Perversion the Social Relation

146 James Penneytic structure and the subterranean, disavowed transgressive one. But insteadof structuring the critical self-relating agency that characterizes theclassical "bourgeois" superego, however, this dual-faceted structure, accordingto Freud, extends "the original narcissism in which the childishego enjoyed self-sufficiency" (no). From a historical perspective, onecould even go so far as to say that the decline of the rigid feudal socialstructure is a factor in this process. Insofar as the phenomenon of theemerging capitalist mode of production displaces the subject's criticalagency from the "external" figureof the feudal superior (lord, guild master,etc.) to an "internal," critical voice of "bourgeois" moderation andfrugality, it might be said that a general cultural anxiety related to thesubjectivation or individuation of the moral voice in part contributed tothe audience's inability to fashion a more autonomous, "responsible" relationto Gilles's confession. In this view, at the historical moment of thetrial, the feudal masses, subject to increasing urbanization and greaterindependence with respect to the landed lords, were confronted with theanxious hysteria to which their very (relative) freedom gave rise. Subjectto the new, abstract, and unpredictable laws of commercial exchangethat for us have long since become overfamiliar, the subjects of Nantescame to recognize that the trial of Gilles de Rais presented the prospectof creating a kind of cult premised on both a covert nostalgia for theold, however oppressive, social certainties, and the dissimulation of atraumatic yet irresistible enjoyment.The Sacrificial Logic of PerversionIt will be necessary to examine in greater detail the transcripts of thetrial in order to understand how Gilles de Rais was able to considerhimself worthy of divine grace while divulging the most inconceivabletransgressions. Such an examination will enable us, moreover, to cometo terms with the properly perverse quality of Gilles's confession. Thespeech at the ultimate moment of the trial is especially demonstrative ofthe logic of Gilles's subjective structure. This discourse clearly conveysthe illicit complicity between Gilles's theatricalization of his innocenceand the guilty transgression not only of the crimes themselves but alsoof the church hierarchy's cynical manipulation of the spectacle. Additionally,the coda of the confession underscores how, during the entirety