Témoignage/Testimony -- Reflections in Memory of Jacques Taminiaux

Jacques Taminiaux  

(Seneffe, Belgique, 29 mai 1928 – Saint-Sauveur, Belgique, 7 mai 2019)

I included the above photograph of Jacques in a Facebook Album I put together to feature philosophers, and another (for good measure), both taken 22 March 2007, in Brussels. 

Unquestionably one of the most genial, profound and rich, thinkers of the last century and not less to this day, Jacques Taminiaux took on the most challenging thinkers (Heidegger but also Kant and Schiller, Hegel, but also Plato, and not less Nietzsche, as well as Hölderlin and Arendt as well as Merleau-Ponty), writing on themes that ranged from metaphysics and the inception of German Idealism to phenomenology, where he always remained insightful, to art, where, perhaps, he had his heart.

You can, you should, google him.  These are only personal reflections of a former student who admired him and who was, over many years — and at a great distance — his friend.

I asked him to supervise my thesis (I wrote on Nietzsche’s perspectival aesthetics of truth) although I knew full well that he would do no such thing. Taminiaux directed almost everyone’s thesis during my time at Boston College, so universally so, that there was a joke that Jacques would leave a page of yellow legal paper tacked to his office door over the summer, doctoral students: sign here.   In turn, this meant that he was not present for my defense which led to terrible catastrophes as the reader in question, that was Bill Richardson, was not exactly a friend to the topic — Nietzsche, perspectivalism, aesthetics — and I have been traumatized ever since. None of that mattered: as Jacques casually asked his friend and colleague, Richard Cobb-Stevens (with whom he lived in the charming woods of Carlisle when Jacques was in Boston), how it could happen that I managed such insights into, of all thinkers, Nietzsche?  

Now Nietzsche was not taught to students at the grad level at BC and American Nietzsches, adumbrated by Arthur Danto and John Wilcox et al., were not exactly the envy of the philosophical world. This practical detail did not mean I never took a Nietzsche seminar with Jacques, simply that one was never officially scheduled (one cannot trust records for this reason). Thus, my closest intellectual colleague early in grad school, Jim Chansky, who was then and still is ahead of me as well as being an enthusiastic fan of Schopenhauer (The Fourfold Root, which says a good deal about how serious Jim was) and whose own thesis, of course, Jacques directed, was able to persuade Jacques to offer us an independent reading seminar.  We met every week (or every other week) and the experience was brilliant.  I still have Jim’s copy of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, a detail I only realized when the cover fell off after many years of use: there was Jim’s name in Jim’s handwriting on the fly-leaf.  I still have it. And I still treasure Jacques’ wondering surprise (regarding my reading of Nietzsche): it would be the only feedback he gave me on the thesis apart from approving it.

Jacques’ sense of humour and urbanity stayed with one.  He never stood on ceremony, he never needed to, the subtle move was his trademark.  No bluster — he was not a theological superstar like Bernard Lonergan or Mary Daly for that matter and Hans-Georg Gadamer and William J. Richardson were both on the philosophical faculty along with Jacques — no appeal to the peanut gallery, a gesture that would not have been beneath the pedagogic and comradely gifts of his friend Richard Cobb-Stevens. 

Many years later I saw a kind of tour-de-force presentation, a round-table assemblage of faculty members squaring off, one after another, to show their talents in the process. Jacques came last and quietly mopped the floor with everyone who had gone before, he was that good: there was no contest. 

He wrote a letter for me when I thought that, following an ‘84 Fulbright in Tübingen (though I spent the Summer Semester, 1985 at the Freie Universität in Berlin), I should look at Nietzsche through a French lens and perhaps given my ongoing interest in science, work with Jean Ladrière (who had been a teacher of my undergrad teacher, the Belgian-Irish, Patrick Aidan Heelan, S.J.) and of course with Jacques himself in Louvain-la-Neuve, maybe there Jacques would be different or maybe one would never know because one wouldn’t get a grant to go, but, as I learned, a letter from Jacques was a slam dunk in Belgium and there I was.  I never pressed him for anything more, silly as that seems now that I think about it. 

