Perversion the Social Relation

136 James Penneycal circumscription thereby causes him to perform the crimes. There isno logical solution of continuity between the circumstances surroundingGilles's life and his "being"; he is fully articulated by, perfectly expressedthrough, the discourses through which we have access to him.In short, Bataille fails to attribute to Gilles the chance to fail to subjectivizehimself, to become a subject of desire, to resist the perverse, sacrificiallogic through which he paradoxically tries to exculpate himselfthrough crime.More specifically, the notion of tragedy comes into play, according toBataille, when we take into account the lateness of this feudal mode ofbeing, in other words the fact that, throughout fifteenth-century France,the feudal elite found itself overcome by historical forces that even theresources of its enormous privilege failed to subdue. Bataille refers, forexample, to the increasingly administered approach to war: "heavy cavalry"is replaced by "infantry and archers, arrows and pikes." 15 War isno longer a chaotically playful field open to personal distinction throughfeats of bravery, but a carefully managed and strategized activity inwhich the warrior becomes a soldier: an anonymous instrument of another'swill who sacrifices his desire for glory to duty, cause, or nation.At the moment of Gilles's military distinction, the act of war had alreadybegun to lose its ludic function as it became tethered to a project forcollective assertion and national identity formation. Socialized to participatein violent conflict as a means of demonstrating his aristocraticessence, Gilles and those of his privileged ilk were suddenly stripped oftheir means of distinction, bereft of a medium through which to channelthe force of their warmongering energies and the violent aggressivenessof their fragile narcissism. According to Bataille, Gilles was "rivetedto war by an affinity that marked a taste for cruel pleasures." And, now that war no longer existed in the way it once did, Gilles, as Ba-, taille pathetically puts it, "had no place in the world" (41; 51). The-tragicnature of the case of Gilles de Rais devolves from the impact of thesesociohistorical developments on one particular "type," on an individualtrained to perform a historical function that had been superseded byhistory itself. Late feudalism introduced into elite culture a structuralconflict between the calculation, moderation, planning, and sacrifice ofthe emerging bourgeoisie with the daring, playfulness, spontaneity, andprofligacy integral to the aristocratic style of life. With the appearance