Chapter 5 - Approchement (Barthes)

Summary

Chapter 5 engages with Barthes’s tact by situating it within a philosophical landscape that expands from the West (Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche) to the East (Kakuzō, Suzuki). In so doing, I reconstruct how Barthes explores the connection between human sociability and intellectual productivity in view of its hermeneutic potential. I show that Barthes’s alternative practice of critical inquiry bears striking resemblance to Adorno’s idea of hermeneutical tact. I argue that Barthes’s notion of tact, although unfashionable in the 1970s, is crucial to ongoing debates that challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion (Gadamer, Ricœur) and transgress the limits of critique (Felski). I also question, however, if the essentially democratic idea of a tactful hermeneutics first introduced by Kant truly translates into Barthes’s, Adorno’s and Gadamer’s theories. Tact, they jointly contend, cannot be taught. Unlike politeness, it must be lived. The elitism this idea implies, and its implicit vicinity to the Romantic idea of the genius, give rise to the suspicion that, while aiming to suspend any class-oriented conceptions of tact, in the end, this may be precisely what their theories help to reproduce.