Marriage as Prison Form: Institutional Continuity, Relational Agency, and the Post-Monopoly Human

This article advances a radical ontological thesis: the problem is not bad marriage; the problem is marriage as such. The claim is not that every marriage is experientially oppressive, nor that every married subject is unfree. The claim is that marriage, insofar as it operates as an institutional form, structurally privileges institutional continuity over the revisable continuity of the relationship. Marriage becomes a prison-form when institutional continuity is granted normative priority over relational continuity, making the preservation of the institutional form a privileged condition of relational intelligibility. Drawing on the ontology of finite continuity, the monopoly of form, and the concept of responsible suspension, I demonstrate that consent cannot emancipate the subject from this structure, because consent authorizes participation in an institutional form that systematically increases the structural cost of imagining, negotiating, or exiting alternative forms of relationship. Against this, I propose the figure of the "post-monopoly human"—a subject for whom relational continuity no longer requires institutional continuity, and who practices relational fluidity through responsible continuance, ethical plurality, and the preservation of agency. The article concludes that the task of contemporary philosophy is not to reform marriage but to imagine and prepare for its ontological overcoming. Keywords: marriage as prison-form, post-monopoly human, monopoly of form, institutional continuity, relational continuity, responsible continuance, consent, finite continuity, ontological overcoming.