My Mother, Marlene Banki

In his book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, Frank Ostaseski advises us to “welcome everything, push away nothing” and “don’t wait”.

My mother had a very difficult childhood. For the first ten years of her life, she lived in orphanages, first in Ashfield and then at Burnside Presbyterian Orphan Home in Parramatta. Her mother, Dorothy Pryor Wilson, had died three weeks after she was born from septicaemia (blood poisoning) because the midwife arrived from another birth and had not washed her hands.

Her half sister, Joan, who had the same mother was taken in by one her aunts. However, none of my mother’s six aunts were prepared to do the same for her. To the very end of her life she remained outraged by this. She said: “It it were me, I would have taken her in.” And it’s true, she would not have let a member of her family go to an orphanage, despite it being during the Depression in the 1930’s. In the orphanage all the children had numbers, she was number 8. While she said they were not cruel there, everything was regimented.

My mother met her father, John Wilson, for the first time when she was 14 years old in 1946, when he returned as a squadron leader in the RAF as part of the war effort in Egypt. Prior to that, he had married Ivy Mendelssohn, a schoolteacher and mathematician, a relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He had asked Ivy to take her out of the orphanage and to live with her and her Jewish family during the war. Later in life, my mother asked him why he had never visited her during the 10 years she was in the orphanage. He said that seeing her would have been too painful because it would have reminded him of the wife he had lost.

So there was great trauma in this family - my family. When Felicity, who is here today, asked my mother about the effect of the orphanage on her, she said: “It made me strong.” Spending time with my mother this week at Liferites, helping to dress her and put her in her coffin, I was struck that even in death she seemed to me to be so strong. Touching her hands and feeling through my body to the earth, it felt as if she were giving me energy and strength.

My mother’s own childhood experiences made her resolute that she would provide a better childhood for her own children, much more loving and protected than the one she had had. She said: “I knew what I lacked, so I made sure my children didn’t.” she said.

As an infant she was baptised Catholic on the insistence of her mother before she died and later Presbyterian at the request of her Scottish father. As a child she also had exposure to Jewish life and culture due to living with Ivy Mendelssohn and her family during the war. These experiences may have led to her to seeing herself as not belonging simply to one tribe, maybe not having a tribe. She used to say that her religion was her family.

She met my father while working at Cross TV in the late 1950, when television was introduced in Australia. She took a job in a business that was run by Hungarian Jewish immigrants, which obviously didn’t seem to bother her. She married my father in 1964 and they celebrated together in the Menzies Hotel in the city. On the way home from the celebration, she noticed that she had a ladder in one of her stockings. My father insisted that they stop to buy her three pairs of stockings and said: “You won’t have to worry about this anymore.” She responded by saying: “I was in doubt about getting married and now I’m sure I did well.”

Prior to marrying my father, she had been married once before to a man with whom she had my sister, Dallis. She left him because he did not treat her well and was an alcoholic. When my father married my mother, he accepted Dallis as his own daughter.

After marrying my father and my mother went into business together and complemented one another very well. He was very good with money and she was excellent with people. They were fashion retailers and had shops in Blacktown, Miranda, Hurstville, Australia Square in the city, Randwick and Rose Bay: 10 shops in all over a period of 40 years. The shops were called names such as “Bobby Loray”, “Marlene Fashions” and “Girl Talk”.

With their success they travelled. During the 70’s, a period when it was highly unusual for people to travel with their children because it was so expensive, my parents took me and my sister on a six month world trip to Europe, the US and Israel. That was in 1974-75. Two years later we went to Brazil, Peru and Argentina. And later to Hawaii. This made the object of quite a significant amount of jealousy from the boys in school.

My father now says that my mother loved him and stayed with him because she thought he was very caring. They were married together for 57 years. Both my father and my mother had very traumatic childhoods, and I think that they may have also been part of the attraction and the bond that they shared together. Gabor Mate says that we are deeply attracted to people who remind us of unresolved issues in our childhoods.

Throughout my parents’ life together they travelled. My mother’s favourite places were Capri, Venise and Lake Como. While they were in Sydney, very often they went to very good restaurants for lunch: Bistro Moncur, the Mixing Pot, Pruniers, Doyles, Beppis. They were almost always known by name by the people who ran these restaurants. This was even true in Europe. I very much admired the very graceful way they grew old together, going out and doing things they wanted to do and still traveling. They were always very independent.

I also admired how organised they were both as business people and in life. Everything was always put away neatly in the right place and everything that was necessary was always there. The last five or so years were very difficult for my mother with chronic pain in her hips and legs and arthritis and also living with my father’s deafness and frailty.

