Times of crisis expose how we experience social, physical, and emotional forms of distance. Alone with Others explores how these experiences overlap, shaping our coexistence. Departing from conventional debates that associate intimacy with affection and distance with alienation, Haustein introduces tact as a particular mode of feeling one's way and making space in the sphere of human interaction. Reconstructing tact's conceptual history from the late eighteenth century to the present, she then focuses on three specific periods of socio-political upheaval: the two World Wars, and 1968. In five reading encounters with Marcel Proust, Helmuth Plessner, Theodor Adorno, François Truffaut, and Roland Barthes, Haustein invites us to reconsider our own ways of engaging with other people, images, and texts, and to gauge the significance of tact today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

‘What does it mean to be tactful? Are there different forms of tact? And is being tactful always a good thing? Katja Haustein explores tact as a means to negotiate between conventions and authenticity. Drawing on the insights of Continental European literature, film, and thought, as well as on recent studies by Richard Sennett and others, she provides a penetrating analysis of this important yet often ignored concept in modern ethics and aesthetics. Lucidly written, historically informed, and philosophically convincing, Alone with Others is both a powerful exercise in intellectual history and a fascinating stimulus to examine our own behaviour.'

Henk de Berg - Professor of German, University of Sheffield

‘Alone With Others is a book for times of crisis. Through multi-disciplinary engagements with artworks, Katja Haustein re-fashions the idea of tact from a rule book of bourgeois behaviour to a theory of social relation. With a critical palette drawing on moral, political and social philosophy, on semiology and aesthetics, Alone With Others is a book about the relations of distance and proximity needed to resist the excesses of power, and through which to build communities based on understanding and respect.'

Timothy Mathews - Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, University College London

‘Katja Haustein has written an insightful and remarkable addition to the ongoing conversation on the power of tact, which she understands, counterintuitively, as an egalitarian means of engaging with others by keeping our distance. I thoroughly enjoyed disagreeing with this book - and learning from it.’

David Caron - Professor of French and Women and Gender Studies, University of Michigan

‘Ultimately, ‘Alone with Others’ understands the works of the writers it examines as variations on an ethics of indirectness. ‘Cultivated as the art of making space when we fear colliding, and of bridging gaps when we drift too far away from each other, tact is a mode of being alone with others that exists not to destroy but to protect our societal ways of living together,’ Haustein persuasively argues. The encounters she stages in Alone with Others share a preference for individual difference over communal identification and push back against forms of incorporation. The eventual outcome of all this […] is a kind of nonviolent contemplation, viewing one another across a shifting respectful expanse.'

Ian Ellison Source: Los Angeles Review of Books

‘... after years marked by pandemic-induced isolation and the remapping of personal and collective boundaries, Alone with Others proposes a timely, intriguing examination of the inherent value in distanced contemplation and attentiveness.’

Sofia Cumming Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘Katja Haustein’s essay is decisive proof that the value of an argument is not necessarily proportional to its length. In barely more than a hundred pages of tightly written prose, Haustein offers the reader a history of the notion of tact through several centuries, accompanied by close readings of key modern and contemporary thinkers and artists who have foregrounded tact in their work. … This sampling of Katja Haustein’s argument should whet the appetite of potential readers interested in how to imagine what post-critical reading and interpretation accomplish and on what grounds they have come to be. The detailed analysis of the individual works in the chapters that unfold in Alone with Others are challenging and revealing and can provide readers, through the notion of tact, with new avenues for understanding modernist ways of interpreting and interacting with others and with the world more broadly speaking.’

David F. Bell Source: Barthes Studies