Isidore isou – uprising of the youth

A Jewish Messiah has lost three times into our Jammertal. The first is Jesus of Nazareth, the second Schabbatai Zwi (1626–1676), the third Isidore Isou (1925–2007). The Nazaren scandalon still has an effect on the hair -raising Shabbatai Zwi only a few more Jews, the ISOU, which was born a hundred years ago, are more likely to be.

Everything had started so well. Isidor (still without French explanation “) Goldstein, the son of a loving mother who tenderly calls him” Isou “, and one host with” steel will “, who often dismiss him, is born in Romania, the school is already throwing school At 12, Dostojewski reads at 13, Marx at 14, Proust at 16. He writes for Zionist magazines, first for “Palestina”, which must appear underground because the “iron guard” and the “land of” Jewish-communist “and other ›vampires‹ of the Moldavic-Walachian people wants to clean, as Isou reminds itself. His Zionist fighter companions and he succeeds in leaving Romania behind. You go to Palestine, he to Paris.

And in Paris he does something that cannot be admired enough in our era of migration and the fascist defense against migration: instead of making yourself small, the twenty -year -old manages to the greatest. Just two days after his arrival, he penetrates false facts to the head of the Gallimard publisher and persuades him to print a novel that demands in the title “Recognition of a name and a Messiah” (1947).

He already throws the school at 12, reads Dostojewski with 13, Marx with 14, Proust at 16.

The novel states that nothing will remain from the war and post-war period except Stalin and Isou, whose sacred task is to judaize France. There are “no other possible person than the Jews” because the self -hate Christians already had their god, but the Jews taught humanity to deematize themselves. The “success man”, above all Messiah Isou, the greatest philosopher, scientist, poet, artist since time immemorial. This makes the good news in the world, and none other than the philosopher Georges Bataille hears it. He calls Isou’s novel “a touching, tasteless, stupid, unsuccessful, puberty, brilliant, also ridiculous book, as embarrassing as a naked butt”, what, you think of the bare butt in battales, has to be considered praise.

The disciples are already gathering around the Messiah. He got to know his “archangel”, rather his prophet Gabriel Pomerand in front of the building of the Jewish Volks Union. Pomerand jumps onto the tables of the Parisian cafés in the evening and declamates Lettristic poems. Lattrism, i.e. the art of the letters, is the grandiose discovery of isou. As not to be expected at a Messiah, it is revealed to him, exactly on March 19, 1942. At that time, still in Romania, he finds the beautiful sentence in a writing by the cultural philosopher Hermann Graf Keyserling: »The poetry consists of words. “Since Isou reads the keyserling in French, a language that he has only learned since the previous year, he confuses” vocables “(words) with the Romanian” vocale “for” vowels “.

It is the most productive misunderstanding of the century. Because of this fateful day he not only writes in vowels and consonants freed from words, he creates music and plays from sounds and body noises (“screams for five million Jews murdered”; 1947). He covers paintings and a great film from “Found Footage” or remains (“Tract of Geifer and Eternity”; 1951) with signs of all kinds. Above all, he gives talented followers – the anarchist Maurice Lemaître, the co -founder of the “new Realism «, François Dufrêne, and the later situationist Guy Debord – about themselves, who also draw attention to themselves with disorders of readings and services. The group’s first magazine is called “The Lettist Dictatorship”. Isou even provides the largest scandal with a pornography, “Isou or the Mechanics of Women” (1949), whose 1,500 copies are sold in no time. The author is arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison for probation and a sensitive fine.

Until the end of his life, Isou’s writings on all topics of the “cladological”, that is, like branches of a tree, should present himself with decreasing success. According to André Breton, the “best idea” Isous, which is hard to overview, is highlighted: “The uprising of the youth” (1950). For Isou, the boys are “the slaves, the tools, the luxury, the property of the others, regardless of their class, because they do not have the” free choice “, their family decides for them”. This excluded must be provided by various measures – shortening the school days, abolition of the Abitur, tax cutting, starting capital – market access. By not focusing on the proletariat, but on the outsider, he does the politics of Herbert Marcuses, but with a decisive difference: the system should not be changed, just rejuvenated.

However, the “boys” at Isidore Isou always mean the refugees, i.e. those that almost all parties in Europe and the USA now want to set insurmountable limits. If the politician Isou may have been a liberal reformist, his uprising appears as revolutionary under today’s conditions.

Frédéric Acquaviva: Isidore Isou. Griffon, Neuchâtel 2018 (in French), 279 pages, born, € 68.
Isidore isou. The signs of the Messiah, in: »Writing booklet«, No. 78, 2012, 113 pages, € 16.50, to order via writingheft@netcologne.de
The Elke and Arno Morenz Collection (EAMC), Berlin, Sybelstr. 62, organized on February 24th. A memorial evening for Isidore Isou.