Author: Sonja Boos, Department of German & Scandinavian, University of Oregon

Lecture: Boos, Sonja. »Filmriss: The Politics of Consent in Schnitzler, Schnitt, and Habermas.« Forty-Third Conference of the German Studies Association. San Diego 2019. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Summary: »In his 12015 Essay "The Sexual is (Not) Political," Slavoj Žižek makes a case against affirmative consent, the "yes means yes" sexual rule by which all parties involved in a sexual encounter agree to specific forms of conduct, either through clear, verbal communication or nonverbal cues or actions. Not surprisingly, Žižek considers recent calls to codify "yes means yes"' a prime example of the "narcissistic notion of subjectivity" that feeds our "politically correct obsession with protecting individuals from any experience that may hurt them in any way." According to Žižek's polemic, affirmative consent is based on the naive idea that a sex act could be freed of any suspicion of coercion if both participants announce their free and conscious intention to participate. Žižek argues that this false assumption ignores the conflicts resulting from the competing pressures within the Freudian triad between id impulses and a punitive superego. "Under the pressure from the Superego, my Ego says 'no' but my Id resists and clings to the denied desire? Or (a much more interesting case) the opposite: I say 'yes' to the sexual invitation, surrendering to my Id passion, but in the midst of performing the act, my Superego triggers an unbearable guilt feeling? So, to bring things to the absurd, should the contract be signed by the Ego, Superego, and Id of each party, so that it is valid only if all three say 'yes'?"
Žižek's point in this essay is consistent with his Lacanian interpretation of the superego as an antiethical agency that stigmatizes what it formally commands; namely, the ego's failure to suppress the instinctual demands of the id. As Žižek explains, the superego is "the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more guilty, the more I try to suppress my 'sinful' strivings and meet its demands." In this understanding, it is impossible to withdraw from or reject the fundamental nature of desire that structures the very core of erotic interplay.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Austria / History of Austria | Litetature: Austrian literature / Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde (play) | Sex and the law: Sexual consent