[...] if the act of giving consent is the authentic expression of a freely self-determined interiority, then consent does not exist. If it is understood as the unconditioned approbation of a subject that proceeds only from itself, then it does not exist, for heteronomy is the condition of all things, including all human things, and no action is such that anyone could claim it entirely as his or hers. [...] The idea of their freedom is merely the effect of a deficient capacity of intellection and the truncation that results from it. Incapable, for obvious reasons, of tracing back the infinite chain of antecedent causes, they record only their volitions and their actions, and take the shortest path, which consists in considering themselves their true source and only origin. [...]

[...]

The question of the authenticity or the ownership of desire vanishes once the subjectivist point of view is abandoned and attention is turned outside, to the infinite concatenation of causes, since it is equally true that, being exogenously determined, none of my desires is of my doing, and that as the very expression of my conative force, each of my desires is indisputably mine. And this is where the idea of consent begins to founder, shipwrecked together with its opposite, alienation. For if to be alienated is to be prevented from proceeding from oneself and to find oneself instead chained to an ‘other than oneself’, then alienation is merely another word for heterodetermination, namely, for passionate servitude, the human condition itself (governed by passive affects). If alienation is determination by the outside, nothing is outside alienation [...]