Review: Viewing Eclipse Through A Foucauldian Genealogy of Sexuality

Foucault and Lightbulb

Well, what my wandering mind dredged up to shimmer on the surface was Foucault's History of Sexuality, and, this is where the lightbulb went on, OMG! Eclipse is a visual genealogy of sexuality! It's all there!


An object does not exist unless and until it is observed. - William Burroughs

Since my mind was and is interfaced with Foucault, Eclipse drifted into it. The lightbulb went on. I had seen Avatar the previous January and thought of writing about it from its deep meaning on Foucault's take on Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body.

The previous nine months I had spent 24/7 reading and thinking about everything Michel Foucault had written that I had so far read. Lots of books, internet articles, interviews (hard because his French accent makes him difficult to understand in English on youtube) and nothing else, and nothing criticizing him until I felt grounded in his work. Reading him is like getting the inside of your head cleaned out with steel wool.

So I immediately went back to see it again. And again and again, until I felt I really understood it from a genealogical reading.

As Foucault has said, the method of genealogy is a tool, not a theory. Genealogy is not chronology. Genealogy is not linear, not progressive, not Hegelian, not historical. 


Genealogical "cuts" can be synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time, they are  "cuts" into the Dominating Discourse of history, psychology, language, economics, and the arts. A "cut" into all human behavior, knowledge and thinking and feeling, ideology and concepts.


Knowledge is not for knowing. Knowledge is made for "cutting". - Michel Foucault (The Archeology of Knowledge)

Foucault's Spiraling Powerful Prose Scouring Your Mind

Sexuality in Eclipse:


Courtly Love: Passion Love. - Cortezia - A ritual of sexuality originating in the 12th century in Western Europe, Southern France, the Languedoc region, in Eleanor of Aquitaine's court. Married and divorced from Louis VII, her court traveled to the British Isles when she married Henry II.  She took her troubadours with her. This is the romance of Edward and Bella that is based on Tristan and Iseult, true love, non- consummation, (chastity or abstinence), and unity in death.

Rape: This is James, present in Twilight, who is absent but present - in Eclipse -  through his avenging mate, Victoria.


Blood Lust: These are the newborns who fit perfectly into ancient warrior hordes who killed with lust. And raped of course as spoils of war. Caesar describes all this in his victorious campaigns if you have translated or read him. 


The newborns also are descriptive of Melanie Klein's work on orality which she divides into two stages: passive sucking orality and active, biting orality. As the infant 's teeth come in it bites the mother's breasts and blood is sometimes or often mixed with the milk. The unconscious phantasies of the infant are to devour all the goodness from the mother, leaving only a shell. Here we recognize Renesmee. Klein insists that the mother must remain with the infant after nursing, not just plunk it down to go to sleep.  It is required that the mother remain with the infant for the "period of "reparation", "restoration" so the mother can be seen as whole in spite of the oral aggressive, destructive phantasies. That feelings and phantasies are not real, and the mother is still intact. She will also go into the good and bad mother imagos.

The Stone Age infant confronts its 20th century mother. - R.D. Laing


Makes you wonder about the present and historical fascination with vampires, eh. 


Conjugal Sex: This is seen in the relationships within the Cullen family - Carlisle, Esme, Jasper, Alice, Emmett and Rosalie. Outside of  the Cullens in the parents of Bella's friends in Forks, the Quileutes, etc. Nothing much is explicit, although we are told in BD about voracious vampire sex between vampires, but we neither read nor see of any evidence of it. An example of normal, family sex from which undying passion is absent, as there is constant availability and consummation. Desire is inseparable from Lack  - in a matrix with lack. Lacan.


Homoerotic Sex: Only implied between Edward and Jacob in their triangular relationship with Bella. Discussed in Freud's case studies on male paranoia. We also see it in the Tribal relationship of the wolves. Again only implied. This cut in sexuality is unconscious in the Twilight Saga.


All of these "cuts" are synchronous in time, occurring at the same moment in time. "Cuts" are not chronological; therefore, not linear, progressive or historical. The modern temptation is to attribute levels of  consciousness to the different types of sexuality, but Foucault dispenses with the idea of consciousness and its raising. When you read him and he finishes with an idea or concept, it is time to give it up.


Eclipse is a film, and the film much more so than the book, makes the genealogy of sexuality explicit, and is a gem in elucidating "CAMP" and an aspect of post - modern theory. It is an introduction to Foucault's tool chest as he calls it.

Great "CAMP" Scene

Review: Snow Flower And The Secret Fan;The Inscription of the Body

Official Site

Oh what a gorgeous film this is. Wayne Wang is the director and he never disappoints. Ebert doesn't like it much but I like to read him anyway so maybe you will too. The official site tells you much more.

