Debord was directly inspired by Isidore Isou, a Jewish Romanian émigré in Paris, and the founder (and initially the sole member) of the Lettriste movement.



Isou had been inspired by the Italian poet and philosopher Giuseppe Ungaretti, who stated that language is all that stands between mankind and chaos. But in turn, Ungaretti believed (like Debord, and Adorno/Horkheimer, and Derrida later on) that Enlightenment rationalism had turned everyday language into la parola abusata : the deliberate misuse of the word. Writing in the 1930s, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ungaretti’s apocalyptic message was unmistakable. And Isou, a Jew who had escaped from Nazi-run Romania ten years later at the age of 23, heard it : meaning must be untied from a bastardised language. Poetry must be stripped down to the letter. Only then can a new language be created. Or, as Isou put it, “you couldn’t kill five million Jews and go on living as if nothing had happened.”