Jalal Toufic: »Untimely Collaborators«

Jalal Toufic: »Untimely Collaborators« PDF

»How (…) do we know that there is a future? From our feeling that we still receive, from the continuing relevance of intuition in our work. Intuition is but respect for the future creation of others. The destruction of the future would be felt in the present by writers; if writers are avant-garde, they are that also and mainly through this collaboration with the future. Long before the future is abolished (through a nuclear conflagration, ecological catastrophe, etc.), we will feel one of the main effects of such an absence: those close to the disaster in the future will to a large extent be unable to think properly since they receive from no one, and we, who receive from them, will feel the effects of their reduced intuition and thinking, becoming increasingly less able to think, for increasingly less intuitive. Long before this disaster happens we will no longer be able to think it; this disaster will be preceded by that other disaster: our inability to think the disaster (and not only because of our being too steeped in the kind of temporality/technology leading to it).«