After the dissolution of Le Grand Jeu, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, in an autonomous capacity, carried on the mission that had been established by his now estranged fellow travelers. Collecting thoughts, essays,fragments and paroxysms on the revolutionary impulse of poetry, art, and life, THE BOOK IS A GHOST presents an image of Gilbert-Lecomte as a visionary writer whose impulse to transcend the banality of the everyday has been matched by few since Antonin Artaud.

In considering the revolutionary spirit within the context of a mysticism (a term that is still functionally a dirty word for intellectuals), the texts gathered in this two-volume set strive to present alternative considerations of the intellectual & artistic concerns of Gilbert-Lecomte's day—concerns which still grip us a century later: the cinema, the value of art, the metaphysics of absence, a speculative consideration of vision through the pineal gland, a refusal to posit the high and the low as binary opposites, the limiting nature of expression & representation, and the ever pervasive question of death. In his consideration of poetry & the way language can shape thought, these essays reveal that Gilbert-Lecomte predated the structuralists & post-structuralists that would rise to prominence in the second half of the 20th century.

In this volume, deftly translated by Michael Tweed, Gilbert-Lecomte's constant striving for revelation and revolution, his desire to refuse (and transcend) the corporeal limits one inhabits by being human, are finally revealed to English language readers.