Tony Duvert: a political and theoretical overview

• Main Authors: Ezio Puglia, Irene Peano
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Università di Pisa 2018-07-01
• Series: Whatever
• Subjects: literature; politics; modern history; mass culture; intergenerational sex; childhood
• Online Access: https://whatever.cirque.unipi.it/index.php/journal/article/view/12

The late French writer Tony Duvert gave voice, scandalously, to the child-lover he never hid he was. He outlined, with rare precision, a desiring subjectivity struggling for existence in a hostile society, which portrayed him as a criminal. The right to homosexuality; the battle against the condemnation and the repression of underage sexuality; the deconstruction of the scary image of the ‘paedophile’, a bugbear typically represented as a rapist ogre; the invective against parents (the actual source of violence and of the castration forces deployed against children) and the institution of the family (the backbone of a morbid and unjust society); the ferocious criticism towards sexual and emotional capitalism, parenthood and the “bourgeois economic scheme of libidinal investment”: those are some of the themes Tony Duvert deals with in his essays, and on which we focus in this paper.