Letterist International

Part of the Politics series on
The Situationist International
"It is forbidden to forbid"
Concepts Anti-art Class consciousness Class struggle Communism Dérive Détournement General strike Internationalism Psychogeography Recuperation Situation (Sartre) Situationist prank Spectacle Unitary urbanism Workers' council World revolution
People Michèle Bernstein Ivan Chtcheglov Guy Debord Jacqueline de Jong Asger Jorn Attila Kotányi Jørgen Nash Constant Nieuwenhuys Charles Radcliffe Ralph Rumney Gianfranco Sanguinetti Alexander Trocchi Raoul Vaneigem René Viénet
Works Can Dialectics Break Bricks? Mémoires On the Poverty of Student Life Report on the Construction of Situations The Revolution of Everyday Life The Society of the Spectacle
Organizations Letterist International Golden Fleet Gruppe SPUR International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (IMIB) Situationist International Council for Maintaining the Occupations Second Situationist International
Related articles Anarchist communism Autonomism Constructivism Council communism Left communism Libertarian Marxism Libertarian socialism Ultra-leftism Youth International Party
Anarchism portal  Socialism portal  Communism portal Politics portal
v t e

The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman rejoined by Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna as a schism from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group. The group went on to join others in forming the Situationist International, taking some key techniques and ideas with it.^[1]

'Letterist' (lettriste) was the form the group themselves used, as in their 1955 sticker: 'If you believe you have genius, or if you think you have only a brilliant intelligence, write the letterist internationale.' Though the spelling 'Lettrist' is also common in English, authors and translators such as Donald Nicholson-Smith, Simon Ford, Sadie Plant and Andrew Hussey use the 'Letterist International' spelling.

The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures.^[2] In the Summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957.^[3] In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved notoriety, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.^{[citation needed]}