I'm Katja Haustein, I teach comparative literature at the University of Kent and I'm here today to talk to you about the ethics and aesthetics of tact. And to give you a better idea of what I mean when I say tact here, I would like to open this talk by telling you a little story and I take the story from a film that was made by Francois Truffaut in 1968, filmÕs called Stolen Kisses, in French Baisers volˇs and the protagonist in this film Antoine Doinel at some point in the course of the film takes up temporary employment with the detective agency and one of his first jobs is to work as a shop assistant in a shoe store to find out why the owner of the shoe store, Monsieur Tabard, is detested by everyone including his beautiful wife Fabienne. 

Now, Antoine develops an increasing infatuation with this beautiful lady Fabienne, he managed to get himself a lunch invitation to the apartment. Monsieur Tabard who was present at first then has to leave early, Fabienne sets the music, she pours the coffee and to make a little bit of conversation asks, do you like music Antoine? To which he replies, yes sir. Now, for every one of you who might have seen that film the embarrassment of the moment is hard to bear and Antoine in fact drops the coffee, he runs off, only to return hours later to his own apartment where he finds a little present by his door. It is by Fabienne, of course, and there's a note attached to it and this note reads as follows: 'when I was in high school my teacher explained the difference between tact and politesse, tact and politeness: a gentleman caller mistakenly opens a bathroom door and discovers a lady stark naked. He withdraws immediately, closes the door and says, oh pardon madam, this is politeness. The same gentleman opening the same door, discovering the same lady stark naked and telling her, Oh pardon monsieur this is tact. 

Now tact is like compassion or pity, derivative of empathy. To be able to empathise with another presupposes our capacity for identification. We need to be able to imagine and to feel what the other person feels in order to be able to find the way to alleviate their state of distress. Etymologically, empathy comes from the Greek consisting of meaning in and at, and pathos meaning passion and suffering. The German translation einfuhlung, feeling into, further accentuates the idea of identification and empathetic coalescence between the individuals involved. Tact in turn comes from the Latin tactus meaning touch, tactility feeling, but also influence, beat or a pulse. You can already see that these etymological associations underline the temporal and spatial dimensions of the term tact, the idea of duration, rhythm and speed. Being tactful towards one another here implies the shared negotiation of the right balance between approach and detachment, assonance and dissonance, coincidence and deferral. The image of dance or game formations which emerges here is further accentuated by the link of tact to the Greek taxus meaning quick or sudden as well as taxis meaning arrangement or order, status, position but also battle or March formation. You can note here the relations between tact and tactics as well as the potential military connotations of the term. The German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm adds yet another dimension to the idea, which becomes increasingly important in the course of the 19th century and this is the idea that tact should be associated with perception and valuation, and hence with taste. Tact now is often being understood as a form of ethical and aesthetic judgment. 

Now, despite the etymological connection with touch and contact tact unlike compassion or pity is associated with discretion and I think this is very important, not only with discretion and also with the respect for this space of the other. Jacques Derrida talks about this when he writes, 'tact is the name for the aporia for touching that does not touch, a touch without contact.' Fabienne's story in Truffaut's film illustrates exactly that point. The tactful behaviour of the gentleman caller is based on the pretence of not noticing what caused the embarrassment. The aim is here to preserve and to respect the intimate sphere of the other and in this way to restore her dignity. Being tactful means, or is essentially defined at this point, by what one does not say. Note the association of tact with latin tacet to be silent and to conceal. 

Now I don't think we should confuse this aspect of tactful behaviour with denial or even with lying, instead I think we should understand this in the sense of a role play in order which in order to function needs to be understood and adopted by all individuals involved. The goal is here to mend a face-to-face relationship that is temporarily damaged, to restore what Erving Goffman calls the normal state between the interlocutors. This cannot be attained or achieved by mere means of politeness. Politeness, and we can see that in Fabienne's letter, is mostly based on convention, it is based on a set of tools a code, a code of etiquette if you will. Tact, by contrast, could be described as the individual's variation of that code, it could essentially be defined as some sort of deviation. Tact is situated in between the demands of social roles and their actual execution. Tact organises the relations between the social persona, persona also meaning in Latin mask, and the intimate self. Its goal, the goal of tact and tactful behaviour, is the sparing of someone's intimate self. Unlike politeness, tact is a form of behaviour that is difficult to teach or to train, it is seemingly effortless, it must be lived like grace or taste, for tact is based on, I would say the individual's very high degree of awareness of sensitivity and of attention. Tact is, and this is perhaps what Fabienne's husband, the unloved Monsieur Tabard fails to comprehend, tact is with Tibet Sigler the marksmanship or accuracy of sensitivity. Fabienne's story has attracted the attention of a whole series of scholars amongst whom Slavoj Zizek and David Caron but also the writer Haruki Murakami who dedicates one of his latest short stories to the principle of tact epitomised in one of the characters called Doctor Tokai. 

