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

185–198
doi:10.1093/litthe/frr006 Advance Access publication 22 April 2011

A BOOK ABOUT NOTHING:

THE POETICS OF THE ROMAN
BLANC1
Sami Sjöberg

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Abstract
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 inde-
pendent functioning of language by turning towards irrationality, obscurity
and ineffability. These themes emerged from medieval mysticism (Kabbalah),
a source of influence for the avant-gardists. The blank book ‘La loi des purs’
by Isidore Isou charts both the praxis of language and what exceeds repre-
sentation. 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, enfin aussi bien, d’effacer les textes que de noircir les marges, de
les boucher jusqu’à 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 Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés to dadaist experimentations and
beyond, blank spaces have become an integral part of a work’s 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 numer-
ous 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.fi
Literature & Theology # The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press 2011; all rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
186 SAMI SJÖBERG
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 anti-
nomic 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 litera-

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ture? 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, 1925–2007), 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 book’s preface, Isou underscores the roman blanc as a
complete aesthetic exhaustion (épuisement) 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 invis-
ible narration (a-optique), Isou caused an ‘inversion’ of the blank page, which
rendered emptiness a signifying space.10 Therefore, instead of mere destruc-
tion, the blank page manifests hiddenness.
Isou thus goes beyond any understanding according to which both the mani-
fest 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 under-
standings are accurate, but I will argue that Isou’s unusual way of perceiving the
blank page and his notion of invisible narration were not a case of facile ab-
straction, but come close to the conception of the white page as found in the
Kabbalah. This correlation suggests that examining certain kabbalistic character-
istics, such as the particular notion of God’s modality, are necessary for under-
standing the raison d’être of his blank book.12 Furthermore, I suggest that these
influences 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 Jabès, whose Le livre de questions (The Book of
Questions, 1963–73) was concurrent with La loi des purs. White spaces (blancs)
were essential in his works. For him, the blank denoted ‘un espace qu’aucune
lettre ne désigne’;13 however, Jabès 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
Jabès considered the empty page as a non-messianic place of rumination,
for Isou the blank page entailed a messianic quasi-religious potential.14
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC 187
Isou’s 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 Jésus-Christ fut le Messie, mais que le salut de l’homme dépend d’une
révélation à venir, pensée qui justifie en partie le judaı̈sme.’15 Isou adopts the
forward-looking idea of à venir [to come] from religious messianism and this is
a defining feature in the interpretation of La loi des purs, as will be argued in
this essay.16 The à venir puts into question the meaningfulness of the present,
the here and now, by subjecting it to both anticipation and open-endedness. It

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exemplifies the desire to go beyond the present and rational.17 Based on the
idea of invisible narration, I suggest that 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.18
In what follows, Isou’s blank book is approached as an appropriation of
kabbalistic features, which is quasi-religious in that it preserves a link to secular
aesthetics. The first 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.

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 min-
imum, 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
188 SAMI SJÖBERG
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 ambigu-
ous 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.

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Isou’s 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 affili-
ation 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 aes-
thetics of subversion, the blank book epitomises the annihilation of language
simply because it 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, lettrist Maurice
Lemaı̂tre distinguished two kinds of roman blanc based on La loi des purs: the
empty novel (roman vide) and the prospective novel (roman à 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 mes-
sianism. The first 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 représenter qu’un symbole d’épuisement
d’un secteur esthétique déterminé.’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
significance as an anti-art gesture: language is still the backdrop against
which the dismissive gesture is performed. Hence anti-poetics is inevitably
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC 189
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.’22 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

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un espace vivant dans lequel se rencontrent les possibles.’23 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.24 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.25
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.26 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 sig-
nifies God’s infinite substance.27 The myth also carried an eschatological
sense: in the Kabbalah, white fire refers to the messianic world-to-come
(aB' h: <l' Au, olam ha-ba), that is à venir, while black fire signals the present
world.28 In the Kabbalah, this parable affirms the divine attributes of the blank
page.
The interpretation of the fire myth is quintessential as regards the prospect-
ive 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
190 SAMI SJÖBERG
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 presum-
ably 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 com-
plete 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 signifi-
cation. The potential of the blank page is its capability to function as a frame-

