the rite of harm in the aesthetics of violence — study
massive content warning: sensitive topics, sensitive associations, sensitive everything
𓌜1 the contemporary subject above all else is too audaciously afraid of rape, which is the ultimate western taboo because it threatens not only the falsely absolutized christian order of the unity of soul and body, but the primacy of the body as orchestrated above the spirit of the will of the soul rested within the mind - the quatriary agency - which is connected to a libidinal underlayer that selects the subject into its existence as the cool girl archetype, or the commodification of social forces that themselves compromise against the limits of taboo by sexually performing them in isolation. but yet, the problems that arise out of rape fall down the middle of ethics itself, when corporeality becomes an aesthetic experience, images come back to haunt the supposed ethical divisions, and in this way aesthetics attacks ethics.
in the classic rethinking rape, cahill well understands that rape threatens the contemporary subject as vulnerable because it posists intersubjective embodiement as the very possibility of threatening the constituency of the supposed wholeness of the contemporary subject through rape's displacement of the supposed binaries between their supposed ultimate limits. an important example, rape questions the way in which we organize what it means to be autonomous versus dependant. she also attacks her feminist opponents for arguing on the one hand that consensual heterosex is established as an illusion against the sexualization of the lack of agency of the woman, as well as the opposite view, that the absence of consent privilidges rape as violent rather than sexual. cahill reasserts that rape as embodied is a distinctly sexual attack on subjectivity because of the way it transforms agency even if it doesnt touch personhood.
personhood itself however is just a front for wagering the limits of agency, rather than considering the contract of consent, which requires a fixed conceptual parameter but an open embodied parameter, so that women's accounts always symbolically defend their vision of the event. this current organization is due to the way in which in contemporary times, subjectively violent experience itself is abstracted and therefore held liable and turned into an economic resource for regulation.
𓌜2 cahill shows us how rape proves that the libidinal outrage layer collapses the distinctions when it questions how women dress or what they do for the economic model, women are on the market as a sexual commodity as far as they can wager the limits of their agency, but this agency itself as a product is precisely meta-economic in that its also a compromise, the result of an archetype of a woman that allows the operationalization of erotic benefit not only as power within affective economies but as overdefining of identity as subjective surplus.
if agency means selecting consent, and dependency means a direction of the economy that allows women to commodify themselves to the point where they can choose sexual partners, but then simulate the limits of consent in fixed enviornments, then violating consent doesnt violate agency, but only the contract that organizes how symbolically harmful rape is.
ethics posits itself above aestheticity by wagering the act above the contract but the experience of the act as an abstracted version of ethical discourses, which themselves always decide the aesthetic rather than arguing its limits. this hypocrisy becomes clear when you notice that throughout historical accounts, almost no tabboo has any form of fixed meaning, nor is there anything inherent to its level of harm, not due to actions not having definable aesthetic limits but to the sheer power of symbolic significance and the way it shapes nearly every judgement of outcome as always ethically decisive within an abstracted concept of law.
𓌜3 the contemporary subject in the form of woman cannot today neither symbolically nor authentically be raped nor assaulted, only either in a more crude empirical sense, or in an absolute but nevertheless non-traumatic sense - the one that still makes rape the worst tabboo as a social reality and not just as a constructive make belief, but not one that can be encoded as somehow devoid of symbolic encoding or neutralized as a cosmically negative experience.
neither concept explains the corporeal realities of contemporary violence, which aesthetically present in various forms that cannot access the body of the woman. this very body is orchestrated to push a commodified self-image as something retroactive to rape instead of constituve of its reality, just to better paint exactly how culturally yet somehow organically imbedded the victim status of a raped woman is.
the problem with this victim status isn't just that it is a position of power that audaciously evades its responsibilities the same way the character of women itself does, but it further precludes the attempt to investigate its own parameters. cultural investigators also fail to encode a genealogical discovery on top of victimhood as an ontological force, instead opting to either perform a reactionary spectacle as return credit, or to investigate social signalling as if its supposed to denormativize victimhood as an ontological totality.
finally, on the concepts themselves, assault cannot possibly be a byproduct of eroticism, pure assault barely even exists, since its abstractive function rids it of the very proto-sexual energy that would define assault as libidinally valid. the rare case of genuine assault itself is almost never aesthetically worth it precisely because ethical domains in the excuse of what we call an "economy" encode the valid simulations that define when a tabboo action can reasonably be performed, but as such also symbolically grant the various relevant aesthetic preferences of the act, essentially ordering its total signification and as such the harm its perceived to cause - which usually correlates with the real valu eof harm.
even worse with the category of rape, which is not only categorically abstracted in popular media as both the event of trauma and the ever-increasingly lenient post-traumatic dependencies and needs that supposedly arise out of it, but also as everything that shapes an intersubjective loss of agency which includes any auto-perceived form of harrassement, asssault or anything in between, only so long as this is secluded within a market of believability, which as a symbolic force has to at least partially subscribe to a more ontic view of the world, if only to then phenomenologically attempt to wager exactly how much leniency in tabboo others are allowed to express, which is a strictly stratified conclusion.
this is because agency itself belongs not to the aesthetic categories of victim or perpetrator but to a auto-regulating market of wagers that describe the rite of harm by developing economic dependencies that work in real-time abstractive activites to regulate raw activity. women themselves are fully complicit in this endeavour, actively and discoursively deciding the limits of their very own supposed opression, even in cases of the supposed raw and transcendental experience of rape. rape itself is one of the key taboos that has never been fully abstracted precisely because of its socially auto-targeted domain, rape authentically risks various forces such as trafficking, kidnapping and interpersonal symbolic conflict to even get its foot of the ground.
the subject is defined by his correlation with an economic self-formation, where the economy is the ritual structure that enables the concepts of circulation, trade and service to be intertwined with the concept of harm and its legislation. the economy itself is always seperate from the law, which is an older and more arcane structure. in paranoid finance, muniesa shows us how all currency in the form of money itself presents as speculative value, so that meta-speculation in the officialized ritualistic object of speculative finance can't exist, since speculating on a speculative form of value-creation which is already destabilized by a supposed counter-force cannot cause further probabilism but instead is simply the externalized form of that very same outward drive of prophetisizing value as inclusionary.