But our minds are polarized by artificial debates in which we are enjoined to take sides: for or against surrogate motherhood, for or against the scarf, for or against prostitution. The question is not to know if a woman’s consent is real or not when she prostitutes herself. To question the subject behind the prostitute or the woman who wears a scarf is a form of class contempt. The real question is whether consent is a political argument. And to that I say: no! I cannot think correctly in politics without having first carried out an epistemological investigation: with what tools, what arguments do we think?

Geneviève Fraisse, in interview. I like very much her “no!” here. She has written a book on the subject of consent, which addresses such questions as whether individual acts or dispositions of consent can be joined together so as to amount to collective consent or will, and what the value of “choice” can be when it is a choice between forms of domination, but I don’t know what her conclusions are.

They’re good questions though. I think that framing the question as one of the possibility of linking a subjective disposition to a political argument is a suggestive approach to take - but also, mightn’t the link run in the other direction, such that to be won over to an argument or a political position is then to move towards assenting to the consequences that follow from it?