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In Memoriam:
Jacques Taminiaux
 

05-26-2019

Jacques had come to lecture on Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art, which since then has played a decisive role in my attempt to understand the work of art. Artworks also, but the work of art more so. Not to answer the question "What is art?" but to experience wonder at what is revealed when art is made, and what it is that happens when the domain of art is preserved. Aside from sharing his thinking with us, Jacques was the most convivial of companions. The monastery had a fine kitchen from which local produce and wines arrived in abundance. We dined in the great refectory twice a day with the monks, splendid individuals, a number of whom traveled and taught, others gardened, sang, and painted. What they had in common was the absence of any need of any money at all. There was a handball court for those of us collegians who wished to exercise their bodies as well as their minds, according to the ancient Roman dictum. 

Jacques had been one of Heidegger's last students, and had marvelous stories to tell of the mutual "need" that related Heidegger to the French poet and resistance fighter René Char. But as the years progressed, Jacques moved closer to the thinking of Hannah Arendt.  He likened her relationship with Heidegger to the laughter of the Thracian maid when her master, the philosopher Thales, gazing at the stars, tripped over his own feet and fell into a well. This is rather ike Arendt herself when she saw in Heidegger the image of a fox that builds his own trap with such precision that he himself cannot escape from it.
 
Jacques and I met several times over the years, in Rome and Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those were highly anticipated occasions, for Jacques always arrived with something new to talk about and to reflect upon.