Dinamiche del desiderio omoerotico in Les enfants terribles di Jean Cocteau

Dynamics of homoerotic desire in jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. It is assumed as critical common sense that in Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles (1929) the network of forbidden desires revolves around the incestuous bond between Paul and his sister Élisabeth. This paper aims at highlighting how incestuous desire is itself a compro- mise formation, resulting from the dialectic between repressive and normalising forces (integration into adult society) and the unspeakable, anticultural drive of homoerotic desire. In this framework, Paul’s yearning for his schoolmate Dargelos goes through an elaborate path of sublimation: the first stage consists in the mythologisation of its object (which separates the sign from its referent), the second in its channelling onto a culturally more conceivable object (Élisabeth’s colleague and friend Agathe). As a result, the incestuous complicity between the ‘terrible’ siblings Paul and Élisabeth stands indeed as an alternative to bourgeois integration (which they both abhor), but also to Paul’s pri- vate experience of precultural, self-destructive homoerotic enchantment.