Consent is impossible under patriarchy.
Consent is impossible under NCAA rules.
Consent is impossible on television.
Consent is given unasked for on the internet.
Consent does not limit liability absolutely.
Consent is impossible under the US Constitution.
Consent is impossible under the Carter Doctrine.
Consent is impossible under the Reagan Doctrine.
Consent is given in advance by the Bush Doctrine.
Consent is impossible in a modern state without the biopolitical manufacturing of compliant subjectivities.
The consent of the unborn is voiced by dead white men.
Consent is the form of appearance of command.
Consent is for God, cleanup for Caesar.
Consent is what you’re getting paid for.
Consent is impossible through mere cumulative growth.
Consent is impossible through mere redistribution of surplus.
Consent is impossible with wealth.
Too big not to consent to.
Consent is impossible in China.
Consent is running out in Hong Kong.
Consent is impossible in Ukraine.
Consent is impossible in Russia.
Consent is impossible in an occupied territory.
Consent is impossible between two invented peoples.
Consent is impossible between two non-self-identical subjects.
Consent is impossible after the linguistic turn.
Consent is impossible in Euclidian space.
Consent is impossible in the anthropocene.
Whether consent is possible depends on how you think about it, which depends on whether you want it to be.
Consent is possible, despite all these things, but sex is still masturbation with another person’s body.
Bravo (as usual).
ReplyDeleteI am a little dissastisfied with the final entry, however:
"Consent is possible, despite all these things, but sex is still masturbation with another person’s body."
Specifically, it's (for me) a little disappointing by comparison with the others - the uneven anaphora building in a crescendo towards it - because of the "but" linking the two propositions. Despite everything, consent is still possible (and, you imply, to be striven for, although not to the exclusion of something better). AND sex is masturbation with another person's body. To put a "but" there seems to risk collapsing everything back into ressentiment, relying on a 'male' version of what sex is as well as a romantic/idealist frustration about achieving subject-object unity transcendentally through the intersubjectivity of fucking. (Fucking, it is strongly implied by the logic here, and Elliot Rodger would surely conflate the two concepts, cock-in-cunt copulation. When one has a vagina, it's not actually very easy to jerk oneself off with a flesh-and-blood cock.) So, what's bad about masturbation? Who ever said sex *wasn't* masturbation? And for whom? And that masturbation - but not 'sex' - involves doing things with yourself, alone? Whom did that account of what's desirable serve?