Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 137of humanism on the Western European cultural scene, life itself becamea value, and one was no longer required, as were the feudal nobles, togo to heroic lengths to prove oneself worthy of it.In this way, Bataille's sociohistorical methodology allows him to qualifytragedy as an essentially aristocratic mode. "Without the nobility," heasserts, "without the refusal to calculate and to reflect,... there wouldbe no tragedy" (53; 42). Tragedy thus becomes the sole domain of thenoble class; it articulates in historical actuality the nobility's impotentprotest against the hegemonization of reflection. Bataille does not appeartoo concerned by the extreme desubjectivation of Gilles his definitionof tragedy implies, by his dismissal, in other words, of the relevanceof what we might learn if we were to consider Gilles in his subjective particularity,as the expression of a structure of psychic life. We read, for instance,that Gilles "differs from all those whose crime is personal." Themurders have no psychical significance; their meaning may be reducedwithout distortion to "the convulsive tremblings of [the] world" that thevictims' "slit throats" expose. "The crimes of Gilles de Rais," Bataillesummarizes, "are those of the world in which he committed them" (43;54). Gilles emerges as a kind of template on which were set in motiongreat historical conflicts that were not only utterly beyond his control,but that transformed him into an instrument for their own abstract ends.Perfectly sutured to his representation of the class to which he belonged,Gilles is deprived, at least at this level of Bataille's analysis, 16 of eventhe most modest capacity for agency, of any ability to reflect upon ormediate the concrete historical circumstances through which his experiencewas necessarily articulated. Or, to put it in a way best suited to theperverse meaning of the case, Bataille deprives Gilles of the chance tofail to mediate his historical circumstances by issuing a protest againstthem or by assuming the direction of his fate—by establishing a positionof enunciation, in other words, with respect to his very discursivecircumscription.As one might well imagine, the trial transcripts suggest that Bataille'scarefully constructed social diagnosis of Gilles's criminality leaves anumber of things, as it were, to be desired. Indeed, there is ample evidencein Bataille's own interpretation of the trial that his notion oftragedy fails to elucidate every detail of the case. All the evidence suggests,for example, that Gilles's first acts of morbid criminality coincide