Is the Rectum a Grave? Quotes

“Sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart.”
― Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays

“Are communitarian identities necessary, or even desirable? Does sociality depend on such identities? To what extent do antagonistic confrontations between different communities derive not merely from particular historical and sociological conditions but, more profoundly, from the very value attributed to communitarian identities? Doesn’t this valorizing of particular communitarian - and cultural - identities in turn privilege difference over sameness in human relations, thus condemning the social to repeated efforts to overcome the trauma of difference as well as to a dependence on such weak cohesive virtues as a mere tolerance for diversity?”
― Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays