the

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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 incognizable. The experience signals the untraversable gap between men and God, of their distinct modalities, which can only
be bridged by the Messiah.
IV. CONCLUSION

REFERENCES
1

This article is a part of the project

Literature, Transcendence, Avant-Garde,
funded by the Academy of Finland
(1121211).

you would do better, at least no worse,

to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to ll in the holes of words till all is
blank and at and the whole ghastly

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The roman blanc, and La loi des purs as an example, 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 Isous case suggest both structural and ideological similarities with the
Kabbalah and Jewish messianismwhich are illustrated by the a` venir. Isous
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 sufces to distinguish the secular aspect from the
more religious one, La loi des purs does not afrm one interpretation over
any other. Instead, ambiguity remains a fundamental feature of the work.
By framing these endeavours, the roman blanc does not denote an absolute
void but rather a non-rational emptiness induced by religion, which is furthermore experiential. Hence at issue is not the 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 Isous 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 afrming 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 afrmation 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 signies. Therefore, it should also be
noted that the empty page may represent the invisible as it can only present
the visible.

POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC

10
11

12

de la litterature a pu etre celui-ci: ne rien dire,

parler pour ne rien dire [ideal of literature
could be this: to say nothing, to speak in
order to say nothing]. Maurice Blanchot,
La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949),
p. 314; Maurice Blanchot, Book to Come
(Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003), p. 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. Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles
et textes pour rien (Paris: Editions de
Minuit,
1958);
Jacques
Derrida,
Comment ne pas parler: Denegations,
In Psyche: Inventions de lautre, Jacques
Derrida (Paris: Galilee, 1987), pp. 53595.
Isou had previously introduced vanguard
ideas concerning writing, such as
pseudo-writing that amalgamated distinct
writing systems with signs invented by
the author with an aim to sacralize writing. Cf. Isidore Isou, Les journaux des
dieux (Paris: Aux Escaliers de Lausanne,
1950) and Amos ou introduction a` la metagraphologie (Paris: Arcanes, 1953).
Isidore Isou, La loi des purs (Paris: Isidore
Isou, 1963), p. 78, 14.
An anti-art gesture, such as refusing to
produce art, is meaningful only in the
context of art. Cf. Charles Harrison,
Notes Towards Art Work, in
Alexander Arbello and Blake Stimson
(eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp.
20410.
See Isou, La loi, p. 15.
Anne Mglin-Delcroix, Ni Mot, ni
image: livres vierges, in Vides: Une retrospective (Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag,
2009), p. 405.
Isous appropriation of kabbalistic ideas
was eclectic. It is uncertain what features
of the historical Kabbalah he was
acquainted with but he occasionally
referred to the 13th-century Catalan
kabbalist Abraham Abulaa. See Isidore
Isou, Lagregation dun nom et dun messie
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 355. For more

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business looks like what it is, senseless,

speechless, issueless misery. Samuel
Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1951), p. 18. Translated by
Beckett, Molloy (Paris: Olympia Press,
1955), p. 14. All translations by the
author unless otherwise stated.
There are numerous comprehensive
introductions to how typography in
avant-garde poetry has evolved, cf.
Richard Grasshoffs dissertation on letter
ber
poetry Der Befreite Buchstabe. U
Lettrismus (Freie Universitat Berlin,
2000); Willard Bohn, Modern Visual
Poetry (London: Associated University
Presses, 2001); Johanna Drucker, The
Visible Word: Experimental Typography
and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Isidore Isou, Introduction a` une Nouvelle
Poesie et a` une Nouvelle Musique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947), pp. 2159.
The blank book is dened here as a print
consisting of white pages that 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 Sternes Tristram Shandy (1759)
or the Poema kontsa (Poem of the End,
1913) by the Russian futurist Vasilisk
Gnedov. For other examples, cf. All or
Nothing: An Anthology of Blank Books,
ed. Michael Gibbs (Cromford: RGAP,
2005).
Criticism of its predecessors is a common
feature in avant-garde aesthetics, see e.g.
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), pp. 9596.
For instance, Maurice Blanchot identied
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 signied contents. Accordingly,
in Blanchotian writing, a word lacks subjective denitions. For Blanchot the ideal

