I have reviewed Jalal Toufic's *Undeserving Lebanon* (Forthcoming Books, 2007) for the recent "Art and War" issue of Modern Painters (April, 2008)...
"The stakes of Toufic’s newest book are immense and emphatically stated, as the thinker identifies the task of a present and future Middle-Eastern culture to think beyond justice, commemoration, historicization and reparation towards the creation of original works of art, experiment, and concepts that may confront events which befell Lebanon during its civil war. For Toufic, to leave these ‘basic tasks’ to others might preserve in Lebanon’s Event the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a memory anterior to both psychological memory (the “working through” of individual and collective traumas) and collective-historical memory (reparations, commemoration of the dead, “settling of accounts”). This anarchic memory presents what Toufic recognizes as the ‘invocation of the Redeemer’—an ability to imagine the forthcoming of the Messiah as the event of a virtual existence in relation to social fact, actuality..."
To download *Undeserving Lebanon* as a PDF link here.
No comments:
Post a Comment