Now I have dwelled on the example of Truffaut's Stolen Kisses because the film dramatises one aspect of tact in particular I am interested in in my research and I that I seek to explore. Tact, Truffaut shows us, is based on a dialectical relationship between nearness and distance, between identification and separation and its purpose is to determine what we would call, or what I would call, the appropriate distance between individuals. Truffaut's crucial diagnosis is that the key problem of modern subjectivity is not, as we might suspect, the increased distance between individuals but on the contrary the very erasure or increasing disappearance of that distance. 

Now this observation is also I think in the heart of three major series of tact that the were written in the course of the 20th century by three different scholars that are rarely compared and that are perhaps for that reason also at the heart of my current research. The three scholars in question are Helmuth Plessner who was a trained biologist and an advocate of philosophical anthropology, Theodor Adorno the co-founder of critical theory and the French semiologist Roland Barthes. Now you might think that this is quite an unlikely group of scholars for comparison. Plessner's and Adorno's periods of intellectual productivity did overlap with that of Barthes in the 1950s 60s and even the 1970s but neither Adorno nor Plessner mentioned Barthes' writing in their works, nor does in fact Barthes make reference to either Plessner or Adorno in his lectures as well as publications. The relation between Plessner and Adorno in turn is rather complicated, both scholars returned from exile to Germany in 1949 and Adorno from California and Plessner from the Netherlands where he held professorship at the University of Groningen. They knew each other well, they were temporary colleagues in Frankfurt Am Main, they were rivals whose works stood essentially for two competing and mutually exclusive schools of thought. But, and I think this is the interesting aspect of putting these three figures together, the works that I am looking at in my research share a number of similarities not un crucial I think when we're trying to think about tact and one most obvious parallel between the writings of Plessner, of Adorno and of Barthes is rehearse that the particular texts I'm trying to compare were produced in times of significant social and political change. 

Helmuth Plessner's fervently written essay called, The Limits of Community, a critique of social radicalism came out in 1924 and in this essay Plessner warns against the rise of social and political radicalism both from the right and from the left in the Weimar Republic. In Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life Theodor Adorno contemplates in 1951 the effects of fascism on German society and explores how the smallest occurrences in everyday life can reflect on one of the most catastrophic events in human history. And Barthes in the late 1970s in the lecture series he convened at the College de France entitled, How to Live Together and the neutral experiments like in fact the Truffaut of Stolen Kisses with new forms of individuality in the aftermath of 1968. My hypothesis or the hypothesis that drives my research at the moment is really that in their writings all these three authors Plessner, Adorno and Barthes, the differences in historical and intellectual context notwithstanding, react to a shared sense of crisis when responding to what I would formulate as the following question: what distance must I maintain between myself and others if we are to construct a community without collision, a sociability without alienation and a form of individual freedom that may imply solitude but not isolation. 

Tact we learn from Fabienne's story about the gentleman caller and the lady in the bath presupposes our capacity for empathetic identification but the essential function of tact we also learned from this story is not to affect identification but to restore difference and to re-establish a distance between the individuals involved in order to protect and preserve their dignity. When we revisit these three theories of tact produced by Helmuth Plessner in the 1920s by Adorno in the 1940s and by Barthes in the 1970s, we realized I think that tact is crucial in times of crisis when established calls on conventions crumbled but have not yet disappeared. The challenges then to develop new forms of communication that enable individuals in Plessner's words to come close to each other without meeting and to establish distance without damaging each other through indifference. I read these three texts or two texts and a lecture series by Adorno, Plessner and Barthes as three variations of what I would call an ethics of indirectness, an ethics of indirectness that is based on strategies of communication that the defy authenticity in the case of Plessner, frankness in the case of Roland Barthes, and touch in the case of Adorno. They share a preference of individual difference over communal identification and resist any possible forms of incorporation. The outcome is a kind of non-violent contemplation that is in the words of Adorno, and this is how I would like to conclude, 'the source of all the joy of truth, it presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself: a distanced nearness'. 

Thank you.