ADHUC – Seminari Filosofia i Gènere. Conversation based on the book El sentido de consentir by Clara Serra

ADHUC and Seminari Filosofia i Gènere organize the presentation of the book El sentido de consentir (Anagrama, 2024). In the presentation will participate the author Clara Serra, PhD candidate of ADHUC, with Rosa Rius, honorific researcher of ADHUC, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, Philosophy Professor of the Complutense University of Madrid, and Àngels Vivas, president of the Secció d’Apel·lació Penal of the Tribunal Superior de Justícia of Catalonia.

Clara Serra adresses in El sentido de consentir (Anagrama, 2024) the thickness and ambivalence of the concept of consent. Questioning the promises of clarity, transparency and univocity that accompany consent according to some actual discourses, Serra raises the intrinsically problematic nature of a notion related to liberal contractualism. It is an essential concept for the legal sphere but nevertheless has been problematized from feminism and psychoanalysis. Inhabited by the malice between desire and will, consent is as irrevocable for the legal field – which seeks “express wills” – as it is precarious and imperfect to contain a desire inseparably linked to not knowing and the unconscious and not able to be the subject of a contract. El sentido de consentir defends the necessary nature of consent as a delimitation of sexual violence, but, at the same time, its extreme difficulty.

This philosophical perspective raises the question about the kind of effects that a legal framework and legal doctrine (the positive paradigm of consent) built perhaps on the promise of the transparency of consent and the search for a non-differentiation between desire and the will. If consent is a precarious and imperfect legal continent to contain sex, the law will encounter certain shadows and opaque areas in its attempt to clarify the limits of consented sexual intercourse. Where are the gray areas of consentment? Which kind of confusions and ambiguities do we find when we interpret the existence or inexistence of consentment? What discomforts and damages must the law address in the field of sexual intercourse? Which aspects of a sexual disagreement correspond to the sphere of ethics and which others to the criminal field? What are the limits of right and law on illuminating sexuality?