Conversation around the reading of the book "El sentido de consentir"

On 1 March, a philosophical-legal conversation will be held on the light and shadows of consent, based on the presentation of the book El sentido de consentir (Anagrama, 2024). The event will be attended by the author, Clara Serra, predoctoral researcher at ADHUC, together with Rosa Rius, honorary professor at the UB and member of ADHUC, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, professor of philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid and Àngels Vivas, president of the Criminal Appeal Section of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia.

In El sentido de consentir ( Anagrama, 2024), Clara Serra tackles the thickness and ambivalence that runs through the concept of consent. Questioning the promises of clarity, transparency and univocity that accompany consent according to some current discourses, Serra raises the intrinsically problematic nature of a notion linked to liberal contractualism and essential for the legal sphere, but which has nonetheless been problematised by feminism and psychoanalysis. Inhabited by the duality between desire and will, consent is as inalienable for the legal field - which seeks "express wills" - as it is precarious and imperfect for containing a desire inseparably linked to not knowing and the unconscious, and which can never be the object of a contract. The meaning of consent defends the necessary character of consent as a delimitation of sexual violence, but, at the same time, its extreme difficulty. This philosophical perspective opens up the question of what kind of effects a legal framework and a legal doctrine (the positive paradigm of consent) built perhaps on the promise of transparency of consent and the search for an indistinguishability between desire and will can have. If consent is a precarious and imperfect legal container to contain sex, the law will encounter certain shadows and opaque areas in its attempt to clarify the boundaries of consensual sexual relations. Where are the grey areas of consent? What kinds of confusions and ambiguities do we encounter in interpreting the existence or non-existence of consent? What discomforts and harms must the law address in the area of sexual relations? What aspects of a sexual misunderstanding fall within the realm of ethics and what aspects fall within the realm of criminal law? What are the limits of law and the law in illuminating sexuality?