ABSTRACT
A 26 June 2006 editorial in The Nation urged progressives in the United
States to recognise that now is the time for conviction, not caution. Judith
Butler, in her 2005 book, Giving an Account of Oneself, suggests otherwise,
opposing conviction to responsibility. Butler reads conviction critically, in
terms of an ethics that ‘takes the self to be the ground and measure of
moral judgment’ (2005a: 108). And, even as she acknowledges that there
might be times for condemnation and denunciation, her discussion works
against these modes of judgement, associating them with a kind of certainty and opacity that disallows connections to another. Whose advice should we
heed? Is Left politics fundamentally incompatible with conviction, con-
demnation, and denunciation?
