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