How to Be Alone with Others: Plessner, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact

This article looks at three theories of tact that are rarely compared. Although developed during different periods of radical change in the twentieth century, they are based on the same diagnosis: the key problem of modern subjectivity is not the increased distance between individuals, but, on the contrary, its disappearance. This article explores how tact, understood as an ongoing negotiation between the demands of convention and the ‘unruly claims of the individual’ (Adorno), emerges as a figure of distance, and of deviation, a figure that does not only serve to describe the relations between individuals, or the individual within the group, but that also facilitates alternative forms of critical inquiry.