Jalal Toufic

The Sleep of Reason: This Blood Spilled in My Veins

video, 32 minutes, 2002

video still courtesy of the artist

The organic dying of a (resurrectable) human is as nothing compared to that of an animal, exemplarily of a bull in a corrida; the only phenomenon that equals in intensity the death of a bull in a corrida or of a cow in a slaughterhouse is the resurrection of a human, Lazarus coming out from the grave. The living woman in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is found settling her pillow to sleep when she encounters the undead. Why are you settling the pillow, why are you so sleepy? What disclosure are you thus trying to elude? “Tell you all,” Lazarus, in other, more accurate words, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, says in Eliot’s poem, and would that “all” not also include himself? Did the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha come back to tell himself about death? And did he find himself sleeping then?

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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. His most recent book is What Was I Thinking? (e-flux journal-Sternberg Press, 2017). His other books, a number of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download at his website http://www.jalaltoufic.com. And his videos are available for viewing at https://vimeo.com/jalaltoufic. He, along with artists and pretend artists, was a participant in the Sharjah Biennials 6, 10 and 11, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, the 3rd Athens Biennale, and A History: Art, Architecture, and Design, from the 1980s Until Today” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD; and in 2013–2014, he and Anton Vidokle led Ashkal Alwan’s third edition of Home Workspace Program, based in Beirut. He has been the director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (Alba) since September 2015.