ABSTRACT
What makes for a liveable world is no idle question. It is not merely a question for philosophers. It is posed in various idioms all the time by people in various walks of life. To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself, and this can have several meanings: to be transported beyond oneself by a passion, but also to be beside oneself with rage or grief. To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to a simple passivity or powerlessness. Kinship ties that bind humans to one another may well be no more or less than the intensification of community ties. Nevertheless, those who live outside of the conjugal frame or who maintain modes of social organization for sexuality that are neither monogamous nor quasi-marital are more and more considered unreal, and their loves and losses less than true loves and true losses.
