In this closed seminar, Jalal Toufic invites participants into a rare exploration of what an archive truly is when not housed in boxes or databases but embedded in time itself, impossible to erase and endlessly returning. Through a guided reading and discussion, the session examines how the past persists beyond destruction, how repetition becomes a form of retrieval, and what it means to work with a metaphysical archive. This seminar is an opportunity to think with Jalal’s influential ideas on memory, disappearance, and the indestructibility of the past.

“Derrida wrote in Archive Fever: ‘The death drive … threatens … every archival desire. It is what we will call … le mal d’archive, “archive fever.”’ … The mere presence of a mal d’archive in the manner of a death drive specific to the archive, targeting it, would be a sign that the fundamental archive, the one targeted by this death drive, with the latter’s associated compulsion to repeat, cannot be completely destroyed or irrevocably erased but is rather preserved indefinitely, given that there can be no compulsion to repeat in relation to what can be destroyed in one attempt, or even in a finite number of attempts. Are there such archives? Yes! the (Bergsonian) virtual past, … and, what could be considered its physical support, (general relativity’s) four-dimensional spacetime” (Ibid., 325–326).

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.