Clotilde Leguil, psychoanalyst and philosopher, professor at the University of Paris-VIII, wrote Giving in is not consent (PUF, 2021) and The Age of Toxic (PUF, 2023). She defends the relevance of psychoanalysis on questions of influence and consent.
Besides the age of the protagonists, what do you see in common between the story of Judith Godrèche and that of Vanessa Springora?
Vanessa Springora has brought from literature an unprecedented questioning of consent as an enigma in itself. The consent [Grasset, 2020] shows very well how the subject can consent to a romantic and sexual encounter, and ultimately realize that what he consented to is not at all what happened to him. The characteristic of the pervert is not only to enjoy the body of another without his consent, but also to violate his psyche by making him believe that he consents to what destroys him. Why do we “let ourselves be done”? “This thing – consent – I never gave it”says Judith Godrèche. Both go through creation to explore something of this mystery of consent. In the miniseries Icon of French CinemaJudith Godrèche questions the question of influence.
Hearing Benoît Jacquot speak, in The Ruses of Desire, the documentary by Gérard Miller filmed in 2011, of what she was for him then, she testifies to having experienced in her body afterwards the traumatic effects of this past influence. According to the director, cinema would serve as a cover for a strange pact, formulated as follows: : “If I give her the film, she, in return, gives herself completely. Which can be understood in any sense you want. » We really have a Sadean scenario here. In Kant with Sade, Lacan [au sujet duquel Benoît Jacquot a réalisé un film, écrit avec Jacques-Alain Miller] takes this sentence from Sade, taken from Philosophy in the boudoir: “I have the right to enjoy your body without any limit stopping me from the caprice of the exactions that I feel like satisfying there. » Benoît Jacquot uses a lot of Lacanian formulas – the desire for desire, the transgressive dimension, the relationship of desire to the law – to legitimize this pact of subjugation.
It’s still a “certain era” », imbued with ideas about the desire of children and adolescents, which finds itself called into question. There was, you say, a misuse of the heritage of psychoanalysis…
Just as consent was a non-question at the time of sexual liberation and in the years that followed, enjoyment seemed to be considered legitimate as long as it asserted itself against the repression exerted on sexuality. Today we can clearly see the emergence of questions about the abuse of those who, often in the position of father or authority, after having overthrown authority themselves, impose a monopoly on their legitimate enjoyment. Lacan’s formula defining, in 1960, the ethics of psychoanalysis, “do not give in to your desire”was used in the wrong way.
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