Diseño de Líneas Base

Of all the key turning points in his confession, Gilles’s speech at the moment of the trial’s climax is especially demonstrative of its perverse logic. In addition, this speech helps to convey the illicit complicity be- tween Gilles’s theatrical protestations of innocence and the guilty trans- gression of not only the crimes themselves, but also of the church

hierarchy’s manipulation of the spectacle. This passage of the transcript highlights once again how, during the entirety of the proceedings, Gilles never once vacillated from his absolute faith in both his exemplary piety and God’s imminent clemency even while relaying the most shocking details of the crimes. Indeed, so great was his sense of God’s love and favor that Gilles proved abundantly capable of bestowing moral counsel on his accomplices as they prepared for their own encounter with the final judgment. Notary Jean de Touscheronde recorded Gilles’s final words as follows:

[T]he said Gilles de Rais confessed and exhorted his aforesaid servants [Henriet and Poitou] on the subject of the salvation of their souls, urging them to be strong and virtuous in the face of diabolical temptations, and to have profound regret and contrition for their misdeeds, but also to have confidence in the grace of God and to believe that there was no sin a man might commit so great that God in His goodness and kindness would not forgive, so long as the sinner felt profound regret and great contrition of heart, and asked Him for mercy with a great deal of persever- ance. And God was closer to forgiving and receiving the sinner in His grace than the sinner was to asking His forgiveness. And they should thank God for having shown them such a sign of love, He who required them to die in the fullness of their strength and memory, and did not permit them to be punished suddenly for their wrongs, and who gave them such an ardent love of Him and such great contrition for their misdeeds that they no longer had anything in this world to fear from death, which was nothing but a short death, without which one could not see God in all His glory. And they ought very much to desire to be out of this world, where there was nothing but misery, so as to enter into eternal glory. And thus, as soon as their souls left their bodies, those who had committed evil together would thereby meet each other again in glory, with God, in paradise. (278)

And to this declaration of faith in the imminent salvation of those united by a communion in sin, the notary appended the following pas- sage, which has the merit of underscoring the dimension of Gilles’s perversion that solicited the transferential identification so characteris- tic of the public’s response:

[A]fter having exhorted them thus, Gilles got down on his knees, folding his hands together, begging God’s mercy, praying to

Him to be willing to punish them not according to their mis- deeds, but, being merciful, to let them profit by the grace in which he put his trust, telling the people that as a Christian, he was their brother, and urging them and those among them whose children he had killed, for the love of Our Lord’s suffering to be willing to pray to God for him and to forgive him freely, in the same way that they themselves intended God to forgive and have mercy on themselves. Recommending himself to holy Mon- signor Jacques, whom he had always held in singular affection, and also to holy Monsignor Michel, begging them in his hour of great need to be willing to help him, aid him, and pray to God for him, despite the fact that he had not obeyed them as he should have. He further requested that the instant his soul left his body, it might please holy Monsignor Michel to receive it and present it unto God, whom he begged to take it into His grace, without punishing it according to its offenses. And the said Gilles then made beautiful speeches and prayers to God, recommending his soul to Him. (279)

This climactic moment of the Gilles de Rais trial brings to its point of greatest intensity the synergy between, on the one hand, Gilles’s desire to guarantee his salvation through the graphic divulgation of his criminality and, on the other, the efforts of the institutional apparatus of the church to consolidate its political power under the guise of an ide- ology of faith. As far as Gilles is concerned, his final discourse displays the properly perverse short-circuit through which he effectively per- forms the crimes as a means of establishing his innocence before God. It is precisely by becoming as guilty as possible before the divine agency, by performing the most taboo actions, that Gilles secures his innocence and therefore his salvation. In other words, Gilles deliberately sins in order to secure the guilt from which he will then be able to beseech God for forgiveness; he violates the law in order to offer himself as the means of its redemption or reparation. Put in more straightforwardly ethical terms, Gilles performs evil as a means of safeguarding the Good, in this instance his favor with respect to God’s grace.

It is worthwhile examining more closely the theological logic, if one can put it this way, which supports Gilles’s rationalizations. Remarkably, Gilles claims to know with certainty the content of the final judgment: God’s desire is to bestow forgiveness on his straying flock, most espe- cially on those among it who stray the most spectacularly. From this premise Gilles proceeds to the far from illogical conclusion that the subject with the greatest sins, and hence the one required to make the

most demanding acts of contrition, will best answer to the divine will to grant salvation’s grace. It becomes apparent in this way how, rather than pervert the theological position on grace in late-medieval Christianity, Gilles’s confession uncovers an authentically perverse kernel within forms of Christian casuistry which safeguard a realm of illicit taboo by granting to the believer the guarantee of divine pardon in advance. Whereas Pas- cal, as will be explored in the next chapter, insists on qualifying God’s will as irremediably indeterminate, as not amenable to predication, Gilles claims to know the secret of his personal Other’s desire, which is to bestow innocence on those who acquire guilt. This assumption of knowledge in the Other inaugurates a logic whereby salvation requires the performance

of crime. If God wishes to forgive the sinner, so the logic goes, then the believer must sin in order to enable God to forgive.

