Perversion the Social Relation

144 James Penneyinnocence creates a kind of alibi for the shadily shared transgression towhich Bataille refers. What is so moving about Gilles, in other words,is not the manner in which he presents an externalization of the public'sguilty regret at having in some manner contributed, however unwittingly,to the children's grisly end. Instead, Gilles's strange charismashould be explained with reference to the means he provides to his audienceto exorcise these intuitions, to eradicate them through the unfurlingof a beautiful image of divinely sanctioned purity. Gilles's furnishingto the audience of a means of escape from a messy interrogationof its own complicity in the demise of the children explains the apparentlack of any dissenting voices at the trial. Gilles is able to confess insuch morbid detail precisely because he premises his testimony on anunshakeable conviction in a properly metaphysical innocence, an innocencethat remains pristinely independent of anything of the order ofempirical reality, and that paradoxically increases, in consequence, indirect proportion to the "objective" guilt Gilles accrues through the confessionalnarration of his crimes.With reference to linguistic theory, we might state that the radicalself-incrimination of Gilles's énoncé, or statement, is enabled by the unswervingfaith in innocence that frames his enunciation, or enunciation.Absolute innocence is the enunciative perspective from which Gillesconfesses his guilt. Gilles's moral authority therefore accrues from thewillingness with which the crowd attributes him with knowledge of itsown innocence. Here we witness, in psychoanalytic terms, the properlynarcissistic structure of the ego ideal. The persuasiveness with whichGilles exonerates himself encourages the public to take the criminal asthe point of its symbolic identification: the perspective from which itappears worthy—good—to itself. This narcissistic structure also allowsthe crowd to shield jtsëlf from the traumatic kernel of truth in Gilles'sconfession, namely, that he is not, in fact, an inhuman, monstrous incarnationof radical evil, but rather a manifestation, extreme to be sure,of evil in its universal "banality," of perverse, sado-masochistic tendenciesoperative on some level in any "normal" subject's libidinal economy.Contrary to Bataille's interpretation, then, the audience binds itself tothe spectacle of Gilles's perversion not in order explicitly to communewith the scandal of his crimes, but rather to construct an absolute barrierdisqualifying any effort to establish a continuum between Gilles'sradical brand of bestiality and "everyday" human wickedness.