Perversion the Social Relation

128 James Penneythe trial was inscribed. Our main premise will be that in spite of its tremendoushistorical perspicacity, Bataille's description of the tragic dimensionof the Gilles phenomenon fails to account for the trial audience'swillingness to forgive the criminal, and works against Bataille'sown efforts to describe Gilles's position with respect to his own conditionsof historical possibility. Bataille's inability to recognize the significanceof the audience's relation to Gilles's confession symptomaticallyrepeats the logic of fascination that accounts for the audience's sympathyin the first place. For this reason, Bataille's historicist 5 considerationof Gilles's confession must be supplemented by an account of the dimensionof desire—both Gilles's own and that of his audience—if weare properly to understand the trial phenomenon. Bataille's reduction ofGilles's subjectivity to his circumscription in and by the discourses oflate medieval France results not only in a contradictory psychologizationof Gilles that portrays the criminal at once as an evil manipulatorand a suggestible simpleton, but also in a disturbing depoliticization ofthe church's agency in the manipulation of the trial proceedings for itsown material gain.The Spectacle of PerversionIt is now commonly acknowledged that the medieval church required itsheretics in order to construct its ideology of faith and to impose its politicaldominion. The Inquisition served as a political instrument throughwhich faith became an imperative of submission to the earthly representativesof divine authority rather than to the command of the divine willitself? One of the most striking elements of the trial of Gilles de Rais issurely the judicial apparatus's theatricalization of the criminal and hisperversion, or perhaps more accurately the complicity of this apparatuswith Gilles's own desire to create a spectacle of himself. The trialtook place in the great room of the Tour Neuve castle in Nantes beforea large and attentive audience. The transcripts of the trial vividly conveythe thoroughly public character of the proceedings, highlighting thescandalous juxtaposition of Gilles's graphic evocations of the infanticideswith the formal procedures of the church's judicial machinery.In the text of Gilles's citation, Jean de Malestroit, bishop of Nantes,decries the enormity of Gilles's crimes—their "unheard-of perversity"—