Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 149the more from the goodness of the divine. Confident in the knowledgethat God's desire is to bestow forgiveness on his straying flock, Gillesproceeds to the not altogether illogical conclusion that the subject withthe greatest sins, and therefore the most spectacular acts of contrition,will best conform to the divine will to grant the grace of salvation. Farfrom perverting the theological position on grace in late medieval Christianity,Gilles's confession uncovers the authentically perverse kernel offorms of Christian casuistry that safeguard a realm of illicit taboo bygranting divine pardon to the believer in advance.There is a tendency in the available interpretations of the trial of Gillesde Rais—that of Georges Bataille being the supreme example—to overstatethe oddity of the paradox of Gilles's faith: the facility, in otherwords, with which his increasingly obsessive solicitation of his invokers'forbidden powers of black magic segues into an equally obsessive promiseof moral cleansing coupled with vociferous protestations of innocence.According to Bataille's thesis, Gilles's unceasing oscillation betweentransgression and faith, devilishness and saintliness, offers furtherevidence of his radical distance from normative rationality. Indeed, thisvery coincidence of high religious piety and murderous criminality con-/stitutes for Bataille Gilles's foreignness to the human. But is it not thecase that Gilles's mania for both the black arts and divine redemptionmanifests the same, properly perverse, subjective structure of abdicationand sacrifice? Are they not both desperate efforts to escape the enigma ofthe Other's desire? If we take Gilles at his word when he adamantly denieshis monstrosity and stresses the resemblance of the temptations thatplagued him to those of his auditors, then how are we to interpret thephenomenon of the strange complicity of guilt and innocence in this descriptionof his subjective state? In his reformulation of the problematicin psychoanalytic theory, Lacan shifted the emphasis of the interrogationof perversion from the concrete details of the subject's sexual comportmentto a description of the pervert's position with respect to theOther's desire. In Lacan's view, the pervert circumvents the uncertaintythe neurotic experiences about what kind of object it is for the Other'sdesire by presenting itself as the object-instrument of the Other's enjoyment.27 "The pervert," as Bruce Fink sums up, "plays the role of... theobject that fills the void in the mOther" (175). 28 From this perspective,the apparently contradictory logic of Gilles's innocence in guilt gains