Planes de Análisis

If the audience’s relation to Gilles was characterized by a transferential dynamic by means of which it disavowed unconscious intuitions of guilt, then the Inquisition’s relation to Gilles may be described as informed by

a politically motivated effort to subvert Gilles’s pretensions to normality through a hysterical demonization of him. It is possible to illuminate the Inquisition’s desire to impute a diabolical intentionality to Gilles with reference to Kant’s refutation, through his development of the theme of radical evil, of the possibility of a purely malignant rationality in the moral life of man. This brief philosophical excursus will shed more light on the mechanism through which the church attempted to set up, as I have suggested, an absolute demarcation between Gilles’s criminal acts and the terrain of the “human.” When confronted with the scandal of the crimes, the ecclesiastical authorities showed an extreme anxiety with respect to the question of Gilles’s intentionality: According to what prin- ciple of evil, they asked themselves, could acts as unspeakable as Gilles’s be carried out?

The Inquisition’s hysterical discomfort manifests itself through the insistence with which it wanted to discover, beneath the discursive evi- dence of the crimes, what Gilles actually wanted through their accom- plishment. This is yet another instance of the church’s radical othering of Gilles. His crimes could only have resulted from a diabolical desire— “diabolical” here understood in the properly Kantian sense which I will shortly evoke—to destroy the points of reference according to which the normal subject negotiates its actions in the world. For the church, Gilles’s crimes quite simply could not be located among the possibilities for earthly conduct in the late-medieval period. Unsatisfied with Gilles’s own account of his intention (or lack thereof), the authorities issued a truly proto-Stanislavskian demand for a principled account of Gilles’s motivation. For the Inquisition’s aggressive questioning repeatedly in- sinuated that Gilles must have acted with reference to an idea of evil whose presence in his moral consciousness would effectively banish him, it was maintained, to a diabolical inhumanity which could then serve as justification for his execution.

Gilles’s response to the authorities’ line of questioning, in its disarm- ing simplicity, is surely the most potentially subversive aspect of his confession because it reveals how, in Kantian terms, his horrible acts resulted from an everyday inversion of the constituents of moral con- sciousness rather than from a radical negation of the very form of the moral law. In one of his most salient utterances, Gilles declared that he committed the crimes “according to his imagination and idea, without anyone’s counsel and following his own feelings, solely for his pleasure and carnal delight, and not with any other intention or to any other end” (187). One could perhaps go so far as to say that in this utterance Gilles effectively claims responsibility for his perversion. The president of the trial, Jean de Malestroit, was clearly dissatisfied with Gilles’s explanation,

for he repeatedly returned, like a method acting coach, to an inquiry after the “motives,” “intent,” and “ends” which informed the murders.24

There followed a telling exchange between an uncomprehending Gilles and an exasperated Malestroit. As transcribed by Jean Petit, notary of the out-of-court confession, this exchange began with Gilles’s exclama- tion, “ ‘Alas! Monsignor, you torment yourself and me along with you.’ The Lord President responded in French: ‘I don’t torment myself in the least, but I’m very surprised at what you’ve told me and simply cannot be satisfied with it. I desire and would like to know the absolute truth from you. . . .’ To which Lord President the accused responded: ‘Truly, there was no other cause, no other end nor intention, if not what I’ve told you: I’ve told you greater things than this and enough to kill ten thousand men’ ” (187).

In his celebrated posttheological treatise Religion within the Limits

of Reason Alone, Kant contemplates the possibility of a radical evil in human nature to which he attributes what common sense would con- sider two contradictory qualities: innateness and responsibility. Evil, according to Kant, is not a natural predisposition which inheres in the concept of humanity in such a way that it determines the actions of agents; rather, evil is a propensity: a function of the maxims, in other words, according to which we acquire responsibility for what we choose to do. Though evil is the subjective ground of the will, and thus the product of a freely determined choice, it is nonetheless so deeply in- grained in experience that Kant is able to claim that it is “rooted in humanity itself.”25 _{It was through these counterintuitive, not to mention}

contradictory, assertions that Kant was able to argue that evil inheres in human experience while maintaining that we freely choose evil through the adoption of a bad maxim of action. Though the moral subject is irreducibly responsible for its failure to conform to the moral law, it cannot do otherwise: A stain of evil will forever separate any humanly accomplishable act from perfect conformity with categorical duty.

Kant was careful to distinguish his notion of radical evil from previ- ous conceptions, such as numerous Christian formulations of original sin—though not, as will be evident in the next chapter, Pascal’s—which related evil to the “natural inclinations” of man’s sensuous nature or to the “corruption” of a “morally legislative reason.” Kant refuted the former by claiming that we do not partake of evil simply by virtue of our “merely animal being” and the latter by arguing that evil does not result from a subversion or negation of the moral law which burdens us with obliga- tion.26 _{The moral law, in the Kantian view, is a function of humanity’s}

innate rationality; one’s actions in consequence necessarily carry within themselves, as it were, a reference to it. In spite of the moral subject’s

inability fully to purify its will, morality’s rationality remains sovereign, is not in itself corrupted by human failing. From a Kantian perspective, in other words, a subject is never capable of acting in perfect ignorance of the moral law; the more the subject attempts to evade the traumatic ratio- nality of freedom, the more this subject accuses itself for its failure to comply with duty. But if evil for Kant is coextensive with actions resulting neither from an indulgence in a sensuous inclination, nor from a willed opposition to the form of the moral law, then . . . what is it, exactly?

