Condemnation and denunciation may not succeed. Their efects on the addressee as well as their relation to other acts and interpretations cannot be determined in advance. If the condemned is powerful, at the head of a mighty military machine, then to associate condemnation with paralysis and deratification surely overstates the power of the address. One could wish that condemnation had such efects, and with respect to Bush's unconscionable, immoral, unjustified, illegal, and imperialist war against Iraq, I certainly do. Bush's persistence in his preemptive war against Iraq in the face of the condemnation of millions throughout the world, however, points to the weakness and ineficacy of condemnation unbacked by force.
At the same time, condemnation may work in a diferent direction. Weakness in. one respect may enable another sort of strength, a capacity to form new alliances and connections, to open a space wherein to imagine the possibility of another world. So condemnation and denunciation may produce new links. When I condemn, I may do so in the context of addressing another, one whom I am not condemning. If in a political gathering I condemn the president of the United States, I wil be addressing others, ·attempting to politicize and change the scene in which we find ourselves. Such politicization, moreover, may well be called for by the very inconsistency and lack in this scene that excites us, as Santner suggests.
Condemnation is not as powerful and eficacious as Butler implies. And insofar as it occurs within a context of address, condemnation is citational, relying for its eficacy on a set of prior norms that it reiterates, a set of prior practices and values to which it connects. Condemnation does not occur ex nihilo but is based on something, something shared, something that wil be unavoidable, incomplete, and fissured. As with other utterances, condemnation is "uncontrollable, appropriable, and able to signify otherwise and in excess of its animating intentions" (ES, 98). To condemn, then, is to appeal to a prior set of connections at its basis and thereby to open up this basis for critique and politicization. It is also, and more importantly, to be excited by the lacks fissuring our social formation and to take responsibility for the past harms and omissions that enable it.
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