Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 151able innocence. 31 In fact, such crimes serve as proof to the Other of thesubject's worthiness with respect to God's grace; the crimes secure, inthis way, the very power of forgiveness through which they are expiated.While the neurotic subject indulges in crime as a result of an irrational,pathological motivation beyond its conscious control, and then chastisesitself as a means of both intensifying the enjoyment of transgression andreconstituting the contours of its symbolic universe, the pervert commitsthe crime in order retroactively to present himself as the object-cause ofredemption. The pervert, in short, must commit the sin with referenceto which he will subsequently rationalize his innocence. Rather than experiencethe split inherent in subjectivity to which the neurotic's sufferingbears witness, the pervert transfers this splitting onto the object ofhis act in order to present himself as the object that fills the gap, thatheals the wound in the Other. The lifeless, bloody bodies of the youngvictims function precisely in Gilles's subjective economy as the evidenceof this wound that Gilles then "heals" by offering himself as the veryimage of divine purity and innocence.Gilles's testimony demonstrates in this fashion the effects of his overzealousprotestations on his psychic life: the more he announces hisinnocence, the more he feels the need for absolution, for some assurancethat he remains within the community of God. The very criminalityensuring that God must step in to bestow forgiveness requires the unceasinggestures of contrition meant to secure it. It is for this reasononethat furnishes the required supplement to the historicist-culturalistrationalization that the valorization of membership in the church wasan inherent discursive feature of Gilles's particular sociohistorical context—thatthe prospect of excommunication was so intolerable to Gilles.Excommunication confronted Gilles with the full, traumatic prospect ofhis radical guilt; it would provide irrefutable, objective proof that Gilles,in light of his perverse criminality, is not an object of innocence, butrather a subject of guilt.Gilles's eventual execution at the stake for his crimes clearly evincesthe danger he posed to the church's moral and political authority. Butthe apparent facility with which Gilles was reincorporated into thechurch after his brief excommunication and later laid to rest on theproperty of a Nantes church also bears witness, more significantly, tothe church's complicity in the identificatory structure that allowed the