Perversion the Social Relation

142 James PenneyThough Bataille needs to argue for Gilles's particular monstrosity inorder to avoid a confrontation with the trial's most unsettling universalramifications, he asserts nonetheless that the audience's relation tothe criminal was mediated by an empathie identification—a positioningof the ego at the locus of the other—that counteracts the spontaneous,visceral disgust one would intuitively attribute to the response of theauditors of Gilles's confession. At the same time that the crowd viewshim as an object of horror, Gilles is "offered for the terrified sympathy,for the compassion of those who see him cry" (61; 77). The substanceof the audience's identification, according to Bataille, is Gilles'sparticular brand of extreme criminality: that which separates him, inother words, from what is allowed to be associated with the human. Batailleappears to imply that this idea of a shared monstrosity is a functionof the crowd's fully and consciously cognized representation of Gilles.When an audience member looks at the accused, he sees a deviance,a perversion, he recognizes in himself. The fascination of Gilles is afunction, in this view, of a shared transgression, a communion in guilt.Watching Gilles break down before the evidence of the evil inside him,the spectator can weep vicariously at the evil he senses in himself. Bataille'sargument here features an intuitive, commonsensical persuasiveness.Although we do not disagree that the libidinal dynamic motivatingthe public's sympathy is related to such a fraternity in transgression, itis nonetheless unlikely, however, that this transgression constituted thepublic's point of identification. Among the presuppositions behind Bataille'sargument is the notion that a group consolidates its identificationsolely around a representation of its shared guilt. Let us now returnto psychoanalysis to discover in what manner it renders more complexand intellectually persuasive the trial audience's transference with respectto Gilles and his grisly confession, and to explore in further detailthe manner in which this confession exemplifies the logic of the perversestructure.The Transference and the GroupThe manifest and aware identification Bataille attributes to the trial'spublic is not only highly improbable, given in particular the extreme sufferingthe crimes surely brought upon the audience members, but also