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on the inuence of Isous Jewish background on his theories, cf. Sami

Sjoberg, The Jewish Shtetl Tradition in
the Franco-Romanian Avant-Garde:
The Case of Isidore Isou, in Juhani
Nuorluoto and Maija Kononen (eds),
Europe Evropa: Cross-Cultural Dialogues
between the West, Russia, and Southeastern
Europe (Uppsala: University of Uppsala,
2010), pp. 13249.
a space undesignated by any letter.
Edmond Jabe`s, El, ou le dernier livre
(Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 20.
For Jabe`s, see William Franke, On What
Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in
Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the
Arts, Vol. 2 (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 3769.
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 justies Judaism.
Isidore Isou, Quelques anciens manifestes
lettristes et esthapeiristes (19601963) (Paris:
Centre de creativite, 1967), p. 2.
Emphasis added.
The temporal condition a` venir is present
in the bulk of Isous theoretical works, in
which it establishes a temporal structure.
For instance, he wrote that Isidore pretend
begayer un langage future. Il nest donc jamais
present, mais a` venir [Isidore pretends to
stammer a future language. It is therefore
never present but to come]. Isidore Isou,
uvres de Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), p. 129.
Such desire is similar to Jewish, especially
kabbalistic, messianism. See Moshe Idel,
Messianic Mystics (New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 1998),
pp. 13, 3336.
Here poetics refers to a general, but
concise, understanding of the term as
the theory or principles of the nature
of poetry or its composition. Ross
Murn and Supryia M. Ray, The
Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary
Terms (London: Palgrave MacMillan,
2003), p. 350.

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Everyday language has been subject to

criticism by the avant-garde throughout,
even though the understanding of this
notion was rather vague. See Sascha Bru
and Gunther Martens, The Invention of
Politics in the European Avant-Garde (19061940) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 11.
Maurice Lematre, Entretiens avec Pietro
Ferrua sur le lettrisme (Paris: Centre de
Creativite, 1982).
empty expression cannot represent but a
symbol of a specic aesthetic sectors
exhaustion. Isou, La loi, p. 8.
place of the book is an enclosed emptiness. Every page, precarious refuge, has its
four walls that are its margins. Jabe`s, El,
p. 28.
There exists a blank place, regarded as
a living space in which the possibles
meet. F. Devaux, De La Creation a` la
Societe Paradisiaque: Isidore Isou et la
Pensee Judaque, Tome 2 (Paris: Editions
du Christolien, 1998), p. 80. Devauxs
study is the rst concerning the
Jewishness of Isous theories, but is
rather associative in relating Isou to the
bulk of Jewish mysticism without academic precision and, at times, lacks critical distance, probably due to Devauxs
close afliation with lettrism.
Whereas the prex anti- designates opposition, the a- denotes being without
or lacking. See Oxford Advanced Learners
Dictionary, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995). Moreover, the
a- is fundamentally ambiguous, because
it permits a range of meanings. For a further discussion, see Raoul Mortley, The
Fundamentals of the Via Negativa, The
American Journal of Philology 103 (1982),
42939.
See Les anti-lettries in Jean-Paul Curtay,
La poesie lettriste (Paris: Seghers, 1974),
p. 199.
This myth was not exclusively kabbalistic
even though it was highly inuential in
the Kabbalah. According to this view, the
Torah is simultaneously the word of God
and, as a physical object, the scroll.

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Edmond Jabe`s, My Itinerary, Studies in

