(the) American (Novel of)

204 Karmen MacKendrick
Nietzsche notes, “If God wished to become an object of love, he should
have given up judging and justice first of all; a judge, even a merciful
judge, is no object of love.” 8 In religious terms, grace is concerned not
to justify but to redeem, 9 and perhaps it redeems our social spaces as
well, beyond the rigid ordering of ethical behavior.
So I would argue that etiquette is precisely the element of ethics
that involves grace. Our eagerness to have its rules right is reflected in
that remarkable proliferation of intercultural etiquette books (especially
but not exclusively for business use) earlier mentioned. The idea is that
people have rules to follow in interaction, rules that tell us what to do,
and the better we know these the easier it will be to get along (and
presumably turn a profit, which point I leave aside as not being of quite
such direct concern to the present project). This gives the impression
that etiquette is a kind of knowing that fits best into the tabular model,
where the rules are set forth in a neat and orderly system and anxiety
is reduced by the confidence that knowing brings.
But the point of etiquette’s rules is to smooth ethical spaces, not
to foreclose them; to both ease and to ornament, to impress but not
negatively; rather, as with physical grace, to please. 10 Social graces can
never be ethically required, yet are more than irrelevant frills.
The key is this: in the possibility of grace, which disrupts or lies
outside of (which disruptively opens the very possibility of an outside
to) any system, that nonetheless makes a system possible. The law alone
is unlivable 11 —this is a commonplace criticism of Kantian ethics in
particular, as Kant virtuously attempts to provide an ethical option for
every possible action. Without the grace of mercy, no system of justice
could remain in act; in fact, without grace, no system of law is ever just.
I do not mean simply that we would be unhappy under it; I mean that
it would be impossible, incomplete to the point of insufficiency (no
system can contain every possible circumstance and variant, yet no set
of circumstances is identical to any other, nor any judgement just which
leaves them wholly out of account). This openness is likewise fundamental
to the possibility of ethics. Without the possibility of new conceptual
spaces, rethinkings, no advance in the systematic sciences is
possible: rigidified knowledge destroys learning; in fact, knowledge itself,
through which our learning must move if we are to come to know
it, is impossible. Without the possibility of dance’s topographic seduction,
no space permits bodily movement; even the most efficiently