Après #MeToo, l'érotisme?

Seduction often gets a bad reputation because of its Latin etymology. Se-ducere means to lead someone away from the straight path and, by extension, to deceive, abuse or manipulate. To seduce is to foster in another person a relationship with illusion, Plato says in the Gorgias.

The myth of Don Juan does little to help its cause! Yet seduction, which is too often reduced to the realm of sexuality alone, is also a biological, moral and political bond, and therefore lies at the heart of all social relationships.

For better or worse, seduction wields the power it derives from its mastery of desire in politics and economics, and even in our relationship with images, fiction and algorithmic creatures.

14h - 15h: What does it mean to consent? With philosopher Johanna Lenne-Cornuez. Opening lecture in Spanish, with French surtitles.

Desire, sex and love today seem inseparable from one question: consent. In the space of a few decades, consent has become the principle through which we understand erotic relationships and the boundary between what is allowed and what is forbidden. But what exactly does “consent” mean? Can consent tell us everything about desire, encounters with others or freedom? Drawing on a philosophical history of consent and feminist debates about the concept, I will explore the emergence of this notion and the unprecedented place it has come to occupy in our societies. Why has consent become the moral language of our time? What does it reveal about how I understand autonomy, responsibility and human relationships? An invitation to reflect on an idea that seems obvious, yet brings the complexity of desire to light while also leaving some of it in the shadows.

15h15 - 16h15: Sexuality: a user’s guide. Conversation with social demographer Armelle Andro and journalist Sylvain Bourmeau.

Sexuality has long been a public issue: contraception, abortion and HIV have each brought it onto the agenda. #MeToo has reopened the discussion from a perspective that challenges earlier scripts and places consent at the heart of what should constitute good sex. But what about our practices? The question also applies to fantasies, which are said to escape norms even as they draw on them. We can desire scenes we would not want to experience. Do the new expectations placed on sexual relationships nevertheless reshape old imaginaries? Large-scale surveys have recently been conducted in France, making it possible to begin to measure these changes. Younger generations have a vocabulary their elders did not, and this vocabulary shifts what can be said—and therefore what can be recognized as violence or pleasure.

Digital technology has become central to meeting people and shaping desire, heterosexuality is no longer self-evident for some younger generations, and sexual and gender-based violence continues to be a prominent topic of public discussion. Our fantasies have lived through all this. What have they become, and what should we do with them?

16h30 - 17h30: Fantasy, filters and fetishism: the test of dating apps. Lecture by philosopher Richard Mèmeteau and filmmaker and writer Ysé Sorel.

We have never had so many ways to realize our fantasies, and yet we have never understood so clearly how much our desire eludes us. Twenty years ago, meeting a handsome rugby player who loves music, enjoys horror films and likes cat ladies, lives less than 3 km away and is available within 24h was a challenge. Today, you just have to apply the right filters.

So perhaps the problem with dating apps is not that they make sex too easy, but that they offer the hope of defining desire so precisely that there will be no gap between desire and reality. But has desire ever been real? Can we truly leave the world of fantasy? Fantasy creates an ideal; the filter searches reality for what matches it. Fetishization begins when we demand that a person embody this ideal. There is another way to think about sex: rather than starting from our fantasies alone, we can start from the practices that make those fantasies possible. Paradoxically, fetishists could then teach us to fetishize people less: instead of looking for someone who is our fantasy, we can look with someone for a practice that could become a shared fantasy.

17h45 - 18h45: The eroticization of power (and ways of evading it). Conversation with film theorist Dork Zabunyan and filmmaker and writer Ysé Sorel.

In the 1970s, Michel Foucault considered the strange attraction power could exert: not the power one wants to conquer and preserve at all costs, but the power one desires even when one is subjected to it and has no interests in common with those who wield it. This attraction does not necessarily stem from the physical elegance of those in government, since heads of state lacking any physical presence can create, to use Foucault’s expression, an “eroticization of power” that is remarkably effective. What is this love of power that separates us from ourselves and from others? And what strategies using images might allow us, if not to escape it, then at least to thwart it?