We have to ask how we can stretch and how sometimes we can break the norms that determine what's intelligible and readable and what is not.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we "should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.

Let me say one thing to clarify my position. I think we can take distance from norm but I think we are also mired in norm, "empêtrés", I think you say in French. And I think the choices we can make are only in a certain struggle with the norms out of which we're constituted.

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.