ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at what sustainable ethics emanating from families and communities might entail. It argues that the family, comprising parents and/or caregivers, is an important part of democratic civil society precisely because it is not necessarily culpable to the state and it need not collude with neoliberal governance. The chapter begins this argument below with the obvious point that the family is often where a young person first engages in relations, and extends this point to argue that relations form through the practice of erasure. It draws on D. W. Winnicott's ideas about play and infant development through what he called potential or transitional spaces, which the author relate in important ways to Lauren Berlant's notion of living in ellipses and Rosi Braidotti's idea of capacities as potentia. The chapter makes an important connection to how potentia is always about relations, and the importance of erasure to relations.
