Beyond Consent

On the Opacity of Desire
An audacious inquiry into consent, desire, and the limits of contractual thinking.
Consent has become the defining concepts of our moral imagination. It is no longer understood simply as the legal boundary between sex and violence. Increasingly, it has become a magical concept, containing within itself the central promises of our contemporary political culture. But what happens when a society expects consent to make desire transparent, eliminate conflict and misunderstanding, and become the ultimate criterion of sexual ethics?

Drawing on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and legal thought, Beyond Consent traces the history of consent and examines how it came to occupy such a central place in our debates about sex, freedom, and autonomy. Rather than rejecting consent, Clara Serra reveals both its indispensable role and its limits. She challenges the contractual understanding of sexual relations in neoliberal societies and questions the belief that explicit agreement can dispel the opacity of desire or resolve the ethical and political complexities of intimacy. In doing so, she also questions the growing tendency to entrust criminal law with resolving problems that are fundamentally ethical and political.

Beyond Consent offers a new framework for thinking about one of the most contested concepts of our time and opens up a new and radical way of thinking about equality, freedom, and justice from the terrain of sexuality.

Contributor: David Broder (Translated by)

Translator: David Broder

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