 

Before I went off to Germany for the first time, I had told him that I would take a brief tour through France, Switzerland, and Italy, to see a bit of Europe before arriving in Göttingen to learn German, a project to which learning of the German language I planned to dedicate eight weeks. Jacques nodded, never letting on what he thought of the idea of dedicating a whole two months to learning German, he mentioned the names of two wines when I said that I would first fly to Paris, and travel south from there. 

 

I should be sure to see ‘Chateaux’, Jacques  said, perfectly clear on the trajectory I should follow, and he told me not to forget to get to know the white, important for a fan of the red as I was, specifying names I had never heaard: Sancerre and Vouvray. Wines of excellence, like Jacques, himself.  Decades later I would discover the marvel that is a red Sancerre. Fortuitously then, I have Jacques to thank as my initial visits to the Loire were very helpful when I returned a year later to study French in Tours.

I dedicated as much time as I gave to learning German to learning French.  This was more than ill-advised. By one measure, I succeeded, by which I mean that I read French easily and of course I understand and of course speak it too, taking care with my articulation. It is also true that I speak monstrously slowly.  Francophone speakers act as if they have the sense they might go out to shop and be back again before I am finished with a sentence.  My Belgian landlady, after I fled to Brussels because I could not stand living in Louvain-la-Neuve in university housing above La Crêperie Bretonne — no amount of Calva could redeem the architecture — used to talk in French in my presence, so confident was she that I could not understand her, which error on her part helped me negotiate rent and avoid random charges.

Language mattered to Jacques but he had both a beautiful sense of irony and no less pride in this. English he would say towards the end of his life, after years of teaching and lecturing in English was seductively, dangerously simple. But this was only an appearance: it took him years to realize just how complex a language it was, an insight which frustrated the philosopher in search of nuance.

 

The point of irony also reflected his Belgian French and his sense of Francophone elitism. He liked to tell the story of having been trapped in an airport in Canada, snowed in, and playing chess for hours with a French Canadian stranger who, as flights finally began to be called, while saying goodbye, asked him where he was from, Jacques told him where he was born, only to hear his erstwhile partner exclaim, with triumph: ‘I knew French was not your native language!’ 

 

The point of pride, for Jacques, the joke was on his Canadian colleague, also concerned Belgium, famously and contestedly bilingual. I called Jacques in 1984 and spoke to him in the confused way one does at such times, calling from a strange land, out of the habit of speaking on the telephone because of the cost, calling from country to country, I spoke to him in German rather than English. My accent in German is just fine but Jacques' German was brilliant. Later we would joke about that. Jacques told me he took pride in knowing all the languages of Belgium, recounting his experience of the student ‘68 protests, when Flemish activists barred Francophone students and faculty, allowing only Flemish students and faculty access to the university, Jacques was stopped at the doors (this was Leuven), answered in Flemish and passed the barricade.

While I was learning French (one cannot count on the feeble requirement that it is to pass one’s grad exams in any language) in Tours, I came up to Brussels in the summer of 1985 (when I was not arguing with Jacob Taubes on his own trips between Berlin and Paris to see Derrida), having arranged, I forget if this was by letter or phone, an ‘official’ meeting with Jacques.  Our first Belgian encounter was in the Grand-Place in the center of town where I was overwhelmed both by the resplendence of the architecture: every tiny corner of every guild house roof was a miniature glory — and the summer heat. But after a year in Germany, I was an old hand at dealing with the European lack of ice.  here would be no ice at all or at best there might be a miniature ice-cube, homeopathic, a vanishing treasure. Were one to specify a request, avec des glaçons, s’il vous plaît? in general, such exotic items, one would be informed, did not “exist.”  The ontological challenge fascinated me as I am convinced it fascinates most Anglophones, even if I rarely take ice.  In this case, I had recourse to my German aquired tactic and ordered a beer instead. Not knowing what I was doing, I had never had one before, I ordered a Chimay Bleue. In the middle of the day. Of course: Jacques was late. Of course: I had another. 

