Sexual consent - Some reflections on psychoanalysis and law

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We're used to hearing that there are consenting adults, and then there are those who are incompetent to consent, and most age of consent laws try to decide what are the conditions of competence; who is competent to consent and who is not. But perhaps incompetence is part of the very process of yes-saying. We are not competent to know all the future consequences of the sexual relations to which we say 'yes' or to which we willingly or ambivalently echo 'yes'. We are never fully active knowing and competently predictive at such moments. We open sometimes in spite of ourselves to a future we can not fully control. Even though we can steer and direct and try to give it shape in one way or another to the best of our abilities. Perhaps the opposite of the subject of consent is not the subject who is too young or who is too inexperienced or the subject who suffers incompetence, although there are cases where that is legally right, to be sure. We have to remember that something of childhood exists in adult sexuality. Making us more vulnerable or less knowing than we might like. That a certain incompetence; my argument is that a certain incompetence pervades? our efforts to predict in advance how things will go. And that even a certain inexperience is there at the outset of sexual encounter and in its midst.

The juridical subject of consent rules out the humility of unknowingness, without which we cannot really understand sexuality. We can as the former anti-archolist [?] rules of sexual conduct try to do, make every sexual act discussable between two people in advance and a settled matter of consent, before embarking on any touch. At such moments the law has pervaded sexual encounter; the law has drenched our discourse. We expect knowingness precisely at those moments when unknowingness is inseparable from sexuality itself. The law then functions as a defense against the unknown. And tell me, who would have sex if it really known in advance exactly what it would be like.

source: Speech < Judith Butler: "Sexual Consent: Some Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Law" >; Posted by Instituto de Humanidades UDP; vimeo.com/22547545; 2011