(the) American (Novel of)

166 Kevin MacDonald
be closer to the bone of life and the living of it than we would like
to admit. We might have to see gratitude as a practice, and not as a mere
emotion or institution. It could be phrased in this manner, with much
hesitation and some caution—where Heidegger in Being and Time
mentions and delineates the “Inauthentic” read “Ungrateful.” So is the
authentic therefore the grateful? Such a correlation would be easy to
make, and the temptation is strong to reach just such a conclusion.
However, it would be more appropriate to the nature of grace itself to
state that the grateful is what it is precisely because it is radically
uncertain of its status as either authentic or inauthentic. “One merely
accepts the gift, one does not ask who the giver is,” as Nietzsche says
in the Gay Science. One suspects that the ungrateful thinks of itself as
authentic, and furthermore is disposed to even make such a distinction
in the first place. If I may borrow the language of Bataille, the ungrateful
is a participant in a restricted economy, where please and thank you
must be met with the appropriate responses or acknowledgement of
debt and credit that go without saying in this form of transaction.
If we briefly examine the phenomenon of road rage we can see
this ingratitude at work firsthand. The boundless anger which many
drivers experience would seem at first glance to be a mere psychological
problem. The automobile has, as is obvious to everyone, become a
multivalent symbol functioning on many levels. This includes of course
any representative power that accrues to the vehicle as an icon. What
is it, however, about the automobile and its use that opens up this
bottomless reservoir of anger? When we sit in our automobile not only
are we shielded from others, the automobile also installs us into a sense
of entitlement, we are in a position in a most definite sense of the word.
The car opens up on a new level of possession where there is a fiction
of independence, where one is no longer tied to the interactions that
interrupt and commit us to the social.
The car is the concept of the individual right made visible. The
anger that erupts at the slow driver in front of us, or when someone
is too close behind us, or someone is careless signaling, is not simply
a reaction to a lack of consideration, but a response to our impotence
revealed in the violation of our right to the road. Ingratitude is revealed
the moment this impotence is broached, the moment the vulnerability
of the thankless is revealed. For those without grace, nothing is guaranteed,
not even a place in the sun—precisely because it is the ungrate-