Twentieth Century Literature 12 (1987), 4.
Devaux, De La Creation, 2, p. 163; Ofrat,
Jewish Derrida, p. 20; Devorah Baum, Le
Rien et les juifs. In Vides: Une retrospective
(Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, 2009),
p. 425.
Cf. Daniel C. Matt, Ayin: The Concept
of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism, in
Robert K. C. Forman (ed.), The Problem
of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 12159.
Ofrat, Jewish Derrida, p. 54.
Devaux, De La Creation, 1, p. 163. Isous
stand is similar to that of subsequent gures in the French phenomenological
tradition who posit God without being
or otherwise than being (such as
Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and
Jean-Luc Marion). However, this strain
of thought is already found in
Heideggers thinking. Even earlier, God
was posited as hyperessential in negative
theology by gures such as PseudoDionysius, Moses Maimonides, Meister
Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and Angelus
Silesius. Furthermore, Jewish thinkers
were inuenced by these very gures,
see Matt, Ayin, p. 122.
Jabe`s 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 nal volume of Le livre de
questions.
the presence of this absencethat is to
say the blank, absence as a frame (and
not as nothing) signies, in the case of a
lettrist author, an opening. Quoted in
Devaux, De la Creation, 2, p. 88.
lled with everything that could
shouldconstitute it; positive, negative,
real, imaginary, possible, impossible.
Lematre, Entretiens, p. 214. Emphasis
removed.
Cf. Umberto Eco, The Open Work
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989). Such understanding of interpretation is common also in hermeneutics

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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 identied 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 re.
Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah
and Interpretation (New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 2002), p. 49. Even
Jacques Derrida identies, albeit not unambiguously in the context of Judaism,
the re as absent center, original meaning
and divine speech, whereas ashes (written
signiers) are a dead trace of the very
meaning; see Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish
Derrida (New York: Syracuse University
Press, 2001), p. 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 Jacques Derrida,
Dissemination (London & New York:
Continuum, 2004), pp. 3757.
Georges Lahy, Introduction et presentation, in Abraham Aboulaa (ed.), La Vie
du monde a` venir, trans. Georges Lahy
(Roquevaire: Editions Lahy, 2009), p. 5.
Moshe Idel, White Letters: From
R. Levi Isaac of Berditchevs Views to
Postmodern
Hermeneutics,
Modern
Judaism 26 (2006) 170, 185.
Ibid., p. 173.
F. Devaux, De La Creation, p. 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 Creation, 2, p. 86. In
Recits hassidiques Martin Buber shares the
same vision of God revealing the white
mystery (myste`re blanc) of the Torah in the
times to comesee Catherine Chalier,
Judasme et alterite (Paris: Editions
Verdier, 1982), p. 293.

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and reader-response criticism; see

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und
Methode (Berlin: Akademie Verlag
GmbH, 2007) and Wolfgang Iser, Der
Akt des Lesens: Theorie aesthetischer
Wirkung (Stuttgart: UTB, 1994).
For the possible inuence of the
Kabbalah on Jabe`s, see Matthew Del
Nevo, Edmond Jabe`s and Kabbalism
after God, Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 65 (1997), 40342.
Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), p. 9.
the work is always to come like the
Messiah. It is promised, future. Devaux,
De la creation, 2, p. 136. Devauxs formulation is problematic in the same way as
Jewish messianism: Who is making the
promise and to whom it is made? In
Isous case the messianic promise is historical and biblical. However, the parties
to this promise, afrmed in the passive
voice, remain unknown. Hence the
work is fundamentally an open-ended
structure in which the promise is neither
present nor absent.
Isou utilized key Jewish myths, but
appropriated them into his own Jewish
system. He stated, with rhetoric typical
to messianism, that he had uncovered
la methode de creation qui est ce
secret des Dieux que le Messie doit
apporter [et] je conside`re mes apports

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novateurs artistiques ou philosophiques

comme des etapes de la demarche messianique.[the method of creation that is
the secret of the Gods that the Messiah
must provide and I consider my innovative contributionsartistic and philosophicalas stages of the messianic
endeavor.] Isidore Isou, La Creation
Divine, la Transformation Recente de
leglise Catholique et la Revelation
Messianique, Lettrisme 4 (1972), 12.
Paul Auster, Book of the Dead: An
Interview with Edmond Jabe`s, in Eric
Gould (ed.), The Sin of the Book:
Edmond Jabe`s (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 19.
everything was blank, so blank that I do
not even understand. Isidore Isou,
Lagregation, p. 134.
Jewish God is the center of unknowing
towards which we advance and around
which we build the world. Ibid., p. 259.
For a similar effect in poetic language, see
Elisabeth Loevlie, Literary Silences in
Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.
2135.
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. Devaux, De la creation, 2, p. 145.

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