My mother wanted me to become a barrister. I took such a different path in life to the one they had taken and that they admittedly had some difficulty understanding. But then I have realised that I have received a kind of legacy of business. I kind of just know how to do it. Because I grew up with it. I find it much easier than academic work.

I remember taking my mother’s side over my fathers side in arguments. Maybe this was my earliest appreciation of feminism in witnessing my mother’s resistance to my father. My mother was not a feminist. She chose not to be part of the feminist movement in Australia, the evolution of which she no doubt witnessed from the 70’s onwards. But she had a kind of visceral resistance against behaviour she thought was unjust and self- protection.

As a teenager, I remember the way she used to scratch my back as I sat on her bed, lulling me into a feeling of deep safety and relaxation. There’s a pose in yoga called Svangasana, Shoulder stand. Even though it’s quite a difficult pose, once you get inside it it is profound for the effects on your nervous system. It’s called sometimes the queen, and other times the mother - because of this deep and reassuring effect on the nervous system. Some teachers call it the most important pose in the system.

Close to the end of her life, my mother recounted a story about how one one day she was in the Hakoah club in Bondi Beach with my father. Apparently she seemed a bit of a fish out of water, looking like, as my father said, a high class English woman among all these typical Jewish people. A woman came up to her and very provocatively asked her why she was with my father and she responded: “Because I find him interesting.” And the woman said: “That I can accept.”

I think you learn what love is from your parents, you learn how to love from your parents - for better or for worse. I have felt the benefits of this education in my life, especially in my relationship with my partner, Natalia. Just a way of being generous and loving.

Peter Banki, Ph.D

Jean-Luc Nancy

I didn't only want to know these French philosophers from books, I wanted to meet them and study with them personally. So I went to Paris in 1993 and learned French. I met Derrida, attended his seminar on responsibility and the secret and later on testimony and started writing a DEA with Sarah Kofman. After Kofman suicided on 15th October, 1994, just after publishing Rue Ordonner Rue Labat, which chronicled her experiences as a Jewish child in hiding during the Nazi occupation, I called Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Strasbourg. Lacoue-Labarthe didn't answer. So I called Jean-Luc Nancy.

I introduced myself, I said my Ph.D adviser had died à l'improviste which, of course, is a euphemism. It means unexpectedly, but also resonates with improvisation, as if she had improvised her death or her death was an improvisation. He asked me on the phone what am I working on, I said "nothing". He said, "aha." In the Philosophy Department at Sydney University it was not okay to write on 'nothing'. To them it meant I wasn't serious, which was part of the reason why I want- ed to go to France. He asked: "With what authors did you wish to work on nothing", I said: "Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot". He said "okay" and he invited me to meet him at his home in Strasbourg.

That story says a great deal about him. I think I told him I was Australian, but by that time I could speak French quite well. I was deeply shocked by Sarah Kofman's death, especially since my own father is also a Holocaust survivor and whose experiences were comparable to hers.

During that first meeting when we discussed the role of nothing in Blanchot, Bataille and Heidegger we arrived at the question: "Comment faire du silence?", "How to make silence?" Not speak it but make it, as if this were a way to think about our artistic, philosophical or political task in com- mon. The making or doing of silence recalls what John Austin in Speech Act Theory called a performative utterance: silence as an action. How to communicate in such a way that silence is still heard or even made through the speech? On that first meeting I was struck by the way he made me feel that I was part of an effort to think in common, to share the work or unworking (dèsoeuvrement), regardless of my youth or status.

Often in Western philosophy we condemn silences: the silence about the body, madness, slavery, children, or what is called colonisation. But there's another dimension to this, where the acknowl- edgement or permission of silence is also an ethical responsibility.

Bataille wrote: "Silence is a word which is not a word, and breath an object which is not an object." Reading Bataille in Writing and Difference, Derrida wrote: "If the word silence !among all words,” is the most perverse or the most poetic,” it is because in pretending to silence meaning, it says nonmeaning, it slides and it erases itself, does not maintain itself, silences itself, not as silence, but as speech."

I recall Derrida's homage Le toucher - Jean-Luc Nancy which means untranslatibly both "To touch him, Jean-Luc Nancy" and "The touch - Jean-Luc Nancy", so both a philosophical treatise on the touch and the articulation of a wish or desire to touch a singular gendered other (emotionally and physically). The word 'touch' is almost a fetish around Jean-Luc.

I don't think I ever touched him, but I'm not sure. Maybe I did. Maybe that's why he became so important to me. I wonder if we talk enough about philosophers touching one another? I wonder if we could think about inter-generational transmission in philosophy as a kind of touching, which opens up the taboo questions of sexuality and even abuse.