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work of various kinds: the implosion of the linguistic backdrop ‘opens’ the
blank page for both presentation—the visual aspect, such as the visible white-
ness of the page—and representation, the white page standing in for some-
thing 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 present as derived from messi-
anism. 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 tran-
sition. 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 frame-
work of the blank book. In this case, invisibility involves a material require-
ment, 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 Isou’s 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 identified 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 identification was not
even foreign to Jabès 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 literature—the absence
of a discussion about God—but rather a more thoroughgoing absence as a
prerequisite of God. This stance can be clarified by considering the Jewish
conception of God.
The Jewish God is invisible, abstract and inconceivable. This God lacks
definition altogether—even 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
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC 191
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 ab-
sence did not indicate mere non-existence; instead, the absence of all attributes
of God’s essence marked God’s elusive existence.36 For him, emptiness thus
becomes firsthand 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

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of God does not result in nihilistic reflection, or evil, but in an affirmation of
the existence of the absent God.37 Isou confirmed that ‘la présence de cette
absence c’est-à-dire le blanc, l’absence comme cadre (et non comme rien) [sig-
nifie] chez l’auteur 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 Jabès 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 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 con-
ventional 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 quasi-religious 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.

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 (œuvre) is not
directly identifiable 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 pro-
spective novel is ‘plein de tout ce qui peut – doit – s’y faire, de positif, de
négatif, de réel, d’imaginaire, de possible, d’impossible’.39 In other words, it is
192 SAMI SJÖBERG
a plenitude of potential meaning. 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.40
Equally, the abstract notion of a work of art is distinctly different in
Blanchot’s and Isou’s quasi-religious 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.41 The main difference be-
tween the prospective novel and the book to come is that the latter was a fully

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abstract ideal and hence Blanchot made no distinction between the terms
‘book’ (livre) and ‘work’ (œuvre).The book to come is aporetic—it cannot,
by definition, 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 pro-
spective 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 under-
scores the autonomy of literature, the prospective novel—as a work—is
beyond the immediate material framework (the blank book). The incommen-
surability 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 that is caused by the work’s 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 ab-
sence 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.’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 accommo-
dative of the messianic promise. His theories contain a genuine striving to-
wards 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 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
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC 193
‘‘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 nothing.’45 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

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conceptual thinking, by declaring that ‘tout était blanc, si blanc que je ne
comprenais même pas.’46 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 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. Isou’s
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 judaı̈que [est] ce centre d’inconnaissance vers lequel nous
avançons [–] et autour duquel nous bâtissons 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 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 incon-
ceivable 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 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.’49 The blank, as
open-ended representation, opens the instant by which it evokes the
194 SAMI SJÖBERG
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 untraver-
sable gap between men and God, of their distinct modalities, which can only
be bridged by the Messiah.

IV. CONCLUSION

The roman blanc, and La loi des purs as an example, reveals the multiplicity of

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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, the roman blanc does not denote an absolute
void but rather a non-rational emptiness induced by religion, which is fur-
thermore 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 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 pecu-
liar 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.

