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.

DISTRACTED

Toufic, Jalal

Biographies & Memoirs

Station Hill Press

Cultural Writing. Film history and criticism. "Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse--turning the trap of 'what can't be named' into a true paradise"--Richard Foreman. "Relentlessly uncompromising.Toufic's radical and visionary poetics gird the reader to forge ahead into uncharted territory"--Village Voice. "Jalal Toufic is one of the best writers in America today...and his first 2 books, DISTRACTED and (VAMPIRES), are some of the best writing of the past 20 years"--John Zorn, Film Works IV. Jalal Toufic is a teacher, film theorist, video artist, and author of several books. His films have been shown worldwide.

Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

AmazonUs/INDPB

"No brief comment can adequately describe this book; it is impossible even to categorize it. But this is true of Nietzsche's writings, too, and it is with Nietzsche that I can most readily compare Jalal Toufic. Like Nietzsche, Toufic is a writer of philosophical aphorisms, manifestations of the intensest of experiences under pressure of incomparable intelligence. But Nietzsche was no miniaturist, and neither is Toufic. The pressure that the thinking must withstand makes the writing remarkably concise, but its power is enormous, its scope vast, its effect sweeping. This, Jalal Toufic's fifth book, can be read as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms. And though it is the shortest of his books to date, it is perhaps also the greatest.... Toufic's writings have already attracted something of a cult following; it is likely that Undying Love, or Love Dies will bring him a far larger readership. Certainly that is something to be hoped for. 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, author of A Border Comedy, The Cold of Poetry, The Cell, My Life, The Language of Inquiry, and Professor in the English Department, University of California at Berkeley).

Undying Love, or Love Dies

Post-Apollo Press

Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film: Revised and Expanded Edition

"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 Shahrayâr dying to tell Shahrazâd? 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 variety of movement; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (for example, lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: 'Am I in a film?' as well as a significant number of other anomalies. This new book contains two or three additional things I am dying to tell its readers as well as the poet Lyn Hejinian and myself" (Jalal Toufic).

TWO OR THREE THINGS I'M DYING TO TELL YOU

The Post-Apollo Press

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.

Over-Sensitivity

Sun & Moon Press

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.

Forthcoming

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Atelos

"Todo na koorta, espo sipito fuela laquna qui no uisi dar: Distracted puelo forta na scusi. 'Chorbs trada,' 'kobingo,' "Pressta fenna Tesserae'--ya kibsh Toufic ordinatarae. Tengo no sladin casamo. Morshada!!" (Peter Rose, film/video maker of Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time, The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The Pressures of the Text, etc., peterrosepicture.com)

Distracted

Literary

Tuumba Press

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.

Forthcoming, second edition (Sternberg Press / e-flux journal)

Arts & Photography

Sternberg Press

"What Was I Thinking? is an initiation into thinking. With a mind that is extremely analytical and yet extremely capable of rendering all kinds of knowledge and experiences permeable to each other, Jalal Toufic creates here a 'summa,' but an open-ended one. He looks into the arts as if they were&nbsp;the privileged&nbsp;site of thinking, even when they inevitably fail, and still confronts his insights/thoughts with texts taken from the traditional religions and mystics of the past. He has reached in this work an Olympian attitude--tuned to his basically Dionysian temperament--that announces the beginning of a detachment, of a remarkable serenity (a joy in thinking that Nietzsche had already understood). Jalal Toufic is today, and has been for some time, the most original thinker on the planet. He assumes the challenge stated by Heidegger in What Is Called Thinking? by his own thinking (by writing this book). To imagine the best possible worlds, to go into uncharted territory; these worlds are eminently those of the arts (as he practices them, as he delves into their layers, their paradoxes, their darings, ever admitting their maddening inbuilt inaccessibility). His kind of an endeavor takes a tremendous courage. And a unique freedom: letting his mind go into unpredicted ascertainments, so that his writing 'does not fall apart&nbsp;two days later.' Situated somewhere close to the spirit of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Nietzsche's breakthroughs, we can say that Jalal Toufic is indeed a 'destiny.'"--Etel Adnan Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle

What Was I Thinking? (Sternberg Press / e-flux journal)

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