Cultural Writing. Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist presently living in Lebanon. His video and installation works, which include Radical Closure Artist with Bandaged Sense Organ (1997), have been shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque; the Pacific Film Archive; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and elsewhere. He edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World. FORTHCOMING is a fascinating blend of political theory, film theory, and cross-genre writing -- an essential book for those interested in contemporary thought and culture.
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The Lebanese writer, film theorist and video artist Toufic is the author of three previous volumes, including Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead and Distracted, an analysis of culture as spectacle. Forthcoming can most conveniently be described as film criticism, since it returns to film as the subject and the springboard of its near-recursive meditations, though the writing rigorously defies categorization on a deeper level. Using abstractions like "substitution," "reflection" and "counterfeiting" as unstable structures around which associations, thoughts, philosophical propositions, speculations and poetic musings intersect, collide and interact, Toufic ranges over a plethora of art forms, genres and eras Shakespeare, the Koran, Nietzsche, Rilke, Magritte, Shi'ism, David Lynch, descriptions of Cairo, the speaker's dating life, and the politics of the Middle East are just a few. At some points Toufic "updates" the material he is working with, such as an altered Hamlet, intended for avant-garde director Richard Foreman, or the criticism-cum-appropriation of the photo portrait of Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance in Kubrick's The Shining. The boundaries of description, analysis and speculation are intentionally thin, and Toufic manages to be evocative, exacting and vague all at the same time: "Was photography invented not so much to assuage some urge to arrest the moment, but partly owing to an intuition that it already existed in the universe, in the form of the immobilization and flattening at the event horizon?" Toufic blurs the boundaries of critical thinking and poetically pitched writing (risking incomprehensibility in the process), but his work reveals a richly interconnected world that can be completely accepting of its own particularities.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You (2005), 'Âshûrâ': This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) and Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009). Several of his books are available for download at his website: jalaltoufic.com.
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