There is a tendency among the available interpretations of the trial of Gilles de Rais—Bataille’s being as we have seen the supreme ex- ample—to overstate the oddity of the paradox of Gilles’s peculiar brand of faith, namely the facility with which his solicitations of his invokers’ forbidden powers of black magic, for example, transform into increas- ingly vociferous promises of moral purgation or atonement. Bataille’s claim is that Gilles’s unceasing oscillation between transgression and faith, wickedness and saintliness, offers further evidence of his estrange- ment from normative rationality. Indeed, this very coincidence of high religious piety and murderous criminality constitutes for Bataille Gilles’s very foreignness to the human. In my view, however, Gilles’s confession makes plain that his mania for the black arts and his conviction in divine redemption manifest the same, properly perverse, subjective structure of abdication and sacrifice. They are both, in other words, desperate efforts to escape the enigma of the Other’s desire, to determine, in theological terms, what precisely is required to merit the grace of God. But if we take Gilles at his word when he adamantly denies his mon- strosity and stresses the resemblance of the temptations which plagued him to those his auditors might themselves experience, then how pre- cisely must we interpret the strange interimplication of guilt and inno- cence in Gilles’s account of his motivation and intentionality?

When, as mentioned in the previous chapter, he adopted as his formula for perversion a reversal of his formula for fantasy (S <> a becomes a <> S in perversion), Lacan underscored how the pervert transfers castration’s effects from the subjective function properly speak- ing to the sociosymbolic function embodied by the Other. In order to avoid the anxiety that the neurotic subject experiences regarding what kind of object it is for the Other’s desire, the pervert effectively cas- trates the Other in order then to offer himself through a gesture of

pseudosacrifice as the object which will heal the Other’s wound, thereby granting it completion. Indeed, as Lacan puts it, the perverse subject obtains its pleasure when it “immobilizes itself [se fige] in the rigidity of the object with the aim of returning its subjective division to the Other.”31

Through his criminality Gilles effectively becomes the object-instrument of divine clemency’s jouissance by first tarnishing the image of God through crime and profanation and then posturing as the very means of the restoration of innocence. Gilles’s perversion consists in taking to its extreme limit what would shortly become, in historical-theological terms, the perverse tendencies of Jesuitical casuistry, which asserted the pos- sibility of earning divine grace in the earthly dimension through acts of contrition and self-justification.32 _{In a theological framework which al-}

lows for certainty with respect to the content of the final judgment, the believer acquires an ability to “cheat” with respect to its salvation by asserting that the surest means of acquiring God’s forgiveness is an active participation in sin. One receives proof of God’s love by meriting his forgiveness; in consequence, the most direct way of executing God’s will becomes crime.

The attraction of the kind of absolute religious faith that Gilles con- structs for himself is that it permits the complicity of an illusory ideal of innocence with a subterranean world of transgression which paradoxi- cally enables this innocent state. One may detect in the trajectory of Gilles’s testimony a toleration of contradiction reminiscent of the logic Freud elucidated in his 1927 essay “Fetishism.” On a level not too deeply hidden, Gilles knows he is guilty. Otherwise it is impossible to account for his deep-seated need for the moral purgation for which his plan for a holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for example, provides evidence. Yet Gilles re- peatedly posits during his confession that he is always already pardoned for his sins—that the unceasing act of contrition he performs at the trial serves to preserve him in the condition of beatific grace. Gilles professes to a need for contrition which is strictly speaking unnecessary according to his own moral framework. The believer of Gilles’s ilk—the moral33

fetishist—says to himself, “I know I am guilty of reprehensible injustices, but still, such actions do not tarnish my fundamental, inalienable inno- cence.”34 _{Indeed, in this logic crime begins to serve as proof of the subject’s}

worthiness with respect to God’s grace: Crime secures the very power of forgiveness through which crime may be expiated.

Here a crucial distinction between the respective logics of neurosis and perversion emerges in regard to their respective relations to law and transgression. Whereas the neurotic inscribed within a religious sociosymbolic framework is perturbed by his inability to conform his actions to a divine will resistant to all attempts at determination, the

pervert succeeds in conforming absolutely to his God’s desire, effec- tively attributing to the function of divine forgiveness the quality of obscene enjoyment. The neurotic indulges in crime in consequence of an irrational, pathological motivation beyond his conscious control, and then chastises himself as a means of both intensifying the enjoyment of transgression and reconstituting the contours of his lawful symbolic universe. In this way the neurotic’s suffering bears witness to the fact that he psychically experiences the traumatic subjective split between law and transgression; he is condemned to suffer the consequences of his inability to integrate his enjoyment within his sociosymbolic world. The pervert, for his part, transfers this split, along with its painful symp- tom, onto the Other in order to offer himself as the object which effec- tively sutures the gap between innocence and crime, grace and sin. In essence, the pervert commits the crimes God himself cannot allow himself

to commit, thereby offering up to God the guilty substance which he may then elevate through his miraculous gift of grace.

