Penser l'art et le monde après 1945 – Isidore Isou, essai d'archéologie d'une pensée

This reflection aims to understand the theoretical functioning of lettrism through a study of the intellectual substrate of Isidore Isou, between 1945 and 1968. The artistic and intellectual activity of Isou is completely in the context of these years. But at the important moment of a reconsideration and questioning of Western universalist values, the lettrist shows a clear intellectual filiation with them. Isou's goal was clearly to bring to light universal laws of analysis and operation, both with regard to things of art and to each field of knowledge, laws of operation resulting from a teleological reading and evolutionary of "History", allowing the development of criteria, notably formal, of novelty. In the global field of post-war avant-gardes, Isidore Isou is a restorer of a certain type of values and certain traditions that forged the culture of Western humanism. But while being in the extension of "traditions", he was connected to the issues of his time. That of communication, a new utopia of the 20th century. That of the secretion of a permutational aesthetic. Of an aesthetics of the sign and more of the linguistic sign. Hypergraphy is itself connected to contemporary research on language, on semiotics, as a new great utopia of integral communication.

Frédéric Alix is a doctor in the history of contemporary art, a specialist and theoretician of the aesthetic avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century. His research tends to favor and construct a multidisciplinary approach to this history.