Join us for the launch of The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal Death: Jalal Toufic. This publication is the first in a landmark three-volume series gathering the complete works of an indispensable voice in contemporary thought and aesthetics.

For new readers, the volumes provide an introduction to Toufic’s central concepts, including the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer’s two bodies, while for longtime readers they offer a comprehensive view of more than three decades of thought, presented in their most rigorous and fully articulated form. 

The evening will include an introduction and keynote from Jalal Toufic followed by a book signing. 

Volume 1 (2025) includes newly revised editions of Toufic’s first three books—Distracted (1991/2003); (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003); and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009)—together with the script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and, new, The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024).

Jalal Toufic is “today, and has been for some time, the most original thinker on the planet” (Etel Adnan); in other words, “one of the most important ‘living’ writers (I put the word ‘living’ in quotation marks for Toufic would never refer to himself as solely a living writer, but more as a writer and a mortal to death)” (Walid Raad); in other words yet, “the most original and captivating Arab thinker and artist of our time” (Omnia El Shakry, Professor of History at Yale University). The first volume of No Place Press’s The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic—a series that gathers re-edited versions of his earlier works alongside two newly written books, arranged and organized by the author himself—was published in December 2025.

Image: The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic, 2025. Image courtesy of  Jalal Toufic