Perversion the Social Relation

138 James Penneywith the death of Jean de Craon, his grandfather, guardian, and initiatorinto the violent world of the feudal warrior. As Bataille himself underlines,the most obvious instigating factor in the onset of Gilles's criminalbehavior is an event of primarily "personal," psychodynamic significance,one related to the demise of the concrete person most likely tohave represented for Gilles the agency of symbolic castration. When hemakes reference to Craon's death and to his turbulent childhood duringhis testimony, for example, Gilles himself invites us to read his crimespsychoanalytically: as a response to a trauma indeed inscribed withina specific sociohistorical context, but additionally linked to a properlypsychical meaning that betrays a particular structural orientation withrespect to the Other's desire. Indeed, Gilles's self-diagnosis is so perfectlymodern and spontaneous it acquires, from our perspective, a trulycomic dimension not wholly dissimilar to the zealously confessional andpuerile ethos of North American daytime talk-show television; in nouncertain terms Gilles blames his criminality on his screwed-up childhood—onthe lack of direction, discipline, and authority characterizinghis overly privileged early years. 17 In the absence of any more objectiveinsight into his psychical predicament, Gilles "psychologizes" his pathologicalbehavior in a way that requires no historicization.Revealing the subterranean complicity of an allegedly anti-humanisthistoricism with a tendency toward a resolutely humanist psychologism,Bataille presents a truly contradictory portrait of the criminal in whichGilles emerges simultaneously as a "type" and an aberration, a historicalexample and an idiosyncratic perversity. Bataille fully participates,in other words, in Gilles's own psychological confessional method. Bataille'sGilles manifests dark tendencies innate to the human fabric whileembodying a properly monstrous negation of what Bataille mysteriouslyrefers to as "human values." This confusion is at work, for instance, inthe critic's consideration of Gilles's agency. Working against the grainof his description of Gilles as an infantile simpleton without a will ofhis own, Bataille occasionally imbues his subject with a redoubtable andmalicious cunning, with an inhuman ability to seduce both his publicand the church authorities. "The character of Rais ... is a forcethat seduces and dominates," he writes. Moreover, comparing the feudalwarrior class to which Gilles belonged to the Germanic Barbariantribes, Bataille attributes Gilles's nobility with "a violence respecting