The Opening of the Hunt, Dominique De Roux

This "Opening of the Hunt" is an invitation to passionate, yet critical, reading. Throughout his life, Dominique de Roux tirelessly denounced literature without stakes, even if it hid behind the flattering mask of the avant-garde. In the essays and pamphlets from which he composed this book in 1968, he denounces the logomachy to which literature has been reduced. Conversely, he extols the language of action which, through its poetic charge, protects us from theory. Thus, he shows himself to be both a brilliant polemicist and a fervent propagandist. To criticisms, sometimes the most violent, against Jean-Pierre Faye, Philippe Sollers, and Herbert Marcuse, he offers enthusiastic tributes to Witold Gombrowicz, Ezra Pound, Claude Pélieu and the Beat Generation, Jean-Luc Godard and Constantin Brancusi. As befits the language of action, he invites a re-reading of immediate history by addressing, among other things, the events of May or the "Gaullist international." Whether observing literary life or political life, the goal is the same: to shake up "intellectual comfort," to disrupt benchmarks in order to free taste and judgment from the weight of opinion, from the straitjacket of ideologies. "Opening of the Hunt" is a manual for combat.