HISTOIRE DELA VOLUPTE
Isidore Isou

[Lettrisme] Isidore Isou: HISTOIRE DELA VOLUPTE [HISTOIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE ILLUSTRE DE LA VOLUPTĖ PARIS]. Paris(?): SPE Alger Publications et editions, 1960. First edition. Text in French. A fine hardcover book in a very good dust jacket that is lightly chipped on the tips. Interior unmarked and very clean.

The strangest book I have listed on my website, by far.

6.5 x 8 hardcover book with decorated boards with 128-page essay by Isou sandwiched between approximately 100 pages of b/w cheesecake (pin-up style) nudes from the late 1950s. The essay is printd on deckled-edged uncoated paper and the photographs are printed offset on glossy stock that has a slightly larger trim-size than the deckled section. The boards are embossed with an op-art checkerboard pattern with the title type knocked out. A very unusual volume that makes me wish I could read French.

When words fail me, I think it best to quote Greil Marcus from Lipstick Traces (p. 249): "[Isou was] Š a crank with a sense of history, and a fierce sense of publicity. He wasn't born "Isidore Isou"; he was born Jean-Isidore Goldstein, just as his Romanian-Jewish dada forebear was born Sami Rosenstock. Rosenstock gave himself the exctiing new name "Tristan Tzara"; awarding himself a name almost as alliteratively memorable, Isou played Chubby Checker to Tzara's Fats Domino. "

Born in Rumania in 1928, Isidore Isou came to Paris at the end of WW II with many ideas for a renovation of all the arts, a re-visioning from the ground up. He called himself a "Lettriste," a movement of which he was initially the only member. But others soon joined him, and the movement continues to grow, albeit at times under a confusing number of different names.

Lettrism was as much a reaction against Andre Breton's dictatorial control of Surrealism (and Surrealism's movement away from its conceptual origins in Dada towards that of mysticism), as it was an attempt the get poetry back into people's lives and on the 'hit parade.' In his attempt to rewrite all of human knowledge, Isou had discovered that the evolution of any art was characterized by two phases: 'amplic' and 'chiseling.' In following the development of the art of poetry for example, Isou saw the Lettrist at the end of a long chiseling phase which had begun with Baudelaire reducing narrative in his poetry to anecdote, then Rimbaud disregarding anecdote for lines and words, Mallarmé reducing words to sound and spaces (particularly in Un Coup de Des), and finally the Dadaists destroyed the word altogether. Isou saw at the end of this phase the new beginnings of an amplic stage for culture, from which a whole host of new arts, ways of working, and social institutions would eventually spring, with Isou at the center of all creative work.

I'll leave it up to you whether HISTOIRE DELA VOLUPTE is amplic or chiseling.

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