REFERENCES
1 2
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 mar-
gins, to fill in the holes of words till all is
blank and flat and the whole ghastly
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC
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.
3
There are numerous comprehensive
introductions to how typography in
avant-garde poetry has evolved, cf.
Richard Grasshoff’s dissertation on letter
poetry Der Befreite Buchstabe. Über
Lettrismus (Freie Universität Berlin,
2000); Willard Bohn, Modern Visual
Poetry (London: Associated University
Presses, 2001); Johanna Drucker, The
Visible Word: Experimental Typography
7
and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Isidore Isou, Introduction à une Nouvelle
Poesie et à une Nouvelle Musique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947), pp. 21–59.
4
The blank book is defined 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
8
preceding the 1950s also exists; consider
for instance the famous blank page in
9
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. All or
Nothing: An Anthology of Blank Books,
ed. Michael Gibbs (Cromford: RGAP,
2005).
5
Criticism of its predecessors is a common
10
feature in avant-garde aesthetics, see e.g.
11
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), pp. 95–96.
6 12
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 sub-
jective definitions. For Blanchot the ‘idéal
195
de la littérature a pu être 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
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instance, cf. Samuel Beckett, Nouvelles
et textes pour rien (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1958); Jacques Derrida,
‘Comment ne pas parler: Dénégations,’
In Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Jacques
Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 535–95.
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’ writ-
ing. Cf. Isidore Isou, Les journaux des
dieux (Paris: Aux Escaliers de Lausanne,
1950) and Amos ou introduction à la meta-
graphologie (Paris: Arcanes, 1953).
Isidore Isou, La loi des purs (Paris: Isidore
Isou, 1963), p. 7–8, 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.
204–10.
See Isou, La loi, p. 15.
Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, ‘Ni Mot, ni
image: livres vierges,’ in Vides: Une rétro-
spective (Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag,
2009), p. 405.
Isou’s 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 Abulafia. See Isidore
Isou, L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 355. For more
196 SAMI SJÖBERG
on the influence of Isou’s Jewish back-
ground on his theories, cf. Sami
Sjöberg, ‘The Jewish Shtetl Tradition in
the Franco-Romanian Avant-Garde:
The Case of Isidore Isou,’ in Juhani
Nuorluoto and Maija Könönen (eds),
Europe – Evropa: Cross-Cultural Dialogues
between the West, Russia, and Southeastern
Europe (Uppsala: University of Uppsala,
2010), pp. 132–49.
13
‘a space undesignated by any letter’.
Edmond Jabès, El, ou le dernier livre
(Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 20.
14
For Jabès, 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. 376–9.
15
‘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’.
Isidore Isou, Quelques anciens manifestes
lettristes et esthapeiristes (1960–1963) (Paris:
Centre de créativité, 1967), p. 2.
Emphasis added.
16
The temporal condition à venir is present
in the bulk of Isou’s theoretical works, in
which it establishes a temporal structure.
For instance, he wrote that ‘Isidore prétend
bégayer un langage future. Il n’est donc jamais
présent, mais à venir’ [Isidore pretends to
stammer a future language. It is therefore
never present but to come]. Isidore Isou,
Œuvres de Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), p. 129.
17
Such desire is similar to Jewish, especially
kabbalistic, messianism. See Moshe Idel,
Messianic Mystics (New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 1998),
pp. 1–3, 33–36.
18
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
Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, The
Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary
Terms (London: Palgrave MacMillan,
2003), p. 350.
19
‘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 (1906-
1940) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 11.
20
Maurice Lemaı̂tre, Entretiens avec Pietro
Ferrua sur le lettrisme (Paris: Centré de
Créativite, 1982).
21
‘empty expression cannot represent but a
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symbol of a specific aesthetic sector’s
exhaustion.’ Isou, La loi, p. 8.
22
‘place of the book is an enclosed empti-
ness. Every page, precarious refuge, has its
four walls that are its margins.’ Jabès, El,
p. 28.
23
‘There exists a ‘‘blank’’ place, regarded as
a living space in which the possibles
meet.’ F. Devaux, De La Création à la
Société Paradisiaque: Isidore Isou et la
Pensée Judaı̈que, Tome 2 (Paris: Editions
du Christolien, 1998), p. 80. Devaux’s
study is the first concerning the
Jewishness of Isou’s theories, but is
rather associative in relating Isou to the
bulk of Jewish mysticism without aca-
demic precision and, at times, lacks crit-
ical distance, probably due to Devaux’s
close affiliation with lettrism.
24
Whereas the prefix ‘anti-’ designates op-
