Reviewed by: The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature by Corina Stan Lucy Bergeret Corina Stan. The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in Twentieth-Century Literature. Northwestern UP, 2018. 304 pages. In a day and age where screens are erected between individuals and borders between countries, can one still argue in favor of the ethical, perhaps even political, value of distance? Rather than defending an extreme or unilateral response to this question, Corina Stan's The Art of Distances develops a nuanced and incisive argument based on the multiple senses and connotations of the term "distance." As a starting point, Stan builds on the idea expressed in Roland Barthes' 1976–1977 course Comment vivre ensemble, according to which we need "a science, perhaps an art, of distances" to guarantee an ideal form of vivre-ensemble, of being with others (15). In Stan's title however, the term "art"—which, in its links to the particular and the contingent, was distinguished by Aristotle from the necessity of episteme—seems crucial. Indeed, in a world "deprived of shared morality" (12) and in the face of injustice, inequality, or alienation, individuals and collectivities have no choice but to rely on practices and dispositions—such as phronesis, or practical wisdom— which cultivate an art of distance. As Stan posits, such an art protects us from the dangers of its absence, as in totalitarianism. It is valuable as it maintains both the singularity and self-respect of the individual, as well as the dignity of others. It thereby preserves the richness of human life and brings us closer to the ideal of a "nonexclusionary notion of community" that remains open insofar as it distances itself from rigid, predetermined, or imposed ideas of commonality (198). The book is organized into two parts, which track the art of distances in works of anglophone, francophone, and German philosophy and fiction of the past century, spanning from the late 1920s to 2010. The introduction situates Barthes and Adorno among various thinkers and their criticism of the traditional notion of community, setting the stage to reveal the ethical value of distance and its neighboring notions, such as delicacy, discretion, "reject," tact, politeness, and so on.1 Part I traces the emergence of the "field of tension" of an art of distances both public and private in the first half of the twentieth century. In Chapter 1, Stan tackles the question of the "right (di)stance" for the intellectual and analyzes two metaphors which serve to represent the writer's retreat from the world: the leaning tower (Woolf) and the whale (Orwell). Following Lionel Trilling's distinction, she examines George Orwell's critique of English sincerity, as well as his self-imposed exile and poverty, which serve to overcome the guilt and distance of social class. She then turns to Henry Miller's model of authenticity in Tropic of Cancer, which corresponds to a flight from imposed social, moral, and aesthetic norms. From there, she is able to carry out a comparative analysis of three modes of detachment and of "not being at [End Page 1102] home in one's home" in the work of Orwell, Miller, and Paul Morand (29). From her close readings emerges the contention that unlike Miller and Morand, whose reliance on distance may be considered a lack of understanding, Orwell's "ethnography of proximity," his specific form of sincere authenticity—or authentic sincerity—that combines the exterior stance of the outsider and the direct experience of immersion, creates a form of tact which verges on tactlessness and a paradoxical balance of distance and closeness that aims both to unmask society and write "for it," in the hopes of bringing about change (64). Chapter 2 then examines a second model for overcoming the distances imposed by the everyday, as in Elias Canetti's conception of the "redemptive crowd" (84). According to Canetti in Crowds and Power, the experience of immersion in a multitude of people offers a glimmer of hope in a world beset with distances and hierarchies. The crowd overcomes distance through the shared experience of the ordinary and, most of all, of embodiment, creating a common feeling of equality among its members...