Butler does not always avoid condemnation. Important to my argument is the fact that her ethics need not preclude condemnation and that it can and should be sharpened so as to account for such divisive, political moments. When Butler does condemn, though, it is as if she finds herself in that moment trapped within a discourse she rejects, to which she can only gain access through a condemnation. In Precarious Life, she condemns "on several bases the violence done against the United States and do [es] not see it as 'just punishment' for prior sins"' $( P L , _ { 4 0 } )$ . Butler seems to find herself compelled to condemn those who attacked the United States on September n, 2001, before she criticizes the U.S. government, as if this condemnation gives her permission to argue. Yet in her analyses of U.S. policies of indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay, U.S� violence against Afghanistan, the "shock and awe" attacks on Iraq, and the Bush adminstration's he emonization of political discourse after 9 I 11 in terms of its own position as victim, she does not condemn. Rather, she analyzes, explains, contextualizes, interprets, interrogates, and, in so doing, critiques. This raises the question of Butler's separation of condemnation and critique and the political place and function of each.
Butler presumes that condemnation involves closure and that closure entails finality and disconnection. That is, she treats condemnation a<sup>s</sup> an act of sovereignty bent on efacing its own supporting conditions, its own vulnera�ility and dependence. So even as she recognizes judging as a mode of address preril.ised on the context of address that "can and should provide a sustaining condition of ethical deliberation, judgment, and conduct;' she reads condemnation as violently eroding "the capacity of the subject addressed for both self-reflection and social-recognition" and denunciation as working to "paralyze and deratify the critical capacities of the subject to whom it is addressed" (PL, 49) . If the one who is condemned and denounced is already positioned in a prior relation of subordination, such erosion and paralysis may result. But not necessarily. The condemned may reject the bases, the terms, of condemnation-! am not who you say I am or Because I am who you say I am, you are the one who ultimately sufers, who is left shattered and bereft in condemning me. The denounced may accept the words of the denunciation, but challenge the suppositions supporting these words, the suppositions that give it an ethical valence beyond a mere statement of fact-Yes, I am a godless communist so ?
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