'The word tact stems from the Latin tactus, which means 'touch', 'tactility', 'feeling', 'influence', and, since the late fifteenth century, is also used to mean 'beat' or 'pulse'. These etymological connotations underline the spatial and temporal dimensions of the term. They emphasize the aspects of distance, duration, rhythm, and speed. Being tactful towards one another 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 that emerges here is further accentuated by the suggestive assonance between 'tact' and Greek tachus, meaning 'quick' or 'sudden', as well as Greek taxis, meaning 'arrangement' or 'order', 'status', and 'position'. Despite the etymological connection with 'touch' and 'contact', tact, unlike empathy, is often associated with discretion and respect for the space of the other. Tact, we might say with Jacques Derrida, who plays with the etymological implications of the term, 'is the name for the aporia of a touching that does not touch, a "touch without contact"'. Fabienne's story thematizes this. The tactful behavior of the gentleman caller is based on the pretence of not noticing what caused the embarrassment. The aim is to preserve and respect the intimate sphere of the other person, and in this way to restore her dignity. Being tactful is here defined by what one does not say (Lat. tacere = 'to be silent', 'to conceal') and yet it presupposes mutual awareness of the unspoken thing. This should not be confused with repression, denial, or lying. If anything, it could be understood in the sense of a certain form of role-play in which, in order to function, needs to be recognized and adopted by all individuals involved. Tact, writes Niklas Luhmann, is based on the expectation of expectations. More specifically, tactful behavior does not simply consist in the fulfilment of the other's expectations. Instead, Luhmann defines it as a 'behaviour with which A presents himself as the one whom B needs as a partner, to be able to be the one that he would like to present in A's eyes'. The goal is to mend a face-to-face relationship that is temporarily damaged or broken, and to restore what Erving Goffman calls the 'normal state' between the interlocutors. This cannot be achieved simply by means of politeness. Politeness, as Fabienne's letter suggests, is based on convention, a set of tools, a code (of etiquette). Tact, by contrast, is an individual's variation of that code. It is a deviation. Tact, we could say, is situated in between the demands of social roles and their actual execution. Tact organizes the relations between the social persona (Lat. persona = 'mask') and the intimate self. Its goal is the sparing of someone's intimate self. Unlike politeness, tact is a form of behaviour that is difficult to teach. Seemingly effortless, it must be lived, like taste or grace, for tact, as David Caron rightly emphasizes, is based on the individual's high degree of awareness, sensitivity, and attention. Tact is—and this is perhaps what Fabienne's husband, the unloved M. Tabard, fails to comprehend—what Theobald Ziegler calls 'die Treffsicherheit des Gefühls' ('the accuracy of sensitivity').'

'It is thought that Voltaire was the one who around 1769 imported the notion of tact from the musical domain into the social sphere. The Germans, Dutch, and English adopted this usage from the French. But only in German educational theory has there been an articulation and discussion of tact in a pedagogical sense. Moreover, the German Taktgefühl expresses a more subtle sentient quality than the English "tactfulness." The term Gefühl means feeling, sensitivity, sentiment: the sentient quality of having a "feel" for something. Thus, to be tactful with another person one must be able to "hear," "feel," "respect" the essence or uniqueness of this person. The English "tactful" means having the quality of tact and literally being full of tact; the German word Taktgefühl has the additional connotation of having a feeling for tactfulness. There is a hint here that the quality of tact is somewhat like talent. We often think of talent as a fortuitous gift—either you are or you are not blessed with a "feel" or talent for the violin, the canvas, or the stage. But, of course, talent must be recognized, developed, nurtured, and disciplined. Similarly, pedagogical tact, although a gift in some sense, needs to be prepared and practised as a special "feel" for acting tactfully.

Naturally, musical "tact" is at best a metaphoric referent or analogy for social tact. It is usually misleading to try and follow the many possible implications of metaphoric comparisons, but it is tempting to venture a few steps further with the musical metaphor. In music the basic chords, beat, pulse are the elements on which the melody can be improvisationally created. It should be realized that takt and melody are not mutually exclusive however—they need each other. Yet, takt (beat, pulse) needs to retreat to the background and loosen its grip on the total musical situation for the more subtle improvisations of melody to become possible. And rhythm can even become the organizing element in the performance of musical improvisation. So the existence of the musical metaphor of takt may prompt us to wonder: What are the organizing elements which make tact in social life possible?'

