Perversion the Social Relation

134 James PenneyThe Gilles de Rais phenomenon symptomatizes the sensual decadenceand warmongering violence of an outdated social class issuing a futileprotest against a democratizing bourgeoisification that would increasein importance with the emergence of an urban commercial middle classduring the transition to the French Renaissance.Without denying, of course, the relevance of the trial's placement inits historical context, as well as the lucidity and richness of Georges Bataille'sevocation of it, it is nevertheless necessary to state that it may notproperly be understood outside of the reaction to the scandal of perversionunveiled by the transferential relation between Gilles and his public,as well as the properly perverse machinations of moral consciousnessthrough which Gilles attempts to justify his actions to God—his sociosymbolicOther. Implicit in our approach will be the assumption thatthe trial, considered as a historical event, is not reducible to the materialtraces that have survived it. It is possible, in other words, to read thesetraces as a means of describing with adequate plausibility phenomenathat these traces may not articulate in positive terms, and that informcontemporary cultural dynamics in a way similar to their illuminationof the context in which they occurred." Where Bataille explains Gilles'scrimes as a determinate effect of his sociohistorical location, we will insteadattempt to recover Gilles's subjective sovereignty 12 by drawing conclusionsfrom the manner in which his speech orients him with respectto the available representations of his actions, and positions him withrespect to the Other's desire, that is to say with the lack of completioncharacterizing the sociosymbolic order. Our approach, in other words,will insist on reading Gilles's testimony psychoanalytically with the viewof describing the nature of the desire inscribed therein. It is only in thismanner that we may ascribe responsibility to Gilles for his crimes, to attributetheir causation to a force other than that of a traumatic historicaltransition that succeeds in fully instrumentalizing the subjects who experiencedit. By restoring to Gilles's confession the dimension of desire,we wish to open a gap in the seamless continuum of Bataille's historicistanalysis, a gap in which Gilles positions himself with respect to his ownconfession, and onto which the audience projects a consoling narcissisticfantasy of its irreproachableness.Georges Bataille's analysis of the trial of Gilles de Rais pivots around aparticular understanding of tragedy: "The principle of tragedy is crime,"he explains, "and this criminal, more than any other, perhaps, was a