Last Words: Jalal Toufic, THE WITHDRAWAL OF TRADITION PAST A SURPASSING DISASTER and GRAZIELLA

This week’s Last Words comes a couple days earlier and is a holiday double feature! Here are two endings from Jalal Toufic; one from The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, the other from Graziella, both of which are available for download here on Toufic’s very generous website.

From Aaron Kunin’s introduction to his interview with Toufic in Rain Taxi:

“Most things that are strange are actually strange in a fairly predictable way–e.g., ‘You’re different from me, but I understand you completely; I know exactly what you’re going to say.’ Jalal Toufic, who is, in his own description, ‘a writer, film theorist, and video artist,’ writes books that really are different from anything else I’ve encountered. To say, for example, that they’re about film or dance would distort the way in which they’re engaged with—or obsessed with—these subjects. To say that they’re about politics or psychology would require forgetting their fundamental disengagement from politics as it is usually practiced, and from conventional accounts of consciousness. To say that they’re autobiographical would be missing the point: they’re about death and undeath as well as life.”Â

Toufic describes himself as “a thinker and a mortal to death.”Â

I think the first book of his that I read was Undeserving Lebanon, which I loved, with all its vampires, its ruminations on the stage directions for the ghost in Hamlet (“Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost”Â), its omnivorous and digressive wanderings around Thomas Bernhard, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Alain Resnais, Gaspar Noa, Diamanda Galas, Rabih Mroua, Raphael, Nietzsche, the Bible, Artaud, post-war Lebanon, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Egyptian and Syrian war prisoners, the multiple arrests, imprisonments and tortures of Riad al-Turk; there’s much more, I’m being spare and neglectful. His books have a totally singular way of engaging with disaster, with all forms of the undead and undeath: with zombie martyrs, with massacre and evil (even Evil), with blood and death, with ghosts and vampires and mortality, with the human and inhuman; with real haunted people, haunted places, haunted things.

A conversation from Undeserving Lebanon goes: “My favorite films all belong to the horror genre. What’s your favorite film?”— Hiroshima mon amour —it is the only zombie film I care about.”Â

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster:

Stephanie Sykes
Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 4:25 PM
To: Jalal Toufic
Dear Jalal,
I hope this email finds you well.
Jalal, I am hoping that you will permit me to query a term that surfaces quite a bit in your writing. You make references to the “surpassing disaster,”Â and I do not have a firm grasp of your use of “surpassing.”Â Do you mean this in the literal sense, in which case it would refer to the scale of disasters that exceed social/personal anticipation? Or, alternatively, is the use more abstract, similar to the way Maurice Blanchot perceives disaster/the writing of disaster in that it is unknowable, that it becomes the “other”Â in a sense?
(“Â¦)

Kind regards,
Stephanie Sykes

Jalal Toufic
Fri, May 9, 2008 at 5:40 PM
To: Stephanie Sykes
Dear Stephanie:
The surpassing disaster I have conceptualized is more limited than the disaster Blanchot writes about in his great book The Writing of the Disaster (“The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact”Â); the surpassing disaster leads to the withdrawal not of everything, but of tradition, and touches not everyone, but a community, with the caveat that this community is reciprocally defined by it as the community of those affected by it, and this tradition is defined by it as that which withdraws as a result of the surpassing disaster. And while the disaster Blanchot writes about “takes care of everything,”Â and “is not our affair”Â since it “threatens in me that which is exterior to me “an other than I who passively become other”Â; the surpassing disaster is “our affair”—thus defining the community—and it is thinkers, writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and dancers who can “take care,”Â by resurrecting it, of what has withdrawn as a result of the surpassing disaster. Notwithstanding that Blanchot’s disaster puts “a stop to every arrival,”Â it is not rare, since “it is always already past,”Â while the surpassing disasters I write about have been rare. Even those who had the fortune of not undergoing a surpassing disaster have already been ruined by the disaster Blanchot writes about; and even what has been resurrected by artists and thinkers following its withdrawal past a surpassing disaster continues to be ruined and left intact by the disaster Blanchot writes about.

Jalal

Jalal Toufic, Graziella:

—Graziella Rizkallah: I think I’ll title this interview: “The Sacrifice of the Promise.”Â
—Jalal Toufic: In my book Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You, I already raised the question whether we should no longer promise, especially a messianic, millenarian promise, given that the price of inculcating memory in humans as a condition for them to promise is exorbitant; I hope it will be clear from this interview that the sacrifice of the promise being addressed here should not be taken in the sense of sacrificing the promise but only in the sense that sacrifice is implicated in every promise, since by promising, one gives one’s word, one can no longer use one’s word(s) (to justify oneself and one’s promise), and because sacrifice was one of the (anthropological) conditions of possibility for the human animal to be able to promise: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? How can one create a memory for the human animal? How can one impress something upon this partly obtuse, partly flighty mind, attuned only to the passing moment, in such a way that it will stay there? If something is to stay in memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory—this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth. Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties)—all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics”Â (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals).
—Graziella Rizkallah: Any final words?
—Jalal Toufic: I love you.