There is a moment towards the beginning of Economimesis when, in the course of paraphrasing the preliminary argument in section 43 of Kant's third Critique, Derrida draws the reader's attention to the of an acrobat in a confidential note that Kant appends to the discussion of the difference between science and art regarded as human skill. Kant confides that in the region he comes from [In meinen Gegenden . .1], the common man has no trouble distinguishing between, say, the science of an illusionist and the art of a rope-dancer [ein Seiltinzer]. The common sense judgment, as it always seems in Kant, conceals a strictly rigorous principle. The first is a science because one can do it, if one knows how; the second is an art, because one many know completely must be done and yet not possess the skill to do it. Science, says Kant, is a theoretical faculty, like geometry; its knowledge is immediately a capacity or power. Art is a practical, technical faculty, like surveying; knowledge of it is not know how. The principle allows us to imagine, for example, impeccable critics who may know what ought to be done and are consequently cognizant of the desired effect but are utterly excluded from art, in this scheme; for only that which a man, even if he knows it completely, may not have the skill to accomplish belongs to art. But what, according to this principle, should we decide about philosophers? Is their skill a science or an art? Kant does not raise the question but in the footnote invites the opinion of a non-philosopher from his own region regarding the art of rope-dancers. is a rope-dancer? Derrida notes the brief passage of this and without elaboration offers succint hints to the reader who wishes to take the plunge and insert here something of his own: Pour qui veut faire le saut et y mettre du sien: Kant, Nietzsche, Genet. Derrida cases a veil, creates a little enigma, opens a depth in the surface of the text and invites the reader to let his curiosity plunge, at the risk of breaking his neck-like the rope-dancer in the Prologue of Zarathustra. Derrida himself might have risked it. He has already, here and there, suggested how it might be done. In Glas, he proposes that all of Nietzsche can be read from the perspective of the funambule, who like the acrobat in Genet's text Pour un funambule is not the dancer but the dance of the cord itself. Zarathustra exclaims to the crowd gathered to watch the acrobat; Man is a cord, stretched between Beast and Superman-a cord above an abyss. And then, What is great in man is that he is a Bridge and not an End. In the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant displays he