The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Tact as Social Music Making

Tact 291 TactasSocialMusicMaking Here’s another example, from Hervé Guibert’s AIDS memoir, The Compassion Protocol (Le protocole compassionnel). One day, the narrator enters a neighborhood café where he has been a regular customer for ten years,often having a cup of coffee at the counter, even though the waiters have always seemed hostile to him, presumably out of homophobia. Hervé, ill and extremely frail, trips on the doorstep and falls to his knees, unable to muster enough strength to get back up on his feet. The other customers are staring at him: he has committed a literal faux pas and feels like a burn the social death of the fallen. He finds himself in an uncomfortable position—­ again, literally—­ and is making onlookers uncomfortable as well, this time metaphorically . Contamination is the source of discomfort, and this includes the contamination of the literal by the figural. Something happens then that Hervé did not expect: Not a single word was uttered, and there was no need for me to ask for help, for one of the two waiters I had always thought to be an enemy came up to me, took me in his arms and put me on my feet again [me remettre sur pied] as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I avoided the other customers’ eyes, and the man behind the counter simply asked:“Coffee, sir?” I feel deeply grateful towards those two waiters I’d never liked and who I thought detested me, for having reacted so spontaneously and with such tact [délicatesse ], without a single unnecessary word. Notice that Hervé is the one looking away. As was the case with Berr, it is difficult—­ and probably unnecessary—­ to determine whether he is trying to shield himself from the gazes of others or treating their own discomfort with tact. Regarding the waiter’s gesture, when Guibert writes“as if it were the most natural thing,” he underscores a fundamental aspect of tact-­ as-­ policing: that it is not natural but must appear so in order to stay out of reach of those it singles out for exclusion. But in this particular scene, the waiters’ tact testifies to their professionalism. Whether they actually hate Hervé doesn’t matter. What does matter is that their professionalism allows the two men neither to enforce nor to erase their power over Hervé, but only to deflect it without singling him out. By doing so, they maintain their difference from him—­ they are waiters; he is a customer—­ but it is a difference that rests on the codependency of the two social positions. 292 Tact (I don’t know what the German translation of the text looks like, but the verb aufheben, all at once, to pick up, to abolish and to keep, would fit nicely .) So when the first waiter proceeded to ease Hervé back up, he may have wished to conjure away the latter’s dis-­ease and the customers’ malaise, but Hervé perceived his professional distance as an act of community occurring within the delicate, ephemeral parameters of a specific situation. When Hervé realizes that he cannot get back up on his feet, the verb used in the original French is relever. (Relève, incidentally, is the French translation of the Hegelian Aufhebung.) And relever is what the waiter eventually does to Hervé. The word offers interesting possibilities. Its English cognate,“to relieve,” reminds us that the verb means “to alleviate suffering,” which is what both waiters do with regard to his body as well as to his feelings . Indeed, the expression remettre sur pied may mean “to be back up on one’s feet,” but its more idiomatic sense suggests restoring someone’s well-­ being, be it physical or psychological. Furthermore, relever almost means“to notice,” a dual meaning that may also be found, conveniently enough, in the English“to pick up”—­ as in“to pick something up” and“to pick up on something ,” something that is presumably relevant. That too is what the waiters do: they pick up on what what’s happening and one of them picks Hervé up. With their professional casualness, they bring him relief by treating the whole incident as ultimately irrelevant. This doesn’t mean, obviously, that AIDS is irrelevant, or Hervé’s suffering, but that what happened to him does not pertain (ne relève pas) to any essential inferiority. If the policing mission of tact is to make certain people irrelevant, in some cases...