Jalal Toufic: “Any artistic or literary work is related to the future … fundamentally because it collaborates in an untimely manner with future philosophers, writers, artists… If writers are avant-garde, they are that also and mainly through this collaboration with the future. Long before the future is abolished (through a nuclear conflagration, ecological catastrophe, etc.), we will feel one of the main effects of such an absence: those close to the disaster in the future will to a large extent be unable to think properly since they receive from no one, and we, who receive from them, will feel the effects of their reduced intuition and thinking, becoming increasingly less able to think, for increasingly less intuitive. Long before this disaster happens we will no longer be able to think it; this disaster will be preceded by that other disaster: our inability to think the disaster.” The seminar will address Toufic’s “untimely collaboration” through a close reading with Walid Raad and Omar Berrada and a discussion with the participants of the sections relating to this concept in his books Distracted (2nd edition, 2003) and Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005). It complements his video work in the biennial, Mother and Son; or, That Obscure Object of Desire (Scenes from an Anamorphic Double Feature) (2006).

Please download the below material prior to the seminar:

“Untimely Collaboration,” pp. 32–42 of Jalal Toufic, Distracted, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2003)

Jalal Toufic, “Something I’m Dying to Tell You, Lyn” A Prior, no. 16 (February 2008): 262–274