In addition to its moral-theological dimension, Gilles’s testimony reveals that an important aesthetic aspect featured within his particular perverse dynamic. Indeed, Gilles was nothing if not an artist of horror: He manipulated the bodies of his victims as if they were works of art in a museum of cruelty. As part of his sadistic ritual, for example, Gilles would suspend the young corpses from poles and hooks in various poses with the aid of ropes and straps, and then proceed to mutilate the bodies with daggers and knives while they were still suspended, most often finally bringing the bloody drama to a close by eviscerating or decapi- tating them. Gilles’s cohort Henriet claimed that these latter torments, generally occurring after the properly sexual forms of abuse, provided his master with the greatest pleasure, greater even than that of ejaculat- ing onto the bellies of his victims (231).

Once the children were dead, the criminal would caress their corpses, “offering for contemplation,” in the words of the trial documents, “those who had the most beautiful heads and members” (190, TM). This passage is a truly crucial one, and Richard Robinson’s misleading translation pro- vides an inaccurate depiction of the aesthetic dynamic at work in the performance of Gilles’s crimes. Klossowski’s translation from the Latin clearly indicates that Gilles gave for contemplation the bodies of the dead children (il les donnait à contempler), which Robinson fails to render in his phrase “he gave way to contemplating” (190). What the English misses are the elements of passivity and oblation inherent in Gilles’s action—the fact that the bodies are, very precisely, offered up for the aesthetic enjoy-

ment of the Other. It is not properly speaking Gilles who enjoys the beauty of the corpses; rather, they are given over as objects of sacrifice to an

eternal and perfect being, God or Devil, each of whom performs, of course, exactly the same function within Gilles’s psychical economy.

The counterintuitive quality of Gilles’s perception of beauty in the gruesome spectacle of bloody corpses can be illuminated with reference to this crucial element of the logic of perversion: The object of sacrifice must function to signify both the wounding of the Other which makes reparation necessary, and the results of this reparation. In other words, on one level the corpses function as metaphors for the evil of the fallen human world, for God’s failure to incarnate his perfection in the earthly sphere; on the other, however, by almost invariably choosing prepubes- cent boys as his victims, Gilles is able to capture a moment of seeming corporeal wholeness and beauty after the body is set free from its ma- ternal dependency, but before the traits of sexuality, and hence the psyche’s fundamental dependence on the Other, are made manifest. In this way the boys’ gruesomely arranged corpses serve to represent for Gilles and his diabolical God a complete cycle of degeneration and re- demption seemingly sufficient unto itself, and thereby exempt from the painful consequences of castration, one of which is of course the natural cycle of life and death.

It now remains for us to determine how the Inquisition succeeded in taking advantage of the strange complicity between Gilles’s perverse moral self-justification and the trial audience’s hysterical identification with his innocence. Clearly, Gilles’s eventual execution at the stake for his crimes evinces the danger he posed to the church’s moral and po- litical authority. But the apparent facility with which Gilles was rein- corporated into the church after his brief excommunication, and later laid to rest on the property of a Nantes church, bears witness to the church’s own investment in Gilles’s criminality. Indeed, the contextual evidence suggests that the church authorities became aware of how they could benefit from Gilles’s seduction of the audience at the earliest stages of the trial, and it is undoubtedly for this reason that Gilles’s scandalous confession was allowed to proceed in such an unbridled way. The trial audience’s fascination with Gilles discouraged any critical ef- fort to uncover the church’s manipulation of the proceedings, to identify how the trial effectively functioned as a distraction from its appropria- tion of Gilles’s enormous wealth. Witnessing the symbiotic interaction of Gilles’s perversion with the public’s hysterical identification, the church stepped in to secure the spoils derived from its manipulation of the spectacle, confident that the creation of a cult around Gilles would pre- vent any critical scrutiny of its actions.

Indeed, there is ample evidence to support the claim that the po- litical elites of Brittany and the Vendée, not to mention the authorities of

the Inquisition themselves, wanted Gilles dead largely for self-interested economic reasons, and that the church benefited enormously from the manner in which the public’s seduction by Gilles helped to occlude the more disturbing political motivations for the trial. During the last five or six years of his life, for example, Gilles’s outrageous expenditures had brought him near ruin, and it was with increasing desperation that he turned for assistance to the counsel of alchemists and the liquidation of his property. It appears eminently plausible to think that the ecclesiastical and political authorities delayed their investigation for so long after the emergence of strong incriminating evidence because they were directly profiting from Gilles’s self-destruction. In particular, Jean V de Montfort, Duke of Brittany and Jean de Malestroit, Archbishop of Nantes, acquired significant portions of Gilles’s property during the years leading up to the trial as they took advantage of his increasingly dire financial situation. Only when the ecclesiastical authorities had fully taken advantage of Gilles’s situation did they begin to amass the evidence required for an arrest.

However, during these final years Gilles’s profligacy was not en- tirely out of control for, likely aware that he had no descendants to