'In the End It Always Does' captures self-shattering desire
The big secret about sex, Leo Bersani writes in his 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” is that most people don’t like it. And this is true, he says, even for those who seem most capable of embracing their own sexual impulses, including, say, the most enthusiastic proponents of polysexuality with multiple sex partners. In saying this, Bersani intimates that there is nothing more disorienting and boundary-breaking to our selves than the truth of our sexual desire. Or we can say with Bersani that desire disrupts and dissolves the coherence of any stable identity, causing the “shattering of the psychic structures themselves.”