Evil, like goodness, presupposes the adoption of a maxim which, due to our sensuous nature, may never be perfectly realized in a con- crete, completed action. If we may not be reduced to our brute animal nature, however, neither may we renounce this nature in favor of a purely noumenal existence in which it would be possible to perform a dutiful action entirely for duty’s sake. Consequently, for Kant, humanity must be neither purely good nor purely evil, and every subject will freely choose the maxim its actions in the world will presuppose. As moral agents, in other words, we are irremediably split between the sense of obligation or duty with reference to which our actions are performed and the pathological stain of self-interest which forever poi- sons our devotion to the moral law.

It is now possible to discern how Kant’s thoughts on radical evil helpfully illuminate the trial of Gilles de Rais. For how are we to inter- pret the president’s insistent questioning after Gilles’s motivation other than by recognizing it as rhetorical: as presupposing the “correct” an- swer that Gilles acted not purely in accordance with a bad maxim of action which merely fails to obey the moral law without reference to sensuous self-interest, but rather, as Kant puts it, to “repudiate the moral law in the manner of a rebel”27_{—to adopt evil, that is to say, as a pure}

principle of action, thereby subverting the moral law’s pretension to foster actions which take the highest Good as their end? The Kantian framework allows us to see clearly why Gilles’s response to his interro- gators is so unsettling: It reveals how (at least minimally) distant are his actions from a diabolical intentionality, from a motivation so pure in its dedication to evil that it features no determination derived from experi- ence. “I had no end in mind,” Gilles effectively and unambiguously de- clares, “other than my own immediate sensuous gratification.”

The Inquisition quite simply proved itself incapable of entertaining the admittedly unsettling prospect that the all-too-human motive for what Gilles called his “carnal delectation” could have pushed him to commit such gruesome murders. To the dismay of the authorities, in Kantian terms Gilles proves to be evil only insofar as he “reverses the moral order of the incentives when he adopts them into his maxim.”28 _Instead

of first attempting to comply with the categorical moral law, and then falling into human sensuous self-interest, Gilles subsumes the law’s command under his pathological, experientially determined motivation. In the Kantian framework, any action features a noumenal and phenom- enal component, the former designating the supersensible, principled relation of the action to the moral law, the latter denoting the empirical, sensuous incentive which articulates the agent’s self-interest. Where the good agent subordinates, without successfully subsuming, the phenom- enal to the noumenal component, the ordinary evil agent, as opposed to the genuinely diabolical one (which Kant claims cannot exist), “makes the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the moral law.”29

In Kant’s vocabulary, the Inquisition’s insistent questioning mani- fests a desire that Gilles confess to wickedness, when his crimes, at least on one level, demonstrate a perfectly ordinary, in the sense of universal,

perversity. Kant defines wickedness as “a disposition . . . to adopt evil as evil into our maxim as our incentive”; in contrast, the perversity of an evil heart “may coexist with a will which in general is good,” and des- ignates merely “the frailty of human nature” before the command of the moral law or a “lack of sufficient strength” to conform categorically to duty.30 _{Just as the pure-hearted agent’s attempt to conform to the moral}

law will never succeed in perfectly separating itself from sensuously determined motives, there will always be a potentially benevolent or well-intentioned feature discernable within the effort of the wicked rebel to subvert the law in its very notion, to make evil the category of ratio- nal freedom itself.

Kant’s contention concerning the impossibility or nonexistence of what he terms “wickedness” lends itself to comparison with what I have identified as the structural and universal concepts of perversion that psychoanalysis bequeaths to us. The implication of Kant’s critique of radical evil for the psychoanalytic theory of perversion is that no abso- lute distinction can be drawn between the two concepts; if we imagine the structural and universal formulations of perversion as mathematical sets, there is at least one point at which they intersect. In other words, the subject whose discourse may be qualified as perverse (and I will indeed maintain in the next section that elements of Gilles’s confession can be qualified in such a manner) does not fully succeed in escaping the universal, a priori conditions of desire. The pervert and the normal neurotic subject feature different ways of dealing with the same impasse of desire—the same impenetrable enigma in the heart of the Other. This impasse of the real, which in psychoanalytic theory causes desire to be forever estranged from itself, is conceptually analogous, I wish to sug-

gest, to the perversity which disallows, in Kant, the existence of either a purely evil or a purely benevolent will. An irreducible libidinal dissat- isfaction disallows in psychoanalysis the full normalization or genitalization of the drive, thereby rendering impossible the execution of a successful sexual act (or, put differently, the successful sexual act depends on the failure or fragmentation of the drive); in strictly parallel fashion, the malignity at the heart of Kantian practical reason renders impossible a perfect realization of duty in a moral act. Here the analogy between the sexual and moral universalist concepts of perversity be- comes strikingly clear.

As is quite evident, the trial authorities tried to seduce Gilles into admitting to a properly diabolical or wicked intentionality because, in their view, such a confession would have justified a tidy execution at the same time that, more crucially, it would have put in abeyance the ques- tion of the Inquisition’s own deeply pathological motivation in orches- trating the trial. By eliciting a confession of Kantian wickedness from Gilles, the church would have been able categorically to distinguish the criminal’s evil motivation from its own cynically self-interested reasons for prosecuting him. By attempting to figure Gilles as the agent of a purely evil will, the Inquisition wished to appear fully justified in pursu- ing the criminal; this endeavor featured the additional advantage of strongly discouraging the trial audience from investigating what the ecclesiastical elites had to gain from Gilles’s arrest and execution.

Paradoxically, however, because Gilles refused to succumb to the Inquisition’s pressure—because, in other words, he so transparently, so naively, so responsibly, I am tempted to say, divulged the perverse logic behind his crimes—it becomes possible for us as readers of the tran- scripts to discern through the haze of the trial’s diversionary melodrama the full extent of the authorities’ political opportunism and cynical ex- ploitation of the Gilles phenomenon. But in order to spell out more precisely the means by which the church elites were able to capitalize on Gilles’s perversion, it will first be necessary to describe in detail the workings of its logic.