BFF Best Friends Forever now was named lao tong in the 19th century. With parents' consent,  two girls with good astrologically compatible signs were paired often before birth. It resonates with the two Elizabeths - John the Baptist's mother and Mary's mother, both of whom desired a child desperately as they aged and prayed together for God to grant their wish, depicted in Giotto's murals in  the chapel in Padua.
Your lao tong is a serious  relationship and was considered for life, no matter what changing circumstances intervened decreed by fate. Two women bound for life in a man's world. Nu shu, a secret language was invented by women, forbidden an education, to communicate their secret heart to their Other in this world of men. Only a handful of women now know this language and it threatens to be lost. Ebert misses all this but then he is a man, so understandably. He confuses it with lesbianism which it is not. All cultures must have rituals and institutions where women interact with other women and men with men. In the middle east, men get together to decide whom their sisters, cousins, aunts, will marry - who they will fuck. Deleuze describes the homo-erotic aspect of this in his book Anti-Oedipus. I hope all this is enough to interest and inform you about this movie. But none of this is my interest, because it is the binding of the feet, the bound feet that has riveted my attention. Because this is a specific and ritualized Inscription of the Body. And the body is never - never - inscribed without the Inscription of the Mind accompanying it. But it is known as the Inscription of the Body after Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, where he lays out TORTURE as the necessary and sufficient condition for the dawning of human consciousness. Torture is required to inscribe MEMORY in the mind of primal unthinking and without language early humanity. Nietzsche acknowledges the ghastliness of the practice of torture as he tells us of its necessity.

Foucault will take torture up in his Discipline and Punish and elaborate its presence today in ensuring normality, normal behavior in both mind and body, in his 1974 Lectures on  Abnormal at the College de France. By the time you have followed Nietzsche and Foucault you will observe it everywhere in body language, in novels, in films, and you will never be free of it again. To inscribe the body is to inscribe the mind at the same time.   This is why human rights is not going to make a dent on the symbolic practice of genital mutilation of young girls to inscribe on their bodies and on their minds the excruciating torture and pain connected with sex.

Stephenie Meyer has made the Inscription of the Body a central theme in Twilight. Bella's heart races, it splutters, it stops, it restarts, her stomach clenches, her knees weaken, she swoons, she blushes, she stammers, she trips, she falls, and then in New Moon when Edward leaves her, all this is shut down, her mind is shut down, and she becomes the Deleuzean Body Without Organs. So I hope my readers are on the same page now with this Inscription of the Body.

The two young girls in the film are played in the 19th century and the present time by the same actresses. Wang keeps switching back and forth. One comes from a wealthy family and the other from a poorer one. The mother of the poorer child determines to ensure her daughter's prosperous future by binding her feet. This starts the day she is born. It continues as long as she grows. The torture is excruciating, relentless, unending and she is left with tiny stubs that cripple her for walking. She must be helped or carried as an adult. She spends much of her childhood in unending pain, her mother tosses in bed as she hears her daughter cry. But the mother deprives her daughter and herself of all compassion, pity, love, concern in her obsession to make her daughter's feet so perfectly bound that she will be married to an aristocratic son of a ruling family. Her face endures the torture without it marring her expression or her beauty. So we are witnessing a girl/woman who has endured unbelievable torture for all her growing life to avoid a primitive existence, in order to marry a wealthy and distinguished man from a ruling family. The perfection of the bound feet determined the quality of the husband. The miniaturization of the feet are the prized possession. We see a young woman, who has never run or walked any distance, who has a precarious sense of balance, totally dependent, who has been deprived of all love and affection, except from her beloved lao tong.

She marries and her new husband touches her first by kissing her feet, acknowledging the suffering she has undergone to be worthy of becoming his wife. She withdraws. She will never know any real physical pleasure, and will only submit to give birth to sons and serve her mother-in-law, who also has bound feet, is jealous, will not let her communicate with her lao tong. The older woman is a tyrant. But the older woman has endured the same Inscription of the Body and Mind and then we see its real purpose within the rituals of this culture before Chairman Mao. Lily will always serve her mother-in-law before anyone. She will always want the approval of this cold woman who is like her own mother. She will forever be trying to get too little too late. She serves her mother-in-law before her own children, with whom she is cold. Her only love is Snow Flower, her lao tong.

And so we see how this brutal Inscription of the Body holds up the entire aristocratic family, freezing it from change, determining its loyalties and practices, ensuring the care of old mother-in-laws by the accompanying practice of crippling the mind and the emotions. One can only imagine the horror of a girl child enduring this, and her emotional crippling as she suffered and suffered and suffered in an emotional void.

The American Quaker from Philadelphia, William Hinton was in China during the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960's spending the year in Ox Bow Village, telling about it in his book Fanshen, (turning about), while the peasants there went through the Cultural Revolution change. One older woman with bound feet at last liberated but crippled went and worked in the fields, attended all the meetings and proclaimed her freedom at last. I wonder.

At the end of Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body is another horrifying example of The Inscription of the Body.

I am nowhere near finished with this theme.