Perversion the Social Relation

154 James Penneyinterpretations of the trial, however, subscribes to this thesis; for example, GeorgesBataille, in The Trial of Gilles de Rais, argues vehemently against it (Georges Bataille,The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson [Los Angeles: Amok, 1991]).Clearly, Reinach's article must be placed in the context of a post-Dreyfus affair revisionisteffort to comb French legal history for instances of abuses of power againstpolitical undesirables. Though Reinach demonstrates analytic acumen in his discussionof the political motivation for the trial, and in fact we draw significantly on hiswork in our own concluding discussion, we agree with most commentators that thestrength of the evidence against Gilles should not allow us to go as far as to questionthe authenticity of the witnesses' depositions. Ludovico Hernandez's text is anotherexample of the effort to "rehabilitate" Gilles de Rais (Ludovico Hernandez, Le procèsinquisitoriale de Gilles de Rais [Paris: Curieux, 1911]).3 The late-nineteenth-century reawakening of interest in the trial of Gilles de Raiswas largely due to the publication of Eugène Bossard's historical biography (EugèneBossard, abbé, Gilles de Rais, maréchal de France dit Barbe-Bleue [Paris: Champion,1886]). Most of the subsequent studies that argue in favor of the influence of Gilles'sbiographical life on his criminality make reference to Bossard's pioneering text.4 Pierre Klossowski supplied Bataille with the French translation of the trial for TheTrial of Gilles de Rais (1991).5 Joan Copjec has provided the most concise définition of historic ism: "The reductionof society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge" (JoanCopjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists [Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1994], 6). An example of Bataille's historicism is offered in this statement:"[Gilles] represents exactly the feudal society of a period when the bourgeois ideal ofmanagement and the exploitation of goods wins out over the concern with traditionalvirtues, linked to the notion of feudal honor" (The Trial, 2,2, [English translation],17-18 [French original]; translation modified by author for greater clarity). In sucharguments Gilles "disappears" under the discourses surrounding him; he is deprivedof an unconscious, deprived of desire. All subsequent page references to The Trial ofGilles de Rais are to the English translation and the French original respectively.6 Henry Charles Lea provides contextual information on the history of the Inquisitionin medieval France (Henry Charles Lea, A History of The Inquisition of the MiddleAges [New York: Harper, 1888], z: 113-61). James B. Given examines the question ofthe political power exercised by the Inquisition in thirteenth-century Languedoc ina way that usefully illuminates the case of Gilles de Rais (James B. Given, Inquisitionand Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc [Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1997]).7 G. Bataille, The Trial, 150; 191.8 It is not clear from the evidence of the trial documents of what consisted this oftevoked"sodomitic vice." Etienne Corrillaut, known familiarly as Poitou in the Gillesentourage, provided the most detailed account of what occurred during the rituals ofabuse. According to him, Gilles "first took his penis or virile member into one or theother of his hands, rubbed it, made it erect, or stretched it, then put it between the