The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic, vol. 1, 437–446

With Jalal Toufic
Ages +17
In English

In this seminar, thinker Jalal Toufic interrogates the limits of pedagogy. Starting from the premise that the human subject is not fully teachable, the seminar examines the ‘brick wall’ of each person’s ‘spiritual fatum’ and the necessity of an ‘intelligent and subtle incomprehension’ in relation to art. Drawing on The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic, the session confronts the growing obsession of academic institutions with ‘well-being’, proposing instead a Nietzschean dual perspective of sickness on health and health on sickness as a condition for any genuine ‘revaluation of values’. Participants will analyse the crisis of academic evaluation, whereby evaluators are reduced to elementary accountants rather than creators of values, and will examine one manner of redeeming the ‘rest’—and philosophy itself—from the dismissive formula ‘the rest is philosophy’: the affirmation of ‘the rest’ as being, desire and the object a.

‘Nietzsche: “Learning transforms us.… But at our foundation … there is clearly something that will not learn, a brick wall of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decisions and answers to selected, predetermined questions … the great stupidity that we are.” One teaches neither those who are fully teachable (is there such a human? Would an entity be human or still human if it is fully teachable, or would it turn out to be, for example, a trainable deep neural network? Beware of those who are fully teachable) nor those who are solely unteachable, those who are, from a Gnostic perspective, devoid of any spiritual light, but those who have something unteachable, a spiritual fate. And one teaches them with what is unteachable in one—one’s “stupidity,” one’s spiritual fate. One teaches them in part to counter the teaching that treated them as fully teachable. One teaches them to differentiate what is teachable in them from what is unteachable in them’ (The Collected Writings, 438).

This session is free, and all materials are provided.

Sharjah Art Foundation is committed to making its programmes inclusive and accessible. You can arrange for any support needed through the registration form.

For more information, email learning@sharjahart.org or call 06 568 5050.

A limited number of signed copies of the book will be available for purchase during the seminar.