Last lectures by Jalal Toufic during his stay in Copenhagen Artist in Residence 2009

Lectures by:

Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You about “The Thousand and One Nights”

The Factory of Art and Design, Sundholmsvej 46, DK-2300 Copenhagen S
www.cphair.dk/current artist,12 August 2009 , 7-10 PM

Statements for the two lectures:
Saving the Living Human’s Face and Backing the Mortal; and: Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You about The Thousand and One Nights:

Saving the Living Human’s Face and Backing the Mortal
“You take me for granted.” “You take yourself… in the mirror, your mirror-image’s facing you, for
granted.” At a stage when the child still lacks coordination of motor functions, he or she anticipates
that coordination in the mirror image. The anticipated motrice control includes—it is disappointing it doesn’t in Lacan—the ability to turn around to answer a call. To see one’s mirror-image facing one presupposes not only the standard Lacanian imaginary identification with the unitary mirror image, but also the Althusserian symbolic turn to answer an interpellation. It is therefore possible that what the child facing the mirror sees prior to what Lacan termed the mirror stage is what the figure facing the mirror in Magritte’s Reproduction Prohibited, 1937, witnesses: a similar figure but with its back to him. Since the mirror image’s facing a human is not natural, but something that has been conquered, it may fail to take place: a condition actually encountered in psychosis or undeath.
Jalal Toufic

Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You about The Thousand and One Nights
“Morning overtook Shahrazâd, and she lapsed into silence… The king thought to himself, ‘I will spare her until I hear the rest of the story; then I will have her put to death the next day.’” Borges errs when he writes: “Why were there first a thousand [the apparently Persian version: Hazar Afsana, the thousand tales] and later a thousand and one?” It is confounding that despite all his flair Borges should miss the displacement from tale in the Persian version to night in the Arabic one: I consider that the first title refers to the stories Shahrazâd tells, while the second refers to the nights, the one thousand nights of the one thousand unjustly murdered previous one-night wives of King Shahrayâr plus his night with Shahrazâd, a night that is itself like a thousand nights.
Jalal Toufic