The Great Game:
Writings of a Lost Avant-Garde

Instructor: Jason Mohaghegh Date & Time: September 25, October 9, 16, 23, 30, November 6, 13, 20. 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: From 1928-1932 in Reims, France, four obscure youth formed a secret society devoted to exploring the outer boundaries of the universal. Such was the genesis of an association later known as The Great Game (Le Grand Jeu), an inner circle whose experiments with drug visions, near-death experiences, and anesthesia included: ingesting poisonous leaves, strychnine, opium, and carbon tetrachloride (a cleaning fluid and insect killer); mastering “sightless movement” by bicycling through their rural town blindfolded and attempting panoptic vision (seeing hidden visual phenomena without using the eyes); practicing auto-asphyxiation or holding sharpened instruments against each other’s throats while writing, and focusing their gaze on mirror surfaces for hours until the reflective image blurred and began motioning with strange, ghostly autonomy.

This Seminar is an intensive study of the recently-translated writings of this short-lived alliance of The Great Game—envied by the Surrealist leaders who craved their subordination in several failed attempts, led by the mystical seer René Daumal and the “dark angel” Roger Gilbert-Lecomte who wrote of glimpsing “the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness.” We will study the newly published collection of their most intimate and influential writings, rescued from a silenced archive to win their rightful place as perhaps the most brilliant and daring lost souls of the avant-garde. Together, we will read texts such as “The Night Battle” and “The Seductiveness of Voltage” as prophetic formulations of the philosophy of fatal risk that never fully emerged, yet left behind remnants like no other. We will extract the most provocative theories behind their parapsychic trials and experimental metaphysics, their pseudonyms and secret gatherings, their rebellion and outcast status amid the dominant vanguards of their time, their near-lethal techniques of sensing the void, and their principles of “horrible revelation” sealed in a blood pact of four young geniuses. Moreover, we will use this Seminar to expand their thoughts and contemplate what next ventures they might have undertaken if not burning out and collapsing after just a few years of incendiary activity, or, as they wrote in their elegant omen of a Preface: “The Great Game is irremediable; it is played only once. We wish to play it every moment of our lives. It is a case of ‘loser wins’ since the aim is to lose oneself. And we want to win.”

IMAGE: Le Grand Jeu du (1-3), Complete Collection.

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