Foucault News

Sanna Karkulehto, The ‘Greatest Finn’ meets the ‘Gay Marshal’: Foucault’s cycle, national narratives and The Butterfly of the Urals, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, vol 1, no.2, June 2011
https://doi.org/10.1386/jsca.1.2.177_1

Abstract
The article examines the case of the ‘Gay Marshal’, the late C.G.E. Mannerheim, president of Finland, supreme commander of Finnish military forces during World War II, and often voted the ‘Greatest Finn’ in opinion polls. In the puppet-animation film The Butterfly of the Urals (Katariina Lillqvist, 2008) Mannerheim wears a purple corset and enjoys a relationship with his male servant. The film incited a media war. The article shows how the film’s reception involves Foucault’s cycle, a concept adapted from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1984 [1976]): sexuality fascinates and attracts large audiences, but its visibility is viable only under certain conditions, rules and restrictions. Focusing on sexuality also turns out to be a means of closeting the painful, wilfully forgotten Civil War (1918) history, which has divided Finland and remained a problematic topic in Finland’s national narratives.

Keywords
Michel Foucault,nationality,queer,sexuality,media reception,Mannerheim,Finland,animation,

Nielsen, Cynthia R. (2011), Unearthing consonances in Foucault’s accourn of Greco-Roman self-writing and Christian technologies of the self, The Heythrop Journal, pp. 1-15
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00694.x

Opening paragraphs
Although his critics claim otherwise, Michel Foucault understood his work as consistently focused in one way or another on the genealogy of the subject and the construction of subjectivities.1 In other words, while acknowledging changes, developments, retractions, methodological expansions and the like, Foucault also observed strong lines of continuity unifying his corpus – continuity centered upon and constantly hovering around subject-formation.2 Here perhaps I should say a few words regarding my synonymous employment of the terms ‘subject,’‘subjectivity,’ and ‘self.’ Although some scholars might contest my usage, claiming that it conflates distinct concepts, my riposte is that Foucault himself, or at least the English translators of his work, employ the terms synonymously. For example, in his essay, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self,’3 he describes his work on the institutional practices associated with prisons, hospitals, and asylums as directed towards how ‘subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination.’4 He then describes the next phase of his work – the focus of this essay – as an analysis of ‘those forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself.’5 This attention to an active subject who creates, transforms, or reconstitutes himself, Foucault correlates with what he calls, a ‘technology of the self.’6 Rather than analyze the subject primarily from the perspective of social construction or ‘techniques of domination’– as was the case in Discipline and Punish–, he now examines how subjects constitute themselves via techniques allowing them ‘to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves.’7 In these passages, as well as others, Foucault uses the terms ‘subject’ and ‘self’ interchangeably, adding qualifiers such as ‘phenomenological’ or ‘transcendental’ to the word ‘subject’ when distinguishing his particular understanding from that of Husserl, Kant, Sartre, or any other philosopher.

Kevin Hetherington, Foucault, the museum and the diagram, The Sociological Review Volume 59, Issue 3, Article first published online: 1 SEP 2011
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02016.x

Abstract
Foucault’s work on the museum is partial and fragmentary but provides an interesting opportunity through which to explore issues of power, subjectivity and imagination. Following a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his introduction of the issue of diagram as a way of understanding the discursive and visual operation of power, the paper explores some of Foucault’s work from the period around 1967–9 on the non-relation to consider how he engaged with the question of seeing/saying that Deleuze identifies as a key problematic in his work. Through analysis of Foucault’s discussions of the themes of the outside, heterotopia and the work of the painter Manet, in the context of the museum, the paper explores how power operating through the diagram of the museum allows us to understand the space of imagination as one in which subjectivity is constituted.