The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death

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).

• Author’s Note
• Distracted
• (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
• Jouissance in Postwar Beirut
• Over-Sensitivity
• The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker, 2020–2022
• Appendices
• Endnotes
• Credits

"In this first of his three-volume set of collected writings, Jalal Toufic bequeaths to us a style of thinking and writing whose force and generosity are legible in the fact that, before his physical death, he nevertheless speaks to us from beyond the grave under all the names of history to tell us, among many other things, that we are mortal, dead even while still physically alive; and that we haunt labyrinthine ruins as dead humans while increasingly living among ruins. Toufic is one of our greatest resources in the face of a world that is reeling toward destruction—now more than ever, we are in urgent need of his forthcoming published writings."
—Eduardo Cadava, Philip Mayhew Professor of English, Princeton University, author of Paper Graveyards, and co-author of Politically Red


On The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker, 2020–2022
"Jalal Toufic, the most original and captivating Arab thinker and artist of our time, has finally outdone himself. The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker, 2020–2022 is like a Zen kōan where we re-find the gateless gate of radical closure, the black hole as archive and anti-archive, and those who died before (physically) dying. Indeed, being peerless, whom else could he outdo?"
—Omnia El Shakry, Professor of History at Yale University and author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt

On Over-Sensitivity
"Jalal Toufic is one of the best writers working in America today."
—John Zorn

On (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
"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. Both of his books [Distracted and (Vampires)] knocked me out; totally original, totally fascinating."
—Richard Foreman, Artistic Director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater and author of Plays and ManifestosJalal 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).