The Collected Writings (1991-2024) of a Mortal to Death - by Jalal Toufic (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The first in a landmark three-volume series gathering the complete writings of an indispensable voice in contemporary thought and aesthetics.

No Place Press is collaborating with Jalal Toufic on an ambitious publishing project: The Collected Writings (1991-2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic. Spanning three volumes of more than six hundred pages each, the series gathers re-edited versions of his earlier works alongside two newly written books, arranged and organized by the author himself. For new readers, the volumes provide an introduction to Toufic's central concepts--including the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer's two bodies--while for longtime readers they offer a comprehensive view of more than three decades of thought, presented in their most rigorous and fully articulated form. Yet, in keeping with Toufic's practice--which participates in untimely collaboration (including with future filmmakers, thinkers, and artists) and abides in the suspension of the avenir of messianism/Mahdism--some of these works remain forthcoming even after their inclusion in the Collected Writings.

Volume 1 (2025) includes newly revised editions of Toufic's first three books--Distracted (1991/2003); (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003); and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009)--together with the script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and, new, The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024).

About the Author

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. A number of his books were published by Forthcoming Books. He has made over twenty films and videos: essay films and conceptual films; short films, feature-length films, and "inhumanely" long ones (72 hours, 50 hours); standalone films and others that form part of mixed-media pieces; films he shot himself and films composed entirely of images from works by other filmmakers--Hitchcock, Sokurov, Bergman, etc.--as well as six created in collaboration with his wife, Graziella Rizkallah. His work--alongside that of artists and pretend artists--has been shown in Sharjah Biennials 6, 10, and 11; the 9th Shanghai Biennale; the 5th Guangzhou Triennial; MoMA PS1; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou; ZKM; Kunsthalle Fridericianum; MAXXI; FKA Witte de With; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; and elsewhere. Many of his films and videos are available for viewing on Vimeo. In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. From September 2015 to August 2018, he was Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Alba).