Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 143implicitly predicated on an improperly theorized notion of transference.Transference, by its very nature, is put in motion by forces of resistanceand disavowal that distract the subject from a traumatic confrontationwith unconscious material through a relation to a fascinating, consolingobject imbued with knowledge of its desire. The dynamic of identificationconstitutive of the transferential relation is therefore fundamentallynarcissistic: the knowledge I suppose in the subject to whom I addressmyself is the knowledge that will allow me to see myself in the way I wishto be seen. In Lacanian terms, then, the audience attributes to Gilles theknowledge pertaining to how one might "remain" innocent in the lightof traumatic intuitions of guilt. By qualifying the audience's relation toGilles as transferential, we wish to point out the means it offers to avertan encounter with unconscious conflict, in this case with the recognitionof unconscious guilt associated with the subject's experience of jouissance,of the death drive. The logic of transgressive communion Bataillesees at work in the case is indeed the cement that binds the trial audienceto Giles's confession; contra Bataille, however, this guilty communionneed be unconscious, and it is therefore with Gilles's conviction in hisinnocence, rather, that the audience identifies, properly speaking. Thus,we can describe the audience's relation to Gilles as a collective transference—onethat exemplifies the dynamic of the Freudian "group"—becauseit defers a traumatic encounter with unconscious guilt. 24 As assiduousreaders of Freud, we all know that our most deep-seated intuitionsof culpability, traceable to the murder of the primal father in unconsciousfantasy, are not reducible to any concrete wrongdoing for whichwe could existentially assume responsibility. Nonetheless, given boththe length of time between the emergence of unconfirmed knowledge ofthe crimes and the first actions undertaken against Gilles—not to mentionthe apparent facility with which most of the children were handedover to Gilles's cronies—it could indeed be argued that numerous audiencemembers undoubtedly, in their "empirical" lives, had much to feelguilty about.On this alternative reading, then, Gilles acquires this attribute oftransferential fascination for the crowd not through his admissions ofguilt, but rather through his protestations of innocence. Or, more preciselyput, the audience's fascination takes hold as a result of the mannerin which its narcissistic identification with Gilles's sense of his own