At the opening of Derrida's homage to touching with Jean-Luc Nancy, he writes "Quand nos yeux se touchent, fait-il jour or fait-il nuit?" Again there is this idiomatic and untranslatable use of the verb "faire". "When our eyes touch one another, is it day or is it night?" "Does it make day or does it make night? There is the suggestion that we are blinded through touch, we no longer see if it's day or night. One day Derrida said to me in his seminar, looking directly at me, when eyes touch one another, there is absolute secret, which one cannot betray and that we are betraying all the time.

Differently to Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman and even Avital Ronell, Nancy's work, particularly his work in praise of the body, on dance, singing, swimming and sex, even glory holes, [one day he spoke to me about glory holes as expression of love (a glory hole is a wall in which a penis put in and through and someone invisible on the other side may or may not suck it)], is a festive celebration of being alive, of the richness and diversity of corporal experience. Arguably, there’s a melancholic tone that pervades the work of the others, no doubt in part due to trauma. The way Nancy traversed and thought through his heart transplant, it would seem, gave him the gift of celebrating and being thankful for every moment of the extra 30 years of life it gave him.

This for me remains profound role model, even if the philosopher in me, would have to interrogate, the concepts of "role" and "model". In a lesser known paper on education in philosophy entitled "Sur la Formation Philosophique", Nancy writes of the teacher as an "example": "The example doesn't signify a model proposed for imitation, but the singular figure, the form before which an- other singular figure may constitute itself."Formation (Bildung) is radically heteronymous, thus it aims to respect the autonomy of both partners."

I remember Jean-Luc was surprised (unhappily I think) when he learned that I did not have an academic position. Despite this theory of Bildung, there remains, it would seem, a silent expectation that this particular form of imitation, i.e., the reproduction of an academic appointment, be- tween master and student is followed. But, as I tried to argue yesterday, whether or not one succeeds or fails in the endeavour to become a part of the profession, or to what degree one succeeds, I do not believe that it changes anything with regards to one's responsibilities vis-à-vis writing and indebtedness. If Jean-Luc was my teacher and my friend, [he insisted many times (despite my reluctance) that I tutoie him, we hadn't spoken for 5 or 10 years, and when I contact- ed him again I vouvoied him, but after a few exchanges he remembered that we had tutoied one another and he insisted I do it again], it is in a sense my obligation to remember him publicly in a context where his work is read.

The last time I saw him was in Sicily and I actually remember he made a real point of saying goodbye to me and also hullo to me, come to think of it. It was at a spa where he had decided to conduct a 3 day seminar on sex and philosophy. It was already a pretty remarkable thing to do: conduct a philosophy seminar in a spa, where we would bathe clothed or naked. He started the seminar by saying that the moment one's starts to talk about sex one is given over all sorts of suspicions, and that he himself had not been spared this. As distinguished from gender, queer- ness, etc, which are today acceptable academic topics, it is necessary he believed to talk about sex, to talk about it seriously, and especially to question the snigger, giggling or uncomfortable- ness that almost always accompanies talking about it in spaces where speech about sex normally silenced, which is of course a symptom of our cultural shame. I thought to myself if Jean-Luc Nancy is put under suspicion for talking about sex, I wondered what hope is there for me? During that seminar in Sicily he put forward the theses:

* that which gives birth in us is sex;
* "le sens de la vie, il faut bien qu'il soit de l'order de la joie"
* the experience of sex can be understood as an experience of the common, of communication, community and communism. There is a political potential in sex linked to the dream of communism.

Finally, I want to recall something very important I learned about death and finitude from Nancy's first wife, Claire, at the moment when it was discovered that Nancy had contracted cancer. When he was diagnosed with a lymphoma caused by the immunosuppressant drugs he had to take to stop his body rejecting his heart transplant, the prognosis was very bad. Feeling despair, I called Claire, who I knew a little from the doctoral thesis defences in Strasbourg, which Derrida also sometimes attended. She said how difficult it was for Hélène, Nancy’s second wife, because all Jean-Luc's friends had already taken him for dead. At that moment I realised that for most people more frightening than death is the undecidable, in this case the liminal spaces between life and death. For many the thought of death is calming, reassuring in the face of not knowing whether someone you love will live or die. When many years later my father"s hiatus hernia ruptured and he was in intensive care for many weeks and we thought he would die, I remembered that lesson. I told it to my mother and it actually reassured her. It helped her to realise that living in the undecidable is actually not the worst thing.

Peter Banki 10/12/21