What Was I Thinking?

Author: Jalal Toufic

Publisher: Sternberg Press (2017)

What Was I Thinking? is an initiation into thinking. With a mind that is extremely analytical and yet extremely capable of rendering all kinds of knowledge and experiences permeable to each other, Jalal Toufic creates here a “summa,” but an open-ended one. He looks into the arts as if they were the privileged site of thinking, even when they inevitably fail, and still confronts his insights/thoughts with texts taken from the traditional religions and mystics of the past. He has reached in this work an Olympian attitude—tuned to his basically Dionysian temperament—that announces the beginning of a detachment, of a remarkable serenity (a joy in thinking that Nietzsche had already understood).