Chimay Bleue remains a favourite but it is also one of the strongest of the Chimay ales — two is too many.  Jacques, being Belgian, took this without mentioning or seeming to notice it.  Same diff when I invited him for dinner and made what is usually a wonderful combination of chicken and lemon and garlic and wine, but we talked too long, ruining the dish.  I was beyond inconsolable: Jacques rescued the meal so brilliantly I could barely tell anything had gone wrong. He could cook, as Richard who was also a good friend of mine, would always tell me, regaling me with stories of their dinners together, shopping together, and if Jacques liked a Boston or Concord restaurant, this would be a kind of culinary imprimatur.

There were also amusing details and crossed convictions.  I arranged to have Jacques speak at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Phenomenology one year, on which lecture (on Nietzsche and Heidegger and art) I very happily volunteered to comment.  The times allotted for papers were then still a respectable 45 minutes, commentaries were one third that, with a half hour for discussion, and so, meaning to be discrete, I wrote a fifteen commentary, which I thought, counting time for his response, would leave abundant time for questions from the audience.  Being European, and old school and correcting the translation of his text as he read, and adding glosses as he did, seeming between every line, Jacques spoke for an hour and 45 minutes. These were the glory days of Derrida and his 3-hour lectures. After the first hour, I cut my text, first by two pages (shaving five minutes), then another two, then another five minutes, until a sentence or so remained. When he finished, I announced I would skip the commentary: leaving fifteen minutes for questions for the speaker.  

 

There should always be questions.

As journal editor, I could also publish Jacques’ lecture in New Nietzsche Studies:  “On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Art,” [nota bene, open access!] so I did and the essay remains as timely as ever for Heidegger and for Nietzsche scholarship — I cite it routinely and often recommend it to students.  In fact, and this is part of the legacy of a teacher, recommending Jacques’ work has been a constant in my own graduate teaching, as Jacques’s work is consistently valuable across so many perspectives. For a recent and timely example, see “The Platonic Roots of Heidegger’s Political Thought” in the course of which Taminiaux also recalls his own experience with Heidegger in Zähringen. 

This past Fall, I taught the Presocratics/Preplatonics, beginning with a reading from Jacques on Thales, albeit with a contemporary juxtaposition, via Hannah Arendt. Among recommended secondary readings, I posted Jacques’ chapter: “The History of an Irony.” This is the introduction to Jacques’ 1998 book, The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker, originally published in 1992 as La fille de Thrace et la penseur professionnel. Arendt et Heidegger (Paris: Payot).

In later years we would meet, even, most recently in Brussels, but because of his friendship with Richard Cobb-Stevens (Richard and I were very good friends), even when we did not meet, I always felt closely connected to Jacques, closer than our actual encounters justified, even if Richard never hosted us together — Richard liked to keep his friends as separate as red and white wines. Thus, and this would lead to Bill Richardson’s sorrow at never getting a chance to socialize with Jacques after he first arrived at BC in 1981, Richard adamantly maintained his friends in distinct circles, a habit that was perhaps a leftover of Richard's clerical origins, this is not clear.  I am sure that Jacques missed this as well, and I recommend the positively illuminating interview Niall Keane conducted with Jacques [“Interview with Jacques Taminiaux,” The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, 12 (2003): 18-24 ], brilliant and wonderful.  

There are hits and there are misses in a life, simple chances. For me, when I was asked to write for a recent Festschrift, (well-deserved and certainly long over-due), Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political, organized by Véronique Fóti and Pavlos Kontos, I sent not an essay on some personal focus of my own (I admired Jacques too much for that) but an essay composed on questions that interested him, taking up his work and some of his themes with respect to a philosopher he often wrote on in the constellation that matched the breadth of Jacques’ mind: “On Merleau-Ponty’s Crystal Lamellae: Aesthetic Feeling, Anger, and Politics.”  

[Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political: Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux (Frankfurt am Main: Springer, 2017)] 

I got a last email (as it would turn out), from Jacques who wrote to me to say, I am quite sure he said this to everyone, he was very well-brought up, that he found my essay to be the best in the collection, grateful for what I wrote about his work, etc.  So as not to break the spell, I never wrote back, but read the email again from time to time. This was silly, but I had, after all, already told Richard, who, best as he could, told me that he had already told Jacques.  

The rest is gratitude.

— Babette Babich

                                                      

These reflections were posted, without images/links, on the Centre d'études phénoménologiques website for Jacques, which also includes many other additional memorial reflections.