Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 135character of tragedy." 13 It is thus necessary to examine in some detailhow the concept of tragedy informs Bataille's interpretation of Gilles'sconfession. Bataille's understanding of the tragic is exclusively socialand historical in nature; it is devoid of any relation to the category ofthe subject psychoanalytically defined as subject of the unconscious. Bataille'sformulation of the subject of tragedy, in other words, presupposesa subject without desire. For Bataille, Gilles is a "character": thefeudal lord seamlessly embodies the qualities of the discourse throughwhich his social class historically expressed itself. The figure of Gillesde Rais acquires his tragic cast neither through the particularity of hissubjective structure, nor through the specificity of his mode of reactingto the circumstances of his fate, but rather through the tidiness withwhich he personifies the futile aristocratic resistance to the sociohistoricalforces of late medieval France.Bataille takes great pains, for example, to situate Gilles de Rais in theuppermost "echelons of late feudal culture. Issuing forth from the greathouses of Laval-Montmorency, Craon, and Rais, Giles's ancestors belongedto the "noblest, richest, and most influential houses of the feudalsociety of the time" (20; 25). Each of Gilles's peers was a great lord,owner of vast feudal properties and opulent castles. Living in easy luxury,the society to which Gilles belonged entertained itself through thegallant quest for glory. Supplementing the tedious nonchalance of itsmaterial comfort with the manufactured dangers of chivalric antagonism,the participants in this quest sought after the strengthening ofalliances, the distinction of feats of bravura in battle, and the flauntingof means and privilege through the conspicuous expenditures of mysteriesand fêtes. Bataille thus describes a late medieval social setting characterizedby manifest inter-clan violence and enormous lordly egos—acarefree but cruel field of ambitions realized at any expense. As DenisHollier has pointed out, the Middle Ages represented for Bataille, whowas trained as a medievalist, the historical apex of Christianity's culturalinfluence. The medieval period was the moment of "greatest taboo" andconsequently "also the place of the most astounding crimes." u Throughhis reckless bravery on the battlefield, his aggressive provocation of feudalrivals, and his profligate spending on the accoutrements of devotionand camivalesque spectacle, Gilles exhibits, according to Bataille'sunderstanding, his neat exemplariness, his perfect personification of theethos of noble privilege at the late medieval moment. Gilles's histori-