Perversion the Social Relation

Confessions of a Medieval Sodomite 155thighs or legs of the said boys and girls, bypassing the natural vessel of the said girls,rubbing his said penis or virile member on the bellies of the said boys and girls withgreat pleasure, passion, and lascivious concupiscence, until sperm was ejaculated ontheir bellies" (219; 275). It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that anal penetrationnever featured among Gilles's practices with his young victims. Corrillaut's accountalso underlines the tremendously broad late medieval understanding of sodomy, extending,as it did, to any sexual activity that may not directly lead to conception.9 Michel Bataille, Gilles de Rais (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 20.10 G. Bataille, The Trial, 189; 242; translation modified.11 Although it is impossible to deuil this point here, the Gilles case cries out for comparisonwith mass media treatments of serial killers, in particular those whose casesinvolve child or adolescent victims and same-sex eroticism. As the Gilles phenomenonexemplifies, the spectacularization of cases of perversion has as much to sayabout the anxieties and social antagonisms of the culture in which the crimes arecommitted as they do with the subjectivities of the perpetrators. The case of JeffreyDahmer, for example, provided an alibi for the venting of ugly homophobic prejudices,and the media coverage of instances of child molestation routinely expressesintense social discomfort at the reality of child and adolescent sexualities. For a lucidanalysis of the figure of the serial killer in popular culture, see Mark Seltzer {SerialKillers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture [New York: Routledge, 1998]).12 It is crucial to distinguish this idea of subjective sovereignty from any erroneous voluntarist,psychologistic interpretations. The subject is sovereign in the precise sensethat it remains unexpressed through its utterances; the subject, in other words, isnecessarily indeterminate. This notion has a patently paradoxical application to theGilles case. The infanticides are the means by which Gilles attempts to express theinexpressible, to occlude his desire, to defer the necessary splitting constitutive ofsubjectivity. In order to assert that Gilles fails to subjectivize himself, to become asovereign subject, the subject must first be defined as sovereign in the manner heredescribed.13 G. Bataille, The Trial, 10; 12; translation modified.14 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 36-37.15 G. Bataille, The Trial, 40; 50.16 As we shall go on to explore, Bataille's historicist account of Gilles's relation to discursivecontext has the somewhat paradoxical effect of psychologizing the criminalin a deeply contradictory way. This is also an opportune moment to distinguish ouruse of the terms subject, subjective, and subjectivity from their psychologistic usage.By reclaiming Gilles's subjectivity we defend the gap, the chasm—the contradiction,even—between Gilles's discourse and the desire it articulates. The psychoanalyticsubject is defined precisely by an unconscious desire. The subject of psychology, bycontrast, is an intentional, coherent "self" transparent to desire.17 Gilles claimed that he was led to a life of crime "on account of the bad upbringing[mauvais gouvernement] he had received in his childhood" (189; 242; translation