Lecture by Jalal Toufic, a thinker, writer, and artist.
This lecture provides an overview of Jalal’s concept of the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster: ‘To detect this withdrawal, whether symptomatically or otherwise, one is well advised to look for it in messianic movements as well as in artistic and literary works: “With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. ‘You have seen nothing in Hiroshima’ [Duras/Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour]. Does this entail that one should not record? No. One should record this ‘nothing,’ which only after the resurrection can be available.” We will examine if and how one can record this “nothing,” as well as how to contribute to the resurrection of the withdrawn tradition—without this resurrection tradition becomes a counterfeit of itself.’
Jalal Toufic, film theorist, and video artist, was born in Lebanon in 1962. He is the author of ‘Distracted’ (1991); ‘Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film’ (1993); Forthcoming (2000); and ‘Undying Love, or Love Dies’ (2002). His videos and mixed media works have been presented in North America, Brazil, the Middle East and Europe. He has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the California Institute of the Arts, USC; and Amsterdam’s DasArts and the Rijksakademie.