Jalal Toufic's work spans many types of activity, from experimental critical writing and film criticism

to videography and the production of conceptual book covers and movie posters—all of which involve a
critical refiection on realism. Here Boris Groys comments on Toufic's work in video, and we present a
portfolio of his conceptual graphics projects.

The videos of Jalal Toufic almost always lead their viewers to feel like witnesses
of a certain public or private ritual.
Boris Groys j ^ yishura:This Blood Spilled in My Veins
Toufic documents a very public Artist's Project
R i t u a l i z i n g Life: SWite ritual of Ashura, the day of
commemorative mourning for the saint Hussein ibn Aii. But some
O f J3.13.1 l O U T I C other rituals are of a more private nature, in The sleep of Reason a private
ritual of sleep is followed by a ritualized slaughtering of animals. The
latter is shown in all its cruel details that the public usually tends to overlook.
And in Mother and Son figures referring to Hitchcock's Psycho are shown involved in
the deeply intimate rituals of death and mourning. The ability to reveal the inner
complicity between ritual and the medium of video is one of the reasons Toufic's
videos so powerfully capture the imagination of the viewer—beyond the imme-
diate impact of their respective narratives.
All the rituals are primarily religious rituals. Religion is often understood
as a certain set of opinions. Correspondingly, religion is usually discussed in the
context of a demand for a freedom of opinion guaranteed by law. But I would
suggest that religion—any religion—is not primarily a set of opinions but a set
of rituals. And every religious ritual refers rather to a state of lack of opinion, a
state of opinionlessness—adoxia—for it refers to the will of the gods or of God
that is ultimately hidden from mortals. The ritual as such is neither true nor false.
In this sense it marks the zero level of freedom of opinion, that is, the freedom
from every kind of opinion, from the obhgation to have an opinion. Toufic's
videos confront us precisely with such rituals beyond any theology—and even
beyond any distinction between sacral and profane. The protagonists of these rit-
uals are in a state of ecstasy, or in sleep, or in a mood of deep mourning. These
video-rituals do not conceal their religious origins, but rather refiect the repeti-
tiveness and reproducibility of video as medium.
Now, one can say that the religious ritual is in general an Urform of the
mechanical reproduction that dominates our contemporary world—especially
our contemporary media. That is, actually, why contemporary fundamentalist
religious movements that tend to insist on the literal repetition of the religious
rituals make such an extensive use of video. Here the message becomes the
medium—namely, a certain religious message becomes the digital code. It is not
the digitalized image itself, including the video image, that remains identical
through the process of its reproduction and distribution. It is, rather, the image
file, the digital data. And the image file is invisible. The act ofthe visualization
of the invisible digital data is thus analogous to the appearances of the Invisible
inside the topography of the visible world (biblically speaking: signs and won-
ders) . In this respect the digital image is functioning as a Byzantine icon—as
a visible image of the invisible God. In our days digital data substitute for the
invisible God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The video image is the moving
icon of the unmoving and invisible digital code.

83 art journal
 In his famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion," Walter Benjamin asserts that the artwork—and also the ritual object and
the ritual as such—loses its aura when it is transported from its original place
to another space or when it is copied. But Benjamin here thinks traditionally
enough: he describes the religious experience as a living, spiritual experience;
in this respect it is characteristic that he evokes an experience of being enchanted
by an Italian landscape as an example of an authentic experience that gets lost
through reproduction. But one can argue that the true religious experience is
actually the experience of death rather than the experience of life—the experi-
ence of death in the middle of life. Precisely because mechanical reproduction
can be understood as the lifeless repetition of the dead image, it can be also
interpreted as a source of the truly religious experience. One can say that it is
precisely the loss of aura that is the most radical religious experience under
the conditions of modernity, because in this way a human being discovers the
mechanical, machinelike, repetitive, dead aspect of his or her own existence.
Already Nietzsche asserted that after the death of God, immortality can
be imagined only as the eternal repetition of the same—as ritualized life.
Contemporary video technique can be seen as a technical realization of this
Nietzschean metaphysical dream. The videos of Toufic show time and again
scenes of sleep, disappearance, and death. But their ritual character suggests the
possibility of repetition that negates the definitive character of any loss, of any
absence. Today, the only image of immortality that we are ready to believe is a
video running in a loop.

Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, curator, art critic, and media theorist, with a special interest in late-
Soviet postmodern art and the Russian avant-garde. Since 1994 he has been a professor of aesthetics, art
history, and media theory at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. Among his
books are The Total Art of Stalin (Princeton, 1992), Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media (Hanser,
2000, In German), and llya Kabakav: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (Afterall/MIT, 2006).

Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991, rev. 2003), (Vampires): An
Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993, rev. 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying
Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You (2005), and 'Ashura': This Blood Spilled in
My Veins (2005). He has taught at the University of Galifornia at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts,
University of Southern California, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie. vwvw/.jalaltouflc.com.

News photographs, pages 92 and 94: AP Images.

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