position, the ‘a-’ denotes ‘being without’
or lacking. See Oxford Advanced Learner’s
Dictionary, 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995). Moreover, the
‘a-’ is fundamentally ambiguous, because
it permits a range of meanings. For a fur-
ther discussion, see Raoul Mortley, ‘The
Fundamentals of the Via Negativa,’ The
American Journal of Philology 103 (1982),
429–39.
25
See ‘Les anti-lettries’ in Jean-Paul Curtay,
La poesie lettriste (Paris: Seghers, 1974),
p. 199.
26
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.
 POETICS OF THE ROMAN BLANC
32
In Jewish philosophy of late antiquity as
well as in the medieval Kabbalah the
33
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
34
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.
27
Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah
35
and Interpretation (New Haven & London:
36
Yale University Press, 2002), p. 49. Even
Jacques Derrida identifies, albeit not un-
ambiguously in the context of Judaism,
the fire as absent center, original meaning
and divine speech, whereas ashes (written
signifiers) 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. 375–7.
28
Georges Lahy, ‘Introduction et présenta-
37
tion’, in Abraham Aboulafia (ed.), La Vie
du monde à venir, trans. Georges Lahy
(Roquevaire: Éditions Lahy, 2009), p. 5.
29
Moshe Idel, ‘White Letters: From
R. Levi Isaac of Berditchev’s Views to
38
Postmodern Hermeneutics’, Modern
Judaism 26 (2006) 170, 185.
30
Ibid., p. 173.
31
F. Devaux, De La Création, p. 33. Devaux
mentions the same approach in stating
39
that one day God will reveal the white
text and everyone will be a future God.
See Devaux, De La Création, 2, p. 86. In
Récits hassidiques Martin Buber shares the
same vision of God revealing the white
40
mystery (mystère blanc) of the Torah in the
times to come—see Catherine Chalier,
Judaı̈sme et altérité (Paris: Éditions
Verdier, 1982), p. 293.
197
Edmond Jabès, ‘My Itinerary,’ Studies in
Twentieth Century Literature 12 (1987), 4.
Devaux, De La Création, 2, p. 163; Ofrat,
Jewish Derrida, p. 20; Devorah Baum, ‘Le
Rien et les juifs.’ In Vides: Une rétrospective
(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 Philo-
Downloaded from http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/ at North Dakota State University on June 18, 2015
sophy (New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 121–59.
Ofrat, Jewish Derrida, p. 54.
Devaux, De La Création, 1, p. 163. Isou’s
stand is similar to that of subsequent fig-
ures 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
Heidegger’s thinking. Even earlier, God
was posited as hyperessential in negative
theology by figures such as Pseudo-
Dionysius, Moses Maimonides, Meister
Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas and Angelus
Silesius. Furthermore, Jewish thinkers
were influenced by these very figures,
see Matt, ‘Ayin’, p. 122.
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.
‘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.’ Quoted in
Devaux, De la Création, 2, p. 88.
‘filled with everything that could—
should—constitute it; positive, negative,
real, imaginary, possible, impossible.’
Lemaı̂tre, Entretiens, p. 214. Emphasis
removed.
Cf. Umberto Eco, The Open Work
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989). Such understanding of interpret-
ation is common also in hermeneutics
198 SAMI SJÖBERG
and reader-response criticism; see
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und
Methode (Berlin: Akademie Verlag
GmbH, 2007) and Wolfgang Iser, Der
Akt des Lesens: Theorie äesthetischer
Wirkung (Stuttgart: UTB, 1994).
41
For the possible influence of the
Kabbalah on Jabès, see Matthew Del
Nevo, ‘Edmond Jabès and Kabbalism
after God’, Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 65 (1997), 403–42.
42
Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), p. 9.
43
‘the work is always to come like the
Messiah. It is promised, future.’ Devaux,
De la creation, 2, p. 136. Devaux’s formu-
lation 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 his-
torical 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.
44
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 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 mes-
sianique.’[the method of creation that is
the secret of the Gods that the Messiah
must provide and I consider my innova-
tive contributions—artistic and philo-
sophical—as stages of the messianic
endeavor.] Isidore Isou, ‘La Création
Divine, la Transformation Récente de
l’église Catholique et la Révélation
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Messianique’, Lettrisme 4 (1972), 12.
45
Paul Auster, ‘Book of the Dead: An
Interview with Edmond Jabès’, in Eric
Gould (ed.), The Sin of the Book:
Edmond Jabès (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 19.
46
‘everything was blank, so blank that I do
not even understand.’ Isidore Isou,
L’agrégation, p. 134.
47
‘Jewish God is the center of unknowing
towards which we advance and around
which we build the world.’ Ibid., p. 259.
48
For a similar effect in poetic language, see
Elisabeth Loevlie, Literary Silences in
Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.
213–5.
49
‘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 uni-
verse.’ Devaux, De la création, 2, p. 145.