Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 141debauchery, but rather the very mode of their devolution into brutality,lawlessness, and excess. Homosexuality thus "facilitated," as Batailleputs it, the descent of the young feudal warrior into chaotic archaism (31;38). Phobically, Bataille makes Gilles's homosexuality an essential featureof his perversion, a condition of possibility for the crimes. Homosexualitybecomes synonymous with transgression, to the point that itis impossible to imagine crime—and hence the tragic—within Bataille'sframework in the absence of its homosexual element. Clearly, this isanother danger of Bataille's historicist understanding of tragedy. Sincethe tragic mode for Bataille features concrete and particular historicalcontent, Bataille is able to make homosexuality itself an attribute ofthe historical dislocation of the feudal social structure in late medievalculture. This gesture not only implies a highly problematic historicistunderstanding of homosexuality that collapses homosexual desire intoits concrete historical manifestations, 21 but also relates homosexualityin an essential, necessary way to the themes of decadence, lateness, profligacy,and excess with which Bataille describes the feudal aristocracyin mid-fifteenth-century France. 22Thus, it is precisely Bataille's symptomatic othering of Gilles—thefacility, in other words, with which his suggestive gestures toward thenotion of a universally shared human monstrosity or radical evil 23 devolveinto accounts of Gilles's idiosyncratically diabolical foreignness tothe human—that prevents him, along with the vast majority of the trialdocuments' readers, from grasping in its disturbing nuance the significanceof the audience's transference with respect to Gilles. Bataille willrefer, for example, to the "insensitivity" and "indifference" that "situate[Gilles] beyond the feelings of ordinary humanity" (16; 20; translationmodified). Here it becomes necessary to inquire after the type of objectGilles constituted for his confession's auditors. Bataille, for his part, attributesGilles's apparent seduction of the crowd to a strange power ofpersuasion traceable, but not perfectly reducible, to the impressivenessof his feudal authority. Of what metaphysical attribute does this charismaticsupplement consist? Bataille explains the "compassion" of theaudience for Gilles de Rais by claiming that its members were able, duringthe trial, "to realize through [their] tears that this great lord whowas to die, being the most notorious of criminals, was like everyone inthe crowd" (58; 73; translation modified).