Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 139nothing, before which nothing fails to cede" (37; 47; translation modified).It is at textual moments such as this that Bataille symptomaticallypsychologizes Gilles: he endows the criminal with the capacity to apprehendhis desire transparently, to represent a conscious intention tohimself and to bring it straightforwardly to fruition. In such passagesBataille also betrays his own transferential seduction by Gilles; it is asif he had suddenly taken a seat among the trial's audience members andsuccumbed to the logic of their fascination. In such instances Gilles isimagined as a virile, sexually threatening, and "hardened" (12; 15) Othercapable of instrumentalizing his subjects after his own evil will while atthe same time remaining a naive simpleton, a "niais" (34). Bataille's selfcontradictorycritical moves bear witness in this way to the paradox ofthe transference: the subject's unconscious attribution of impotence tothe Other is precisely what fuels the fantasy of omnipotence. Paradoxically,in other words, the two aspects of the fantasy work in tandem.Indeed, the splitting of the subject's fantasmatic image of the Other isthe surest sign that the transferential dynamic is in full effect. Breakingthe smooth surface of the passive, tabula rasa version of Gilles he needsto illustrate his historicist thesis, Bataille's fantasy version of the diabolical,omnipotent Gilles emerges from time to time with disastrous resultsfor the coherence of his argument. Gilles is simultaneously an exemplaryincarnation of his social milieu and an utterly singular contradiction ofhuman nature, both an infantile simpleton adrift in necromantic fantasyand a masterful, self-conscious manipulator of circumstance.It is most interesting to note, in addition, that the properly homophobicaspects of Bataille's consideration of the trial are not unrelatedto its contradictorily symptomatic portrait of the criminal. By way ofcontextualizing Bataille's strange comments about what we would nowcall Gilles's homosexuality, let us briefly open a historicizing parenthesison the topic of sexuality and late medieval culture. First, ashas been amply demonstrated in the past decades, our current understandingof sexuality as a term descriptive of a subject's identity doesnot predate the nineteenth-century invention of sexuality discourse. AsJonathan Goldberg notes with reference to the term's usage during theEnglish Renaissance (and one fails to see how it would not also applyto fifteenth-century France), sodomy confusedly describes illicit sexualacts—virtually anything outside of procreative sex within marriage—