Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite1x7Reinach, 2 reawakened interest in the case when they began to questionthe authenticity of the documents and the legality of the trial. 3 Most recently,Pierre Klossowski's 1965 translation from the Latin of the trial'sproceedings, accompanied by Georges Bataille's analysis of the culturaland historical importance of Gilles de Rais, has brought the case to theattention of the contemporary literary public, and has raised importantquestions about the conceptual stakes involved in our engagement withGilles's perversion. 4 Clearly, Gilles de Rais has been the source of endlessfascination for more than fivehundred years; but one senses that thetradition of critical literature on Gilles has yet fully to come to termswith the mysterious contradictions and seemingly incredible goings-onof the trial phenomenon.The record of the trial's proceedings documents the scandalous confessionof a man of unsurpassed feudal privilege and unshakeable faithwho, accused of the most unthinkable crimes, managed nonetheless toobtain, despite his eventual execution, a symbolic pardon by the Inquisitionin the form of reincorporation into the religious community. Thepreservation of Gilles's remains in the church of the Carmelite monasteryof Nantes further demonstrates the church's strangely conciliatoryattitude with respect to Gilles. Adding to the strangeness of the trialis the reaction of the public who witnessed Gilles's confession. Whiledescribing the atrocious crimes before the parents and relations of hisvictims, Gilles managed to elicit the empathy of his audience, which followedhim in a procession to the gallows and offered prayers to Godfor his redemption. What follows is an attempt to clarify the nature ofthe dynamic informing both the church's and the public's strange complicityin the spectacle of Gilles's trial, and to spell out in detail how apsychoanalytic approach to the case helps to fill in the blanks the exclusivelysociohistorical account of Georges Bataille and others tendsto leave open. In short, we will suggest that Gilles's confession demonstratesthe logic of what Lacan defined as the perverse psychic structure;in addition, we will put forth that the Inquisition took advantage of thisperversion, as well as the trial audience's transferential fascination withits spectacle, to consolidate its political dominion over the believers ofNantes.At issue will be the theoretical status of the relation between the transcriptsof Gilles's confession and the sociohistorical context in which