ABSTRACT
Rooted in the pre-symbolic of a shared 'real', the question of experience culminates for Le Grand Jeu in a symbolizing strategy of all-out negation — an assault within language on the presumed ability of words to adhere. Rene Daumal's practice of the non-lieu is characterized throughout his work by a suspicion of literary form and device that is intellectually conditioned by those beginnings. His personal engagement with the non-lieu results, for this reason among others, in a very different set of textual manifestations from those engineered by Victor Segalen. In Daumal's lyrical attempts there is no object creditable or believable enough to distract the subject from its own negative imperative. The situation in which the act of poetic creation takes place is one where, in a sense, the poet is wrong-footed by his own diction and placed in a state of performative incoherence.
