The first in a landmark three-volume series gathering the complete writings of an indispensable voice in contemporary thought and aesthetics.

For over three decades, Jalal Toufic has written across disciplines and traditions, producing a body of work that eludes categorization as part philosophical inquiry, part metaphysical treatise, part experimental literature. Collected Writings (1994–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic, Volume I brings together the long out-of-print books Distracted, (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, and Over-Sensitivity with the lesser-known film script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut and the new text The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker, 2020–2022. This volume charts the evolution of Toufic’s thought as he meditates on the undead, disaster, withdrawal of tradition, and messianism. Through his engagement with issues of memory, trauma, and diaspora, Toufic offers poignant reflections, constructed with philosophical rigor and poetic intensity, on the complexities of living in a fragmented, postcolonial world.