15.

Zoom out. Isidore Isou claims, however, that the letter itself constitutes the minimal element of writing — what he calls “the fraction of the word” ¹⁵ from which “[e]verything must be revealed” ¹⁶ (i.e., the asemic pieces of words, pulverized into their alphabetical constituents). Isou insists that these “particles of the Letterist” ¹⁷ can revivify the abstract meanings of poetry by confronting the reader with the concreteness of such indivisible foundations for expression in the debris from the destruction of the word. Such a fixation upon the irreducibility of the letter eventually leads Isou, late in life, to formulate an imaginary aesthetic movement called excoördisme — a movement, both “extensible” and “co-ordinate,” aspiring to become an “art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small” ¹⁸ — an art whose concepts transect all scales of expression, from atoms to stars.