ABSTRACT
The work emerging from the phase of Rene Daumal's life has attracted a critical rhetoric bordering at times on the 'New Age', just as that of Le Grand Jen sits readily with discourses connecting avant-garde, revolutionary theory, and transgressive action. There is an apparent critical consensus that Daumal recoiled from the logic of destruction entertained in Le Grand Jeu in favour of more roundly spiritual concerns, while Gilbert-Lecomte is standardly cast in the role of poete maudit. In a 1936 review of a work by Alexandra David-Neel, Daumal approvingly quotes a definition of nirvana. Knowledge is attained through a fundamental upheaval in the processes of thought and perception. The personal self was already in place as the goal of Daumal's personal reflection prior to the period of Le Grand Jeu's publication.
