Lebanese Performance Art; Circle: Ecstatic; Class: Marginalized; Excerpt 3, 2007. 5’
Beirut Arts Center, Líbano. www.beirutartcenter.org
Jalal Toufic’ s moving video shows the value and strength of a cultural trait, incomprehensible for whoever contemplates it. A call to reflection on diverse and complex manifestations and cultural rituals, which, due to incomprehension, urevel prejudices and violences. Beirut Art Center participates for the first time in this edition of Art in the Auditorium:
On 3 January 1889, on coming across a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, in Turin, Nietzsche reportedly threw his arms around the horse’s neck to defend it, and collapsed. Had this philosopher who signed the following day several of his letters with “The Crucified,” and who was discerning enough not to view himself as the owner of “his” body come across Twelver Shi‘ite participants in the yearly ten-day commemorative event ‘Âshûrâ’, would he have intervened likewise between them and “their” bodies as they whipped and slapped the latter, exclaiming all the while, in the words with which Saint Francis addressed and referred to “his” body: “Brother donkey!”?
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) and Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009). Several of his books are available for download at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Southern California, as well as in Lebanon and Istanbul, and he will be a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD in 2011.