::fc-announce:: Saving the Living Human's Face and Backing the Mortal (Jalal Toufic) (Modified by Geert Lovink)

[Dr Charles Green]

Saving the Living Human's Face and Backing the Mortal
   
  Professor Jalal Toufic
  Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Holy Spirit University, 
Lebanon

  A public lecture and video screening
Wednesday 27 September 2006, 6:30pm
Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre, University of Melbourne
   
  Presented by the Writing and Society Research Group, University of 
Western Sydney; Casula Powerhouse; and the School of Art History, 
Cinema, Classics & Archaeology

  Lecture Synopsis: "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 
motor 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.

  Saving Face, 8-minute video, 2003:
  Video Synopsis: Were all the candidates' faces posted on the walls of 
Lebanon during the parliamentary campaign of 2000 waiting for the 
results of the elections? No. As faces, they were waiting to be saved. 
Far better than any surgical face-lift or digital retouching, it was 
the physical removal of part of the poster of the face of one candidate 
so that the face of another candidate would partially appear under it; 
as well as the accretions of posters and photographs over each other 
that produced the most effective face-lift, and that proved a 
successful face-saver for all concerned. We have in these resultant 
recombinant posters one of the sites where Lebanese culture in 
specific, and Arabic culture in general, mired in an organic view of 
the body, in an organic body, exposes itself to inorganic bodies.

  Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and artist. 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), 
Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three 
Things I'm Dying to Tell You (2005), and This Blood Spilled in My Veins 
(2005). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented 
internationally. He has taught at the University of California at 
Berkeley, CalArts and USC. He is the Head of the MA program in 
Film/Video Studies at Holy Spirit University, Lebanon . 
<http://www.jalaltoufic.com.>http://www.jalaltoufic.com.
 
  Admission is FREE (no bookings necessary) Seating is limited

  For more information, contact:
  The School of Art History, Cinema, Classics & Archaeology
   www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au
  ahcca-info at unimelb.edu.au
  03 8344 5565

-- 


Associate Professor Charles Green
Head of Art History 
Reader in Contemporary International and Australian Art
School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology
  University of Melbourne
  Victoria 3010 Australia
  tel 61 3 8344 4429 fax 61 3 8344 5563 email c.green at unimelb edu.au
http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au/profiles/charles-green/

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