That condemnation can work against self-knowledge does not mean that condemnation everywhere and always does so. Condemnation does not always moralize a self through disavowal, seeking to purge and externalize opacity and necessarily failing to own its limitations. Can we not imagine a condemnation capable of acknowledging its own limits? Can we not imagine a condemnation born of past failures, indeed, a condemnation indebted and responsible to failure? Butler, in opposing condemnation to connection and the acknowledgment of opacityj blocks from view the political possibility of drawing a line, of saying "this, not that" and in so doing transforming our connections, connections which condemnation itself may forge.
If I condemn racism, homophobia, or cruelty in another, I am not necessarily disavowing racism, homophobia, or cruelty in myself. I may be addressing it in myself as I confront these tendencies in another. More importantly, I may be calling into question, condemning, practices in which I, too, am implicated such that I recognize this condemnation as a self-condemnation, a condemnation of us and of our practices. Such condemnation may well be my ethical as well as political responsibility insofar as I seek to transform the set of norms in which I find mysel£ thereby changing the contexts in whic others are addressed.
If I condemn someone for pursuing preventive war or for defending a notion of preventive war, I need not base this condemnation on a sense that my knowledge is more certain. I can base it on the sense that the pursuer of preventive war aims to produce a future I reject, or even if these are not his aims, that I fear wil arise in the course of this war's pursuit. My condemnation may be a way of grappling with, of confronting, additional elements of the contexts of address, elements that involve power, hierarchy, and responsibility for other futures, other contexts, other beings. Failure to condemn risks disavowing relations of power and one's complicity in these relations. Rather than indicating an ethical responsiveness, such failure retreats from the political demand to refuse to remain within a certain structure of address and to chalenge its terms, to acknowledge the way these terms block from view those who remain incapable of addressing us at al. Refusing the address, denouncing the presumption of relations an address may endeavor to reinforce, could wel be necessary if we are to attend to the peculiar lack that addresses us and to which we are responsible. As Santner argues, responsibility to the excluded and for opportunities missed in the past may require radical acts that suspend the social bond. <sup>20</sup>
ETHI CS
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