'By "tact" we understand a special sensitivity and sensitiveness to situations and how to behave in them, for which knowledge from general principles does not suffice. Hence an essential part of tact is that it is tacit and unformulable. One can say something tactfully; but that will always mean that one passes over something tactfully and leaves it unsaid, and it is tactless to express what one can only pass over. But to pass over something does not mean to avert one's gaze from it, but to keep an eye on it in such a way that rather than knock into it, one slips by it. Thus tact helps one to preserve distance. It avoids the offensive, the intrusive, the violation of the intimate sphere of the person.'

'Silence is certainly one of the most powerful mediators of tact. In tactful interaction silence can function in different ways. For example, there is the silence that "speaks." This is the tact of the "silent conversation" where chatter would be misplaced, or where intrusive questions may only disturb or hurt. The etymological root of "conversation" has the meaning of "living together, association, company, acquaintance." The noise of words can make it difficult to "hear" the things that the mere conversation of companionship can bring out. In good conversation the silences are as important as the words spoken. Tact knows the power of stillness, how to remain silent.'

In Emerson's chronology one finds: 1875: Journal entries cease. Something to aspire to, to have that matter.

'A l'état de nature, l'homme vit dans l'immédiat; ses besoins ne rencontrent pas d'obstacles et son désir ne dépasse pas les objets qui lui sont offerts… et comme la parole ne peut naitre que lorsqu'il y a un manque à compenser, l'homme naturel ne parle pas.… L'homme de la nature s'en tient à une communication silencieuse, qui n'est même pas une communication, mais seulement un contact.'

'Not until one man speaks to another, does he learn that speech no longer belongs to silence but to man. He learns it through the Thou of the other person, for through the Thou the word first belongs to man and no longer to silence. When two people are conversing with one another, however, a third is always present: Silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening. That gives the words a new fulness. But not only that: the words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that third person, and the listener receives more than the speaker alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a conversation. At the end of the Platonic dialogues it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.'

'Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation. It posits the essentiality of both the subject and the object. The object is essential because it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own structures, and because one must wait for it and observe it; but the subject is also essential because it is required not only to disclose the object (that is, to make it possible for there to be an object) but also so that this object might exist absolutely (that is, to produce it). In a word, the reader is conscious of disclosing in creating, of creating by disclosing. In reality, it is not necessary to believe that reading is a mechanical operation and that signs make an impression upon him as light does upon a photographic plate. If he is inattentive, tired, stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will escape him. The object will never 'catch' with him (in the sense in which we say that fire 'catches' or 'doesn't catch'). He will draw some phrases out of the shadow, but they will seem to have appeared at random. If he is at his best, he will project beyond the words a synthetic form, each phrase of which will be no more than a partial function: the 'theme', the 'subject', or the 'meaning'. Thus, from the very beginning, the meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is he, on the contrary, who allows the significance of each of them to be understood; and the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an opponent of the word. In addition, the hundred thousand words aligned in a book can be read one by one so that the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is accomplished if the reader does not put himself from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence; if, in short, he does not invent it and place himself there, and hold on to, the words and sentences which he awakens. And if I am told that it would be more fitting to call this operation a re-invention or a discovery, I shall answer that, first, such a re-invention would be as new and as original an act as the first invention. And, especially, when an object has never existed before, there can be no question of re-inventing it or discovering it. For if the silence about which I am speaking is really the goal at which the author is aiming, he has, at least, never been familiar with it; his silence is subjective and anterior to language. It is the absence of words, the undifferentiated and lived silence of inspiration, which the word will then particularize, whereas the silence produced by the reader is an object. And at the very interior of this object there are more silences—which the author does not mention. It is a question of silences which are so particular that they could not retain any meaning outside the object which causes the reading to appear. However, it is these which give it its density and its particular face.

To say that they are unexpressed is hardly the word; for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why one does not come upon them at any definite moment in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere.'

'The "other" tragedy has absorbed many elements from mainstream tragedy and given them new emphasis. One of these elements is precisely that silence. Aristotle's catharsis, if the term has any meaning, would have to be located temporally at the end of the play. This is the point at which the audience must return to the world, when the Pequod disappears under the waves, when the last words of the play are spoken. The applause, as Rilke suggested, serves to ward off whatever it is that would make them change their lives. In traditional tragedy, this moment is charged with both terror and exhilaration, the fear of death and the joy of life. In the "other" tragedy this silence is the underpinning of all the words and actions. It is equally contradictory. It is at once the will to live and the proximity of nothingness.'