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The author, son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, lived in Lebanon for 17 years; this extraordinary fictionalized memoir derives much of its intensity from Toufic's exposure to three of the world's most devastated peoples. Viewing life through the eyes of Nietzsche and Kafka, he deftly turns sitting in a cafe into an autobiographical narrative blended with philosophy and observations on cinema gleaned from his own experience as a filmmaker. The text turns on a metaphoric excavation of an always underway process or state of 'distraction'-- A state which for Toufic is not so much an attitude or level of concentration as it is an ontological modality. Insightful, funny, erotic, at times bizarre, Distracted offers an indelible vision of daily life by a man born on the twin currents of art and history.
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. This second edition of a collection of his essays whirls around the appearance of the unworldly in art, culture, history, and the present.
Memoir. Essay. The latest book from an original writer, thinker and filmmaker whose other books (also available from SPD) have attracted a considerable following. "This, Jalal Toufic's fifth book, can be read as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms. And although it is the shortest of his books to date, it is the greatest. Under love's rubric, themes from Toufic's earlier books reappear - memory, the untimely occurrence, the undead of history and their recurrence in film, the hyperrealities of oblivion, ruination. The book is set in contexts (and particularly that of the Arab World) in which not time but other faster forces are bringing about an end to things.There is, in my opinion, no more subtle or powerful thinker today than Jalal Toufic, and none whose ideas are, in the end, more beautiful" - Lyn Hejinian.
Jalal Toufic?s ?Postscripts? appears on the occasion of the exhibition ?Let?s be honest, the weather helped? by Walid Raad at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. The author has made known that some works are not just thought-provoking, they are also initiations into thinking. The aphorisms included in ?Postscripts? function as supplements to Toufic?s previous books, being at the same time both clarifications and disclosures of his earlier material. It is a series of thought experiments constructed from discontinuous scenes, reflections, and questions about the complex relationship between reality and fiction, simulation and phantasy, dreaming and wakefulness, and life and death.
Author of (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Distracted, Lebanese-born writer, film theorist, and video artist Jalal Toufic writes works that embrace the whole activity of his mind, from his daily encounters with life to brilliant concepts that often cut across film, visual art, dance, literature, and theater. Writing about the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, the voice-over-witness in relation to traumatic events, the eruption of unworldly entities in radical closures, Toufic takes the reader of his new book through an intellectual landscape that is akin to running across hot coals.
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Cultural Writing. "What was Orpheus dying to tell his wife, Eurydice? What was Judy dying to tell her beloved, Scottie, in Hitchcock's Vertigo? What were the previous one-night wives of King Shahrayar dying to tell Shahrazad? What was the Christian God "dying" to tell us? What were the faces of the candidates in the 2000 parliamentary election in Lebanon "dying" to tell voters and nonvoters alike? While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or Love Dies, I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead stop and reveals the occasional natural immobilization of the living as merely a...
We are transitioning towards a new and different culture, a digital one in which the medium of photography becomes dangerously diluted in an image world produced moment by moment and consumed at a rapid pace. Photographic images and their reception inevitably converge with the symbolic, cultural, social, and political implications of the act of looking. Here, 40 contributors share their perspectives on photography in Lebanon, evoking its numerous forms of existence. Examining techniques, practices, uses, objects, images, histories, and artistic approaches, the book presents a fascinating collection of 380 photographs produced between the end of the 19th century and today.
In der zweiten Ausgabe seines Buchs (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003) bemerkt Jalal Toufic: »Viele Jahre habe ich mich mit Schizophrenie und Schizophrenen beschäftigt, die in Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995, auftraten; jetzt interessiere ich mich für ›das kleine Mädchen‹, das voraussichtlich in meinem kommenden Vampir-Film eine Rolle spielen wird ... Auf einer Ebene kann die 13. Serie in Gilles Deleuze' Logik des Sinns, 1969, ›Der Schizophrene und das kleine Mädchen‹, so zurückblickend als Programm für zehn Jahre meiner Arbeit gesehen werden.« In seinem neuen Essay schreibt er über das Bildnis des pubertierenden Mädchens, wie es auch ...
It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that's not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Lacan famously defined love as giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it. But love is more than a YouTube link or a URL. Love's joy is not to be found in fulfillment, it is to be found in recognition: even though I can never return what was taken away from you, I may be the only person alive who knows what it is. In our present times—post-human, post-reality, or maybe pre-internet, post-it, pre-collapse, pre-fabricated by algorithmsâ...