Perversion the Social Relation

156 James Penneymodified). There is indeed some evidence of the traumas the young Gilles suffered,enough to persuade us to take seriously the effects of these experiences on his futurecriminality. When Gilles was eleven years old, his father, Guy de Rais, was gored bya wild boar on a hunting expedition and died four years later. It was at this pointthat Gilles's maternal grandfather, Jean de Craon, assumed Gilles's guardianship aftersuccessfully appealing Guy's deathbed attempt to accord responsibility for the boy toa distant cousin. Evidently, Gilles's father had little confidence in his father-in-law'smerits as a parental figure, and Gilles's own testimony reveals that Craon allowed hisward to indulge his most savage tendencies. Further, only months after the death ofhis father, Gilles's mother appears to have abandoned her two boys, owing either tosudden death or to remarriage (Michel Herubel, Gilles de Rais et le déclin du Moyen-Age [Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1962], 49-73). The other standard-issue viewconcerning the influence of lived trauma on Gilles's criminality presents the executionof Joan of Arc as the source of an extreme disillusionment that causes Gilles,in essence, to lose faith in humanity. For a suggestive, though highly speculative, accountof this angle, see M. Bataille, Gilles de Rais, 92-105. Michel Tournier turns thisinsight into a novella entitled Gilles et Jeanne, and Mireille Rosello uses this fictionalmaterial to interpret Gilles's execution through the lens of René Girard's theory ofthe scapegoat. Our own analysis of Gilles, in contrast to these (not absolutely valueless,in our view) psychobiographical approaches, will focus exclusively on the logicof the rationalization of his criminality he offers in his confession.18 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford,Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 9,19.19 Philippe Reliquet, Le Moyen-Age. Gilles de Rais: maréchal, monstre et martyr (Paris:Editions Pierre Belfond, 1982), 244-45.20 G. Bataille, The Trial, 12; 15.21 We can revisit Copjec's definition of historicism via the theme of homosexual desire*.A historicist conception of homosexuality is one that subsumes same-sex desire underthe discourses through which it is represented. This way of thinking about homosexualityfeatures the absurd corollary that one cannot conceive of homosexual desirein the absence of a "discourse" about it.22 Another clear indication of Bataille's deeply symptomatic relation to the idea ofhomosexuality occurs in a bizarre passage of his interpretation in which the Frenchcritic imagines the decadent orgies Gilles allegedly organized as a prelude to thestaging of his bloody scenes of torture. Gilles apparently had a particular fondnessfor the voices of young choirboys and, in reference to two of Gilles's musical recruits,André Buchet and Jean Rossignol, Bataille unaccountably avers that they "undoubtedlyhad the voices of homosexual angels" (43). Elsewhere, with reference tothe increasingly self-destructive nature of Gilles's comportment leading up to his arrest,Bataille refers to Gilles's self-enclosure in "the solitude of crime, homosexuality,and the tomb" (52). Clearly, homosexuality appears to bring out in Bataille a peculiartaste for the oxymoronic. And finally, evoking too-familiar images of plague andcontagion, Bataille makes reference to the Florentine origin of Gilles's favorite necro-