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Passover Hors d’oeuvre Ce sacré pas du repas, this blessèd and blasted pastoverness of the repast, was something that made Derrida and me smile. The occasion was the colloquium “Victor Cousin, the Ideologists, and their Relations with Scottish Philosophy” that took place at the International Study Center of Sèvres in 1982 under the direction of Derrida on the French side, of myself on the Scottish side, and of Pierre Alexandre, who, as then co-director of the Center and formerly director of the French Institute in Scotland, was well placed to coordinate our energies. Professor Henri Gouhier honored us with his presence and his comments. In the course of the weekend participants visited the Victor Cousin Library at the Sorbonne. At the end of the colloquium Derrida invited us to a reception at the École Normale Supérieure. On the final evening several of us, including my colleagues and friends George Davie and Nelly Demé, had dinner together in a restaurant in the rue Descartes. But without Derrida. We had omitted to invite him! Not entirely without good reason. For my part, I had considered that he would surely prefer to get back immediately to his writing. Even so, we should at least have invited him! That is to say, I myself should have, I who was perhaps both not sensitive enough and too sensitive. THIRTEEN 266 | TABLE TALK Entrée Can one be too sensitive? Is it one’s responsibility not to be too sensible? Is it one’s responsibility not to be too responsive, too susceptible to another’s susceptibilities? If so, would this perhaps be on account of the word “too,” for one ought not to be too anything, even too good? According to Aristotle the practically wise person, the phronimos, should avoid the too, whether the too little or the too much (or the too whatsoever, not excluding the too moderate?). Whether excess or lack, the too is in both cases both de trop and too little, a surplus and a minus: always a defect, always a fault, always a shortcoming. So let us avoid for a moment the word “too,” not only in order not to gainsay Aristotle, but because every statement of the form “one should not overdo x” is presumably tautological. As a tautology, it could not serve as a principle of action. A tautology entails only another tautology. Still avoiding the word “too,” should one then say rather that one ought to ménager the susceptibilities of others, that is, to treat them with care and consideration, that one ought to be susceptible regarding them? Is showing consideration for the susceptibilities of others a way of behaving with moderation? Ménager, to treat with consideration and care, is to spare, to be unprodigal , to economize. And for there to be a ménage there must be an oikos. Ménager is a way of managing, of handling and maneuvering. From the notion of ménage one passes via that of the household to that of the hand, to the manus and the maintenance of at once touching and being touched. Now in Le toucher, Jean Luc Nancy it is to Merleau-Ponty, among others, that Derrida refers us when he speaks of simultaneously touching and being touched, and it is in the work of Merleau-Ponty also that the idea of the just perceptive distance is to be found.1 This idea itself is to be found in the Aristotelian idea of the just mean, the juste milieu, the mesotēs. Excess, shortage, and the just mean belong to belonging, being a part of, appartenance, and to holding apart from, à-part-tenance. But two dimensions belong to belonging. There is the dimension of excess and shortcoming with respect to the just mean, and there is the dimension of the agent with respect to the phronimos. The first of these relations implicates the agent and the phronimos. But the relation that implicates the agent does not imply the relation that implicates the phronimos. It is necessary for the relation that implicates the phronimos to be adapted to the psychological and circumstantial condition of the particular agent. How is this adaptation achieved? Not in the light of a second phronimos, then of a third, and so on infinitely, but in the chiaroscuro of a knowing mixed with an unknowing. We judge. And the justness of the judgment is not equivalent to the justice constituted in relation to laws. Justness [3.17...

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